The Outlaw (1943)
Doc Holliday's stolen horse turns up in outlaw Billy the Kid's hands, sparking an uneasy friendship that Sheriff Pat Garrett wants ended — and that a vengeful young woman nursing Billy back to health complicates further by falling for him herself.
Howard Hughes fired original director Howard Hawks partway through production and spent years afterward fighting the Production Code office over Jane Russell’s billing in ads; The Outlaw sat on the shelf and in limited regional release for most of the 1940s before its copyright, like the censorship battle before it, finally slipped from Hughes’s grip.
Background
The Outlaw is best remembered today for the censorship battle that surrounded it rather than for its plot, a loose account of a friendship between Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday complicated by Pat Garrett and a young woman nursing Billy back to health. Producer and director Howard Hughes fired original director Howard Hawks partway through filming and took over himself, and he spent years afterward fighting the Production Code office over advertising that emphasized actress Jane Russell.
What to watch for
The film sat largely unreleased or in limited regional distribution for much of the 1940s as a result of that dispute. Watch for how heavily the marketing and controversy around Russell’s billing shaped the film’s reputation, arguably more than its content did; it is a useful example of how censorship battles of the period could become bigger stories than the films themselves. Its eventual loss of copyright protection is part of the same tangled history that kept it out of a conventional release for so long.
