The Stranger Wore a Gun
In the pantheon of great Western collaborations sits three mantels: John Wayne and John Ford, James Stewart and Anthony Mann, Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher. There is another mantelpiece, unvarnished and dirty from disuse: Randolph Scott and André De Toth. Does it belong there? Elements, directions, suits in a deck—the trappings of the West always come in fours.
Why does this cycle of films lack a reputation, good standing, or even a quick moniker? Skronky where Ford is rhythmic, constricted where Mann is open, jagged where Boetticher is smooth, the De Toth films, six all told with Scott, give, rather than a cohesive persona or moral treatise, a cluster of pictures and ideas on a centerless society. Brass lanterns blown dark, drawn-out fistfights, flaming wagons streaking across the plains, gunfights in pitch-black bars; these images run across the sextet, fogging the hopeful vision of the American West.
This sensation in De Toth’s Westerns, in the Scott cycle of films, is tendered through his style, a difficult thing to name in any of these collaborations. I can, I think, account for Ford and Boetticher, or at least Serge Daney could. Ford’s (and Boetticher’s) skill is in the cohesion between the length and content of his images: “they only last the time it takes a practiced eye to see everything they encompass.”1 This quality produced films tuned to the rhythm of vision, whereas De Toth’s style sows discord between intuition and the eye. The relation of his camera to its subjects creates an aesthetic continuity across American modernity, prompting his style’s central question: what if the images of the corroded urban city were used for the Western? What if Randolph Scott, stalking a gunman through the sagebrush of a baked ravine, was shot with the same frenetic urgency of Sterling Hayden’s chase of Gene Nelson in Crime Wave (1954)? The result is something like marooning Moholy-Nagy in Monument Valley: angular, modernist images; discordant, unsatisfying edits; saloons lit with low-key schemes, entire parts engulfed in darkness; no clean durations, no waving camera movements, but images cut-out and stolen like parts of a collage.
Man in the Saddle
Like fellow Mitteleuropean Fritz Lang, De Toth may not have had a native feel for elements particular to the Western (the vastness, the levity, the communal perseverance, and perfunctory romances). Rather, he intimated—as in his noirs, his anti-war films, his dramas—the repressed realities of plain(s) living: pettiness, avarice, lustfulness. These qualities did not periodically breach the presumptive purity of the setting, but gurgled underneath it like a dormant geyser ready to spurt. This approach does away with the self-approbations of manifest destiny; rather than establishing a homestead on the future, De Toth’s characters have fled (from the law, from their pasts) to the nearly vacant outposts of social life.
A potential answer for the duo’s lack of recognition is the standard deviation in quality relative to the other major partnerships. Mann and Stewart, Ford and Wayne, Boetticher and Scott: each of their films attain by the force of their collaboration something dynamic. I can’t say the same for the De Toth films, whose aesthetic potencies can be divided along studio lines. The two lesser films—Man in the Saddle (1951) and The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953)—produced by Scott’s partner Harry Joe Brown (a third leg of the Boetticher-directed Ranown Cycle), were made for Columbia Pictures. The former is about Scott’s land battle with a rapacious rancher and the latter about his character’s reckoning for his role in a massacre perpetrated by Quantrill’s Raiders. Both films are haphazardly scripted and offer only downriver versions of themes given a full force in other films. De Toth conveyed frustration over Brown and Scott’s lack of care for the projects (“I cared so much for something they cared so little about”), for their dedication to reading the Wall Street Journal more than the script.2 Yet, the failings of these films are mostly stylistic ones: too much proscenium space, mise-en-scène that feels borrowed, banal compositions. The trademark images—fights, flames, and dark bars—pass by the eye without connecting to concepts.
The other four films, made at Warner Brothers without Brown’s involvement, touch the heights of De Toth’s contemporaries. In Thunder Over the Plains (1953) Scott plays a Texan Union Soldier who must decide his allegiances as his home state is assailed by carpetbaggers and unfair taxes. A local Robin Hood type is framed for murder and Scott, through his support, becomes entrapped in the state’s machinations. The inextricable qualities of our historical national identity, law and lore, are, to De Toth’s viewfinder, built on the cloaked desires of self-serving careerists as much as the actions of regional heroes. The notions of blame and guilt are furthered in Riding Shotgun (1954). Boetticher-like in its construction, the film plays like an inverse of Decision at Sundown (1957), where instead of a pinned-down Scott persecuting the whole town, the whole town persecutes a pinned-down Scott. After being assaulted and left for dead by a gang of marauders, Scott escapes to the town of the gang’s next target. His warning is misread by the public and, after several unfortunate encounters, Scott is encircled by gunmen in a local saloon. Stuck there, he must prove his innocence and stop the imminent robbery. De Toth conveys, in his dramaturgy, in his visual form, that the real threat to these western villages is not the bent of outsiders, but the rancorous whims of its citizenries. Consider a telling moment in The Bounty Hunter (1954), the last of Scott and De Toth’s collaborations: the identity of the notorious bounty hunter Jim Kipp (Scott), who has been operating in the town of Twin Forks under an alias, becomes known to the populace. Kipp/Scott is there to capture a few criminals living amongst the denizens, however his targets have remained secret to the public. Townspeople—extras and auxiliary players, most of them—flee the city out of a fear that their past actions supply Scott’s bill of duty. For De Toth: everyone is guilty of something.
