(This is also posted on my blog, but I'd like to stimulate
some discussion so that I'm not just talking to myself!)

Hitherto I have seen only the one Andre De Toth film.

To try to sum up what I feel is most powerful about it, I
seize on the way De Toth has characters enter a scene. "Scene"
here mostly takes place in the stripped, box-like cabins of
Bitters, Wyoming, a remote town situated in a circular
plateau, near completely circumscribed by a wall of wilderness
and mountains. Groups of characters at odds must reconcile
without the possibility of escape. The problem is that it's
getting crowded in Bitters. Whenever a new character or
characters enter(s) a scene alliances shift and priorities are
reordered. Formally, this process plays out without stylistic
flourish. The execution is logical, direct, almost ruthless,
and yet at once tragic and poetic.

A good example of this mode of 'entrance' is the introduction
of Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the more prominent of the film's
two heroines and a reservoir of mercy in a filmic universe
starved of it. In this scene, Helen interrupts a conversation
between Bitters's local store owner Vic (Donald Elston) and
Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) the compromised hero of the
piece. Like so many other Ryan characters, Starrett is a
primitive, a misanthrope and a control freak. His violent love
for Helen will drive him to attempt the murder of her weak
farmer husband. Brooding over this course of action, he
debates the consequences with Vic indirectly. It is at this
point that Helen appears. Rather than merely have her walk
'on-stage', however, as I think would have been common
Hollywood practice (a practice which Otto Preminger had by
this time carried to the apex of its expressive potential), De
Toth cuts outside, to a shot of Helen approaching the general
store, and cutting well before the shop keeper Vic (Donald
Elson) has completed his last line: "you call his hand it'll
be plain murder". That final word, "murder", hangs over Helen
as she walks toward the cabin, hangs over her as if it were
suspended in the dense whiteness of the sky above her. When
she does make her entrance, even though he could probably
manage the staging, De Toth leaves her to her own space in
medium shot, emphasizing, in the shot-reverse-shot montage
that follows, how the other characters internally size her up,
debating her presence outside the master shot, but within the
grand scheme. At the same time, this plan gives prominence to
her own feelings. It is not until she is invited into the
group by Vic's daughter Ernine that she enters this master
shot, and then only to pass through it and gain access to a
site of hospitality, the family dinner table.

The film is filled with such 'entrances' - Starrett's
confrontation with the farmers, Starrett stopping a dance, the
outlaws' arrival etc. - and repeatedly deploys this montage
which opposes an individual to a group of individuals. With an
acrobat's skill, this mode of montage brings momentary
equilibrium to an intricate network of social relations and
emotional tensions, which threaten to boil over at any second.
Rhythmically, this mode plays out deliberately. Our experience
of time is bitter, harsh, and seeming endless. Even more
impressive is that De Toth manages to work this same operation
in single shots. After all, these groups, framed in master
shot, are not communities. Made up of immigrants and misfits,
outlaws and cattle herdsmen, they share no culture, represent
no social order, but in fact a social disorder. They inhabit
fields of conflict: political, emotional and eventually
physical battlegrounds. It is that 'entrance' of some other
individual or some other group which leads people once at each
other's throats to band together. In this sense, the isolation
of the individual, represented in medium shot, outside of the
intertwined, self-destructive group, represented in master
shot, must speak to a kind of freedom, and yet freedom which
enables what exactly? Certainly, it is not a freedom from
association. Like Helen, we must still confront the group.
People still need to be dealt with, social problems to be
negotiated. In a world encased by a "white silence" as De Toth
put it, the tendency of people to strike out, gang up, betray,
and destroy is axiomatic. It simply cannot be escaped. How
then are we free?

In a pivotal scene, the three main characters of the film,
Starrett, Captain Bruhn (Burl Ives) the leader of the outlaws,
and Gene (David Nelson) their newest recruit, must make a
crucial decision: will they sacrifice themselves for the weak?
Accruing added intensity in a film mostly staged in long
shots, the scene is broken down into isolated medium shots of
each man. Each is left to decide for himself. "Every fool has
his reasons." Thus, freedom consists in this reflective act,
when the individual is forced to look at him or herself, to
face the "white silence" in isolation, and to contemplate what
kind of a life is worth living. It is to understand the
inevitability of death, and to determine how we meet it. Only
then can we reenter the scene to influence it, to steer the
group in a new and 'better' direction.