The Outrage (1964)
7/10
Newman deserves credit for trying something boldly unusual
28 January 2009
Newman's fifth film for Martin Ritt, "The Outrage" was based on the classic Japanese film "Rashômon," but Ritt transplanted the tale to the South Western U.S. following the Civil War…

Carrasco has been convicted of raping a woman (Claire Bloom) and murdering her husband (Laurence Harvey), but four eye-witness accounts conflict… All agree that the bandit raped the woman, but only one asserts that he committed the killing…

Sadistic, defiant, and challenging, Carrasco snarls, sneers, and walks with macho arrogance, to hide the fact that he can only be strong by tying a man to a tree and raping his wife…

The role allowed Newman to give a bravura performance, not unlike Toshiro Mifune's in the Kurosawa film, and the stylization would fit the story if everybody else weren't playing it so straight… As it is, the performance seems too showy, easily understandable, exaggerated
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