A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
The fourth collaboration between director Anthony Mann and star Jimmy Stewart is set in 1946 and thus doesn't get the admiring attention of their classic run of westerns, but it's probably the nearest thing to a western of their team-ups outside the genre. It has the same sort of driven Stewart hero the westerns have, though he has no vengeance agenda to drive him. Instead, Steve Martin -- no relation to the American journalist who covered Godzilla's rampage through Tokyo a few years later -- is a heroic if somewhat ruthless entrepreneur. Down to his last dime -- if that -- he and his sidekick Gambi (Dan Duryea) have to convince an oil baron (Jay C. Flippen) to finance the construction of an oil rig off the coast of Port Pleasant LA. Steve clearly knows his stuff but there's still something of the huckster, if not the con man, to him, but that hustling quality earns him the oil baron's sympathy. "You've never had the pleasure of gambling your last dollar on a dream," he chides his corporate bean-counter, recognizing a kindred risk-taker. Steve doesn't earn the trust of the locals so easily. They're shrimpers and worry about the oil riggers disrupting the shrimp beds. Worse, the educated daughter of one of the shrimpers (Joanne Dru) spreads the impression that oil workers are trash. She seems to speak from personal experience, but Gambi, a party animal, doesn't help the oil men's case by promptly stealing another shrimper's girl. They shouldn't worry, since Dan Duryea is pretty much a good guy for once, but the conflict continues to escalate as the shrimpers make repeated efforts to sabotage the drilling while Steve's backers run out of money and patience.
Thunder Bay arguably was ahead of its time in portraying a conflict between energy prospectors and locals concerned about the environmental impact of oil drilling, but as a product of the 1950s it predictably reconciles all conflicts, revealing a harmony of interests as the drillers actually make it easier for the shrimpers to harvest a rare, valuable catch. This is actually one of the most pro-oil films you'll probably ever see, since the writers found it necessary to have Steve defend his drilling with a speech bluntly announcing America's dependence on oil. Without it, he says, the country begins to die, including the shrimpers. That speech may give the film a retroactive camp quality, or worse, for the politically or ecologically sensitive, but it really only makes the film a document of its time, dating it relative to Mann and Stewart's more timeless westerns.
Take away the stark landscapes that give those westerns an outdoor-expressionist quality and for a while Mann looks like a more ordinary filmmaker. Thunder Bay doesn't really come to life until the oil rig is built, and then Mann takes every advantage of his new toy. The picture's visual highlight is a fight between Steve and one of the shrimpers, the man who lost his girl to Gambi, who tries to plant dynamite on the rig just as a hurricane bears down on the site. Mann and cinematographer William H. Daniels give the fight an elemental quality, making the most of his rain effects and the roiling waters below. They achieve something similar when the riggers have to stop a salt-water blow and, on a more exhilarating note, once the well comes in and an oil-soaked Stewart shrieks with joy. This may not be a western, but it's definitely not as tame as The Glenn Miller Story or Strategic Air Command. It's not as good as the westerns, either, but those who love the westerns may still like this one a bit.
Anthony Mann is widely regarded as the best directors of westerns during the 1950s, the golden age of the genre in America. But while his run of films with Jimmy Stewart have entered the canon, and his one film with Gary Cooper, Man of the West, is often ranked on the same level, The Last Frontier is for some reason the neglected cousin of the Mann western family. To be more specific, the reason it's neglected is Victor Mature. Compared to Stewart and Cooper, not to mention Henry Fonda (The Tin Star) or Glenn Ford (Cimarron), Mature is a much less credible actor. He remains identified with Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, which despite its blockbuster popularity made Mature a laughingstock as legends spread of his cowardice on set and Groucho Marx's comment that Mature's breasts were bigger than Hedy Lamarr's. If he's remembered at all now, it's as a bad actor, but I've liked some of his performances, from the film noir Kiss of Death to another sword-and-sandal saga, Delmer Daves's Demetrius and the Gladiators. It might help Last Frontier's reputation if more people knew that it features one of Mature's best performances, but the film has problems of its own that aren't the actor's fault.
Mature plays Jed Cooper, a trapper who works the Sioux country with his mentor Gus (James Whitmore) and his full-blooded Indian pal Mungo (Pat Hogan). They get a cool introduction in which they react to the menacing arrival of a war band by sitting down for a snack to show that they're not scared. They may not be scared, but it's not like they can face down these suddenly hostile warriors. Instead, they're compelled to give up the furs they've accumulated, the horses they're loaded on, and their guns, now that Chief Red Cloud has decided that white men are no longer welcome on tribal land. They're no longer welcome because the bluecoats have built a fort, and it's to the fort that Jed and his crew head in search of compensation, despite Gus's reservations.
