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What's in it for me?
As we near the end of Pride, in memory of Boyd McDonald, I offer a sexual moment from an old movie. It's straight, but it startled me. I was delighted.
Like the 1948 source novel by Niven Busch both concentrated and reimagined by screenwriter Charles Schnee, Anthony Mann's The Furies (1950) does not directly retell any particular classical tragedy so much as it channels their mythic charge of oath-breaking, kin-killing, and incest into a distinctly American dynastic struggle scratching up the blood through the earth of the West. In the New Mexico Territory of the 1870's, T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) presides like the king of his own city-state over a vast and rapacious ranch known as the Furies, so confident in his force of arms and capital that he can issue his own currency in the form of promissory notes engraved with their own Latin motto and the dance-hall Europa of "a lulu of a girl riding a bull." Spurning his softer-hearted son, he's bred up his imperiously independent daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck) as his like-minded right hand and heir, but when he capriciously dispossesses her in favor of his long-time mistress Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), he unleashes in full the powers of female vengeance that have been banked and waiting ever since with chthonically short-sighted possessiveness he tied his daughter's full control of the Furies to his approval of her choice of husband. The repercussions will detonate throughout the Territory, escalating in such unforgiving jolts that the narrative ultimately leaves itself no way out of the scorched earth of a mutually assured blood feud except by a last-minute recuperation of patriarchy even less satisfying than the deus ex of the Eumenides, but even at its most strenuously heteronormative it never does exorcise the psychosexual weirdness that coils from its earliest scene of handsome Vance in one of her dead mother's gowns welcoming her father home with a kiss, the lady of his house and its rightful son. "You won't have it easy, finding a man," T. C. warns his daughter, a brag and a flirtatious dare. "I've spoiled most of them for you."
In fact, he has left his mark on the two other men in Vance's life. Never quite her lover despite the years of closeness between them, Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland) belongs to a cliff-dwelling clan disdainfully dismissed as "squatters," their Spanish colonial claim engulfed by the expansion of the Furies and their persistence on their ancestral land partly dependent on the protection of Vance. Even more messily knotted into the bloody history of the Furies is the uninvited guest at her brother's wedding, Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), a professional gambler whose father lost his land in court and his life in a gunfight to T. C. Jeffords. The antagonism alone might make him enticing to Vance, but his lazily unintimidated outfacing of her father—ordered off the premises for a "grit-eating blackleg gambler," he rejoins courteously, "You stop telling lies about me and I'll stop telling the truth about you"—elevates this lean-faced stranger in fashionable town clothes from a passing diversion to an irresistible objective, so much so that she favors him with a ride out to the familiar lanes of the Darrow Strip and an expectation of his formal call at the Furies, which is really a challenge to defy her father again and which he conspicuously does not accept. The ensuing confrontation in his slant-beamed rooms at the Legal Tender seals them as lovers and raises eyebrows regardless of the decade it's viewed in. While the equivalent scene in the novel opens with the same shock of a slap for risking the deadly attention of the Furies, the film augments the violence with the wildcat handful of Vance flailing to scratch, kick, and even bite the first man who ever dared to hit her while he pins her arms and finally flings her onto the settee still dripping from the basin of water in which he dunked her face-first to "cool down." At the same time, it's more playful than the novel's whiskey-drunk, dreamily fevered coupling as Vance confirms that she brought the cake which melted all afternoon for a caller who never showed just to smash it in his face. She's winding up to be as good as her word when Rip intercepts her, suddenly laughing as if he's recognized the rules of the game: "Ah-ah! It's too good for that." In taking the cake away from her, he's gotten some of the icing on his hand. He looks her directly in the eye as he licks it off. It's a fast and astonishingly filthy gesture, both the physicality of it—for a few frames of film, it's a lot of tongue—and the established symbolism of the cake which a girl of the Territory bakes for the man she invites to court her, which Vance has never before offered to any man, an even blunter signifier of sexual initiation than the simile older than Anakreon which likens her to "a filly that never had a rope on her." (πῶλε Θρηικίη, τί δή μεν λοξὸν ὄμμασι βλέπουσα νηλέως φεύγεις, δοκεῖς δέ μ’ οὐδὲν εἰδέναι σοφόν;) It stunned me that for all their usual screaming about open-mouthed kisses, no one down at the Breen office had flagged this even more open-mouthed innuendo, far more sexually suggestive than the kiss it leads into. Fortunately, without so much as a trip to California, I could look into the PCA file for a clue to what had happened and as soon as I found it, I rejoiced, because it looks like the glorious backfire plaintively described in the memo from "J.A.V." which records the mixed success of trying to get Hal Wallis Productions to cut the picture to the satisfaction of the censors:
That left Item 3, the open-mouth kiss, still up in the air. It was decided that we could not afford to ignore such a brazenly lustful kiss, and that if it were necessary to create an issue over it, there was no avoiding it. We would not approve the open-mouth kiss . . . With regards the open-mouth kiss, we were surprised to find that they had substituted a new "take" of the scene, which completely eliminated the open-mouth kiss, but which substituted another kiss that inescapably suggested an illicit sex affair.
