October 5: Jean Painlevé V -- Films for Le Palais de la Découvert

For this group of films, Lou and read several articles related to Painlevé and efforts to define the documentary.

• Science Film: Accidental Beauty (Andre Bazin, 1947) -- An interesting article by Bazin written on the occasion of Painlevé showing a series of films.  Ever erudite, Bazin categorizes some films as actual scientific discovery (time lapse shows how yeast reproduces) and surgical (preserving expert surgical techniques for future doctors).  His most interesting comments are about how beauty emerges from Painlevé's work when the filmmaker is simply recording data and, by chance, beauty is created.  This is a point where Surrealism and Painlevé's work intersect.
• Castration of the Documentary (Painlevé, 1953) -- Using the 1947 World Union of Documentary Filmmakers definition as his standard, Painlevé laments the lack of originality and commitment in his contemporary documentaries.  He wants a documentary to "consciously increase human knowledge...expose problems and offer solutions." He sees his contemporaries as timid in the face of their audience and worried mostly about making profit.  He believes filmmakers focus on pleasing images rather than energy, art, creativity, challenge and dedication to the subject.  He'd hate the Travel Channel though I think he'd like Ken Burns, who always offers his perspective on his subject.
• The Ten Commandments (Painlevé, 1948) -- This little list could be an outline for the ideas in the later "Castration of the Documentary": Be dedicated, don't use cinema tricks, don't persuade unfairly, don't bore, and report reality honestly.  
• Scientific Film (Painlevé, 1955) -- Interesting article about examples of using filmmaking for research. It covers examples like time-lapse, high speed, ultraviolet/infrared film and endoscopic filming.  He also gives industrial research done with film including analyzing harbors and steel production.  These he calls "scientific film," meaning that filming is a research technique.
• Painlevé Reveals the Invisible (Hélène Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, 1986) -- In this interesting interview for Libération, Painlevé tells gives backgound to his life and work, including the ultimate fate of the vampire in his film and amusing stories like the one about André Breton.  

FILMS FOR LE PALAIS DE LA DÉCOUVERTE

★★★★ The Fourth Dimension (La quatrième dimension), 1936 --  This is vintage, creative Painlevé, a science film unlike any I ever saw in school.  Explaining the fourth dimension, he makes the point that it would depass our comprehension by having hands emerge from walls to pinch a subject's ears and showing an x-ray view of a body with all the organs working.  He shows a 2-D flat world of mice shadows that look surrealist, and he plays with the population by inserting an animated mouse.  Adding time to the mouse-world, he slides an orange through the 2-D plan and shows how it would look to them at different moments; he compares this to how we view atoms, speculating that atoms might be strings that we see only moment by moment.  And finally suggests that a human at any moment might just be the temporal manifestation of a fixed, unchangeable being.  La quatrième dimension is crammed with stimulating images and speculation.  This is the type of film Painlevé calls for in the essays Lou and I read before we watched these.

The Struggle for Survival (Images mathématiques de la lutte pour la vie), 1937 -- Not a riviting short about animal population dynamics and statistics.  Lots of graphs and lines with a few illustrative images of species like barnacles and mussels.  My 21st cetnury takeaway is that human populations can't expand indefinitely.

Voyage to the Sky (Voyage dans le ciel), 1937 -- The imagination that Painlevé praises comes into play here again.  After a straightforward graph showing how to calculate celestial distances, the camera goes on a tour of the universe.  The Martian seasons are interesting, but the view from the planet orbiting a sun in a star cluster is thrilling with stars so bright that they're visible during the day and give the night a glow.  This is the creativity he praises in his writing.

Similarities between Length and Speed (Similitudes des longeurs et des vitesses), 1937 -- Towards the end, this short starts to resemble Images mathématiques with its avalanche of formulae, but the first part with shrinking and growing men is fun.

