The Furies

Anthony Mann's second Western after Winchester '73, The Furies (1950) is a stark, character-driven Western that looks and feels like a film noir crossed with Shakespeare. Its complicated plot, strong female protagonist and complex characters and create a truly unique film. It isn't a complete masterpiece like The Man From Laramie, but it's a fine Western in its own right, one of the landmark "adult Westerns" of the early '50s.

T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) is a powerful New Mexico rancher who owns a large expanse of territory - The Furies. A widower, he finds himself henpecked by his bold, strong-willed daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck), who manipulates him at every turn. She's grimly determined to inherit T.C.'s land, but T.C. agrees only on the condition that she marry. Vance is torn between two undesirable suitors: Rip (Wendell Corey), a tough-minded gambler, and Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), a Mexican rancher whose family is squatting on The Furies. Father and daughter's battle of wills comes to a head, as T.C. engages scheming widow Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), and tries to forcibly evict the Herreras. Vance launches a complicated scheme to get revenge and take control of the Furies for good.

Perhaps what's most immediately noticeable about The Furies is its female protagonist, a rarity in the Western genre. Women were largely backgrounded as passive wives or sutiors, glorified mother figures or dirty whores, with an occasional tomboy character thrown in; the West (or at least Hollywood's traditional West) was a man's world, with little place for nice domesticities.

Vance is a wonderfully drawn character, alternately sympathetic and repulsive. T.C.'s impotent son Clay (John Bromfield) can't compete; he's left hanging there, a potential conflict that's quickly dropped. Vance is a domineering yet neurotic personality, which she undoubtedly inherited from her father; she simmers with resentment towards T.C., an awkward mixture of love and hate tinged with hints of incest. When she's betrayed by her father, she won't take it lying down, and gets back at him not with guns, but by using T.C.'s own arrogance against him. Vance is among the strongest female characters ever portrayed in a Western, and certainly the most interesting.

T.C. is a sheer megalomaniac who issues his own currency, keeps a bust of Napoleon in his study, manipulates seedy bankers (including Albert Dekker of The Wild Bunch) and keeps a private army led by El Tigre (Thomas Gomez), a semi-retired bandit. He loves his daughter, though he sees her as paling in comparison to his hallowed late wife, and ignores his hapless son. He uses brute force to deal with most of his problems, especially the Herreras - after a bloody siege, he convinces the Herreras to surrender, only to coldly lynch Juan afterwards. An old-fashioned brute, he finds himself unable to keep up with his scheming daughter, and is left out to dry in the abrupt climax.

The film is full of moral ambiguities: no character, except perhaps Juan, emerges as really sympathetic, and all are constantly scheming against one another. Rip, a proud man determined to come out on top, matches wits with Vance in a love-hate relationship throughout the film. Juan is a fairly good man but his friendship (and unrequited love) comes with a price, as his family and T.C. are sworn enemies. Most amusing of all is Flo, who flatly admits to Vance that her only interest in T.C. is his money - leading to a rather ghastly disfigurement at Vance's hands. Except for Juan, who hangs out with a grotesque, gun-toting family anyway, the only nice characters are completely backgrounded; The Furies is a moral vacuum where only the most devious survive.

As usual, Mann's direction is wonderful. It has a distinct noir feel, with dark, moody cinematography by Victor Milner that seems to place the film's action at dusk; what might otherwise have been beauty post-card images of blue skies and beautiful ranges becomes foreboding, desolate, almost nightmarish. The large-scale shootout at the halfway point is rough, gritty, and visceral - one of the most intense and nasty scenes in any Western. Charles Schnee writes a script that is well-constructed but contains its share of groaner dialogue. The movie's biggest flaw is its climax, which begins on a reconcillatory note and ends with abrupt tragedy, both of which ring false. Franz Waxman's score is fairly rote and not always appropriate, but that's a minor flaw.

Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity) is one of my favorite actresses. I don't find her physically attractive as such, but she has an alluring je ne sais que in her best roles - and so it is here. Her Vance has some precedent in the femme fatales Stanwyck played in the '40s, but she emerges a distinct personage in her own right, warped into a neurotic, headstrong woman resentful at being out of step with her place and time. Stanwyck invests Vance with her usual fire, intelligence, wit and subtlety, making her a fascinating, believable character, even if she never quite becomes sympathetic.

Walter Huston, who won an Oscar and cinematic immortality for his hammy prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), gives his final performance here, and it's a wonderfully restrained yet energetic turn. Gilbert Roland (Cheyenne Autumn) gives a sympathetic performance as the doomed Juan, who manages to avoid the expected Latin lover stereotypes; Wendell Corey is a handsome but fairly wooden blank slate. Judith Anderson (Rebecca) has relatively little screen time but makes a strong impression; her character's amusing amorality and frankness make her very much deserving of the freakish violence visited upon her.

The Furies is an interesting film and a solid Western, despite its third-act improbabilities and inconsistencies, and is another fine piece of work from Anthony Mann. I've seen The Tin Star enough to dismiss it as pap, but maybe I'd ought to take another look at Winchester '73 and The Naked Spur. And Fall of the Roman Empire... well, maybe not that one.