The Lawless is a 1950 American film noir directed by Joseph Losey and featuring Macdonald Carey, Gail Russell and Johnny Sands.

John Hoyt is cast against type as a sympathetic, racially tolerant father and the then 19-year-old Tab Hunter makes his credited debut.

Lopo visits his friend Sunny Garcia, whose family publishes a Spanish-language paper called La Luz.

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.

[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.

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.

"[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] Pine Thomas said they expected to make a profit of $1 million on the film.

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.