October 4: King Kong (1933 -- Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack)

★★★★

King Kong is big, and it’s still exciting 80 years after the fact.  The story pushes forward at a dizzying pace with rapid development in NY quickly superseded by visual extravaganzas like native ceremonies and culminating in the arrival of the colossal special-effects beasts.  And King Kong doesn’t rest with the introduction of these monsters but goes eight on to fights between the monsters and between people and the monsters.  Then there’s the monster in New York.  This is the breathless narrative that Steven Spielberg resurrected in the 80s. 

Action thrills is the focus here, so we don’t have real characters.  Instead, we have claymation monsters that are oddly compelling.  King Kong’s fur may get ruffled irregularly while he stalks his island, but there’s enough plausibility when he breaks the jaw of the allosaurus to still make today’s audience wince.  And then he gives it an extra thump to be sure it's dead.  Things are even more tense when he adn other animals are matted into shots with real actors.  For 1933, the action is pretty seamless when he tears a piece of fabric off of the dress of live actress Fay Wray and holds it.  And we feel a thrill after Kong breaks into the village and a woman dashes in front of the monster foot to snatch her child out of harm’s way.  And ditto when natives on a platform throw spears at him and he walks over to knock the platform down.  Live action and stop motion merge well here, and generally to give the audience the thrill of the uncanny confronting the normal.

The animation in King Kong also has a lot of expressiveness.  The scenes in Kong’s lair capture the strained, unsteady Romanticism of a Doré print with their dynamic light differences in foreground and background and their starkly vertical lines.  More than that, the clay Kong emotes sensitivity.  He is curious, and he is tender.  His body language at the tragic end of the film speaks of both his desire to continue protecting Ann and his simultaneous recognition that he can’t.  It’s a posture of defeat and regret as good as any we might see from Charles Laughton.

In fact, King Kong is a more developed character than any of the people in the film.  With the focus on action, King Kong treats its characters as story elements and setting more than anything else.  Ann and John are the screaming, shallow blonde and the distant, cool hero.  Our most annoying character is sociopath Carl Denham, and his failure to get his just desserts is as painful to watch as is Kong’s demise.  Denham ignores every caution, and when society declines to place a woman at risk for a Denham project, he goes recruiting among the vulnerable.  He exploits Ann for his purposes, putting her in harm’s way.  He manipulates the ship and crew, knowing they’d object to the danger he’s putting them in and, in fact, ends up getting many of them killed.  Ever with an eye on his glory and achievement, Denham goes on to capture the noble Kong and cause the beast’s death, along the major swaths of destruction.  And at the end of King Kong, he blames Ann as a femme-fatal who has destroyed Kong and ends the film blameless. 

King Kong is not deep, but it is a great, fun film with a surprisingly strong action narration.  It's thrilling to be touched by such an old story with such old effects.

October 2: Jean Painlevé IV -- Silent Films: Popular and Research

Lou and I read several early, contemporary articles by and about Painlevé before going on to watch his films:

