Day of the Outlaw (1959)

The Age of Commercialism

Absolutely brilliant

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

André De Toth's odd western stars Robert Ryan as an angry gunslinger feuding with a local farmer and coveting the farmer's sexy wife. Before Ryan can have it out with the farmer, a band of outlaws hit town and a tense psychodrama ensues. While the acting is uniformly excellent, this film is so devoid of any style it's hard to imagine what De Toth was after. Ryan and Burl Ives (as the lead bad guy) are excellent and the snowy imagery (it's set in the mountains of Wyoming) is different, but the plot is anemic. With zero close-ups of any of the actors, it's tough to get too deeply invested in what happens to any of these characters. Tina Louise and David Nelson are in it too. The rousing music is by Alexander Courage.

There's a fine off-beat (b/w) western hiding behind that generic title. In a small snowed-in outpost town, a land dispute between self-appointed lawmaker Robert Ryan and other residents is interrupted by the arrival of runaway cavalry soldiers and gold thieves (led by Burt Ives, who's very good, as is the whole cast). It's more psychological than action-packed, and never quite plays out the way you'd expect. Based on a novel by Lee Wells. With Tina Louise, Venetia Stevenson, Nehemiah Persoff, Elisha Cook Jr. (barely in it as a barber), Jack Lambert, Lance Fuller, Frank De Kova, Dabbs Greer, William Schallert, Betsy Jones-Moreland (LAST WOMAN ON EARTH), Arthur Space and Robert Cornthwaite. It would make a good bleak winter western double-bill with THE GREAT SILENCE. Yordan wrote that other notably weird western JOHNNY GUITAR, among others.Movie reviews at: spinegrinderweb.com

In the end of the Nineteenth Century, the tough cowboy Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) arrives in the snowing village of Bitters with his foreman Dan (Nehemiah Persoff) with the intention of killing the farmer Hal Crane (Alan Marshal) using the pretext of the barbed wire he is running around his farm. However, Blaise really wants his wife Helen (Tina Louise) with whom he had a love affair. During the showdown between the cowboys and ranchers in the saloon, the violent gang of outlaws led by Captain Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) appears out of the blue interrupting their quarrel. Jack Bruhn, who is a notorious captain of the army responsible for the massacre of a village of Mormons, disarms the men and explains that they have robbed the payment of the army and a cavalry is chasing them. He is wounded and wants to spend the night in the village and he gives his word to the locals that his gunners will not touch the women. Further he orders the barman to hide the booze from his men. When the local veterinary removes the bullet from the chest of Jack Bruhn, he realizes that he might have an internal bleeding and not survive. Blaise decides to lure the criminals and lead them in a journey with no return. "Day of the Outlaw" is a bleak and original Western in a snowing landscape and based on a historical fact of North America: the violent confrontation between farmers and ranchers that ran barbed wire around their own land and public land that they used for grazing without permission and people that cut the barbed wire. The cinematography is magnificent and the sequences in the snow are impressive, with the horses submitted to a great effort to ride through the mountains. The performances are stunning with Robert Ryan and Burl Ives in the role of strong and tough characters. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Quadrilha Maldita" ("The Damned Gang")

Underrated Western with some genuinely unusual features. As a long-time fan of Westerns, I've seen only a handful hardy enough to film in the mountains in winter. But the results here are riveting, especially in grainy b&w. Those bleak snow-scapes with the horses trying to plow across are a rare glimpse of trail blazing before the 4-lane highway. The toll on man and beast must have been excruciating. Those memorable scenes are, I believe, the movie's high point, and to the credit of the producers, I could spot only one minor exterior set to break the continuity. Then too, the weather-beaten town looks authentic as heck. I just wish IMDb had been able to identify the locations so I'll know where not to winter hike.Unusual too is the absence of a good-guy hero. The two leads, Ryan and Ives, are both strong characters, but with a wobbly moral compass that wavers somewhere between low- down meaness and high-type nobility. In short, you never know what they're going to do. That makes for two interesting non-stereotypes to drive the plot. I expect one reason the film was passed over by critics is because of sexpot Tina Louise as an audience draw. Known more for her Amazonian measurements than her acting skills, she nevertheless does well enough here, while watching her get bounced around the dance floor, hair flying, is not anything you'll see her Ginger do on TV's Gilligan's Island. Speaking of vintage TV, there's Ozzie & Harriet's elder son David as a good kid who's fallen in with the wrong crowd, and a teenage Venetia Stevenson who looks and sounds more like a malt shop than a frontier town. Somehow, you just know they'll end up together.Nonetheless, it's a payday for a lot of sturdy Hollywood veterans in supporting parts, including the always dependable Dabbs Greer and my favorite plug-ugly bad guy Jack Lambert. Then too, maybe you can figure out what Elisha Cook Jr.'s role is supposed to be, but who cares, just seeing the little fall-guy resonates across a couple of memorable Hollywood decades. And who better to manage scriptwriter Phillip Yordan's parade of shifting alliances than a central European like Andre de Toth, whose 1947 Western Ramrod remains another hidden gem. Anyhow, no movie that pits the steely Robert Ryan against the immovable Burl Ives can afford to be passed up, especially when stretched across an unusually polar landscape that still gives me the cold shivers.