The Furies

Relationships are unstable and unclear in Anthony Mann’s The Furies, a film like so many others in which superstar Barbara Stanwyck somehow embodies both femininity and masculinity in almost perfect balance. Just like her role in a later western noir, Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957), Stanwyck here plays a hyper-ambitious landowner, both villain and victim, her character Vance Jeffords a furious storm of head and heart as she navigates the three most important men in her life: the equally ambitious banker Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), who may love money more than Vance, the childhood best friend Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), who has always been hopelessly in love with Vance and whose devotion means the world to her, and, most importantly, her father T.C. (Walter Huston in his final film role) with whom Vance shares a mutual and eerily incestuous adoration that is bound to end in tragedy. As has been foretold since she was born, and despite the existence of her somewhat aloof brother Clay (John Bromfield), Vance will soon take over the running of the family land, called The Furies, but the egos of Rip, Juan, and T.C. will both advance and retard that trajectory. This is Stanwyck’s film through and through but, as Mann would often have it, she’s not the only strong female character by a long shot: Judith Anderson plays new stepmother Flo, who’s more than happy to usurp Vance’s influence on T.C.; Beulah Bondi plays a banker’s wife who agrees, seemingly out of a sense of sisterhood, to assist Vance in her later efforts to bankrupt her father; and Blanche Yerka plays the wild, fearless, fully-armed Mother Herrera, who shoots rifles and shoves boulders to save her family and will most certainly have the last word. Mann’s pristine, crepuscular panoramas of the B&W American West are both surreal and subversive, casting a pall of doom over one family’s history in the making.