General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Outrage

The Outrage is a 1964 American Western directed by Martin Ritt, remaking Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon as a story of conflicting testimonies about a rape and murder in the 1880s American Southwest.¹^•² It stars Paul Newman as the Mexican bandit Juan Carrasco, with Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, William Shatner, and Howard Da Silva.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	7 October 1964 (New York premiere); Los Angeles opening 16 October 1964¹
Runtime and format	97 minutes; black-and-white widescreen with Westrex sound¹
Source	Kurosawa's film Rashomon (Daiei, 1950) and the 1959 Broadway play of the same name by Fay Kanin and Michael Kanin¹
Screenplay	Michael Kanin, who moved the setting to the American Southwest in the 1880s¹
Key crew	James Wong Howe (cinematography), Alex North (music), Frank Santillo (editing)¹
Production	KHF Productions (a Martin Ritt Production), released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer¹
Reception	20% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (5 reviews); 6.2/10 on IMDb³

Spoilers

Premise

At a disused railway station, three men waiting out a thunderstorm, a con artist (Edward G. Robinson), a preacher (William Shatner), and a prospector (Howard Da Silva), discuss the trial and sentencing of the outlaw Juan Carrasco for the murder of a man (Laurence Harvey) and the rape of his wife (Claire Bloom). Their recounting explores the conflicting testimonies of the parties to the crimes, and each version of the event raises new questions.³ As in Kurosawa's original, four differing versions of the crime are woven into a philosophical puzzle about the nature of truth.⁴

The film hews close to Rashomon, including the rain that frames the storytelling.⁵ The dead man's testimony, delivered through a medium in the Japanese original, is given here through an Indian shaman.⁶

Adaptation from Rashomon

Michael Kanin's screenplay draws on both Kurosawa's film and the Kanins' 1959 stage play Rashomon, which had itself been filmed for television twice, by Sidney Lumet in 1960 and Rudolph Cartier in 1961.¹^•⁷ The adaptation adds several elements of its own: the preacher's motives are placed more in doubt, since he intends to leave the town and possibly the ministry; the commoner becomes a side-show huckster with more developed dialogue, almost a satanic prosecutor; the husband and wife are more fully drawn, bringing in the defeated Confederate cause and class divisions among Anglos; and the racial dimension is heightened through Carrasco's defensiveness in the face of white hatred of Mexicans.⁸

The setting was moved to the American Southwest of the 1880s, in the post-Civil War period.¹^•⁹ Erik R. Lofgren, a Bucknell University scholar of East Asian studies, has argued that although both films work to silence the wife and treat the rape mainly as a plot device, the genre mismatch between the Japanese source and the Western remake gave the wife a more robust opportunity to speak her rape, in the context of the Civil Rights Movement nearing its apogee and nascent second-wave feminism in the United States.⁹

Production

A September 12, 1963 Daily Variety report announced that Martin Ritt was in final negotiations to direct the picture, which was then set to be titled The Rape, with Paul Newman already attached and MGM set to release it.¹ Although filming was planned entirely in Hollywood, location shooting was later added; Ritt scouted locations for three days in Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona, accompanied by Kanin (also associate producer), cinematographer James Wong Howe, and Newman's brother Arthur Newman as production assistant.¹ An advertisement in the October 29, 1963 Daily Variety listed the release title The Outrage; by November 20, 1963 the title had been changed to Judgment in the Sun before the film was ultimately released as The Outrage.¹ Production ran from December 9, 1963 into spring 1964.¹

Newman, playing his first role with a speaking accent, prepared by spending two weeks in Mexico with the film's dialect advisor, Walon Green.¹

Reception

TIME's review of October 16, 1964 called the film, at best, a 97-minute rehash of the vivid Japanese classic, and at worst "a clear case of Occidental death," noting that the producers had added a bumper crop of cactus, presumably hoping to repeat the success of The Magnificent Seven, the Western based on Kurosawa's samurai tale.⁴ The same review mocked the climax, in which Harvey's character trips, staggers up with a bejeweled dagger protruding bloodlessly from his chest, and announces, "Ah tripped."⁴

Later critics have been similarly cool. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 20% Tomatometer from five reviews; Dennis Schwartz gave it a C-, and Emanuel Levy called it an unsuccessful American version of Kurosawa's landmark film.³ Reviewers have also questioned the transplant's plausibility: a critic writing about both films found the shaman-delivered testimony of the dead man hard to accept in a late-19th-century American courtroom, and the preacher's crisis of faith less convincing in a West where murder and lying were facts of life.⁶ The film's IMDb rating stands at 6.2 out of 10.¹⁰

Place in the Rashomon lineage

Rashomon has been remade as a feature film three times: as this Western, as the Japanese Misty (1996), and as the Thai At the Gate of the Ghost (2011), which is often confusingly also called The Outrage.⁷ The Outrage belongs to the early 1960s wave of Hollywood and European remakes of Kurosawa films as Westerns, alongside John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven (1960, from Seven Samurai) and Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (from Yojimbo).¹¹ The film's narrative device, contradictory eyewitness accounts of a single event, has since become known as the "Rashomon effect," a term familiar even to audiences who have never seen either film.¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1961 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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