Rashomon Revisited

The Outrage, at best, is a 97-minute rehash of the vivid Japanese classic Rashomon. At worst, it is a clear case of Occidental death. In remaking Director Akira Kurosawa's 1952 Oscar winner, the producers have added a bumper crop of cactus, presumably hoping to repeat the success of The Magnificent Seven, a western based on Kurosawa's epic tale of the samurai. Assigned to this prickly task are Star Paul Newman, Director Martin Ritt and Photographer James Wong Howe, all covered with pay dirt from their triumphant collaboration in Hud. The result this time is a slick, shallow olio of rape, murder and violence.

Like the Japanese original, the American remake weaves four differing versions of a crime into a philosophical conundrum about the nature of truth. While waiting out a thunderstorm at a desolate western whistlestop, three men fall to reminiscing about all the sex and sinnin' that came out at a badman's trial for murder. Seems a Southern dandy (Laurence Harvey) and his wife (Claire Bloom) had been lured into a woodsy glen by a notorious Mexican bandit (Newman), who bound the husband to a tree and then raped the wife. Later, the husband was found dead and the case came to trial. Whether he was killed in a fair fight, murdered by his dishonored wife, or done in by his own hand, depends on which of the protagonists' testimonies can be believed. One of the trio gathered at the depot is a thieving old prospector (Howard Da Silva), who finally admits that he was an eyewitness to the crime but claims that none of the stories told at the trial were wholly true.

Unfortunately, before the prospector relates his own near-farcical version of what happened, The Outrage has already set the audience snickering. Even Howe's limpid, meticulous photography cannot redeem the dialogue, which the actors often appear to be addressing to Destiny rather than to one another, perhaps out of kindness. Actress Bloom intones: "He couldn't touch all we've been to each other." Newman's bandit is a growling comic-strip Mexican who leers: "You cooked dee pot of tamales, I juz' took off dee lid." And in the film's bumbling climax, ironic tragedy turns to fatuity when Harvey belly-whoppers into a clump of sage, staggers to his feet, notes a bejeweled dagger protruding bloodlessly from his chest and announces coyly: "Ah tripped."

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