The cavalry can't repay them for what the Indians took, but it can pay them to become scouts. Jed likes the idea of the power and status that comes with a uniform, while Mungo is happy as long as he can get booze. Jed is also turned on by the lady of the fort, Corinna Marston (Anne Bancroft), the commanding colonel's wife. Like his men, or most of them, Col. Marston (Robert Preston) is stationed on the frontier because he's not good enough to fight in the Civil War. He'd had his chance, actually, and earned the nickname "the Butcher of Shiloh" with it. It wasn't Rebs he butchered, but his own men through reckless leadership. Marston is unrepentant, telling anyone who'll listen that he'd take the same chance again, and wants redemption through a decisive victory over Red Cloud. With typical bluecoat arrogance, he underrates "savages" as strategists and makes arrangements to lead his men into a Little Bighorn style slaughter.
Jed confronts the Marstons: Corrina (Anne Bancroft, above) and the Colonel (Robert Preston, trapped below).
Jed recognizes Marston for a fool but is torn between a growing sense of responsibility to the fort and a desire to be rid of the Colonel in order to have Corinna for himself. He claims to have nothing against Marston personally, but he'd plainly be happy to see him dead. The feeling eventually becomes mutual as Jed leaves Marston in a bear trap, only to be guilt-tripped by Corinna into going back and rescuing him. Annoyed by her mixed signals, Jed slaps her before he leaves. Afterward, he becomes increasingly disruptive, finally quitting the fort after Marston's henchman tries to kill him. He knows that Marston will lead his men to destruction, despite the efforts of a lone sensible officer (Guy Madison), but that's none of his business anymore, except that Gus is still with them (Mungo followed Jed out but went his own way) and the opinion of at least one other person at the fort still matters to him....
Mature gives his all in a boisterous, swaggering performance -- at least it's a lot more than he often gave in movies. Jed symbolizes the eventual civilization of the Last Frontier as he gradually learns loyalty to things larger than himself and disciplines himself accordingly. He's not unlike the typical conflicted Mann protagonist, but without Stewart's cool grimness; Mature's a wild man by comparison and the best thing in the movie.
Mann makes the most of his locations, of course, as does cinematographer William C. Mellor. The fort setting and the frontier warfare with "barbarians" anticipates what Mann would do on a larger scale, if not with much more success, in The Fall of the Roman Empire nearly a decade later. What hurts him here is a romance angle that has no good reason to exist, except that Columbia Pictures probably insisted on it. If there's a weakness in Mature's performance, it's that he has no chemistry whatsoever with Anne Bancroft, who doesn't seem herself in this episode from her first, failed tour of duty in Hollywood. Jed's affair with Corinna is an artificial complication that his conflict with Col. Marston doesn't need. We know it doesn't need the extra stuff because it's been done before. The conflict between Mature and Robert Preston is basically the conflict between John Wayne and Henry Fonda in John Ford's Fort Apache, only more forcefully expressed across a greater social gulf.
In the end, however, The Last Frontier is a strange synthesis of Fort Apache and, of all things, Gunga Din. Imagine a Gunga Din remake in which the title character not only survives but wins, and you have the finish of Mann's movie. A lone figure is about to ride into an ambush that'll preface a general slaughter of unsuspecting troops. The uncivilized Jed can save the day (and his friend) and alert the troops by firing his rifle. In the end he saves neither Gus nor Marston, but instead of a dead honorary corporal, Jed ends up a live sergeant. Mann usually opts for the redemptive happy ending in his westerns, but this time it seems too neat and too convenient for the hero. The film is simply too romantic to rank among Mann's best work or the great westerns of the decade, but even an inferior Mann western has a lot going for it. Between Mann and Mature, this one has enough to justify a look.
In the course of three months, from July through September of 1950, three different studios released the first westerns of Anthony Mann. The best-known, Winchester '73, appeared in July, followed by The Furies in August and M-G-M's vehicle for Robert Taylor late in September. Along with Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow and Henry King's The Gunfighter, Mann spearheaded the new decade's trend of "adult" or "psychological" or socially conscious westerns, with Devil's Doorway falling into the socially-conscious category. This time out, Mann directs a screenplay by Guy Trosper that's a stroke of conceptual genius, combining two of the most popular western tropes in the form of a cattle baron resisting the encroachment of sheepmen and homesteaders -- who happens to be an American Indian.
