Day of the Outlaw (1959)

The film takes place at the beginning of winter in the Old West, in a very small frontier town in Wyoming, right at the End of Trails (I think the mythical qualities of the snowy landscape warrant the use of a mythical term the film itself also uses, although probably without the capitalization). For years, the place has been dominated by the rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan, mixing the mythical dimensions of his character and the way it feels being an actual human being in an incredible performance), who is mainly responsible for the relative peace and stability in the region - he "cleaned" the place with his own gun, more or less.

But in the last year or two, farmers have begun to settle in the place, bringing with them a different notion of civilization and law as well as fences that make Starrett's life more difficult (and in his worldview presumably less free) than it used to be.

Matters aren't helped by the fact Starrett had an affair with Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the wife of the farmers' spokesman Hal Crane (Alan Marshall). She ended the affair and decided to stay with her husband, but seems to love both men, if in different ways. Starrett definitely still loves her and knows he can't have her as long as her husband is alive, giving him one more reason to want to see Crane dead, even if he never would admit this to himself.

Everybody knows that Crane hasn't got a chance in hell in a gunfight against Starrett. The showdown between the rivals comes unexpectedly fast. Or would come, if a gang of bandits wouldn't ride into town right when the shooting is about to start and turn the film into something quite different from what the beginning made me expect.

The bandits have no trouble in disarming the surprised townies - after all, the few armed men around (and the town is so small one has trouble calling it one) were lining up in the saloon to kill each other.

These bandits are of the unpleasant type that would later become dominant in the Spaghetti Western, sadistic maniacs who are more interested in the maiming and raping, but less in the pillaging part of their jobs. Still, they only plan on staying for a day to rest and find treatment for their leader "Captain" Bruhn (Burl Ives, in another great performance, seeming at once sympathetic and the cruel bastard who can keep the kind of men he employs in check), who was wounded in their last business excursion.

Bruhn knows very well that his men are maniacs and keeps them in line by pure force of will. Unfortunately he's so badly wounded the town's only doctor - a veterinarian - doesn't give him much time anymore.

What follows are some of the things you might expect, yet played out with the emphasis not on the moments and concepts you might expect. Starrett and Crane, for example, are not slowly growing to be friends, instead some very subtly done scenes between Starrett and Helen let him take a look at his motives for hating her husband so much and, as the film puts it "not liking what I see".

As already mentioned, much praise has to go to the actors who, while Ryan and Ives are especially impressive, all do some excellent work in showing their inner life more through small gestures than through dialogue.

It is of course quite possible that none of those gestures had made it into the film without director Andre De Toth, whose Western are products of a technically very proficient director without the kind of showoffishness that puts itself before the movie. Day of the Outlaw is a very strictly composed film, full of quiet and slow beauty and a passion that shows itself especially when not much seems to be happening on screen. There is a method to show the psychological dimension of occurrences through the rhythms of editing and the way the camera moves or sometimes doesn't move and De Toth seems to me to be one of this method's main protagonists in the Western movie, showing a confidence in his approach that leaves me in something like awe.

Over the whole running time, I didn't see anything on screen that wasn't supposed to be as I saw it. I don't use the word "perfection", unless I describe something as "perfectly awful", but Day of the Outlaw puts me on the brink of using it.

 

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