Andre de Toth's most interesting films reveal an understanding of the instability and outright treachery of human relationships.
--Andrew Sarris
de Toth made beautiful, compact genre films, especially crime films and Westerns. He made four films with Randolph Scott, who was something of a leading man in the 30's before drifting into rather indifferent Westerns in the forties and elegiac Westerns with directors de Toth and Budd Boetticher in the fifties, ending his career with Sam Peckinpah's marvelous Ride the High Country in 1962, where Scott's character sums up his career as a minimalist and complex actor.
In The Bounty Hunter Scott plays a bitter man who saw his father killed in a robbery and has dedicated himself to a career hunting down criminals and bringing them in, often dead, for the money. He is hired by the Pinkertons to track down three murderers that the agency has been unable to find and follows some subtle clues to a small and isolated town; no one knows what the killers look like but Scott is astute enough to know that if he stays long enough in the town the killers will get nervous enough to reveal themselves. The town doctor knows who one of them is but won't reveal it because he and his daughter have been threatened. Scott falls for the daughter while a dance hall girl falls for him.
The opening of the film, where Scott rides alone in a rocky landscape, looks very much like the Boetticher films; but the rest of the film takes place in the small town where everyone is trying to outmaneuver each other. de Toth's tense direction transcends the cheap Warnercolor (one of many versions of Eastmancolor, the inexpensive alternative to Technicolor) and the original gimmick of 3D (guns firing directly at the audience, etc.), though the film was only released flat.
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