EVEN BEFORE it was shown in France, The Outlaw had acquired a scandalous reputation that was bound to result in public disappointment and make it a subject of severe criticism. In the event, the film had a short run. The same people who had fought to get to see it during the first days of its run booed those sections from which they thought the most interesting scenes had been cut. They felt robbed. Reviewers for the most part adopted an indulgent and amused tone. It would have been undignified to show disappointment. One critic managed to see something else in it besides the absence of Jane Russell’s breasts. After all, he knew beforehand what he was dealing with: it would have been naïve to expect more from the Americans. But even the more aggressive critics did not make out a particularly convincing case for seeing in the film yet another example of Hollywood’s decline and standardization. To argue against the hypocrisy of American moralizing was too easy. And too easy also to extol the good old French bosoms of Rabelais’ nuns, or Molière’s servant girls, or even the amorous stories of the eighteenth century, as opposed to this canned eroticism, as deceptive and flavorless as those California fruits which are insipid even to the worms. Surely, no one saw here the sinister hand of the Marshall Plan intending to replace the real bosoms of Jacqueline Pierreux or Dany Robin by the deceptive pneumaticism of a Jane Russell. Undeniably, The Outlaw foundered in a sea of general indifference.
I am inclined to see in this limited attention paid to the Howard Hughes film first an injustice and second a tacit conspiracy of silence. The careless way in which the film was dismissed in no more than a line or two, the unmistakable absence of any passionate feeling, seemed to me more assumed than genuine. I am afraid the assets of Jane Russell have been treated like the sour grapes in the fable. If not, then how do we explain that one of the most erotic films ever made and one of the most sensational scripts ever filmed by Hollywood has been so little noticed?
The Outlaw is a western. It preserves the framework and the majority of the traditional themes of a western and some of the characteristic types of the genre—particularly the lovable and devious sheriff whom we were so delighted to meet in Wyler’s The Westerner. In a film that has retained such a purity of form as the western any originality is measured by the slight changes that have been made to the traditional ingredients, the skill with which the screenwriter and director have succeeded in simultaneously remaining faithful to the basic rules of the genre and still renewing our delight. Jules Furthman, Howard Hughes, and Gregg Toland have concentrated their efforts on the style and on an unexpected switch in the female element, which in the Far West has generally been represented by two types of heroine, reflecting two complementary aspects of the same myth. The prostitute with the heart of gold in Stagecoach is on a par in the spectator’s judgment with the courageous virgin, rescued by the good cowboy from extreme danger, whom he will marry once he has proved himself and triumphed over evil. Frequently he takes the place in the girl’s life of her father or her brother killed in a fight. Thus we see clearly drawn in the western not only the obvious quest for the Holy Grail but in a more precise sociological and aesthetic degree the mythology of chivalry founded on the essential goodness of woman, even the sinful woman. It is man who is bad. Isn’t he indeed the cause of her downfall, in spite of which the prostitute manages to preserve something of her original purity? It is the hero’s role to redeem the evil in man by undergoing trials, in order to win back the respect and the protection that woman demands of him.
It is this mythology that Howard Hughes attacks, with a violence that I have found nowhere in the American cinema except in Monseur Verdoux.
The Outlaw is based on contempt for woman. In contrast to their conterparts elsewhere, its heroes strive to deny the heroine their protection. They scoff at her endlessly, abandon her, and refuse to undergo any trials. In this unbelievable anti-quest of the Holy Grail it is the woman who needs them and who undergoes the severest tests before her master will bestow a kind glance on her. From beginning to end Jack Beutel and Walter Huston share Jane Russell, and these two sympathetic and courageous men, capable of killing one another over a horse, absolutely refuse to fight over her.
It is clear that Howard Hughes has knowingly given a general significance to his heroine. Jane Russell is not a woman who particularly deserves such treatment. The absence of any other female character who might save the good name of her sex, reminding us that “they are not all like that” through some comparison unfavorable to the heroine, is also significant. After all, Jane Russell is not at all antipathetic. A woman of courage, she has sworn to revenge her brother, and it is only after having conscientiously tried to kill her lover, first with a revolver and then with a pitchfork, that she is raped by him. Chimène, after all, did no better. One cannot reproach her for renouncing her vengeance after making love. She will henceforth love with as much fervor and fidelity as she has once sought vengeance. The man will even owe her his life on the night when, ill and shivering and at his last gasp from a deathly chill, Jane Russell presses her naked body against his.*
To tell the truth, this woman is no worse than any other. There is nothing about her to give a moral justification for the men’s cynicism and contempt for her. In the logic of the film Jane Russell does not deserve any particular treatment; these men simply think women are always treated better than they deserve.
