Man of the West - 1958

At this point, director Anthony Mann apparently had no more fucks to give re: Western tropes, stories, themes or outcomes. He cared only about his obsessions and obsessing over them. Joining him in negative-fucksland is Gary Cooper, playing the least heroic, most embittered hero of his career.

Welcome to Mann's most displaced picture- the one in which ostensive narrative content has the least possible connection to what's really happening onscreen. Given that Mann has long been the champion of emphasizing subtext over text, this one is truly out there.

F'rinstance, Cooper beats the living shit outta Jack Lord, in vengeance for coming onto Julie London - wtf is Julie London doing here? - in a ferocious, yes obsessive, grapple. When Lord is a bloody pulp, Cooper, shouting all the while, makes Lord his punk by tearing off all his clothes, one obsessive item at a time. We don't find out what Cooper intends to do with naked Lord because scenery-devourer Lee J. Cobb shoots Lord - his son.

Quite arresting Mann tracking shots appear now and then to remind viewers of the day they're not home watching the TV, but are in fact in a movie theatre admiring big-ass, widescreen Cinemascope. Otherwise, Mann vests in Boetticher epic exteriors and what would become Leone mega-hella-closeups. 

Much unbearable overacting in the Mann mode, but savoring and attempting to suss what each scene is really about will keep you glued to the screen.

With a trail of bodies - all of relatives or adopted relatives - to his credit, Cooper and London ride off into the sunset. But wait! Cooper has told the besotted London he has a wife and kids back in whatever Western shithole his embittered ass traveled forth from.

London takes his hand, tells him she never felt love this like this - consummated with not even a kiss, mind you - and that, even though she can never have him, that love is perfect and all she needs.

And that's the end/climax of the picture!

So, Mann's telling you that all cowboy movie violence is the manifestation of unaddressed or brutally, punitively suppressed queer desire. I mean, who can argue? But fuck Douglas Sirk and all his subtle implications. Mann makes it plain as plain...

THE FURIES

This human being possess identifiable gender characteristics.Can you name them? © Paramount Pictures

Winchester ’73, Mann’s revenge saga starring Jimmy Stewart (and featuring Rock Hudson in his screen debut as an Indian chief), seems closer to naturalism than any prior Mann film. Characters walked, talked, stood, shot and rode much as human beings actually might. Gone was the over-stylized speaking, the stone-faced men, the constantly hysterical women. The pacing, too, seemed to mark a new Mann-gone was the usual sense of glaciers whizzing past. So, it’s reasonable to assume that his following films would become even more naturalistic, more reasonable in tone and narrative, less operatic. But, no…

Mann is tricky. His films are acquired tastes. He made a couple of classic noirs that are almost impossible to sit through (please see: glaciers, whizzing, above) and yet irresistible—T-Men and Border Incident. And he made Raw Deal, an almost perfect, perfectly cheesy, perfectly perverse noir and the only noir in which a woman provides the narrative voice-over. Mann then brought his noir sensibility to the Western: humans treat each other poorly, love spells doom, men’s obsessions obliterate all common sense or worthy purpose, the landscape-the world itself-overwhelms human intention and all effort comes to pretty much naught. Unless that effort involves killing someone, and then it’s rewarded, no matter how difficult the aftermath. Lots of people die in Mann westerns. It’s usually the vanity of others that kills them.

The Furies - Mann’s first film after Winchester ’73- contains all the Mannian tropes, for good or ill: clumsy transitions; weird gigantic close-ups of actors speaking in forced monotones; vengeful murder and vengeance, period; supposedly sex-object dudes who behave like walking corpses and the overly-ardent women who love them. It’s an unsettling mix of Mann at his most naturalist (Walter Huston playing the daddy from hell with such force of personality and humor) and most artificial (Gilbert Roland and Wendell Corey doing their best I-Am-Robot impressions).

And yet, The Furies remains Mann’s masterpiece, the apotheosis of his style and themes. Barbara Stanwyck plays the toughest, most daddy-fixated woman in the history of Westerns. Her relationship with Walter Huston is astonishingly perverse, pretty much the sickest father/daughter connection until Walter’s son John made all The Furies’ implications manifest in Chinatown.

Victor Milner provides the epic, operatic cinematography, and he had shot 129 films prior to The Furies, including Unfaithfully Yours for Preston Sturges. Milner holds to Mann’s John Fordian motifs-the sky dominates, the earth reaches to the far horizon and the protagonists stand alone and abandoned in between, floating above one, crushed by the other. Milner brings the same grand aesthetic to interiors and close-ups, occasionally with unintentionally camp results.

The Furies concerns will, and how the world bends in the face of it. Stanwyck wants what she wants, and when she and her dad’s wills align, none can stand against them. But they clash, inevitably, and the collateral damage scorches the earth and the soul of both combatants.

Maybe it’s intentional that none of the male characters can match Huston and certainly all the women pale in the face of Stanwyck’s gender-bending power. Mann suggests a hierarchical universe, one predicated on Nietzsche (or the Hollywood system). Mann’s ruthless view of human nature elevates the story to another realm of profundity. Though the Furies claims to be a Western, it plays like the Old Testament, or Greek tragedy: when the gods rumble, look out below.