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Customer Reviews of Man in the Saddle

Compared to 'Johnny Guitar', 'The Man In The Saddle' isn't very camp, but it has its moments. That title for a start: along with the song that explicates it, sung over the crepuscular silhouette of a man alone, it sounds like the kind of elegy to existential solitude we would expect from a Randolph Scott film, especially one of those made with Budd Boetticher a few years later. But when the song is finished, we see that it's not about Scott at all; he's sitting comfortably in a communal situation listening with pleasure. Far from suggesting absurdist masculine self-sufficiency, the title refers to male sexual potency, about who's in control in the sexual game, 'in the saddle' (there is a lot of by-play with hats, a favourite phallic signifier as 'Miller's Crossing' attests). The plot is supposed to be about struggles for land, but the real sources of conflict in the film are two women over whom various combinations of men fight. Female sexuality is inscribed on the land - De Toth's compositions emphasise, ahem, triangular shapes, while the film's most extended scrape over a woman takes place in a natural hideout, with forests and gushing waterfall - the only mark of civilisation, a makeshift house, collapses under the pressure. Prowess with guns takes on a different kind of meaning in this context, with the impotent landowner hiring expert gunslingers to do his shooting for him.

The suggestion that this deferral of sexuality onto the plane of action masks yet another displacement, that of homosexuality, is implied by some extraordinary stand-offs in which suppressed feelings and eye contact play a part, and the fact that women, usually accessories in the genre, are forced to take on the male role in order to revert things to normality. This upturning of generic conventions is heightened by de Toth's typically extraordinary and idiosyncratic direction which subjects the mise-en-scene of each frame and the staging of each set-piece to enormous internal pressure, emphasising artifice (the grouping of characters in space; the 'framing' of characters in doorways and windows; the intrusion in the frame of extraneous elements, such as the twigs that create a frame in the fistfight mentioned above; the use of music to commentate on the action; the use of lighting, which is constantly pushed towards silhouette or chiaroscuro, obscuring the clarity of the narrative action, pushing it into the abstract and formal (and reminding us that de Toth would make one of the great horror films, 'House Of Wax', a couple of years later)).

This doesn't mean that the illusion of the action is destroyed - the last third is brilliantly, excitingly choreographed, but even here, the tumbleweed-bouncing, dusty, stormy weather is belied by the clear blue skies whose monumental, sculptural quality was earlier responsible for some extraordinary compositions of the natural world.

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Half-hearted adaptation of Ernest Haycox novel is weak. Scott is good as Owen; Knox is equally good as the baddie, but the film is missing movement. If there were ever a Razzie award at the time, it would have to go to the title song.