The Stranger Wore a Gun
The series highpoint, Carson City (1952), about a city’s plight to build a railroad through their mountainous pass, is an outlier to De Toth’s body of work in its presentation of qualities often foreign to his auteurism: camaraderie in the face of evil, a sense of community cohesion and togetherness, a happy ending. It bears an Anthony Mann-like arrangement: dense plotting, characters who must translate the codes of various social groups, and a concern with the relation between cities, their outposts, and the goods (values) exchanged between them. The difference is in the perspective to the drama. De Toth’s artistry is reverse to the Proust line (“a polite man who doesn’t leave price tags on the gifts he gives”) Jacques Rancière uses to elucidate Mann’s Westerns.3 De Toth leaves the price tag on everything his camera inscribes. “Champagne bandits” who arrange lavish picnics for their victims, steam-powered drills worth more than gold, Scott’s three-piece suit; these are given none of the grace or cadence of Mann’s camera. In De Toth’s lensing these material sublimations of an unconscious desire for riches, for status, are simple facts of the setting, subdued only by the rarified spirit of communal betterment. De Toth’s West is the relationship with incipient modernity and the technological advances (the railway in Carson City, the new weaponry in Springfield Rifle) that enter the dialectic exchange (of money, of values) of ostensible progress.
If I’ve avoided the collaboration at the heart of these films it is likely due to Scott’s sometimes unnatural presence in De Toth’s despoiled West. How is this presence so irregular when shortly after he fits seamlessly into a Boetticherian West that carries so many similar episodes, plotlines, and archetypes? The tension between Scott and De Toth is the tension between dirt and sheen, between a director who didn’t want his costumes washed during the entire shoot of The Indian Fighter and an actor who “took showers twice a day.”4 In the best of their films the handsome gloss of Scott’s visage is dirtied by the natural conditions of the world. The compulsion of Scott becomes the compulsion of the viewer. He (we) must try to get clean again.
The entire collaboration sits on a rift: between the smooth lines of Scott’s face, his decent demeanor and the austerity of De Toth’s screwtaped worldview. The soft qualities of the genre that tip it towards pablum (those qualities done away with by Mann and Boetticher)—slapstick humor, scenes that end lamely in jokes, stuff with children—feel unnatural to both Scott and De Toth. Yet, something seeps in those unnatural elements. The smoothness of Scott’s skin and De Toth’s artificially colorful mise-en-scène: both succumb to something much darker, more blemished. By the 1950s, Scott’s slightly foxed face reveals a traceable melancholy, just as De Toth’s flamboyant interiors feel like a coverup for the grottiness of western life. Each according to their milieu: a broken man for a broken society, a broken mise-en-scène for a broken world.
The De Toth/Scott West is this great irruption in social life, as if the desire to move westward, of manifest destiny, is not propelled by the siren call of freedom but rather the need to escape. Of course, things are the same everywhere. Violence, mob rule, squandered innocence, repressed guilt; the movements repeat out West, forming the contemptible rhythms of our rutted social life from Arizona in 1870 to LA in the 1950. The best of the Scott films, along with Ramrod (1947), Springfield Rifle (1952), and Day of the Outlaw (1959), each extol a truth about social life. One that was defined by Georg Simmel in an essay on the work of art’s relation to its frame: the society and the individual mutually wear each other down.5 A reciprocal wearing-down could be the conditions of the collaboration’s end. De Toth didn’t show up for another contract and Scott moved on to the fine-looking twilight of his career. When asked decades later about the unceremonious ending of such a long relationship, De Toth offered, along with faint criticisms, no regrets nor reservations. And as to why he never worked with Scott again, he said only this: “I couldn’t get blood out of an abacus anymore.”6
1. Daney, Serge. “John Ford for Ever,” translated by Laurent Kretzschmar, https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2019/07/john-ford-for-ever.html.
2. Slide, Anthony, editor. De Toth on De Toth: Putting the Drama in Front of the Camera. Faber and Faber, 1996, pp 97-98.
3. Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista, Berg, 2006. pp. 79.
4. De Toth on De Toth. Reference to the costumes of the Indian Fighter: pp. 133. Reference to Scott’s cleanliness: pp. 99.
5. Simmel, Georg. “The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 11, no. 1, Feb. 1994, pp. 17, doi:10.1177/026327694011001003.
6. De Toth on De Toth, pp. 101.