I have mentioned De Toth previously (posts of July 7, 2016 and May 13, 2015) as a master of relatively low-budget genre films. Day of the Outlaw is an austere and powerful Western that was made around the time Westerns were beginning to dominate television. De Toth's film is in black-and-white to better emphasize its simple physical beauty and the complex psychological interplay of its characters (the producer wanted color and the cinematographer is Russell Harlan, who also did De Toth's intense Ramrod, 1947). Robert Ryan is ready to shoot it our with the husband of the woman he loves but just before the bottle rolling down the bar hits the floor to signal the shoot-out the door opens and in comes Burl Ives and his men, army deserters and thieves carrying stolen gold.
This changes the whole moral equation and the small town of about twenty people tries its best to keep the injured Ives alive; only Ives can keep his men from drinking and molesting the women. The town of Bitters, Wyoming is snowbound but Ryan knows the troops coming after Ives and his men are not far away and offers to lead Ives's gang though a pass in the mountains to freedom, even though he and Ives know there is no such path. Ryan is no longer concerned about how his cattle is being kept from food and water by the barbed wire of the farmers and the crisis causes him to reflect on his own bad behavior. Ives and all his men die in a snowstorm, some shooting each other and some freezing to death.
De Toth and Harlan capture the bleak beauty of a snowbound town with only three buildings: a store, a barber shop and a saloon. Ryan and Ives start out as antagonists but both have good and bad in their backgrounds that are only hinted at and are used to bluff each other. De Toth uses a grizzled collection of supporting actors --Dabbs Greer, Jack Lambert, Frank DeKova , et al. -- to effectively populate the town and the outlaws. Tina Louise is the confused woman trying to decide between Ryan and her husband (Alan Marshal).
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