OVP: The Furies (1950)

Film: The Furies (1950)

Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Huston, Wendell Corey, Gilbert Roland, Judith Anderson

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Barbara Stanwyck: click here to learn more about Ms. Stanwyck (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Barbara Stanwyck turned forty right before filming her final Oscar-cited turn in Sorry, Wrong Number, and after that, while she appeared in a number of films, she was never nominated for an Academy Award again.  Unlike actresses like Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, & Joan Crawford, the early 1950's was not filled with one last iconic role to go out on (in Davis & Crawford's case, of course, they'd extend their iconography into the 1960's by taking on each other, but that's a story for a different day).  She instead found herself working in genres atypical for women, particularly westerns, and in genres that generally didn't get women Oscar nominations for westerns (is Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller the only one?).  This is fascinating to me because Stanwyck's career is generally considered to have waned during the 1950's, and box office receipts bear that out.  However, several of her films have since been rescued by critics (and Criterion), one of which is today's film The Furies, an Anthony Mann picture (Mann would direct most of Jimmy Stewart's best westerns, as well as the biblical epic El Cid) which is noted as one of Stanwyck's roles today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about TC Jeffords (Huston), a nasty cattle baron who delights in cutting down the people around him, including the Herrera Family who are squatting on his property.  The one person he seems to generally love is his daughter Vance (Stanwyck), perhaps because she's inherited his cruelty & love of material pleasures.  Vance, though, doesn't hate the Herrera's, and has a romantic flirtation with their son Juan (Roland).  She also is flirting with Rip Darrow (Corey), a more conventional choice for her, but one who doesn't want a woman as headstrong as Vance, whom he dismisses when her father buys him off.  However, when her father marries a gold-digger named Flo Burnett (Anderson) their relationship becomes forlorn because she thinks she'll lose the ranch (the titular Furies), and attacks Flo, who is permanently disfigured as a result.  This sets off a chain of events with TC murdering Juan in front of his mother, and Vance buying up TC's debts from across the land, knowing that she'll win back the ranch in the process.  She gets her revenge, followed by a reconciliation with both Rip & her father, but it's upended when her father is murdered by Juan's mother.  The movie ends with Rip & Vance, now betrothed, burying TC's body on the ranch.

The movie is really good other than the ending.  There's an electricity about it that I loved, with Stanwyck's Vance intended to basically be a femme fatale in the center of a western.  The film was nominated for Best Cinematography, which was a strong choice (those western vistas look great, and there's a lot of work to make what is clearly a sound stage look authentically grand within the house).  The score & editing would've been decent inclusions as well, both sharp work.  However, the ending doesn't function for me.  Huston's character is so cruel you know he has to die, but I don't really think he's earned the hero's ending he receives, and I do wonder if the book this is based on is a bit less generous with all involved (I've never read it, though the Criterion edition does come with a copy of it so maybe I'll get there someday).  It defangs Vance, whom you want to get back at Rip more than get with him, and it feels a bit like that weird comic interlude in The Searchers in the center of what is otherwise a very serious movie.  I could've used more of the sour that made it so intoxicating in the first half.

Stanwyck, Huston, & Anderson are all terrific in this.  Stanwyck, in her viper-blonde mode (I read a review on Letterboxd where they said "never trust Barbara Stanwyck as a blonde" and it's sound advice) is delicious, totally eating up this character, and while 1950 is one of the best lineups Oscar ever assembled (not just the five nominees, but also you've got Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place and Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun), I still will be considering her for that quintet when we get around to the 1950 OVP.  Huston is nasty two years after his Oscar win, and plays TC without a bit of remorse, quickly disowning his daughter & discarding her feelings the second they counter her own.  Anderson is also good.  She holds her own against Stanwyck in their climactic fight, but perhaps even better she has a scene late in the movie where TC asks her for money to save the Furies, and she refuses, talking about how she no longer has her beauty & she knows he doesn't love her and will eventually abandon her.  The only thing that she has to help stave off of the loneliness is her money, and it's a shockingly poignant summation of a character that would've been easy to dismiss as just a gold-digger trying to take out Vance earlier in the movie.  I loved all three, and wish that the film had not been the financial failure it ended up being for Paramount.