No shit, Geoffrey Shurlock. The final take is right up there with Richard Conte kissing his way down Jean Wallace in The Big Combo (1955). As soon as Rip can ditch that cake, I wouldn't bet money on them making it as far as the bed which sits innocently under a quilt and some carelessly hung items of clothing in full view of all this close-quarters friction. Even the censors' effort to salvage the substitute kiss by instructing it to be considerably shortened seems to have failed when the memo is forced to concede that "the editing which had been done, if any, was indistinguishable also." It does not record whether the Wallis unit took the issue to the Board of Directors of the Motion Picture Association of America as threatened, but no kiss that comes in two rounds looks all that shortened to me. And thank God: it's a bright spot of raunch in a transaction-driven revenge tragedy. Whatever the tensions of their relationship over the course of the film, what we see in this moment looks more than anything like fun—Vance kisses Rip as eagerly as he pulls her to him, her satisfied laughter matching his appreciative grin—like pre-Code sex, which didn't have to be vanilla or even allied to love, not to mention a blatant telegraph that Mr. Darrow, sir, knows how to show a lady a good time. I am not normally in agreement with the claim that the elevation of Joseph Breen forced filmmakers to find creative ways to communicate around the Code, but in this case I'll make an exception. However brazenly lustful the original kiss, I really doubt it included the implication of cunnilingus. Thank you for your service, J.A.V. The squeaky wheel gets the slippery metaphor.
The PCA's other major criticism regarding these two characters does not offer nearly as much food for schadenfreude, but underscores once again the tendency of the censors to miss the emotional forest for the carnal trees:
The repeated routine of Rip physically assaulting Vance before becoming romantic with her seems to us on the brutal and lustful side, and, it seems to us, could even be interpreted as possibly suggesting a bit of sadism.
To get the well-actualliest objection out of the way first, Rip and Vance are capable of interacting romantically without violence, as proven by several significant kisses including their first and last. More pertinently, while there's no mistaking the kink of their dynamic despite the cautious language of an either obtuse or uncomfortable Breen, to characterize it as one-sided misreads their relationship as a flat case of frontier shrew-taming; it is much more carefully observed by the film as an erotically charged competition over who, in fact, has the rope on whom. Vance looks like the loser of the agon—Mary Renault would have loved this movie—when her desire for Rip persists unabated even after he accepts $50,000 from her father over her hand in marriage, but when she discovers that he's kept the money in trust for her just as if it had been a real dowry instead of a contemptuous payoff, does the sentiment betray him as the more loving one? Or is he still holding the reins, smiling ironically as she compliments him and then slaps him across the face, takes a shot past his shoulder with his own gambler's derringer that she casts back into his lap as soon as he identifies the unsatisfied need it was an eloquent tell for? He warns her from experience against losing sight of love in the pursuit of hatred and sets the price of his alliance against T. C. at the choice cut of the Darrow Strip. She invites him to hit her, then to kiss her, then leaves him with his dick out and his own words ringing in his ears, admission to her body priced at that ten percent of "the sweetest part of the Furies." The face-slapping may complicate it from the vantage of the twenty-first century, but it's such an even-handed wrestle that even their eventual, ambiguous proposal debates the billing of "Darrow and Jeffords or Jeffords and Darrow" and Rip's claim to the final say in their marriage is challenged immediately by the contingency of Vance's acceptance: "Mr. Darrow, sir, I hope you can chew what you just bit off." I regret the loss of the novel's climactic mutual rescue because it's a particularly nice example of the species, a leap of faith as well as life-saving, but the film's take on their chemistry is otherwise successfully hot, twisty, and so dramatically different from the actors' previous pairing in The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) that I hope some arthouse theater somewhere has double-featured them. Adobe-blonde for Vance, Stanwyck looks better than any other time I have seen her fair-haired. I'm not sure she and Corey share any scenes on horseback beyond the closing shots of the finale which I have trouble regarding canonically, which makes these studio promos especially entertaining.