It is no accident that the real scenario is the story of three jealous males. Two of them, Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel) and Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) sleep with the same woman—but they love the same horse. On several occasions they come near to killing one another over the horse, but in the end they retain their friendship. This provokes the jealousy of Thomas Mitchell, who thinks he is Huston’s only friend. So it is that these men are incapable of jealousy except over a horse or over each other. They constitute a Spartan group in which women have no emotional role. Women are only to sleep with or to do the cooking.
It is understandable in such circumstances that the film was banned by the American censors for four years. The official complaint was the daring of some scenes, but the real objection, which was more or less admitted, was to the basic idea of the script. It is forbidden to despise women. Even the misogyny apparent in the American crime film some years earlier is a far cry from the cynicism of The Outlaw. The blonde murderess of these films is presented as a kind of female criminal; even the men are bad. In The Outlaw no one is antipathetic; it is the order of the universe that confers his preeminence on man and makes a domestic animal out of woman—pleasant but boring, not as interesting as an animal.
Still, The Outlaw should not disappoint a perceptive viewer, even on the level at which the censors tried to deal with it. I remarked earlier that those who were disappointed by the film are either insincere or lacking in perception. Admittedly one does not “see” very much. Objectively, if one sticks purely to what is offered to view, The Outlaw is quite the most prudish of American films. But it is precisely upon the spectator’s frustration that its eroticism is built. Suppose for a moment that the film had been made in some European country. The Swedes and Danes would have given us a front and side view of the heroine naked; the French would have plunged the neckline of her dress to the navel and treated the spectator to some sensational kissing scenes, the Germans would have shown us just the breasts, but all of them; the Italians would have put Jane Russell into a little black nightgown and there would have been some sizzling love scenes. Altogether it it is Hollywood alone that is capable of making such a film without showing us a thing. Yet whether in a Swedish, French, or Italian version, The Outlaw would have much less effect on the viewer’s imagination. If an erotic film is one that is capable of provoking the audience to desire the heroine sexually and of keeping that desire alive, the technique of provocation is here brought to the peak of perfection, to the point where we see nothing but the shadow of a breast.
I strongly suspect Howard Hughes and Gregg Toland of having played an outrageous trick on the censor. It is surely not an accident that the director of The Outlaw was an associate of the director of Sullivan’s Travels. Preston Sturges and Howard Hughes were made to understand one another. These two men knew how to structure their work on what for others would be a limitation. Preston Sturges understood that the mythology of the American comedy had arrived simultaneously both at saturation point and the point of exhaustion. There was no way to make use of it other than to take its excesses as the subject of a scenario. Furthman and Hughes had fun here by forcing the censors into pornography. On reflection, the real director of The Outlaw was not Howard Hughes. It was Mr. Hays. If he had been as free as a novelist to use his medium, the director would not have been forced to proceed by way of hints, to suggest rape by noises in the dark and a woman’s body by the edge of a low-necked dress. In such a case the film would certainly have been improved aesthetically, but we would have been deprived of a delightful satire on censorship. Tartuffe’s handkerchief is placed on this bosom in so obvious a way that not even a three-year-old child could resist the temptation to pull it off. From unsatisfied desire to obsession . . .
And so it is that Mr. Hays caters to the erotic dreams of millions of citizens—all good fathers, good husbands, good fiancés. What leads me to believe that the makers of the film knew exactly what they were doing, is the staggering skill with which they were able to play on the fine edges of the censorship code and not overstep the authorized limits by a hair’s breadth, while constantly making us conscious of the moral prohibition that weighed on their undertaking. Otherwise The Outlaw would have been just a daring film, violent and realistic. It was the censorship code that turned it into an erotic film. Gregg Toland must have had great fun lighting the throat of Jane Russell, scrupulously focusing on that milk-white patch barely hollowed by a shadow, whose mere presence had the frustrated spectators dithering with resentment. The critics can perhaps be excused for not having understood The Outlaw. All they saw in the film, for the best of reasons, was what they did not see.
For those particularly interested in the phenomenology of Hollywood eroticism, I would like to draw attention to a curious shift of emphasis between the publicity for the film and the film itself. The posters for The Outlaw show Jane Russell with lifted skirt and generously low-cut dress. In reality it is only her bosom that counts in the film. The fact is that in the past seven or eight years the center of eroticism in the American film has shifted from the thigh to the bosom, but the public is not yet sufficiently aware of this change of frontier to allow the publicity departments to dispense with their traditional sources of stimulation.
* Reminiscent of The River by Frank Borzage. The crow is replaced here by a starving rooster that gobbles up eyes.