• Neo Zoological Drama (Painlevé, 1924) -- This one-page article in the journal Surrealismé clarifies for me how Painlevé fit in so easily with the Surrealists.  The article has a density of language that lifts the prose out of a communicative mode, but more importantly, Painlevé offers language we know -- "sweet," "dull color" -- juxtaposed with latin names and scientific vocabulary like "proboscis."  And in this language, a variety of creatures interact in vaguely-distinguishable but clearly unusual ways.  This very early article could be an abstract version of the scripts of many of his upcoming film like Comment naissent des méduses.
• Mysteries & Miracles of Nature (Painlevé, 1931) --This little article is very relevant to what we see in Painlevé's films.  His main idea here is that a casual observer could feel unsettled because of all the profound variety in world that doesn't fit into clear, simple patterns we're used to and comfortable with.  It's an idea similar to Rugoff's.  But unlike the serious epistemological questioning that Rugoff does, Painlevé celebrates the complication and uniqueness.  His examples and his language communicate joy and enthusiasm about realizing the world is bigger and more complicated than we might think...that god is dead, as Nietzsche might phrase it.  I see this same tone of excitement and wonder in his films.
• Institute in the Cellar (Léo Sauvage, 1935) -- A fun article that describes the underfunded, messy circumstances Painlevé worked under.  Sauvage portrays a basement work area with electrical wires everywhere, specimens in little bowls and equipment in the process of development.  Amid the messy excitement, Painlevé is at work with Geneviève Hamon at her microscope and André Raymond at his latest camera innovation.  Sauvage communicates this trio's excitement and pride in the discovery and creation happening in this dark little basement corner.  Today, there's a different look at 12, rue Armand-Moisant. I wonder if the former basement entrance is the door on the right of the building and if there's a cinema nearby.
• Feet in the Water (Painlevé, 1935) -- Painlevé would have been 32 at the time of writing this article, and he has the excitement of a cable TV host describing his travails in achieving his goal.  After Berg's description of how Painlevé loved cars, I got a chuckle out of his lengthy description of his car problems.  More related to his films, though, it was interesting to hear him talk about how the equipment, lighting and heat affected his work, especially how they affected the behavior of the animals he wanted to film.  After reading this, I've rethought that opening sequence of Les amours de la pieuvre, where the star of the film is in constant motion crossing the tidal flats.  Now I think that, rather than restlessly foraging, the octopus was probably trying to get away from Painlevé and Raymond and the animal's camouflage behavior was probably motivated by the same.  Which in itself raises an interesting question about film and science.
• A Clay Blue Beard (Patricia Hutchins, 1938) -- Sight and Sound article about Painlevé's stop-motion project.  Since stop-motion was far from unknown at this time (King Kong was 1933, after all), it looks like the point of interest here is Painlevé's camera innovation and the naturalistic movement René Bertrand brings to the project.

Painlevé's writing has so much energy, curiosity and enthusiasm...and intelligence.  Lou and I have decided we like this guy and would've enjoyed having a beer and talking with him.

EARLY POPULAR SILENT FILMS
The Octopus (La pieuvre), 1927 – Painlevé's 1967 film on the octopus is one my favorites, and this one is good, too.  Aiming to entertain and educate, this film covers a lot of the same ground as the later one.  Both talk about the eyelid and breathing syphon, and both show the image of water rippling because a hidden octopus is breathing.  This 1927 version goes a bit further in the direction of entertainment, though, when we see an octopus on a window, in a tree, and slithering over a skull.  These surrealist images aren't part of the 67 version.

Sea Urchins (Les oursins), 1928 --  This silent, too, introduces some details that Painlevé would return to in 1954.  Aesthetic elements like the beauty, and variety, of the urhin's quills are in both films as is their hypnotic motion.  In fact, many of the silent images are cleaner and better composed than those of the late films.  Les oursins is a little heavier on science than the later version is, though.  Here we get to see a dissection that reveals sand-filled intestines in the Sand Urchin, and we have some Art Nouveau lettering on a diagram of the Rock Urchin to help us identify the various stems.  

Daphnia (La daphnie), 1928 -- Less entertaining than the other two films, La daphnie excells at microscopic imaging.  Two of the most interesting shots are the one showing the muscles manipulating the daphnia's antennae and the one showing the muscles controling the daphnia's single eye.  Geneviève Hamon at work, I suspect.  In nature's way of confounding our expectation and standards, daphnia have only one eye, and they use their antennae for swimming.  These little monsters engage in their epic battle with the hydra in buccolic streams whose images open and end this film.  Tellingly, the stream is less inviting after we've learned what lives in its waters.

SILENT RESEARCH FILMS

The Stickleback's Egg (L’oeuf d'épinoche), 1928 -- Cinema-wise, L’oeuf d'épinoche is a major snooze with lots of biological vocabulary and pictures of cells and egg development.  It uses the predictable say-show-say-show structure many of us suffered through high school with.  I couldn't tell what the parts of the egg were, so I was pretty lost through most of this half hour.  But there is interesting biological info here: Lou and I both understood that the blood for the fetus migrates from the yoke to fetus, which has already developed a circulatory system and beating heart by the time the blood arrives.  And the twists and torsions inside the egg, which reminded me of information in the much later Les amours de la pieuvre, echoes the type of information Painlevé champions in "Mysteries & Miracles of Nature." As the microscope focus changed in this film, I could imagine Geneviève Hamon turning the knobs the way Léo Sauvage describes in his visit.

Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog (Traitement éxperimental d'une hémorragie chez le chien), 1930 -- Before watching these films, Lou was talking about how abstracted life has become from biology, referring to how few people these days have killed and plucked  a chicken.  Such was not the case a hundred years ago when scientists performed vivisection on a dog, drained most of its blood and replaced it with a chemical composition.  This is science film, showing every aspect of the operation from cutting into the dog, finding an artery, draining the dog's blood out until it's legs stiffen, and then injecting the solution to restore the animal.  Later, we see the dog happy, and the scientist even holds the dog's incision up to the camera so we can see it's the same dog.  Traitement  is an empirical report on an animal experiment, though the subject matter certainly causes an unintended response in today's audience.

ANIMATION

Bluebeard (Barbe-bleu), 1938 -- While I'd guess that Painlevé's major contribution to to the stop-motion  Bluebeard is technological (as Patricia Hutchinson implies), the appeal here is that Charles Perrault's fairy tale doesn't pander to children and that the animation itself is creative and clever.  Contemporary American children wouldn't have been seeing an ambassador's head cut half off, leaving the mouth talking, and a clay spear go through the mouth of a warrior, out the back of the warrior's head, into the head of the soldier behind him and out that soldier's mouth.  There is a lot of such detail in the film, and knowing that René Bertrand's children did a lot of the work on the film, I wonder how many of these ideas were theirs.  The Busby Berkeley-style extravaganza of dancing dresses probably came from an adult though.

October 1: Branded to Kill/Koroshi no rakuin (1967 -- Seijun Suzuki)

★★★★
If the Coltrane of his "Love Supreme" period had made a movie, it might’ve looked similar to Branded to Kill.  There’s a storyline that runs through the film, and we know we’re on that line at certain touchstone moments.  The film also has many parallels and repetitions that occur, giving us yet another line to follow through the film.  And there are occasional moments of intense stylistic beauty when everything stops for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the viewer.  With all these elements of beauty, there is more than enough in Branded to Kill to hold us, but this isn’t a Classic Hollywood movie.

The main thrust of the film is fairly clear -- the work and love travails of a hit man – but our path through that story is jump cut and presented with gaps in causality and motivation.  Even in the beginning, Hanada picks up a car to do a job and finds a body in it.  We don’t know how or why the body is there, and the body isn’t important to the rest of the film.  In fact, it’s there in one scene and gone in the next with only a mention that it had been there.  Branded to Kill regularly introduces elements like this without explaining them or going on to use them, and the film jumps to circumstances with little explanation of how the characters got there or why.  Moves like these follow a logic of viewer pleasure rather than tight causality or temporal necessity.

The job that Yabuhara assigns Hanada is another example of this pleasure principle.  Hanada is to kill four different people, and we later learn that the victims were part of a plot to defraud Yabuhara.  However, that fraud is irrelevant to what has come before and what comes after in the film, and even though the Suzuki uses the job to introduce Hanada to Misako, Branded to Kill doesn’t need four hits for that.  Rather, the individual hits give Suzuki an opportunity for some visual riffs which include an assassination though a sink, a killing from behind a billboard with a moving part, and an escape atop a hot-air balloon.  The hits are visual fun for visual pleasure, improvisations on the main theme but certainly not integral to the storyline.

Another part of the pleasure here is the inconsequential repetition, which we certainly take note of but which bears little significance; the recurrences are less thematically important that they are fun to notice.  The butterfly, for example, would seem to have some significance since it’s the reason Hanada misses his victim on one of the hits, masking in the shape of butterflies fill part of the screen at another point, and Misako’s apartment is filled with dead butterflies.  Ultimately, though, these are just little moments of imagery that give viewers a thrill, a suggestion that an idea is in there somewhere.  Lighters, too, make frequent appearances: several smoking close-ups feature the smoker striking a lighter, and Hanada hides behind a moving lighter advertisement on one of his killings.  Again, it’s fun to notice this recurring image, but the thrill resides only in noticing.  And how many times do we see Hanada savoring the smell of rice?  Yet this fetish doesn’t figure in any important way in the movie.

