One of the things I love about Westerns is how they deal with taming the wild frontier, and how they depict small societies forming miniature communities. As Europeans settled across the Western United States they formed embryonic societies outside the confines of the Eastern cities. Certainly, they brought with them Western ideas of society (while destroying many of the native cultures around them) but they could literally create their communities in the ways that they saw fit.

The television series Deadwood does an amazing job of bringing forth what I’m talking about.

Obviously, Western movies take a great many liberties with history and the societies that they depict are often in the shape of (what was then) modern ideas, but it is still a fascinating concept.

Day of the Outlaw begins with a man, Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) who helped found and make safe the tiny, isolated community of Bitters, Wyoming. He killed and ran off various outlaws and badmen from the area to make it safe for women and children. He figures that gives him a say in how things are run now.

But while society sometimes needs men like Starrett, it likes to forget them once their jobs are done. Homesteaders have come to town, farmers, and they want to put up barbed wire fences (someday I want to do a study on the use of fences in Westerns) to keep their livestock from running away. Starrett runs cattle across the open land and fences get in his way.

It is this conflict that the film begins. Starrett has come into town to either force the homesteaders to not put up their fences or kill them. It doesn’t help matters that the head homesteader is married to Helen Crane (Tina Louise) whom Starrett loves. Just as the fight is about to happen Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) and his band of outlaws bust in.

They are on the run from the cavalry but need a place to button down for the night. The men are raring for a good time and figure copious amounts of whiskey and a few turns with the women would be just about right. Bruhn is a tough man, and not opposed to murder when it suits him, but he forbids the men from indulging their basest instincts. Not so much because he has a soft heart for the women but because he knows the men will wind up fighting over the small number of women in this burg, and that’s not good for anybody.

Director Andre de Toth ratchets up the tension as the outlaws grow increasingly impatient and Starrett learns to become the good man. Matters take a turn for the worse as storms blow in making it nearly impossible for anyone to leave.

Cinematographer Russell Harlan fills the screen with wide vistas of the on-location snowy mountains. The stark black-and-white photographer emphasizes the isolation and frozen hardness of everything.

Robert Ryan and Burl Ives are terrific as two hard men sizing each other up in an impossible situation. It all comes to a boil with Starrett leading the men through the mountains in a suicidal trek that he hopes will at least keep the townsfolk safe.

I liked it a lot and I recommend it to one and all.