If Douglas Sirk had made Westerns, they would’ve been a lot like Anthony Mann’s The Furies. With the melodrama, female-focus, intense psychology, ornate interiors and love of reflection, I could easily have thought this film was Sirk work of the 50s. And I enjoyed the film for the same reasons I like that part of Sirk’s career.
The melodrama is intense. A powerful woman, Vance takes whatever she wants, so when she is used by Rip to get at her father, she not only fails to get the man, she’s used as a tool to hurt her beloved father. And her melodramatic response to that episode governs much of the rest of the picture. We get the same intensity when her father, TC Jeffords, breaks his word and hangs her life-long friend Juan, who has just saved her. And again when her father brings a sophisticated city woman to the ranch and decides to marry her and give her the ranch. Emotions are at pitch point through this entire film.
The Furies also has a psychological intensity throughout, centered on Vance. As the masculine name suggests, there’s a struggle at the heart of the Barbara Stanwyck character, one in which her male qualities of wanting power and authority – mostly to replace her father – conflict with something close to desire for her father. In the opening scene, we find her in her deceased mother’s room trying on one of her mother’s dresses. We also see her cracking her father’s back and often closely face-to-face with him. And then there’s the competitive tension between Vance and TC’s future wife, which culminates in a physical attack on the soon-to-be new wife. It’s hard not to see an Electra complex at work in Vance, but there’s also some amount of gender confusion. After Juan has been hanged, the daughter and father face off with a tall, penis-shaped cactus silhouetted in the background. This is the beginning of their final struggle for power.
In addition to the psychology, power and gender issues are at the center of this film. TC Jeffords is a charismatic sociopath who has built an empire that stretches as far as the eye can see, and Vance’s abiding obsession is to wrest it from him. In The Furies, she realizes her quest for power, even choosing to ignore her father’s last wish. Her other power struggle is with Rip, who repeatedly puts her in her subordinate place only to have her rebel and push back. Her heart might love, but Vance has a drive for power that her heart won’t stymie.
In fact, women’s power is an important subtext throughout The Furies. Not only is the Vance/TC struggle at the center of the film, but every time we encounter women in the film, their primary function is develop the idea of women’s power. Wife-to-be Flo explains to Vance the importance of being lady-like but wielding power, and she demonstrates her master of that skill by wrapping the giant TC around her finger. The wife of the bank president in San Francisco plays a similar role. When Vance goes to San Francisco to ensure that the bank president renews TC’s mortgage, Vance ignores the man’s advances and goes directly to his wife, correctly assuming that she wields the real power in the bank. The two women play to each other, using the hapless male as their pawn. And of course there’s the ending of the film where TC has not only been swindled out of his empire by a woman but is then shot dead by another. The West of The Furies is not like the West we typically encounter in film.
The film develops all these ideas in beautiful, effective cinematography. Panoramic, John Ford landscapes create the larger context for the drama, but Mann brings his unique touch with the interiors. Rich as a Sirk set, ornate rooms here are decorated with unique objects that carry significance, like the three-horn lamp on TC’s desk. And the characters move through the sets with halo lighting bringing the actors out from the background and sparkling off bright highlights and mirrors, which themselves often show what’s happening elsewhere in the room. Carrying over from his recent previous work, Mann also introduces some noir camera into his Western. At one point, we view an angry, frustrated Vance through the screen of a heavy banister, and we also see her from below as she casts a large, menacing shadow. A round-up scene later in the film features a series of close-ups of cow hands, creating suspense as TC decides to wrestle the symbolic, rogue bull. The landscapes may owe a debt to Ford, but these noir-ish elements are Mann’s.There are certainly problems with this film. The tone shifts abruptly, character growth is sometimes unmotivated, and the story logic isn’t always clear. But even with these problems, The Furies is one of the more unique Westerns I’ve seen.
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