Day of the Outlaw

Plot

Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) is a ruthless cattleman at odds with homesteaders in a small, bleak western town in Wyoming called Bitters. A feud develops between Starrett and a local farmer Hal Crane. The farmer's wife Helen (Tina Louise) offers to renew a love affair with Starrett if he promises not to kill Hal.

The feud is about to come to a bloody end when Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), and his band of thugs ride into town. They are on the run from the law after robbing a bank. He is a wounded outlaw, a former cavalry officer but that doesn't stop him and his gang holding the town's civilians hostage. Starrett must now find a way to save his town, and redeem himself in the process. He does so by helping the bad guys escape, or so they think, across the snow-covered mountains.

Cast

Production

The film was based on a 1955 novel of the same title by Lee Edwin Wells (1907-1982), that also ran in several newspapers as a serialized story in the fall of 1955 and others in the late summer 1956.

Producer Buddy Adler originally purchased the film rights as a vehicle for Robert Wagner.

Philip Yordan read the novel and insisted on writing a script based on the book. Filmed in central Oregon at Dutchman Flat and Todd Lake Meadows near the town of Bend in late November and early December 1958, with Leon Chooluck the unit director doing many of the long exterior shots.

Yordan called the script "one of the best I've ever written," but said the problem with the film was that the budget, at $400,000, was not big enough. Yordan told author Franklin Jarlett, in his biographical book about Robert Ryan, that DeToth was having personal problems at the time of filming and it was apparent on the set. Other problems included; Ryan was out for a week with pneumonia, snowstorms caused delays in filming, DeToth changed his mind about where some scenes were to be shot (from interior to remote exteriors), and then they ran out of money and just packed up and went back to Hollywood. Yordan lamented what 'could have been.'

Reception

Roger Horrocks, in his book Male Myths and Icons, says that the film is a 'gold nugget' and on par with Budd Boetticher.