A crusading newspaper editor in California becomes concerned about the plight of the state's fruit pickers, mostly immigrants from Mexico who are (disparagingly referred to as "fruit tramps").
Film critic Thom Andersen identified The Lawless as an example of film gris, a more cynical variety of film noir with leftist themes. The film was also released as The Dividing Line. John Hoyt is cast against type as a sympathetic, racially tolerant father and the then 19-year-old Tab Hunter makes his credited debut.
Plot
California fruit picker Paul Rodriguez hopes to someday have a farm of his own. When his friend Lopo Chavez has a car accident, he is insulted with a racial slur by Joe Ferguson, a passenger in the other car. Joe's father disapproves of this bigotry.
Lopo visits his friend Sunny Garcia, whose family publishes a Spanish-language paper called La Luz. At a dance, Sunny is introduced to Larry Wilder, editor of "The Union", who once was a big-city newspaper reporter. A racially heated fight breaks out at the dance. Paul accidentally strikes Peters, a policeman. Joe is also arrested. A reporter who works for Larry depicts the incident to a Stockton paper as a full-scale race riot. Reporter Jan Dawson arrives to pursue the story.
Peters roughs up Paul in the back seat of the police car. His partner tries to intervene but crashes the car and dies. Paul flees. A dragnet for him begins. It intensifies when a teenage farm girl, Mildred, startled at seeing Paul, falls and is knocked unconscious, after which she blames Paul for what happened.
Larry tries to defend Paul in a newspaper article, inciting more anger. Lopo is attacked and a lynch mob for Paul is organized. The newspaper office is destroyed. Larry considers leaving town for good, but he is in love with Sunny, so they decide to merge their newspapers and continue to fight for what is right.
The film was based on the novel The Voice of Stephen Wilder by Daniel Mainwaring. Film rights were purchased by Pine-Thomas Productions in August 1949.[6] Mainwaring was friends with Pine Thomas and he persuaded the producers to hire Losey. Losey later said:
It was a subject I felt very passionately about but I had big trouble because Pine and Thomas were a combination that made ‘B’ pictures for Paramount, and they were monsters, absolute monsters. And they interfered in the worst possible way at all points and I would never have been able to make that picture in a million years if I hadn’t had the guts and if Dan Mainwaring hadn’t had the guts that he had. He really risked his career to protect me. [7]
Losey studied the film Fury as well as footage from the 1949 Peekskill riots.[8]
The film was known at one stage as Outrage. Gail Russell had been on suspension by Paramount but got off it to make this film.[9]
The film was an attempt by Pine-Thomas Productions to make a more "significant" kind of film. Shooting began in October and took 18 days.[10]
Losey found it difficult working with Russell who could not remember her lines. She was alcoholic and Paramount said she could not drink but Losey had to give her alcohol so she could recall her lines. The director loved working with cameraman Roy Hunt.[11]
Losey said the producer forced a music score on the film which "made it cheaper and more melodramatic and it slowed its tempo" and he was fired off the movie. [12]
Losey said "Mainwaring’s script was a very good one but it was corrupted by the producers. I mean all that business of the rape of the girl and the police car going up in flames were stuck in by them, and | didn’t like shooting them and the picture would have been much better without them. But it was quite a successful picture in spite of everything, and it does say what I wanted to say."[13]
Critical response
Film critic Bosley Crowther praised the film. He wrote, "Within the inevitable limits of the low-budget action film, which happens to be the type of product that these modest gentlemen produce, they have made an exciting picture on a good, solid, social theme—the cruelty of a community when inflamed by prejudice. And although their drama, The Lawless, is no Fury or Intruder in the Dust, it is a startling account of mob violence in a northern California town. With merited optimism, it was presented at the Astor yesterday."[14]
The staff at Variety magazine also gave the film a positive review. They wrote, "Racial tolerance gets a working over in The Lawless, but the producers don’t soapbox the message, using it, instead, as a peg on which to produce a hard-hitting drama, equipped with action and fast pace ... Performances all stack up as topnotch, with several being standout."[15]
According to film historian Foster Hirsch, The Lawless garnered “generally good reviews” in America, but was “greeted with wild enthusiasm” in France. Reviewers at Cahiers du Cinéma offered fulsome praise: Marc Bernard wrote “It is the most beautiful of films…I breathe easier after each viewing.” Pierre Rissient declared The Lawless “the greatest western and even the only western ever made.”[16][17]
Box office
Pine Thomas said they expected to make a profit of $1 million on the film.[1]
However The Lawless was a box office disappointment and not as profitable as other Pine-Thomas films. Pine felt it might have been more successful if it had a bigger star or if released a year earlier, when he said much of the public “was actually going to see message films.” He and Thomas insisted they were glad they made the film because it was the first time they produced “a real critics’ picture” and it "proved we're guys whose only interest isn't making money."[18]