Branded to Kill also has lines of script that seem to have some import.  As Kasugo drives Hanada and his new wife from the airport, we hear a conversation to the effect that the two most destructive things for a hit man are love and drink.  Soon after, a drunk Kasugo is killed while taking out the number four killer, Ko, and it seems the moral is set.  However, our good guy Hanada is soon madly in love with Misako, and he starts to drink about that same time.  Unfazed, Hanada still takes out several would-be assassins, so drink and love hasn't slowed him down.  And later, Hanada kills hit man number one but is killed by the man at the same time, a parallel scene to the one earlier in the film.  Clearly the law about alcohol and women isn’t proven as number one doesn’t have those weaknesses but dies anyway.  The moralizing and repetition here only serve to draw us in and give us titillating points that suggest but don’t lead to wisdom.

This is the beauty of the film.  Like a long, skillful jazz improv, Branded to Kill follows a narrative line while giving us delight and pleasure in its embellishments.  As long as the film moves like that, it’s a delight.  However, when the film becomes too predictable and too repetitious, it loses interest, awhich happens in the concluding quarter as Number 1 controls Hanada, beating him down psychologically and menacing death.  After the fast pace of the first part of the film, this section moves very slowly and very predictably with Number 1 first placing long calls, then moving into the apartment, then taking Hanada out with him.  The only problem with this film is that this section makes so much sense.  Otherwise, there’s more than enough imagination and pleasure in Branded to Kill to satisfy even the most jaded film-goer.

September 30: Tokyo Drifter/Tôkyô nagaremono (1966 -- Seijun Suzuki)

★★★★

Life imitates art.  The last film I saw by Suzuki, Take Aim at the Police Van, was in black-and-white and ended in a train yard.  Tokyo Drifter starts in a train yard in black-and-white, focuses on a single red gun, and then shifts into the full-blown color it’s famous for.  It’s as though a director were managing my film watching.

However, that director wouldn’t be Suzuki because such a transition would be far too fluid.  One of the style flourishes that stands out here --  and in Suzuki’s work in general, I think – is the jump cutting that makes a viewer work to figure how to get from scene A to scene B.  The first attack on Tetsu after he leaves Tokyo is typical of the abrupt cutting.  We see a gang attacking the hideout, we see Tetsu fighting them, we see him walking in snow whistling, we see the face-off with Viper on the track and then we’re back in Tetsu’s hotel where he’s having his wound tended to.  Figuring out how one of those scenes leads to the other is quite a task.  In other places, I nearly missed who shot the girlfriend/secretary, I still don’t know what happened with the attempted kidnapping, and I’m not sure why the car is destroyed in the junkyard.  Tokyo Drifter isn’t afraid to rush forward while challenging you to keep up.  Changes in camera angles challenge, too, like the sudden cut to overhead views when Tetsu is trapped in a pit and when the secretary is shot.  Or the noir-ish low-angle shot of the business meeting.  In another scene, we see Tetsu talking while leaning over a desk with some vague chair detail in the background.  After he talks awhile, he stands up and turns around, continuing to talk.  You do a double-take and see that he’s been pensively leaning on the desk and that the person he’s been talking to all along is, in fact, behind him.  There is a lot of such creative editing and camera work here, all the more surprising given how pre-MTV this film is.

Character development in the film is analogous to story development.  We see Tetsu assume a series of poses and attitudes, but we don’t see how he gets from one to the other.  Tetsu is in love, then he isn’t; loyalty suddenly looms large in the plot.  Just like we get two different scenes and must figure out the connection, we get a series of character attitudes and have to fill in the psychological blanks.

