NH Day of the Outlaw

The film Day of the Outlaw was created in the year 1959. At that period of time women did not have many rights. Women were expected to cook and clean for their husbands and maintain a tidy household for their family. Women did not have much of a voice when this movie was created and there were certain parts of the film that shocked me and certain parts that made perfect sense for the time period.
When Bruhn's gang enters the town and begins demanding that they are going to do whatever they please with the women of the town not a peep is heard out of any of the women. They know that it is not their place to get involved and they just let the men do all of the talking. It is troubling to see how women were treated at that time and it shows through the film that men did not think much of women. They are treated by Bruhn's men as if they are not even people, they are just objects. The men try to kiss them and have intentions of essentially raping them and they say nothing. Such issues surely existed in the 1950's but they were not spoken of.
I was very shocked by the strange relationship that Helen Crane had with Blaise. Although they were ex lovers, the act of Helen being unfaithful to her husband and kissing Blaise would be considered extremely inappropriate at the time that this film was made. This is where we see the "other" of women come into the film more than any other time. Her unfaithfulness was extremely uncharacteristic for a woman at that time and it was also uncharacteristic for the Alpha Male Cowboy to partake in such a situation.