Here is the film that made young Jane Russell an overnight Hollywood sex symbol famous for her plunging neckline, and plunged director-producer Howard Hughes into hot waters with the Production Code Administration. And what an awesomely bad film it is. The Outlaw (1943) remains of interest today less for its scandalous content than for its bizarre psychoanalytic interpretation of the American Western. Looking through the first level racism and misogyny, it seems impossible not to read the film’s deeper structure as a camp variation on the legend of Billy the Kid. That ironic register is activated in large part by Russell herself, whose eroticized body functions as a site of homosocial negotiations and male sexual ambivalence, exposing the patriarchal sexual economy of the narrative as an absurd, impotent performance of male power dynamics. Rio, the fiery mistress of Doc Holliday (Walter Huston), becomes a focal point for a triangle of masculine insecurities, wherein Holliday competes with Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell) and the Kid (Jack Buetel) for possession over this "half breed" woman seeking to avenge her brother's murder.
If it seems like a sillier, kinkier Howard Hawks movie, that’s probably because Hawks directed under Hughes during the first two weeks of shooting. The cause of the breakup is unclear: Hawks claimed he had to leave to direct Sergeant York (1941), while Hughes expressed dissatisfaction over Hawks’s economized method of directing. When Hughes replaced Hawks, he hired cinematographer Gregg Toland to replace Hawks’s DP Lucien Ballard and reshoot the film. Authorship discrepancies aside, it’s Russell’s movie. One can’t deny that her sultry screen presence has commanding attitude and style to burn, and her self-aware smirking almost suggests she’s in on a joke nobody else gets. Of course, the film’s notorious reputation derives not from the intensity she brought to her debut role, something people unfortunately forget, but from Hughes’s exploitation of her cleavage in the film and its iconic publicity material (who else but Hughes would engineer a “cantilever bra” for this very purpose?). The film was completed in 1941 and, due to battles with the PCA and state censor boards, it was not released for another two years. After a public outcry, The Outlaw was quickly pulled from theaters only to be re-released in 1946 with great box-office success, its controversy not diminished over the years.