At first glance, Lance Poole (Taylor) is as assimilated and Americanized an Indian as you could ask for. He returns to his father's ranch in Wyoming in the uniform of a sergeant major of the U.S. Cavalry, a decorated veteran of the Civil War. But times are changing for the worse in the once-unorganized territory. The Pooles have friends in town, including the future marshal (Edgar Buchanan), but an Indian-hating lawyer, Verne Coolan (Louis Calhern) is starting to make nasty noises in Lance's presence. His contagion spreads to the town doctor, whose contempt for Indians arguably contributes to the death of Lance's father. Lance inherits the ranch and prospers as a cattleman, but the formal organization of the Wyoming Territory opens the land to settlers under the Homestead Act. Worse, as Coolan stands ready to argue for sheepmen's rights (with likely ulterior motives), the law no longer recognizes the Pooles' right to their land; Indians are barred from owning land in the territory.
As determined as any cattleman to turn back the sheepmen, and with an ethnic chip on his shoulder, Lance seeks out a lawyer to counter Coolan's influence. When he finds that the attorney he chooses to consult is a woman (Paula Raymond), Lance is tempted to head right out the door; he has prejudices of his own to overcome. But she proves quite capable of stalling the inevitable, organizing a petition campaign to have Lance's land claim recognized as a precondition to accommodation with the sheepmen. That doesn't suit Coolan, who goads one well-meaning sheepman into a violent confrontation with Lance that will justify Coolan raising a posse to take down the man he insists on calling "the Indian." Lance's military training helps keep the posse at bay, but his lawyer may have to betray his trust by calling on the Cavalry to come to his rescue....
Superimposing the "vanishing Indian" archetype over the figure of the reactionary cattleman is a masterstroke. Lance displays the same intransigence in the face of purported progress that usually makes cattle barons villains in westerns, but because he's an Indian and a victim of racial prejudice the viewer is practically invited to root for him and against the people usually portrayed as the true bearers of civilization. But Devil's Doorway presents Lance Poole as a tragic figure, one who really is in some ways obsolete. Lawyer Masters is appalled to witness the final stage of a Shoshone initiation test as young Jimmy crawls the last few feet to the Poole house to beat a deadline after having three days to catch an eagle and take his talons with a knife. Lance says it's necessary because the small Shoshone population needs as many real men as it can get, but I feel certain that the audience is meant to identify with Masters's horror at the ordeal imposed on a mere boy. Masters herself is a tragic figure, prejudiced just enough against Indians in her own right to preempt the movie's last chance for a happy ending: a romantic union with Lance. Progressive though she is, she's not quite progressive enough -- though the M-G-M ballyhoo plays up the interracial love angle (in the wake of Broken Arrow's success). As Lance says, things might have turned out differently "a hundred years from now."
Visually, Devil's Doorway is on a level with Mann's other breakthrough westerns, featuring terrific location work and noirish cinematography by John Alton. The story is probably the most downbeat of the three films, with no happy ending for anyone -- though the actual ending comes with too much of an abrupt thud for its own good. Robert Taylor is an interesting choice for the lead. He's not particularly convincing as an Indian, but that actually helps keep Poole a complex, problematic antihero. Should we see him as Indian or cattleman? Mann gives us visual cues as Lance gradually adopts traditional Indian dress (before returning to his cavalry uniform at the end), but the director also shows us that this isn't so much a case of Poole reverting to savagery but being reduced to prejudiced whites' image of a hostile redskin. He's not an innate savage, noble or otherwise, but a conflicted product of his country's contradictory influences. This much Taylor conveys pretty well.
Devil's Doorway is the least known of Mann's 1950 westerns, most likely because Taylor hasn't stood the test of time as well as James Stewart (Winchester '73) or Barbara Stanwyck (The Furies). Having seen it for the first time today on TCM, I think it's fit company for the other two films, and further proof that Mann had instantly become a major player in the genre at the start of its greatest decade.