I suspect my ideal version of The Furies falls somewhere between novel and film. In favor of the latter, Schnee's sharpening interest in the structures of money and power tightens the narrative by recasting the come-by-chance stranger of the novel's Curley Darragh as an avenger in his own right, his financial cynicism honed further as he branches out from gambling into the banking that makes him such a capable ally for Vance in her plan to cheat her father out of his empire fair and square with his own paper. In favor of the former, I can see no reason beyond someone's pre-production cold feet over interracial romance for the demotion of Juan from Vance's lover and defiantly wedded husband to a merely intimate friend, not least because it eviscerates the act of kin-killing at the heart of the novel, the lynching by which T. C. asserts his rights to his daughter even more brutally than he evens the score of her attack on his intended wife and which summons, truly, the Furies whom the film even has the sense to incarnate in the snaky-haired Señora Herrera (Blanche Yurka), the dead shot "mother witch" who laughs like the grinding of great stones in the earth and croons as if she's charming her prey to her rifle, "Come, my old one, come, my toro, closer." In a film so exceptionally, visually dark that it seems to use day-for-night even for actual day, the scene still stands out in a cold terror of dawn-shadowed cliffs and saguaros, but even the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Victor Milner can't give it blood-guilt. Then again, I can't see any reason beyond patriarchy for an ending that crashes the plot to such a reconciliatory halt, the rest of the film buckles behind it, especially the concluding strains of a ballad so inappropriately valorizing that I have to view it as the satyr play in order not to want it ripped off the print. The novel is quite clear that it is Vance who outlives her father and her husbands to become the legend of the Territory, carrying what the film's title crawl calls "this flaming page in the history of the great Southwest" into the metatextually modern day. On yet another hand, the novel doesn't have Wendell Corey licking frosting off it. Criterion handles the Blu-Ray/DVD which I watched thanks to the generosity of Greer Gilman, but it streams on some of the usual suspects if you prefer that sort of thing. I expect it rewards closer classical examination than I have given it, if anyone wants to knock themselves out over the Minoan echoes of T. C.'s single-handed wrestling of a wild bull. This lulu brought to you by my sweetest backers at Patreon.
Like the 1948 source novel by Niven Busch both concentrated and reimagined by screenwriter Charles Schnee, Anthony Mann's The Furies (1950) does not directly retell any particular classical tragedy so much as it channels their mythic charge of oath-breaking, kin-killing, and incest into a distinctly American dynastic struggle scratching up the blood through the earth of the West. In the New Mexico Territory of the 1870's, T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) presides like the king of his own city-state over a vast and rapacious ranch known as the Furies, so confident in his force of arms and capital that he can issue his own currency in the form of promissory notes engraved with their own Latin motto and the dance-hall Europa of "a lulu of a girl riding a bull." Spurning his softer-hearted son, he's bred up his imperiously independent daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck) as his like-minded right hand and heir, but when he capriciously dispossesses her in favor of his long-time mistress Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), he unleashes in full the powers of female vengeance that have been banked and waiting ever since with chthonically short-sighted possessiveness he tied his daughter's full control of the Furies to his approval of her choice of husband. The repercussions will detonate throughout the Territory, escalating in such unforgiving jolts that the narrative ultimately leaves itself no way out of the scorched earth of a mutually assured blood feud except by a last-minute recuperation of patriarchy even less satisfying than the deus ex of the Eumenides, but even at its most strenuously heteronormative it never does exorcise the psychosexual weirdness that coils from its earliest scene of handsome Vance in one of her dead mother's gowns welcoming her father home with a kiss, the lady of his house and its rightful son. "You won't have it easy, finding a man," T. C. warns his daughter, a brag and a flirtatious dare. "I've spoiled most of them for you."
