The Furies

Anthony Mann: The Furies (US 1949) avec Judith Anderson (Flo Burnett) et Barbara Stanwyck (Vance Jeffords). Photo: La Cinémathèque française.

Les Furies / Raivotar / Våldets lag.

    Anthony Mann / États-Unis / 1949 / 109 min / 16 mm / VOSTF

    D'après le roman The Furies de Niven Busch.

    Cinematographer: Victor Milner

    Avec Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, Walter Huston.

    Filming locations from IMDb:

Empire Ranch, Sonoita, Arizona, USA

San Pedro River, Arizona, USA

Sonoita, Arizona, USA

Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, USA

Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, Arizona, USA

    Filming dates: 9 Nov - 23 Dec 1949

    US premiere: 21 July 1950 (Tucson, Arizona premiere), 16 Aug 1950 (New York City). The Furies was Anthony Mann's first released Western, but Devil's Doorway was filmed first. Its premiere was postponed by MGM because of the subject.

    Rétrospective Anthony Mann.

    La Cinémathèque française, 51 Rue de Bercy, 75012 Paris. M° Bercy Lignes 14, 6 ; Salle Henri Langlois, le 24 mars 2024.

La Cinémathèque française : " Avec l'adaptation du roman de Niven Busch, qui emprunte autant au drame œdipien qu'à la tragédie shakespearienne, Anthony Mann signe un western hybride, dans lequel il utilise habilement les ingrédients du film noir pour brosser la relation complexe d'un père et de sa fille, deux riches propriétaires d'un ranch à la fin du XIXe siècle. Si Walter Huston (dans son dernier rôle) offre une performance épatante en patriarche tyrannique, l'interprétation de Barbara Stanwyck embrase l'action d'un récit aussi féroce que subtil. Un drame familial d'une saisissante sécheresse, qui invoque implacablement les déesses de la vengeance, tout droit sorties d'une épopée grecque. "

AA: There is instantly an irresistibly powerful epic drive in The Furies. The dialogue is razor sharp, the exposition is rapid in the extreme.

We are in New Mexico of the 1870s, on a ranch called The Furies. This is a tragedy of succession and a saga of original accumulation: the cattle empire of T. C. Jeffords, compared with a feudal lord, can only expand via violent eviction of the previous inhabitants, the Mexicans.

The leading actors are Walter Huston as the brutal patriarch T. C. Jeffords and Barbara Stanwyck as his daughter Vance, both at their best in this film. The saga is extremely dark, starting from the foreboding night sky during the opening credits, but Anthony Mann lets Huston and Stanwyck display their talent in humour and comedy, broadening and complicating their register. These are characters we love to hate.

T. C. Jeffords is a figure bigger than life. In the beginning he is not above saving with his bare hands a calf drowning in the mud, risking his life. In the finale he breaks a wild bull (the same individual now grown up?), again with his bare hands. This was Walter Huston's final role, and he is still formidable as the archetypical strongman who is already turning mythological in his lifetime, and even more: there are depths of the tyrannical Urvater or Father Karamazov in his performance, like in William Wyler's A House Divided. T. C. has also created a financial empire of his own based on "T. C." currency = his personal IOUs printed in a banknote printing press. T. C.'s may be worth nothing, evoking today's cryptocurrency fashion. A theme song is being composed about T. C., heard again during the closing credits. His last line: "There will never be another one like me".

In the middle of the movie, the widower T. C. introduces a new lady to the house, Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), whom he intends to marry, without having bothered to inform his daughter Vance in advance. Flo wastes no time taking over the ranch's financial planning and starting to refurnish the deceased mother's room. But when Flo, without consulting Vance, informs that she is hiring a manager to evict the Herreras, Vance hurls a pair of scissors at Flo's face. Horribly disfigured, Flo starts to fortify herself increasingly with her favourite drink of cognac and orange juice.

Barbara Stanwyck was already a veteran of Westerns, but The Furies launched for her a series of strong performances in Golden Age Westerns of the 1950s (Blowing Wild, Cattle Queen of Montana, The Violent Men, The Maverick Queen, Trooper Hook, Forty Guns). The father-daughter relationship is exceptionally volatile, electrifying and unpredictable, and we can never tell what the next turn might be. They love each other and try to destroy each other. Besides her father, Vance has two loves: the gambler Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey) and Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), her childhood pal and only true blue friend. T. C. bribes Rip to leave Vance and orders the execution of Juan, the leader of the Mexicans. That is the last draw for Vance who declares than she now knows what hate is. Observing her, Rip states that "your new love is hate". In full Monte Cristo mode she embarks on a journey of revenge to demolish T. C.'s financial empire and rip him from his ranch. She manages that, but as the night falls, Mama Herrera, the best sharpshooter of them all, gets T. C. in her sight.

In their mating scenes, Barbara Stanwyck and Wendell Corey display chemistry and exchange innuendos such as "Rip - like a blade cutting right through" and "I like to take the reins".

Barbara Stanwyck cuts a fine figure as a Western action heroine, dashing on horseback and performing her stunts herself. She is in her element.

Victor Milner, the great Paramount cinematographer of Lubitsch, Sturges and De Mille, excels also in epic mode, celebrating the sublime grandeur of the Arizona landscapes.

André Bazin in his essay "Le western ou le cinéma américain par excellence" (1953) may have been the first film critic / historian to say that Westerns are the Iliad and Odyssey of today. "The Civil War is part of nineteenth century history, the Western has turned it into the Trojan War of the most modern of epics. The march to the West is our Odyssey". Niven Busch and Anthony Mann had no need to study Bazin to conceive The Furies on those very terms. Writing about Busch and Mann in the context of The Furies, Bazin called Mann "le meilleur réalisateur actuel de westerns" (France Observateur n° 375, le 18 juillet 1957).

The print was announced as 16 mm, but it looked like 35 mm, and a good one at that, the best of the five I have seen so far in the Anthony Mann retrospective.