Edo,

Thanks for some terrific comments on this tremendously great film, long
a particular favorite of mine.

I think you're largely right about the entrances. I would emphasize,
though, things like your "That final word, 'murder,' hangs over Helen as
she walks toward the cabin," more than ideas about individual versus
community and especially more than ideas about freedom. Sirk once said,
"I believe that happiness exists, if only by virtue of the fact that it
can be destroyed," and I would translate that into de Toth's universe as
"Freedom exists only by virtue of the fact that it can be destroyed --
and is being destroyed at every moment." I don't think I'm really
disagreeing with you here, as you seem to acknowledge this. The film's
editing seems to me to fit characters together like the tightest of
frozen jigsaw puzzles, each becoming a trap that ensnares the others,
as Jack Bruhn serves as a trap for the other outlaws when he rescues the
town's women from their entrapping clutches at the dance, to take a
minor example. The film seems to me more like a global ice palace than a
complexly articulated representation of varieties of human
relationships. For that one might look to Hawks or Ford or Cukor or
Minnelli, even though each also overlays all characters with their own
visions. Though others won't always agree with me about this, I tend to
see great filmmakers, including great Hollywood filmmakers, as having a
"total vision" that should not be reduced, as some auteurists do, and as
I all too often have done in my own writing in the interest of
accessibility, as primarily articulating the specifics of character
relationships within scenes, even though many or most great Hollywood
filmmakers do do that too. It sounds like you partly or mostly agree
with me here, actually (and I'd be curious about your thoughts on this
in general), in that you describe scenes and cuts in terms of the way
they serve de Toth's overall expression.

My own favorite "entrance" of the film is perhaps the one that occurs at
the opening, when the outlaws brutally burst into the bar, disrupting
the complications of a "Ramrod" like plot that seems to be unfolding
with the much more totally despairing prison they impose. Indeed, if I
had my choice of a program to introduce de Toth, it would be those two
films, "Ramrod" first of course.

For me, the opening and closing pans that emphasize what you call a
"circular plateau" form the film's ultimate encirclement, so to speak.

The scene you call pivotal, and the line in it you cite, I have always
found immensely moving. I think the full line (and you or others could
check this on DVD) of Bruhn's is something like, "I know what I'm doing,
but what about you? What's your reason for wanting to die." (Pause) "I
guess every fool has his reasons." So they head off into the hopeless
snow, knowing, unlike the men, that there is no way out, that "none
shall escape" (to quote the title of an early and great de Toth.) But
actually, that isn't quite what happens, and the young man's final entry
indoors fits somewhere into your scheme, though I'm not sure exactly
how, as does of course the reflection on the door window as it closes.

Fred Camper