In fact, he has left his mark on the two other men in Vance's life. Never quite her lover despite the years of closeness between them, Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland) belongs to a cliff-dwelling clan disdainfully dismissed as "squatters," their Spanish colonial claim engulfed by the expansion of the Furies and their persistence on their ancestral land partly dependent on the protection of Vance. Even more messily knotted into the bloody history of the Furies is the uninvited guest at her brother's wedding, Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), a professional gambler whose father lost his land in court and his life in a gunfight to T. C. Jeffords. The antagonism alone might make him enticing to Vance, but his lazily unintimidated outfacing of her father—ordered off the premises for a "grit-eating blackleg gambler," he rejoins courteously, "You stop telling lies about me and I'll stop telling the truth about you"—elevates this lean-faced stranger in fashionable town clothes from a passing diversion to an irresistible objective, so much so that she favors him with a ride out to the familiar lanes of the Darrow Strip and an expectation of his formal call at the Furies, which is really a challenge to defy her father again and which he conspicuously does not accept. The ensuing confrontation in his slant-beamed rooms at the Legal Tender seals them as lovers and raises eyebrows regardless of the decade it's viewed in. While the equivalent scene in the novel opens with the same shock of a slap for risking the deadly attention of the Furies, the film augments the violence with the wildcat handful of Vance flailing to scratch, kick, and even bite the first man who ever dared to hit her while he pins her arms and finally flings her onto the settee still dripping from the basin of water in which he dunked her face-first to "cool down." At the same time, it's more playful than the novel's whiskey-drunk, dreamily fevered coupling as Vance confirms that she brought the cake which melted all afternoon for a caller who never showed just to smash it in his face. She's winding up to be as good as her word when Rip intercepts her, suddenly laughing as if he's recognized the rules of the game: "Ah-ah! It's too good for that." In taking the cake away from her, he's gotten some of the icing on his hand. He looks her directly in the eye as he licks it off. It's a fast and astonishingly filthy gesture, both the physicality of it—for a few frames of film, it's a lot of tongue—and the established symbolism of the cake which a girl of the Territory bakes for the man she invites to court her, which Vance has never before offered to any man, an even blunter signifier of sexual initiation than the simile older than Anakreon which likens her to "a filly that never had a rope on her." (πῶλε Θρηικίη, τί δή μεν λοξὸν ὄμμασι βλέπουσα νηλέως φεύγεις, δοκεῖς δέ μ’ οὐδὲν εἰδέναι σοφόν;) It stunned me that for all their usual screaming about open-mouthed kisses, no one down at the Breen office had flagged this even more open-mouthed innuendo, far more sexually suggestive than the kiss it leads into. Fortunately, without so much as a trip to California, I could look into the PCA file for a clue to what had happened and as soon as I found it, I rejoiced, because it looks like the glorious backfire plaintively described in the memo from "J.A.V." which records the mixed success of trying to get Hal Wallis Productions to cut the picture to the satisfaction of the censors:
That left Item 3, the open-mouth kiss, still up in the air. It was decided that we could not afford to ignore such a brazenly lustful kiss, and that if it were necessary to create an issue over it, there was no avoiding it. We would not approve the open-mouth kiss . . . With regards the open-mouth kiss, we were surprised to find that they had substituted a new "take" of the scene, which completely eliminated the open-mouth kiss, but which substituted another kiss that inescapably suggested an illicit sex affair.
No shit, Geoffrey Shurlock. The final take is right up there with Richard Conte kissing his way down Jean Wallace in The Big Combo (1955). As soon as Rip can ditch that cake, I wouldn't bet money on them making it as far as the bed which sits innocently under a quilt and some carelessly hung items of clothing in full view of all this close-quarters friction. Even the censors' effort to salvage the substitute kiss by instructing it to be considerably shortened seems to have failed when the memo is forced to concede that "the editing which had been done, if any, was indistinguishable also." It does not record whether the Wallis unit took the issue to the Board of Directors of the Motion Picture Association of America as threatened, but no kiss that comes in two rounds looks all that shortened to me. And thank God: it's a bright spot of raunch in a transaction-driven revenge tragedy. Whatever the tensions of their relationship over the course of the film, what we see in this moment looks more than anything like fun—Vance kisses Rip as eagerly as he pulls her to him, her satisfied laughter matching his appreciative grin—like pre-Code sex, which didn't have to be vanilla or even allied to love, not to mention a blatant telegraph that Mr. Darrow, sir, knows how to show a lady a good time. I am not normally in agreement with the claim that the elevation of Joseph Breen forced filmmakers to find creative ways to communicate around the Code, but in this case I'll make an exception. However brazenly lustful the original kiss, I really doubt it included the implication of cunnilingus. Thank you for your service, J.A.V. The squeaky wheel gets the slippery metaphor.
The PCA's other major criticism regarding these two characters does not offer nearly as much food for schadenfreude, but underscores once again the tendency of the censors to miss the emotional forest for the carnal trees:
The repeated routine of Rip physically assaulting Vance before becoming romantic with her seems to us on the brutal and lustful side, and, it seems to us, could even be interpreted as possibly suggesting a bit of sadism.