Anthony Mann's production of Erskine Caldwell's once-famous novel has a pretty memorable theme song. In fact, it was practically the only thing I remembered from when I used to see the film on cable TV as a kid, before I knew who Anthony Mann was. All I knew back then was that it was about hillbillies -- and I hated hillbillies. It was nothing personal against Southerners or mountain folk. I mean I hated all the hillbilly-type stuff they had on TV in those days. I hated The Beverly Hillbillies and shows of that kind. I just didn't find it funny, and I figured that God's Little Acre was going to be another hillbilly comedy, so I zoned it out whenever it was on.
I'm grown up now, in theory, and Anthony Mann is one of my favorite directors, so when TCM scheduled it for tonight as part of an evening dedicated to Tina Louise, who made her movie debut for Mann, I decided that I owed it a look. It's one of two films Mann produced for Security Pictures (Men In War is the other), and I can see the book's appeal to him. Mann's unrealized dream project was an Old West staging of King Lear, something that could well have been an American Ran. You can see hints of it in films like The Furies, The Man From Laramie and Man of the West, and in Caldwell's story Mann found a patriarch who starts out at least half mad and has the requisite three sons, along with two daughters.
Ty Ty (Robert Ryan) is a cotton farmer who's abandoned his cash crop because of his obsession with a treasure of gold his father supposedly buried on the family property. He's cratered the land in search of the gold, but proudly spurns his sons' (Jack Lord and Vic Morrow are still on the farm) advice that he consult a conjurer. Instead, he takes up the suggestion of Pluto Swint (Buddy Hackett), a candidate for sheriff and for the hand of Ty Ty's remaining unwed daughter (Fay Spain), that he find himself an albino to dowse for the gold. Since albinos have an innate sense for gold, this option strikes Ty Ty as respectably scientific. The infallible willow branch is soon in the hands of Dave (Michael Landon), and in the one other scene I remember from childhood viewings the "all white man" spasmodically stumbles across the pockmarked landscape, finally settling just in front of Ty Ty's front porch. But this is "God's Little Acre," the proceeds of which Ty Ty has reserved for the benefit of the church. However, Ty Ty had only just relocated God's Little Acre to that spot on a whim earlier in the picture, so it's easy enough for him to move it the river's edge now on a fresh divine inspiration.
If it sounds like I'm describing a broad comedy, that's what the movie is for its first two-thirds. If that doesn't sound like Mann is playing to his own strengths, you're right again. Pictorially he's as good as ever, filming on location with fine compositions in depth and good cinematography from Ernest Haller. Mann and Haller do all they can to make Louise and Spain look as alluring as their print counterparts were for titillated readers. But there's clearly a problem with tone that becomes more apparent as the film turns more serious. One major subplot of the story is the repressed romance between Ty Ty's daughter-in-law Griselda (Louise) and his son-in-law Bill Thompson (Aldo Ray). At first this just seems part of a general landscape of Southern lustiness, no different from sister-in-law Darling Jill's flirtations with Pluto and the albino. But Bill evolves into a tragic figure. He was a foreman at a textile plant (making him a "linthead" in his brother-in-laws' eyes) that has long been shut down for business reasons. Bill becomes obsessed with reopening the mill, upon which multitudes of poor folk depend for their livelihoods. I get a feeling that Erskine Caldwell meant us to see an analogy between the mill left idle and the farm left idle by Ty Ty, but while Ty Ty's story is never anything but absurd, Bill's storyline turns deadly serious as he defies the mill owners in a quixotic quest to put his neighbors back to work. Once that storyline plays itself out, Mann tries to import that more serious tone to Ty Ty's story, and it just doesn't work. Robert Ryan has been playing the character as such a complete clown until then that we just can't take him seriously when Mann wants us to. We're meant to understand that he has a kind of blow-to-the-head induced epiphany while two of his sons try to kill each other that leads him to renounce the error of his ways, but the change in tone is too drastic, and Mann may be too insistent on superimposing his ulterior tragic theme where it doesn't fit. I don't mean to say he ruins the film here. The problem is that he'd already ruined it to the point that his efforts to save it probably only confused people.
God's Little Acre has an additional problem for 21st century viewers. While the 1958 ballyhoo billed the Caldwell novel as the best-selling novel of all time, it hasn't stood the test of time since then. The film is now a remnant of an obsolete pop-culture phenomenon. It simply can't resonate with us the way it was meant to do (it flopped) with its original audience. Worse, apart from the novel itself, our perception of hillbilly or Southern culture has changed profoundly since Mann made the film or Caldwell wrote the novel in the 1930s. Back then, with mainstream American culture still officially repressed, hillbillies embodied a titillating regression to a less inhibited state of earthy intimacy and looser morals -- something to deplore for the record yet fantasize about. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, and after Deliverance (cinematically speaking) the eccentricities and perceived pathologies of the region are harder to contemplate with the kind of wink-nudge complacency displayed in Mann's movie. The film is probably more awkward looking now than it seemed 52 years ago, but I think it's an objective failure no matter how or when you look at it.
