by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

This month I want to talk about two films from one of my favorite directors of westerns, Anthony Mann. Both The Furies and Winchester ‘73 were released in 1950, 8 years into Mann’s career as director, and were his first “A” pictures. Both announce him as a major force in the genre, working with established stars to mix the western with elements of noir and psychological drama to create his own version of the West.

In some ways, Mann is an answer to Ford. Where Ford was always interested in the history of the United States, and showing its present by reflecting its past, Mann seems less interested in the specific time and place of the West and more in the mindset of its characters. Mann’s protagonists are complicated, but drawn in sometimes simple relief. There’s a raw quality to Mann’s westerns. Ford also used landscapes to overwhelm his characters with the majesty and passive indifference of nature. Mann deploys barren, rocky terrain to provide an alienating landscape for shootouts that create maximum uncertainty for the participants.

The Furies is the first of the two films I want to explore, starring Barbara Stanwyck as Vance Jeffords and Walter Huston as her father, T.C. The Jeffords own a vast stretch of New Mexico called The Furies, Both Vance and T.C. are obsessed with owning their land and enriching their family, and they both obsessively mourn Vance’s deceased mother in their own ways. However, complicating matters for Vance is her love and bond with Juan Herrera, the son of a family who squats on The Furies. The story plays out like a Shakespearian tragedy, with T.C. becoming a King Lear-esque figure as the film progresses. Father and daughter clearly love each other, but their obsessions–and threats to their own control over their lives–leaves them at odds.

Barbara Stanwyck owns every shot in this film, and her performance elevates what could be some duller moments into high drama. Both Mann and Stanwyck have extensive noir experience at this point in their careers, and they brought it with them to the frontier. Stanwyck is utterly captivating as Vance, proving herself every bit as cunning and driven as the men in the film. Stanwyck modulates her performance perfectly, and each of her scene partners sees only what she reveals to them. Mann’s use of shadows along with the stark black and white photography emphasize the psychological toll of the plot on the characters, casting them in relief within a harsh environment that hardens them to anything but schemes and suspicion.

On the surface, Winchester ‘73 might not have a lot in common with The Furies other than its director, with its main character arguably being the titular rifle. The movie follows the rifle across the West, becoming an object of desire due to its status as one of the most perfect examples of its kind. However, this film also has as its core a psychological examination of its characters.

The main (human) character of the film is Jimmy Stewart’s Lin McAdam, a man who becomes positively obsessed with revenge. Winchester ‘73 was Stewart’s first western since Destry Rides Again in 1939, and the change in approach is remarkable. Here, he is terse and remote, yet his innate charm and likability peeks through enough to keep audiences on his side. The first time I watched this, I found Stewart’s performance captivating, and it is easy to see how his collaborations with Mann launched a whole new chapter of the actor’s career.

While the episodes themselves are not particularly of interest, taken as a whole, they achieve something remarkable when brought together: an extended homage to the genre as it existed up until this time. Here Mann pays tribute to Ford and others, creating a sort of extended “greatest hits” montage. Some contemporary critics chafed at this, feeling that the film was relentless and overstuffed, but watching now, it feels like a crystallization of sorts. Winchester ‘73 features runaway stagecoaches, a shooting contest, a poker game, a saloon brawl, and more. Mann brings together so many of the cliches of the genre, not to simply reenact them, but to do a bit of genre deconstruction, assembling some of the essential ingredients and adding shades of meeting to the cowboy heroes and villains in this picture. But the effect of seeing them all together for those making westerns in film and television after Winchester ‘73 is that Mann’s use of these familiar elements form a grammar for the next phase of the western as it soared to popularity in the 1950s.

Next time: Rio Bravo!