To get the well-actualliest objection out of the way first, Rip and Vance are capable of interacting romantically without violence, as proven by several significant kisses including their first and last. More pertinently, while there's no mistaking the kink of their dynamic despite the cautious language of an either obtuse or uncomfortable Breen, to characterize it as one-sided misreads their relationship as a flat case of frontier shrew-taming; it is much more carefully observed by the film as an erotically charged competition over who, in fact, has the rope on whom. Vance looks like the loser of the agon—Mary Renault would have loved this movie—when her desire for Rip persists unabated even after he accepts $50,000 from her father over her hand in marriage, but when she discovers that he's kept the money in trust for her just as if it had been a real dowry instead of a contemptuous payoff, does the sentiment betray him as the more loving one? Or is he still holding the reins, smiling ironically as she compliments him and then slaps him across the face, takes a shot past his shoulder with his own gambler's derringer that she casts back into his lap as soon as he identifies the unsatisfied need it was an eloquent tell for? He warns her from experience against losing sight of love in the pursuit of hatred and sets the price of his alliance against T. C. at the choice cut of the Darrow Strip. She invites him to hit her, then to kiss her, then leaves him with his dick out and his own words ringing in his ears, admission to her body priced at that ten percent of "the sweetest part of the Furies." The face-slapping may complicate it from the vantage of the twenty-first century, but it's such an even-handed wrestle that even their eventual, ambiguous proposal debates the billing of "Darrow and Jeffords or Jeffords and Darrow" and Rip's claim to the final say in their marriage is challenged immediately by the contingency of Vance's acceptance: "Mr. Darrow, sir, I hope you can chew what you just bit off." I regret the loss of the novel's climactic mutual rescue because it's a particularly nice example of the species, a leap of faith as well as life-saving, but the film's take on their chemistry is otherwise successfully hot, twisty, and so dramatically different from the actors' previous pairing in The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) that I hope some arthouse theater somewhere has double-featured them. Adobe-blonde for Vance, Stanwyck looks better than any other time I have seen her fair-haired. I'm not sure she and Corey share any scenes on horseback beyond the closing shots of the finale which I have trouble regarding canonically, which makes these studio promos especially entertaining.
I suspect my ideal version of The Furies falls somewhere between novel and film. In favor of the latter, Schnee's sharpening interest in the structures of money and power tightens the narrative by recasting the come-by-chance stranger of the novel's Curley Darragh as an avenger in his own right, his financial cynicism honed further as he branches out from gambling into the banking that makes him such a capable ally for Vance in her plan to cheat her father out of his empire fair and square with his own paper. In favor of the former, I can see no reason beyond someone's pre-production cold feet over interracial romance for the demotion of Juan from Vance's lover and defiantly wedded husband to a merely intimate friend, not least because it eviscerates the act of kin-killing at the heart of the novel, the lynching by which T. C. asserts his rights to his daughter even more brutally than he evens the score of her attack on his intended wife and which summons, truly, the Furies whom the film even has the sense to incarnate in the snaky-haired Señora Herrera (Blanche Yurka), the dead shot "mother witch" who laughs like the grinding of great stones in the earth and croons as if she's charming her prey to her rifle, "Come, my old one, come, my toro, closer." In a film so exceptionally, visually dark that it seems to use day-for-night even for actual day, the scene still stands out in a cold terror of dawn-shadowed cliffs and saguaros, but even the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Victor Milner can't give it blood-guilt. Then again, I can't see any reason beyond patriarchy for an ending that crashes the plot to such a reconciliatory halt, the rest of the film buckles behind it, especially the concluding strains of a ballad so inappropriately valorizing that I have to view it as the satyr play in order not to want it ripped off the print. The novel is quite clear that it is Vance who outlives her father and her husbands to become the legend of the Territory, carrying what the film's title crawl calls "this flaming page in the history of the great Southwest" into the metatextually modern day. On yet another hand, the novel doesn't have Wendell Corey licking frosting off it. Criterion handles the Blu-Ray/DVD which I watched thanks to the generosity of Greer Gilman, but it streams on some of the usual suspects if you prefer that sort of thing. I expect it rewards closer classical examination than I have given it, if anyone wants to knock themselves out over the Minoan echoes of T. C.'s single-handed wrestling of a wild bull. This lulu brought to you by my sweetest backers at Patreon.
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The wheels really come off the ending, but it is an operatically wild ride until then. I also recommend the novel, which I actually read first as soon I realized it was by the screenwriter of The Capture (1950). I don't read that many Westerns and was surprised by how much I liked this one.
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Thanks for this excellent review, and for linking to those promo photos!
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No blame! She does look fantastic, including or even especially in those dungarees and that plaid shirt, and she owns the movie, as Vance should. Have another promotional photo just because I just found it:
Thanks for this excellent review, and for linking to those promo photos!
You're welcome! Thank you.
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Style goals! I saw it as I clicked through that tumblr's entire "The Furies" tag... time well spent! (This one was probably my favourite!)
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That is great.
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Thank you!