There’s not a likeable person in 1950’s The Furies, with the possible exception of a character who winds up at the end of a rope. It’s possibly why it’s so hard to get stuck into this complex and thematically rich film, though bad storytelling might be another reason.
Since it’s called The Furies, you might expect a Greek tragic element, and you get it, in an Oedipal tale with a gender-flip, of an old patriarch and his two children: the son he can barely look at and the daughter he’s looking at a bit too much.
She’s lavishing too much attention on him too, back rubs and whatnot, but for the most part she is biding her time, waiting for dad to shuffle off so she (not her brother) can inherit his ranch. But first a bit of rebellion, in the shape of dad’s sworn enemy, whom daughter Vance decides to set her cap at. Rip Darrow also has a beef, believing part of The Furies, TC Jeffords’s vast ranch, is his by right, so his dalliance with Vance might be part of a plan on his part too.
Just to complicate things further, daughter Vance also has a semi-romantic relationship with a member of a family of Hispanic “squatters” – they dispute the term. She and Juan have known each other since childhood, and we suspect they’d have been long married if he wasn’t brown of skin and low of status.
Even more complication. Dad is actually broke and living on IOUs, which he insists are as good as dollars. And he’s also taken up with a gold-digging widow, who, it soon becomes clear, might have her eye on the ranch.
There’s more but that’s enough to be going on with. The important plot element, which provides the dramatic throughline, is the one concerning the money, which Vance will eventually spin into a sting operation against her own father in an Oedipal takedown. It’s very neat, twisted, dark and satisfying. But, honestly, wouldn’t the film have been better if it had given this plot a bit more weight?
There’s a wedge of King Lear – who gets the old king’s kingdom? – in this grand old western set in a world where almost every relationship is transactional. In fact, the Juan/Vance relationship to one side, they all are.
This was the western Anthony Mann made after Winchester ’73, his most famous and enduring one, and it’s a fascinating if flawed beast of a thing, with race, gender, the patriarchy and the colonial mindset unusually central to what’s going on for a film of this time. It was the last film Walter Huston made. He died suddenly before it came out, which works in the story’s favour, in a macabre way, since it’s about an old dude holding on when he should have let go and destroying everything he’s spent a lifetime building up. It’s a big role, full of gush and guts, and he goes at it like a stage actor projecting to the back of the room.
Barbara Stanwyck plays Vance, an impenetrable and unlikeable schemer only redeemed by her feelings for Juan, which also slightly damn her, since she won’t admit her racism is in the way of both his and her happiness.
Gilbert Roland is noble Hispanic Juan, while Wendell Corey plays narrow-eyed Rip Darrow and Judith Anderson (of Rebecca‘s Mrs Danvers fame) is scheming opportunist Mrs Burnett. All three are excellent in terms of acting. It’s the psychology motivating their characters that doesn’t quite add up and there’s not much the actors can do about it.
In the end, though, it’s the sheer horribleness of Vance that is this film’s real undoing. Stanwyck plays her with a curled lip the entire time, as Vance waits for a man to arrive who will give her “the bit” – as this horsewoman puts it. Vance is a woman crying out to be reined in. The film could do with a bit of the same.
The Furies – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
