The most exciting shoot-outs surrounding The Outlaw were those with the heavily armed censors. Not surprising: Howard Hughes had set out to break with the traditional western and compose a story of down-to-earth sex and hair-trigger action. Your basic buddy film, beautifully shot by Gregg Toland, the plot finds Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid becoming partners in a lawless land. Their tenuous friendship is challenged by constant quarrels, first over Doc’s horse, Red, then over Doc’s girl, Rio. And it was over Rio, played by the as-yet-unknown Jane Russell-or rather Rio’s cleavage-that much of the off-screen quarreling raged. A “breast shot deletion” list was compiled, and minor cuts were made. The film opened at San Francisco’s Geary Theater in February 1943, was pulled from exhibition in April, and re-released four years later, with Hughes still as confrontational as ever. A Maryland judge declared that Russell’s breasts “hung over the picture like a thunderstorm spread over a landscape. They were everywhere.” But now, so was the (Sealless) film. —BAM/PFA
Eccentric entrepreneur who turned to film production in the early 1920s. In 1930 Hughes launched the career of Jean Harlow—the first of many ingenues he would find and promote—with “Hell’s Angels”, which he both produced and directed. Following a brief interruption in his film career (during which he embarked on a new trajectory as an airplane designer and pilot), Hughes sparked a furor with the appearance of "The Outlaw (1943), initially withdrawn from theaters thanks to the conspicuous cleavage of Jane Russell.
In 1944 Hughes formed a production company with Preston Sturges, and four years later he obtained a controlling interest in RKO, which he mismanaged from a distance for nearly ten years. Despite the studio’s loss of $20 million by 1953 and bankruptcy by 1957, he managed to sell it to a subsidiary of the General Tire Company for a $10 million dollar profit. Hughes was a recluse for the last ten years of his life, managing his business interests from a Las Vegas hotel… read more
Worth watching if only to witness Jane Russell fall to the background as the awkward sexual tension between the three male leads grows with every scene. Truly bizarre.
Truly stunningly bad. Laughable. I watched with a growing sense of horror mixed with tedium. The only interesting thing is the underlying homoerotic links between the three male characters.
This is not your father's Western. One of the things I like about the poster for Kelly Reichardt’s new film, Meek’s Cutoff, is
"Jane Russell, the dark-haired siren whose sensational debut in the 1943 film The Outlaw inspired producer Howard Hughes to challenge the
