The Last Outlaw (Christy Cabanne, 1936)

From an original story by John Ford, The Last Outlaw stars Harry Carey as Dean Payton, yes, that Dean Payton, famed bank robber who's just got out of prison after 25 years. The older but unbowed Payton is not adjusting to the New West too well - cars, rude people, ineffectual police, byzantine bureaucracy (a banker prattles on in government lingo, e.g., "the CPA - the Cattle Purchase Act") and, in one of the best scenes, talking pictures (Payton talks back to a newsreel)! Payton and pal Chuck Wilson (Hoot Gibson - one of the oatiest names I've ever heard) attend a singing cowboy movie and they're baffled at the "fancy getup" and "soprano" voice of star Larry Dixon. And in a lesson in how things never change, they get shushed for their "very annoying" talking. 

In their indispensable The RKO Story, Richard Jewell and Vernon Harbin deem The Last Outlaw "a minor masterpiece" (96). I wouldn't go that far. The first half is as creaky as Payton's bones. But the climactic gunfight is a minor masterpiece unto itself arriving at an implosive complexity unexpected from a 70-minute oater. In fact, it's barely a gunfight at all. Payton and Wilson defeat a band of newly minted bank robbers through patience and the preservation of ammunition, taking out the water and heat from the bad guys' lair. Payton even shoots at a water pail carried by his own daughter who's been taken hostage.

I also watched John Ford's 1919 version, a two-reeler of which only the first reel exists. The ten minutes are not much to go on. Edgar Jones as Bud Coburn plays the Payton role. In the most redolent scene, he sits outside of a (movie?) theatre and dreams of a rowdy dance hall of old, proving that depletion and nostalgia will always form a foundation to the western if not American life in general.

Jewell and Harbin link the 1936 version to Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962) and Lonely are the Brave (David Miller, 1962) as films that "chronicled the losing of the west." I suggest a quadruple feature of all three with, oh, let's say Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021).

The Last Outlaw (1936): A-minus

The Last Outlaw (1919): Not fair to grade without the second reel. Check your attics.