Day of the Outlaw
Screening on Film
Directed by André DeToth.
With Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, Tina Louise.
US, 1959, 35mm, black & white, 91 min.
Print source: George Eastman House
With Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, Tina Louise.
US, 1959, 35mm, black & white, 91 min.
Print source: George Eastman House
Day of the Outlaw remains one of the most unforgiving films of under-acclaimed Hungarian director André De Toth – like Raoul Walsh, one-eyed and magnificently drawn to scenarios of violence and treachery. After Ramrod (1947), Man in the Saddle (1951), Last of the Comanches (1953) and a host of other features, he caps his career with a taut and frigid drama of desperate hours spent in an isolated town on the plains below Oregon’s Mount Bachelor. Misguided Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) finds himself at odds with obese patriarch Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), whose gang of vicious thugs – including the horrendous Tex (Jack Lambert, who played “Dum-Dum” in The Killers) – hold the town hostage.