Two New Juvenile Stars In "The Outlaw"

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 8, 4 October 1941, Page 5

Two New Juvenile Stars In "The Outlaw"

JJOWARD HUGHES’ production, of

“The Outlaw,” the story of Billy the Kid, which will shortly be screened in New Zealand, is an event of double importance, for it marks not only the return of one of fllmdom’s most import ant producers, but also the introduction of two discoveries by the man who brought Jean Harlow and Paul Muni to the screen.

The two who make their screen bow in this story of the West’s most famous bad man, whose exploits became legend

to millions, are Jane Russell and Jack Butel. Thomas Mitchell and Walter Huston are also featured in the film. Jane Russell is a beautiful 19-yeai> old Van Nuys, California, girl, who had been working for £2 a week as a receptionist at a doctor’s consulting room to help supplement her large family’s slim income. She had also posed occasionally for a photographer, and a Hollywood agent, seeing her picture on the photographer’s wall, sent it to Howard Hughes just at the time when he was searching for two youngsters to play the leading roles of Billy

the Kid and his fiery sweetheart, Rio, in “The Outlaw.” Jane had no actual professional experience, but her mother, a former actress, had been training her since childhood with the idea of an acting career in mind. Jack Butel is a 21-year-old boy who won the role of BiUy the Kid from 450 aspirants. The requirements were exacting, for the winner had to bs young enough for the role (Billy in his lethal prime was 22), talented enough to become a star, and rugged enough to look like a two-gun killer. Butel went to Hollywood from Dallas in August, 1940, to seek a movie career.

Told to the accompaniment of roaring guns and the curdling shrieks of raiding Indians, this is the story of Billy and Rio, the girl who hated him so savagely that she tried to kill him, and then loved him twice as fiercely as she had hated him. Hughes issued orders that the ending of the picture was to be kept a secret, for it is different from any known vorsion of the life of the quick-shooting, man-killing Kid.