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Andre De Toth: Pictures
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André de Toth was born in Mako, Hungary on May 12, 1913. After earning a law degree in the early 1930s, de Toth, who had won acclaim for plays written while still a college student, acquired mentorship from celebrated playwright Ferenc Molnar and entered the theater scene in Budapest. From that involvement he segued to the film industry and worked as a writer, assistant director, editor and sometime actor. In 1939 he directed five films just before war began in Europe. Several of these pictures received significant release in the Hungarian communities in the United States. De Toth went to England, spent several years as an assistant to fellow Hungarian émigré Alexander Korda, and eventually moved to the Los Angeles.
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De Toth sustained the action well throughout The Indian Fighter (1955), featuring a dynamic buckskinned Kirk Douglas, and filmed in CinemaScope and Technicolor on location in the magnificent mountain country of Oregon. But with the changes in the cinema in the 60s, during which Westerns became rarer, de Toth was offered fewer pictures. However, he was credited as supervising director on a number of Italian epics (the law required an Italian director on the films). He was uncredited on David Lean's Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), though he directed the train crash for the second unit.
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Man in the Saddle (1951) is a Western, one of six André de Toth made with star Randolph Scott. It has some beautiful imagery, but its script has weaknesses. Its big problem: it is full of nasty villains doing terrible things to people. Their relentless villainy is hard to watch or enjoy. The endless fight scenes are hard to take, too, although some ingenuity occurs in the bar fight scene in the middle of the picture. Another problem: you know all about the characters around thirty seconds after their introduction to the picture.
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The Scott Westerns proved to be a boon for De Toth as well. The Hungarian-born director made his first film in America in 1943 and released only a handful of pictures before his first oater, Ramrod (1947). The Scott Westerns helped establish him as an expert at tough, hard-edged action pictures, whether set in the West or the world of urban crime. He ... had a penchant for realistically portrayed violence in his movies.
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The film has a few verbal effects, that continue André de Toth's interest in speech patterns. The two good guy brothers speak at the same time, as if in chorus. This scene is funny, and ... a nice verbal stunt. Much is also made of the gunslinger being from Texas, and his accent. The nice song in the picture, "The Man in the Saddle", is also sung by a singer with a Western feel to his voice. This is a pleasant and evocative scene, shot outdoors on a cattle drive at night.
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De Toth scored again with Pitfall (1948) which turned on a bored insurance salesman who embarks on an affair that threatens everything he holds important. The picture featured leads Dick Powell, Jane Wyatt and
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