Is it Anthony Mann's worst movie? That's hard to say when I haven't seen everything he made, but I think God's Little Acre is the weakest of what I've seen. I have a lot of problems with Fall of the Roman Empire, but that doesn't come close to this film. If anyone's seen worse, maybe I don't want to know.
This YouTube upload from jacklord1920 combines several promos for the film, so forgive some redundancy.
One of director Anthony Mann's first films, this adaptation of a Vicki Baum short story is one of the last starring roles for Erich Von Stroheim. This is an early film noir and in it the 60 year old Stroheim plays the sort of role Edward G. Robinson was playing in films like Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window. As if to establish the ground rules of the rising genre, established heavies like Robinson and Stroheim (the erstwhile "Man You Love to Hate") are thrown like raw meat to the new monster in Hollywood, the femme fatale. In the case of Stroheim's acting career, Flamarion is like a noir do-over of his first talking role, The Great Gabbo, with the balance of power decisively shifted from the imperious showman to his flirtatious protege.
Mann and his writers immediately turn Stroheim against type by introducing him as a disheveled, dying man lurking about backstage as a Mexico City vaudeville show of 1936 breaks down amid sounds of gunfire. The wife and partner of a trick bicyclist has been killed, and the bicyclist is the prime suspect. But as the once-great Flamarion tells the last actor in the theater, after the cops have left, he is the killer -- and in proper noir flashback style, he proceeds to explain why.
The Great Flamarion, after and before.
The Great Flamarion was a trick-shot artist with a unique comedy-act gimmick. His act has him burst in upon an actress playing his wife, who he finds cheating on him. Provocatively for the time, he seems prepared to shoot his wife's clothes off before her paramour attempts his escape. The role of the paramour requires a dancer's agility, for he must dodge Flamarion's real bullets as the star shoots out the lights on a mirror behind the man. The paramour, Al Wallace (Dan Duryea in a very William H. Macy type role) is actually the husband of Flamarion's stage wife (Mary Beth Hughes), but theirs is an unhappy partnership. Al's an alky, but he has dirt on Connie that keeps her from breaking up the partnership. She also has the hots for the bicyclist she'll eventually marry. How to get free? Connie's plan is to work on the cold, teutonic Flamarion and soften him up. It'll take a while, but it'll get Al jealous enough to provoke a situation in which the eminently qualified Flamarion can eliminate Mr. Wallace. The beauty of the scheme is that she'll take advantage of Al's alcoholism to get Flamarion off the hook. He shoots Al deliberately, but a coroner's inquest determines on the basis of Al's drinking that the victim caused his own death by mistiming his steps on stage. Her deal with Flamarion is that, after a decent interval of mourning (three months), they'll hook up in Chicago and she'll marry him. Believe it...or not.
Mary Beth Hughes rarely got out of B-movies, but for Flamarion she deserves a spot in the Femme Fatale Hall of Fame.
In retrospect, it might have made more sense for Connie to set things up to make Flamarion's attack look more blatantly like murder. That way he'd be in jail, or dead, but as things develop, once he figures out (it takes a while, the sap) that he's been jilted and dumped, he sacrifices his career and wealth in order to track her down. He finally has to sell all but one of his guns to afford a ticket to the show in Mexico where he finds her at last. True to form, Connie seems poised to dump the bicyclist for an acrobat before Flamarion intervenes.
The Great Flamarion takes the flashback framing device to an absurd extreme, giving us a detailed narrative related by an old man on the brink of bleeding to death after falling from a catwalk. By backdating the climax to 1936, the writers seem to acknowledge that the vaudeville story was somewhat dated for Forties audiences. The film's femme fatale is a misogynist nightmare of wily femininity chewing up and spitting out successive male victims; even this early in the noir game cliche threatens to overtake social or psychological realism. But the movie is still worth watching for Mann's maturing visual style and Stroheim's iconoclastic performance. The actor starts off (in the flashback, that is) playing the predictable barking martinet, but as he responds to Hughes Stroheim reveals a reticent vulnerability that wins your sympathy. Unlike his archetypal jaded or decadent sophisticate, Flamarion is a once-bitten, twice-shy sort whose gruff manner is all about protecting himself from forming emotional attachments that might hurt him -- a wise approach, we might decide in retrospect. Stroheim loosens up quite a bit along the way, even dancing with himself at one point in anticipation of his reunion with Connie. It's an underrated performance that should serve as proof that the man history remembers as a director victimized by Hollywood has never really gotten enough credit as an actor.
