Although only the first part of this tworeeler exists, The Last Outlaw is a remarkable early example of what would later be called an “end-of-the-West Western.” An old outlaw, Bud Coburn (Ed “King Fisher” Jones), released from prison, returns to a town gone dry to look up his grown daughter (Lucille Hutton) and square a grievance with the local sheriff (Richard Cumming). Coburn finds himself menaced by motorcars, mocked by modern dudes, and beset with sad memories of how much livelier the place was in the old days when saloons and Indians were plentiful on the streets. The reason the title character seems so authentic is that he was played by a genuine Western lawman and sharpshooter from the old days. Based on a story by Evelyne Murray Campbell, The Last Outlaw, was remade with Harry Carey in 1936 from a screen story cowritten by Ford, and late in his life Ford wanted to remake it again.

“Perhaps the most remarkable of Ford’s surviving silents . . . The John Ford of the 1950s is already here in the gripping reflectiveness of an aged ex-con who emerges from years of prison into a changed world. One thinks of Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra (1941).”

Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films, University of California Press, BerkeleyLos Angeles 1986