Day of the Outlaw (1959) The entire history of the Western in a three-act structure (Review)

Westerns and Martial Arts cinema have a remarkable amount in common, for one they remake each other constantly; also, their kinship is important due to them being genre’s that are hard to penetrate for the uninitiated. Both are stuck in a quagmire of form, they are both the definition of repetition in cinema, however, every now and again there comes a film which defies all expectations. Masters of Cinema recently approached the Eastern side of that dynamic with their stellar release of King Hu’s Dragon Inn, now it’s the old West’s turn with the all but forgotten Day of the Outlaw by the enigmatic André de Toth.

The last frontier town before all vanishes into snowy obscurity is Bitters, Wyoming, and with it being so close to Winter emotions are riding high; giving birth to a dispute between cattleman Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) and farmer Hal Crane (Alan Marshal). Offers of hands in marriage to suppress the dispute are offered before a resolution of bloody confrontation. Just as guns are about to be drawn, Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) nonchalantly strides into the bar with his band of thugs taking the town hostage while they gather themselves and patch up their injured boss. For Starrett and Crane problems only exist until something larger and much more dangerous turns up reducing previous squabbles to petty insignificance. Held hostage by the former military men, Starrett has to keep the town alive in spite of Bruhn’s increasingly agitated men.

Using the three-act structure to literal effect, Day of the Outlaw initially sets its stall like the garden variety pre-50s Westerns more concerned with melodrama. While this is perfectly serviceable and saw the genre become the biggest at the time of its making, it doesn’t particularly do anything to endear the characters or their plights. For the first 20 minutes, the plotting of this Western drama is overfamiliar to the point of boredom. At which point, De Toth displays a subversiveness that sees Ives and his gang of military deserters walk into the bar stopping the previous bland western niceties from progressing any further. With the arrival of these classic Western outlaws, De Toth’s film evolves into a town-wide kidnapping picture fronted by a gang deprived of women and alcohol making an already hard situation for the town folk almost unbearable.

This takes up the next 40 to 50 minutes of the film and during this stint, there appears to almost be a pre-eminent spaghetti western in the mix. The tension here is instigated by having these military deserters strip the town’s folk of any means to defend themselves while their boss Bruhn deprives his tired, hungry and agitated Men of both Women and alcohol. Even if the youngest of the invaders in Gene (David Nelson) acts as a mediator, the feeling is never far away that this situation is a powder keg ready to explode. With Bruhn succumbing to the pressure of his men, the situation looks ready to engulf this small town. In this passage, De Toth employs an uneasiness comparable to the quieter moments in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, and, given Carpenter’s interests in cinema – there has to be an influence here.

Then De Toth does it again. When this siege mentality reaches its apex, Robert Ryan leads the outlaws away from town and towards a climax that lending an aura commonly found in the work of Peckinpah and the anti-western. Whereby De Toth thoroughly deconstructs the heroic mythos of the Old West by showing the pitiful extent needed to survive their harsh, violent realities.

Evolving past and through Western tropes with Stoney faced glee; from the studio tropes employed in the opening 20, to the spaghetti for the next 45 minutes before its climactic anti-western methodology. For a 1959 film, this is staggering, De Toth is decades ahead of his time. Retaining all of its power, Day of the Outlaw is cinema at its thrilling best and the brand of defiant movie making that has seen the genre endure for the best part of a century.

While a little grainy it is evocative of how lost and maltreated the original print was, even so, Masters of Cinema see the monochrome Day of the Outlaw looks as good as it did 66 years ago. Extras include a fascinating video appreciation from Bertrand Tavernier with the insight you’d expect from the finest makers of on top of the usual lavish booklet that comes with all of Masters of Cinema’s fine releases. A must buy for all Western fans, big or small.

Thanks for reading our review of Day of the Outlaw

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