The Furies – Directed by Anthony Mann. Western Melodrama. An aging cattle baron and his baroness daughter clash over their mates, their land, and some squatters. 109 minutes Black and White 1950.
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Barbara Stanwyck is 43 when she makes this, and she is too old. True, she was a great star, and the best of all the two-dimensional female film actors. She refused Technicolor because her hair was gray, so she does look blond, her face admittedly is unlined, healthy, unchanged, her figure is lithe and trim, her stride is strong, and she looks great on a horse. But everyone who saw this when it came out knew that she was 43, because everyone had grown up with her. There was something older about her anyhow, even when she started in film aged 20 in 1927. The picture is a turgid melodrama, and it is ingenuous to claim it to be anything more. It is not epic, it is not noir, it is not The Eumenides or Greek tragedy. The execution of the film by the director is unremarkable because nothing in it can escape the necessities of turgid melodrama, which means an impenetrable thickness of plot on all levels that must be obeyed. The writing is occasionally witty, but the direction of the performances is questionable. Walter Huston overplays and indeed garbles and miscalculates the role of the rapscallion, domineering, and impractical cattle baron. By “overplays” I mean, when everyone in a story calls you a rogue, the best thing for an actor to do is not to “play The Rogue” but to play the opposite. Even if it was ever supposed to, the tension between Huston and Stanwyck never adds up to an Electra complex, because they both enjoy one another so much in their dash, ego, similarities, and common respect. They have too much sense of humor about one another to be neurotic and too many honest, horn-butting clashes to be unhealthy. Anyhow, while Stanwyck is a two-dimensional actor and therefore is incapable of over-acting, likewise there can be nothing beneath the performance. When Judith Anderson, with her lizard voice, comes in it is not as a sexual rival to Stanwyck but as a rival for her management of the ranch, and when Wendell Corey comes in as Stanwyck’s boyfriend, it is not as a sexual rival to Huston, but simply as a claimant to part of his property. Jannine Basinger in her book on Mann claims that Corey is like Huston and Anderson is like Stanwyck, and there’s something to be said for that, but not enough. The story and its execution is just old Stetson. Gilbert Roland is lovely as a blood brother to Stanwyck (and in love with her), Blanche Yurka is delicious in the Blanche Yurka role of Roland’s bruja mother, and Beulah Bondi commands the screen for our reassurance in both scenes in which she appears. Henry Bumstead deserves great credit for the adobe ranch mansion he made for the set. Otherwise the filming and direction are ordinary. Supposed to be New Mexico, it does not look like New Mexico. Rather like The Old Germany, The Furies is The Old Hollywood. Its story is unconventional, the treatment of it conventional. It had to be: Stanwyck was starring. Yet, who could have played this part besides Stanwyck? No one. All the younger stars were too goody-goody. Hollywood fell partly because a failure of taste in developing strong-willed female stars to-be. In 1930 there was Crawford, Davis, and Stanwyck. In 1950 there were no young tough ladies on the horizon at all.
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