After turning down United Artists, Hart signed a new contract with Zukor which guaranteed him $200,000 per picture and cut Tom Ince out entirely. Best of all, Fritz was able to return to the screen. The first of the new productions was Sand, but Artcraft held it back in order to launch the new arrangement with The Toll Gate. Working with Fritz once again seems to have inspired Hart to recapture what he saw as the best elements of those Triangle releases which had made him a star: for the last time the good bad man would abandon female companionship and ride off alone, having avenged a duplicitous betrayal by a man he had once considered his friend. In his autobiography Hart spent considerable time describing the dangers he and Fritz had overcome while performing numerous stunts in this film, especially one in which they approach a secret cave entrance through a swiftly flowing stream. Unlike Tom Mix, Hart never emphasized feats of horsemanship for their own sake, but whether this was because he found them flashy and unrealistic, or was simply unable to execute them, is an open question. Ann Little, a professional rider with the Miller Bros. Ranch who worked with Hart on his films, remembered him as a mediocre rider whose amateurish technique was immediately recognized by the more experienced hands around him. Some have even suggested that his more strenuous stunts were accomplished by doubles, especially as he grew older. But despite the general softening of everyone’s films in the post-war period, The Toll Gate still had much of the real stuff. As Louis Reeves Harrison wrote in Moving Picture World, “It is the story of an outlaw without any attempt to gloss over his character…[Hart] represents the combined daring and cunning of the American fighting male….There constantly shines in his eyes the combined pugnacity and caution of the true gunman of the West.”

Richard e Diane Koszarski