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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 33 |
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At last 'The Furies' comes
to the home video market
of TheColumnists.com
For years, his fans have savored the great westerns director Anthony Mann made with James Stewart, for they are among the very best westerns ever made: "Winchester '73," "Bend of the River," "The Naked Spur," "The Far Country" and "The Man From Laramie."
But "The Furies," a film Mann made without Stewart, may be Mann's greatest western--and, until now, it has remained in the vaults of Paramount, never released on tape, DVD or any other format like the other Anthony Mann westerns.
I'm happy to report the long wait for "The Furies" has been worthwhile because it has been issued by The Criterion Collection, the pricey, but distinguished label reserved for home video release of the greatest American and foreign films, most of them now coming in fully restored DVD editions of the very highest technical quality.
This sparkling new edition of "The Furies" comes in a $39.95 boxed set with a new edition of the source novel by Niven Busch, first printed in 1948 and long out of print until now. The film comes with numerous sidebar features and a special booklet. It has been beautifully restored and the moody black and white cinematography by Victor Milner reminds us how artful a film could be without a trace of color.
"The Furies" first was released by Paramount in 1950, but was considered so controversial at the time that its debut actually was postponed until two other 1950 westerns Mann had made AFTER "The Furies"--"Winchester '73" and "Devil's Doorway"--were released to theaters.
The controversy centered on two issues: A suggestion of incest in the storyline and a sequence of violence that many felt was way too intense for film audiences of the period. I have no idea what changes may have been made to play down the hint of incest because it is still rather obvious when you study the relationship between the film's two main characters--New Mexico cattle baron T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) and his doting daughter, Vance (Barbara Stanwyck).
However, I can imagine some cutting was done in the film's most violent sequence in which a furious Vance picks up a pair of scissors and hurls them at her new stepmother, Flo (Judith Anderson), severely wounding her in the eye and cheek. You don't see the actual penetration of the eye, but the scene is still a shocking one--and was extremely upsetting to many moviegoers when I first saw it in a crowded theater in 1950.
Why is "The Furies" such a great film? I think there are lots of reasons, notably the bravura acting by Barbara Stanwyck, who I consider the very best dramatic film actress of her era, and Walter Huston, who made "The Furies" right after winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor of 1948 for his performance as the old prospector in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," the classic film directed by his son, John Huston. Huston's performance as T.C. Jeffords turned out to be his final bow on film.
In fact, Huston's last scene in "The Furies" contains the last words he would ever utter in a movie: "There'll never be another like me!" They were prophetic words--and a fitting coda for the career of a truly great stage and film actor whose final performance may indeed have been his best.
But I also think "The Furies" is great because director Mann was able to take his renowned style as a director of films noir ("T Men," "Railroaded!," "Raw Deal," etc.) and use it quite appropriately in a western with the dark themes and shadowy characters commonly found in films noir. The result was that rarest of hybrids--a noir western.
Now I don't blame you if you're wondering how a western could be a film noir? Aren't they supposed to be urban dramas set in big cities rife with crime, violence and all those deep shadows noir filmmakers adore? And aren't westerns supposed to be filmed outdoors in bright sunlight that reflects off the white hats usually worn by cowboy heroes?
Well, Anthony Mann must have enjoyed breaking the rules and still getting it right because "The Furies" is as noir as a film can get and yet it's unmistakingly a western.
First, the source novel by Niven Busch is dark and kinky. It's quite obviously an attempt to re-tell the story of Shakespeare's "King Lear" in a western setting. There are no heroes with white hats. T.C. Jeffords is a tyrant who does things his way and let the consequences be damned. At one point, he orders the lynching of a defiant Mexican whose family he drove off the land and shows not a trace of remorse, even though his beloved daughter once loved the man.
His daughter, Vance, has a twisted psyche and a serious problem trying to live in the role of a 19th century woman when she wants to do everything her father does, only better and meaner. The itinerant gambler (Wendell Corey) she falls in love with defies her father, who considers him a mercenary tinhorn, but willingly accepts cash from the old boy when he's bribed to stay away from Vance. Vance's brother, Clay (John Bromfield), is a wuss who can't stand up to his dad in any way, shape or form.
Author Busch was a veteran Hollywood screenwriter who had written some major Hollywood studio films ("Babbitt," "In Old Chicago") and some acclaimed movie westerns ("The Westerner," "Pursued"), but had turned to novels after the phenomenal success of his book "Duel in the Sun," a dark and kinky western that Hollywood producer David O Selznick chose for his big-budget follow-up to "Gone With the Wind," filming it in colorful grandeur in 1946. (While covering a rodeo in Hollister, Calif., in 1963, I was assigned to take a photo of Busch and his family in the stands. He seemed very likeable, without a trace of the dark, kinkiness of his novels.)
The novel contains the strong suggestion of an erotic attraction between father and daughter, but no hints that anything physical had ever transpired between them. But the film is loaded with coded messages about it. T.C. frequently asks his daughter to rub his back for him and they both look as if they're transported by the practice. The very essence of Vance's character is her burning desire to please her father, even if it means defeating him in some way to prove she's just like him--ruthless and unsentimental.
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Barbara Stanwyck in a scene suggesting how intimate they are as father and daughter. |
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If you can remember Stanwyck as the sinister leading lady of "Double Indemnity," then you know how good she was at slipping into these roles of women with smouldering ambitions and dark motives. She is marvelous as Vance, a woman who can play sexy, but always seems coiled as if to strike.
I'm guessing that Anthony Mann was fueled by the kinky atmosphere of Busch's storyline and tried to kink it up even further by casting Stanwyck and Judith Anderson as the female rivals for T.C.'s affections. It must have been a great in-joke for Mann to cast Anderson, a great actress with a well-known reputation as a lesbian, as the conniving widow who "steals" the fabulously rich T.C. Jeffords from Stanwyck, whose own preference for females is now well-documented.
The scenes between Stanwyck and Anderson are always stirring--and it's especially amusing to watch Anderson, who was so dominating as the lesbian Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's "Rebecca," knuckle under to Stanwyck, a much smaller woman physically, but imposing just the same.
"The Furies" seems always to take place after dark, even at high noon. I'm assuming Victor Milner shot much of the film "day for night," using lens filters to bring out the looming clouds that always seem to fill the skies. The look of the film is quite recognizably noir throughout. The great Franz Waxman contributes a properly stark and dramatic musical score.
Charles Schnee's screenplay makes many changes in Busch's story. Vance's other brother is eliminated and Quintinella, the vicious sidekick to T.C. in the book is turned into a less interesting character called El Tigre (Thomas Gomez) in the film. Vance's swain, "Curley" Darragh in the book, becomes "Rip Darrow" in the movie. The ending is slightly different and the $50,000 bribery scene in the book is changed completely and is dramatically weaker than it's portrayed in the book.
But the film works remarkably well for all those changes and isn't really hurt badly by the somewhat "Hollywoodified" ending. The supporting cast is extraordinary with fine work by Gilbert Roland as Juan Herrerra, Blance Yurka as his weird mother, Albert Dekker as a San Francisco banker and even a small part for Movita Casteneda, best remembered as the native girl in the 1935 "Mutiny on the Bounty," as T.C.'s housekeeper.
Though "The Furies" has nobody you really feel clean about rooting for, it's still a fascinating drama as we watch a self-made giant of the old west brought down by his self-serving daughter, a monster he created in his own sagebrush lab. I love this movie and am delighted its return has come in such a polished, handsome edition.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The photos are courtesy of The Criterion Collection and Paramount Pictures. This column first posted Sept. 1, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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