Such a frustrating disappointment

It is a performances centric movie

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

No need to recap the sprawling, epic-sized plot. As another reviewer points out, it's like the screenplay is trying to shoehorn the novel's 1000-pages onto the screen. Instead, it's fascinating to watch the different acting styles compete with one another in this operatic western. The thespic turns run the gamut from cold under-playing by Corey to white-hot bravura from Huston to Stanwyck calibrating nicely somewhere in between. The movie's real showdown is between Anderson and Stanwyck, featuring two of the screen's premier tough- cookie women. It's a doozy. Then add the Medusa-like Blanche Yurka (Mother Herrera), and I was ready to crawl under the couch.Anyhow, looks like Paramount was going all out in the production. So why b&w instead of the more logical Technicolor. My guess is the producers were caught up in the film-noir fashion of the time since the results suggest shadowy effects. Then too, none of the major characters, except maybe Herrera (Roland), is morally uncompromised, a key feature of noir. That may also account for Anthony Mann as director since he had cut his teeth on a succession of outstanding crime noirs.Be that as it may, it's the actors that hold this narrative sprawl together; otherwise, it's easy to get lost in the many financial manueverings unusual for a western. I expect director Mann was just trying to hold things together since the overall results bear little of his usual stamp. Because of TV's popular pull, this sort of epic format would soon turn to Technicolor with productions like The Far Horizons (1955) and The Big Country (1958). All in all, the Furies remains an oddball obscurity, maybe too bleak and crowded for its own good, but a good vehicle for Huston to go out on.

Barbara Stanwyck has some serious daddy issues in this weird cross between a women's picture, western and film noir from 1950.Walter Huston plays the daddy, and he steals the show in a vibrant performance. He owns a ranch called The Furies, which he hands over to his daughter when he tires of the daily management. But things go awry when he brings home a new wife from the city (Judith Anderson, excellent) and she has some ideas of her own about how things should be run. Tensions boil over to the point where father and daughter hate each other, and Stanwyck hatches a scheme to bankrupt her father and take the ranch away from him.It's an uneven movie at best. Characters seem to turn on a dime -- Huston and Stanwyck go from idolizing one another to hating each other back to idolizing each other -- but maybe that's the point. They're both ruled by their passions, and those passions extend to the father/daughter relationship, and sometimes confuse it, as much as to their business practices.Anthony Mann provided the noirish direction, and Franz Waxman delivers a frenzied, out-there score.Grade: B+

There's a lot of Freudian subtext in this unusual 1950 Western, but what resonates most is how director Anthony Mann so smoothly transcends the testosterone-driven genre to come up with an entertaining hybrid of a woman's picture and a Greek tragedy. At the dynamic core of this film is the masterstroke of casting Walter Huston (in his last screen role) and Barbara Stanwyck as a spendthrift father and his headstrong daughter at odds over running the expansive ranch that gives the movie its name. In Roman mythology, the Furies were supernatural personifications of the anger of the dead. As females, they represent regeneration and the potency of creation, which both consumes and empowers. It is this single-minded sense of empowerment that drives Vance Jeffords to usurp her wily father T.C. while seeking his approval at the same time.Set in 1870's New Mexico, the story written by Charles Schnee ("The Bad and the Beautiful") is steeped in not-so-indiscreet psychological baggage. T.C. lives by his own rules by borrowing liberally from banks, paying hired hands with his own script, and allowing Mexican settlers to live off his land. Unlike her weak-willed brother, Vance enjoys provoking her father but to what end is never clear as an unacknowledged cloud of incest hangs over their strange relationship. At the same time, T.C. has a sworn enemy in gambler Rip Darrow who is looking to avenge his father's death at T.C.'s hands. Vance falls for Darrow, but she's also drawn to Juan Herrera, a childhood friend and one of the Mexicans now considered squatters. Complicating matters even more is the arrival of T.C.'s pretentious fiancée Flo Burnett, a devious socialite out to rid the ranch of the Mexicans and push Vance aside as the female head of the beleaguered family. This ploy leads to a most shocking scene that fits well within the story's noirish shadings.As T.C., Huston gives a grand performance evoking both as the old prospector in his son John's "The Treasure of Sierra Madre" and the conflicted industrialist in William Wyler's "Dodsworth". Although a bit old for her role at 43, Stanwyck combines her no-nonsense manner with a childlike vulnerability in illuminating Vance's most complex psyche. This is excellent work from an actress who always seemed home on the range. Generally a pliable third lead in films ("Rear Window"), Wendell Corey doesn't lend charisma or a convincing edge to his swagger as Darrow, but Gilbert Roland shines in the smallish role of Juan and strikes sparks with Stanwyck that should have happened with Corey. However, it is Judith Anderson (Mrs. Danvers in "Rebecca") who steals her brief scenes as Flo bringing out a palpable tension with Stanwyck in their almost-comically cutting scenes together (pardon the pun!). Veteran character actress Beulah Bondi also has a nice near-cameo as a banker's wife fully aware of her husband's prideful shortcomings.The intensely passionate movie swirls in all its psycho-sexual emotionalism and Shakespearean-level acts of murder, revenge and greed, but oddly (and perhaps due to the edicts of studio censors), Mann applies the brakes in the disappointing final portion of the film. Still, it's well worth viewing in the new Criterion Collection's 2008 release chock-full of extras. First, there is the meticulously academic commentary track by Western author Jim Kitses ("Horizons West"). Then there is an interesting 17-minute interview with Mann ("Actions Speak Louder Than Words") conducted just prior to his death in 1967. Another interview is offered with Mann's daughter Nina specifically for this release as she recalls her father's often underrated body of work. More of a curio is a silly, obviously scripted 1931 interview with Huston where he evasively responds to the vacuous questions of a pretty reporter. The original theatrical trailer and a stills gallery round out the extras.

This is the second western made by Anthony Mann, he was destined to become one of the great masters of the genre. Even though a film is a joint effort, there is always an element that prevails, in this case the story by Niven Busch. As in Pursued and Duel in the Sun it is about love and hate.There are three magnificent performances here: Walter Huston, Barbara Stanwyck and Judith Anderson. Huston is a megalomaniac rancher who makes his payments with his own currency, T.C.s. He is so in love with his own image that to maintain it he will go to extreme cruelty. Stanwyck is his daughter, who administers the ranch when he is away and counts on being the future owner. When her power is threatened by Judith Anderson the woman Huston wants to marry, she becomes wild. Gilbert Roland is a squatter friendly with Stanwick, but hated by Huston. Wendell Corey is a gambler and Stanwyck's love interest. Worth seeing.