The Furies

“I don’t think I like being in love. It puts a bit in my mouth.” Here, three forms of a woman’s love are at stake: for her father, her suitor, and her childhood friend (a kind of displaced brother, though there’s also a brother). The film does not shy away from taking a close look at the wildness that lies at the bottom of the dark sources of every kind of desire, from the danger that implies, from the complications that arise from the need and desire for it to be bridled (that is, for the wild to be tamed, at the risk of being domesticated), and from the enjoyment that whole gamut of life’s complications offers, despite the suffering it almost always also brings.

In so doing, it offers the audience, too, a great deal of enjoyment, always remaining sympathetic to its characters, even when they behave very badly, indeed unforgivably, and with bold cinematography to match the sharp dialogue and strong performances, especially by Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston (whose character as the very strong father, that is, a father who enjoys very strongly, is just about as memorable, as charismatic and as diabolical as the one his son John would play twenty-four years later in CHINATOWN). The one weakness is perhaps the figure of the suitor, who needed to be written and performed in a way that took him just a bit further in the direction of Dmitri or Ivan, to match the passion of father and daughter. Overall, a very good and unusual idea: an American western with a female protagonist, conceived as a heady combination of and variation on Greek and Shakespearean and Dostoyevskyan tragedy.