If, in fact, filling in the blanks is at all a concern here.  Tokyo Drifter could accurately be described as a series of ecstatic scenes put together with some exposition.  Suzuki gives us one strikingly-colored composition after another.  The hero wears his robin’s egg blue suit and white shoes throughout, and we’re treated to a series of brilliant sets in yellow, red and pink.  The bar is yellow, the meeting room fuchsia, and the office of building owner is decorated with classical imagery.  The final showdown occurs on an classically-inspired, abstract, white theater set with a large, oval sculpture that changes color as the action proceeds.  Tokyo Drifter is a series of such striking, abstract images.

The abstraction in the film is wonderful.  The highlight is the shootout at the conclusion.  By the time we finally get to this point, the film has even given up trying to create rooms.  We have some stairs that don’t go anywhere, a column that doesn’t support anything, a door with no room behind it and the color-changing abstract sculpture.  These are simply theatrically-lit stage props, and the action here is similarly stylized with something close to dance choreography.  I can hardly imagine what a B-film audience would have thought of this movie if they’d come in expecting a gangster flic. 

Or perhaps a Western.  Tokyo Drifter has many echoes of the Western.  Obvious links are ones like the name of the saloon – Western Saloon – and the typical brawl that erupts in it.  But Tetsu himself is also a Western hero, a tough guy who’s a good fighter.  In this character and others, Tokyo Drifter addresses the Western concern with defining masculinity.  Like in many Western films, the tougher a character is, the more masculine he is, and when Tetsu resists fighting, he’s seen as weak.  He earns his masculinity and the attendant respect by fighting.  Just as the film is concerned with honor, Tokyo Drifter comes to focus on loyalty.  Tetsu's character arc is from being a loyal protector of his boss to renouncing loyalty and becoming a wandering drifter, reminiscent of both the wandering samurai of other Japanese films and the Western hero.  The women here are from a Western, too, accessories to the men.  While we may root for Chiharu to win her man as she pursues him, we know that the real Western hero’s life is just going to be too hard for a woman.

Tokyo Drifter is thoroughly enjoyable, and it has distinctive links to films that followed it.  Although it’s easy to see Tarantino’s abstract violence (Kill Bill) and Jarmush’s stylization and color (Mystery Train), even films like Coppola’s One from the Heart and Scorcese’s New York, New York have some affiliation.  And it’s hard not to think of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s colors and abstraction in Diva, which also includes Asian gangsters and a character with a musical fixation.  Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter even provides some small context for Ohbayashi’s later, incredibly creative House.

September 29: A Scandal in Paris/Thieves' Holiday (1946 -- Douglas Sirk)

★★★

A Scandal in Paris doesn’t quite gel the way Sirk’s later Hollywood melodramas would, and it’s not quite as playful as its contemporary Lubitsch comedies, but there are a few elements of both in it.  There’s an artful deftness in Eugéne Vidocq that has the attraction of some of Lubitsch’s villians: the guys are bad, but you can’t help having at least a little sympathy with them.  And when it comes down to it, they aren’t completely bad.  Also, the film has the structure of sophisticated comedy with complex plot turns and surprises like the Vidocq’s evolution from criminal to police chief and his discovery that an old conquest is now married to the police chief he ousted and looking to restart her relationship with Vidocq.

And there’s melodrama here, too, that would become Sirk’s trademark.  After a formulaic first two-thirds, A Scandal in Paris does a sudden shift in tone from witty crime to melodrama.  In a particularly compelling scene, former police chief Richet disguises himself as a bird seller and, while spying on his wife, discovers that she is planning to cheat on him with Vidocq.  An intense argument ensues with both speakers being as cutting and hysterical as they can while the bird chirping on the soundtrack gets louder and louder.  The scene peaks with Richet shooting Loretta in a fit of rage, the bird sounds declining, and the hapless man being led off to jail by the very man who wrongly ousted him from his post.  This type of over-the-top melodrama is what I expect from Sirk.  And I ‘m not surprised at the ending of the film either, as Vidocq confesses his sins, gets absolution from the minister, and marries the girl.

A Scandal in Paris is not what I would call vintage Sirk, but there are plenty of elements to engage.  And you don't' have to look hard to see where Sirk is going.

September 28: The Furies (1950 -- Anthony Mann)

★★★

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.