From the Rental Vault (1950): The Furies

Although we tend to view the overall status of women as more advanced today than it might have been in the middle part of the last century, I dare you to watch Barbara Stanwyck in The Furies and either a) imagine any modern actress in the role of Vance Jeffords or b) imagine any agent surviving after suggesting to someone like Stanwyck (or Bette Davis, or Lauren Bacall, or Maureen O'Hara, etc.) a role in some of today's "romantic comedies."

Vance is the daughter of T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston), a rancher in the 1870s Southwest who has built what amounts to an empire, centered on his immense ranch, "The Furies." She is quite obviously his favorite, as he sees his son Clay (John Bromfield) as ineffective and weak. A widower, T. C. has left the ranch to Vance to run while he wheels an deals around the countryside and into California. Some of his wheelings and dealings have brought the ranch close to financial ruin, but T. C. promises Vance it will be hers to run. He keeps that promise even when Vance falls in love with Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), the ne'er-do-well son of an enemy that T. C. himself killed. But it's T. C.'s own romance with Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson) that threatens to drive the final wedge between them and will lead to betrayal, violence and worse.

Both Huston in his final role and Stanwyck create larger-than-life characters who help fuel the murky moral mix and Shakespearean atmosphere of The Furies. Both willful, full of hubris and unwilling to show any vulnerability, their struggle of competing pride won't let them bend an inch whether they are allies or opponents. The collateral damage in the misery and lives of others doesn't slow them in the slightest. Corey is good but he can never quite convince that he's on the same level as these two giants, which leaves a little bit of a hole in his scenes in the story. Stanwyck manages to carry him well enough that his somewhat pale-by-comparison character doesn't jar the story too much. Judith Anderson's strong presence helps strengthen her short but pivotal time onscreen as the woman who threatens Vance's place in her father's business and his life.

But in the end The Furies belongs to Huston and Stanwyck. Director Anthony Mann alternates his wide-open shots of southwestern scrubland with closed rooms and shadowed woods but largely lets the pair be the twin turbines driving his movie. As T. C., Huston is at first enough of a lovable rogue and so exuberant that it's a shock when we see that his willingness to take the lives of innocents to get his revenge on someone else entirely. The same pride that made him successful has also made him evil, and he will seem smaller-than-life now for the rest of the movie.

Mann went on to direct several successful movies with Jimmy Stewart, including several Westerns such as Bend in the River and The Man From Laramie that helped bring a great deal of dimension and character depth that the genre didn't always produce. But probably not until 1961 did he again have a leading lady who demonstrated the kind of screen command as Stanwyck, when Sophia Loren co-starred with Charlton Heston in El Cid. Such actresses were not common even in Hollywood's studio prime, and as mentioned above they seem to be an even more endangered species today.