Meanwhile, Mann was entering a phase where practically everything he shot helped define the visual look of noir. His effects range from the expressionistic (the bicyclists' shadows behind the curtain as Connie seduces yet another man) to the show-offish (characters often talk to people who are only seen in mirrors), and they give this film a style probably unequaled in any other 1945 release from Republic Pictures.
This is the earliest Mann film that I've seen and I can see the qualities in it that made him one of my favorite directors. It's a minor film in his filmography but one worth watching for fans of him or Stroheim.
Over at Goodfella's Movie Blog there's an inexorable march in progress through the talkie era as Dave names his favorites for each year and takes all comers with other picks and lists. It's great sport for people with lots of movie experience, and Dave makes an eloquent case for his choice every time. 1950 came up on Thursday (Dave named All About Eve), so that was an excuse to crack open a Criterion DVD that I'd picked up at a Borders going-out-of-business sale last year. Why it took so long to look at Anthony Mann's other western from 1950 I can't say, except to point to the constant distractions that show up on the Albany Public Library's DVD shelves.
For those wondering what I mean by "other western," 1950 was the year of Mann's big breakthrough film, Winchester 73. That was the film that signaled the darker turn that would make James Stewart one of the top actors of the 1950s, often directed by Mann in grim westerns like The Naked Spur and The Man From Laramie. Winchester is also one of the early "adult" or "psychological" westerns, as the genre is called that looks beyond the white and black hats to discover conflicted heroes and complex villains. Another frequently-used label that's actually more specialized is "Freudian western," and The Furies is one of these.
The Freudian Western adds a level of sexual obsession to the adult-western template, dating back to David O. Selznick's Duel in the Sun from 1947. Duel was based on a novel by Niven Busch, and The Furies was another of his novels, picked up by Paramount-affiliated producer Hal Wallis for direction by Mann. Criterion has reprinted the novel for inclusion in a neat little box with the movie. I haven't read it yet, but I did open it to answer a question that occurred to me almost immediately as I watched the film.
"The Furies" is a giant cattle ranch owned by T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston), a mighty man of the old school who spends much of his time spending his money in the fleshpots of San Francisco. When I say his money, that sometimes means "his" money. He somehow has the right to print promissory notes called T.C.s that are accepted as legal tender, albeit with increasing reluctance, when he runs up debts.
T.C. has two children that we know of. The son, Clay, is an ineffectual, nearly effeminate fellow who is nevertheless getting married as our story opens. The true heir apparent to The Furies, however, is the daughter, Vance (Barbara Stanwyck). She runs things in T. C.'s absence, gripes about his expenses, and busts his balls when he's home, but theirs is a very affectionate relationship. He trusts her to massage his sixth lumbar vertebrae, and there's something disquietingly intimate about their interaction that's only accentuated by Franz Waxman's suggestive music. Vance is headstrong, competent, yet virginal and naive in sexual matters. This seems inconsistent with the plain fact of Barbara Stanwyck on the screen. Few of her peers in Classic Hollywood exude the raw power that she does, and that's sexual power along with everything else. But there's something about Vance that makes Stanwyck seem inappropriate for the role, though I suppose that only emerges because she has the character nailed as far as acting is concerned. What I had to check in the novel was Vance's age. Stanwyck was 43 when she played the role. In the book, Vance is nineteen. To be fair, I don't know if the movie means her to be nineteen, and Stanwyck's age is arguably appropriate relative to Huston's. Also, I don't know if a more age-appropriate actress could have brought the necessary power that Stanwyck does.
