Way-Out West.('The Furies')(Video recording review)

The director Anthony Mann, an early master of the film noir, turned to the Western in midcareer, and his second, "The Furies" (Criterion), from 1950, is one of the greatest--in effect, a frontier noir with epic ambitions and Shakespearean audacities.

The story revolves around T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston), a self-made rancher, proud and vain, who keeps his strong-willed yet dependent daughter, Vance (Barbara Stanwyck), close to him in a strange, and subliminally incestuous, bond. The complex plot joins sex, money, and power, as when T.C. tries to buy off the gambler (Wendell Corey) whose father T.C. had killed and for whom Vance has fallen, or when Vance battles T.C.'s aging, insidious consort (Judith Anderson), who is scheming for control of the homestead.

Mann, who was born in California, knew that the wide-open spaces of the West were anything but empty, and portrayed its multicultural heritage long before the concept became familiar. To get the mortgage that will save his ranch, T.C. has to clear his land of squatters--Hispanic families who have lived there for centuries, including that of Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), who is Vance's lifelong admirer and, remarkably, her dearest platonic friend. (Their tensions, sarcasms, and tender rituals contribute to what is perhaps the cinema's most ...