There's something in its very weirdness that makes this almost worth watching - which is a positive, because there really isn't much in the story itself that would make it worth watching. Best known as the film debut of a very bosomy Jane Russell, the movie actually describes a completely fictionalized friendship between Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel) and Doc Holliday (Walter Huston). According to the story, Holliday arrives in the town of Lincoln, NM and meets up with his old buddy Sheriff Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell.) Their friendship is strained when Billy shows up on the scene and Holliday becomes more involved with him. That's really where the weirdness comes in. Although Billy and Holliday are supposedly in a romantic competition for Rio (Russell), this really comes across as a 3-cornered homo-erotic relationship, with Holliday jilting Garrett for Billy. In the scenes between any combination of the three of them, that's really the sense you get of the relationship. It's truly bizarre to watch, which is perhaps not surprising for a movie produced and directed by Howard Hughes, who was already in a period of significant mental decline while he was putting this out. Hughes' OCD undoubtedly led to the very realistic and surprisingly detailed sets, but there was a lot that didn't fit well at all - including a dreadful musical score and some ham-fisted attempts at humour. The movie also includes surprisingly little gunplay for a Western. There's really not very much of interest here, but for Russell's sheer beauty as well as the over the top bizarre-ness of the whole thing, it gets a 4/10.
Review of The Outlaw