Father and daughter bust one another's chops and always seem to be maneuvering for advantage over each other, but they clearly love one another until others enter their orbit. She already has a perhaps more-than-friendly relationship with Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), scion of a local squatter clan, but she seems suddenly to be more serious about Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), a questionable character whose family lost a valuable strip of land to T.C. and bequeathed a grudge to their boy. Vance wants to get T.C.'s goat by going with an enemy, while T.C. is determined to show her that Rip is a scumbag. It takes $50,000 to prove it, which is what he offers Rip to walk away from Vance. Rip accepts, taking it as compensation for the loss of his family's land and using it to start his own bank. Vance, who has been repeatedly stood up, not to mention slapped around (in some convincingly rough scenes) by this creep, is heartbroken, confiding her sorrows and lingering feelings for Rip to Juan.
If this film were to be remade today, I suspect that Vance would end up with Juan, who seems like too good a guy to pass up. But there's increasing pressure on the Jeffords clan to drive out all squatters, who are a "cloud" over the land in the eyes of the bankers from whom T.C. wants a new mortgage. For the moment, Vance's affection for Juan earns the Herreras a breather while T.C. and his right hand goon El Tigre (Thomas Gomez) burn out the other squatters.
Anthony Mann's deep-focus style is also suited for illustrating height, as in this scene in which Vance (on horseback at the right bottom of the screen) hails Juan, standing atop the Herrera fortress.
Things fall apart when T.C. brings a new, older woman home from his latest jaunt in Frisco. This is Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), a self-confessed fortune hunter who encourages her beau to pack Vance off for a long European tour while she settles in at The Furies. Vance's anxiety at the alienation of her father's affections seems more than childish, though it does seem very much like a childish outburst when she hurls a good-sized pair of scissors at Flo's face when she learns that T.C. is going to marry her. Enraged, T.C. adopts the tit-for-tat principle and decides to level the Herrera's hilltop fortress, defying a rain of boulders and bullets to hurl dynamite at its foundations. Juan's mother has quite the bloodlust for T.C., but for Vance's sake Juan urges her to stand down and his family to quit the ranch. Unfortunately for Juan, T.C. discovers that he's riding a horse with a Furies brand and has him hanged for rustling on the spot. There's a moral intended for Vance in this: it's not nice to see someone you love hurt. But the analogy fails once Juan is swinging in the wind, and it's Vance who's determined to teach T.C. a lesson by destroying him.
The stage is set for an epic war between father and daughter, but it's at this point that the movie begins to fall apart. Vance's revenge requires her to travel the country buying up all the T.C. notes her father has spread around, and this removes Stanwyck from the explosive proximity to Huston that fueled the first half of the film. The film's early power came from them playing off each other, so isolating them dilutes the drama, especially when Vance's revenge scheme proves more elaborate than it needs to be. Worse, it involves her teaming up with the once-despised Rip Darrow, who now softens as he perceives a newly maturing Vance. Wendell Corey had been so convincing as a dirtbag early in the picture that his emergence as the true romantic lead was completely unconvincing. Even less convincing is the spirit of reconciliation that descends (despite a violent interruption by the Herreras) after a digressive cattle drive that seems included only to demonstrate T.C.'s mightiness in steer rassling and showcase a song about his prowess with whips. Not having read the novel, I can't say whether this decline is faithful to the story or a case of Hollywood coming down in favor of matrimony and domesticity. Either way, it's not what I'd been led to expect from the appropriately furious emotions displayed by Stanwyck and Huston.
None of the above takes away from the pure visual quality of Mann's direction. He had mastered deep-focus composition so that there's always a dramatic balance between foreground and background in his shots. He's as great in his outdoor scenes as anyone familiar with his other westerns would expect, especially during the sequences at the Herrera fortress. But he also makes outstanding use of some impressive sets for the Jeffords house. One such scene stands out: Vance and Flo are arguing in what was once Vance's mother's room. Vance stands by a mirror, in which we see Flo sitting in a chair. We see her rise and walk, and while we hear her talking we first see her in another mirror just behind Vance, then finally in person, entering from the left to face Vance. Mann uses the mirrors to impose a dramatic pace on Anderson's movements that steadily builds up tension. He puts the mirrors to further good use while setting up Stanwyck's scissors attack.
In short, this is a film that's definitely worth looking at despite its story shortcomings. I recommend it to fans of Stanwyck, as this is (I think) the first manifestation of her western-matriarch persona that received its apotheosis on The Big Valley. Anyone who appreciates Walter Huston should also check out his career-closing performance here, in which he shows a vigor that belies the nearness of his demise. The Furies has the makings of a classic, and probably still qualifies as a flawed one.
Here's the trailer, uploaded by ClassicMovieTrailers: