The White Outlaw

THE WHITE OUTLAW is the kind of quickly thrown together silent western where they never watered down the trails with the result that horses and riders disappear in huge clouds of dust. It is also the kind of film where the interior of a rather large saloon doesn't exactly resemble the exterior, which is a mere shack, where the heroine is especially dowdy-looking, and where the director (in this case the famous one-legged Bob Horner) takes time out to photograph the antics of an annoying and completely superfluous child actress. That aside, this is also one of the few chances to see a genuine silent cowboy star, Art Acord, shortly before hard living finally killed him; and it is definitely the ONLY chance to see Acord with two lesser cowboy heroes, Bill Patton and Al Hoxie. The latter always denied ever having worked with Acord, and his footage is probably lifted from another movie altogether. Which is again typical of the kind of slipshod rural film-making that produced westerns like THE WHITE OUTLAW.

I understood the meaning of the title, The White Outlaw, as soon as I read it. In the past I had watched a silent western in which one character says to the other, "That's mighty white of you." The meaning of the word "white" left me a little perplexed, but in discussing it with another wannabe cowboy it was explained that "white" was an old term meaning "good." Since then I have seen the word used in other silent movies and writings from the early 1900's.

Art Acord is the title character in The White Outlaw, and is dressed in a white shirt and hat when he first appears on screen. Johnny Douglas (Acord) is known as the White Outlaw because he is "...a good sport through all his reckless life..." and the white silk scarf he wears when doing his outlaw deeds. The white scarf is central to the movie as it is used for key transitions in the plot. For a cheap movie, the plot of The White Outlaw is interesting. Johnny Douglas decides to go straight and ends up working on a ranch in Texas. Colonel Holbrook has gambling debts to Chet Wagner (spelled "Waggoner" on a collateral note shown in one scene) that can be settled by allowing Wagner to marry his daughter, Janice. Holbrook's foreman, Ted Williams, loves Janice, and Johnny helps Ted save his girl. Much of this became clichéd over the years, but I never expect much from a western.

Early on there is a bit of dialogue that I thought to be unusual for a western hero adventure. In an argument between Johnny and his partner, Jed Isbell (Lew Meehan), Isbell ends his dialogue with "...it's none of your damn business!" That would never have been allowed by the time Gene Autry and Roy Rogers ruled the B westerns. The word "damn" was supposedly controversial when used by Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind.

If I had the time, I would love to look through my Hopalong Cassidy movies to see if the same log cabin used in The White Outlaw was used in a Hoppy that I remember.

In reading more about Robert J. Horner here at the IMDb.com site, I am amazed that I liked The White Outlaw. For all the criticism of Horner's tactics and production values, this movie looks good. A real western setting should not be filled with lavish sets, and exterior/interior discrepancies are just normal for low budget movies. There is actually a well-paced story in The White Outlaw.