The Outlaw (1943)

After watching Scarface and Jane Russell's recent death, it seemed opportune to watch The Outlaw, Howard Hughes' tribute to Billy the Kid and BOOBS. The only things I knew about the film was from Scorsese's The Aviator- where Hughes, played by Leo DiCaprio has a hearing about the sexual content of the film. Not to be prudish but there is a major sexual undercurrent to the film. Not in a bad way, it quite impressive how Hughes creates that sort of tension without any nudity or undress at all.  Of course, when i say undress - I mean underwear. Jane Russell probably wasn't even wearing any underwear and I would be prepared to testify to that. I feel like that would be a subject on was educated enough to speak on having seen The Outlaw. Besides that you'd have to be supremely puritanical to find anything seedy about this film. It's crazily good natured for a western. It's not particularly violent. If anything it's rather queer and silly. Now whoa-whoa-whoa - not the modern parlence of queer, but the classic use of queer: 'a strange or unconventional from the average viewpoint' although it does pretty queer towards the end. Like really queer.
Where was I? Yeah so, this film is not conventional in its conventions at all.  The soundtrack is about 5seconds ahead of the action in the film. I was watching this on IPlayer- I thought the streaming was out of sync. Since its a western, as expected there are showdowns aplenty but Hughes defuses any tension by making intensional funnys accompanied by a kazoo solo.
Despite these factors, you enjoy The Outlaw because it's a bit kooky when it should be tense because you've seen a million Westerns that play like that and in the end,  they all pretty much run together after a while. Hughes realised this on the making and saw no harm; he's knew and respected that John Ford type jawn but wanted to go another way and no, it doesn't play in the way he'd hoped but i'm sure the 2nd World War 2, there was nothing like this around but it still hold up 70years later to look at and watch due to charm and fun.
Like Jane Russell's BOOBS.