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In leather boots and severe bangs, Barbara Stanwyck climbs a jagged hilltop and greets the cowboy who had welcomed her with boulders: "You play with big marbles!" She never got to play Electra, just as Anthony Mann never officially filmed Lear, this sagebrush melodrama realizes both dreams and then some. The heroine is "a filly that never had a rope on her," her father (Walter Huston) keeps a bust of Napoleon in the ranch and feudal rule alive in 1870s New Mexico. The saturnine gambler (Wendell Corey) and the honorable squatter (Roland Gilbert) are the men in her life, though the lacerating amour fou is between père et fille, each seeing their ruthlessness reflected in the other, both "in love with hate." The stormy tomboy puts on her dead mother's gown and, in a shot set to outdo Cagney sitting on mommy's lap in White Heat, eagerly complies when Daddy orders her to scratch his back scar. "The smell of a successful businessman" comes in handy for the overthrow of the patriarch, who realizes too late that he's the bull being ridden by the girl engraved on his own currency. "Daughter, when you gets an idea you stampede like a herd!" Graying kings and the queens behind them, the widowed usurper (Judith Anderson) and the cackling "old witch" (Blanche Yurka) and the banker's wife (Beulah Bondi). The technique is rather akin to Wyler's, until a pair of sewing scissors makes an appearance and Mann unleashes an astounding set piece: A hanging at dawn sculptured with broken fences and erect cacti, Qué Viva México close-ups and Stanwyck's rousing frenzy. "Sir, I hope you can chew what you just bit off." Forty Guns might be a continuation, and there's Chinatown. Cinematography by Victor Milner. With Thomas Gomez, Albert Dekker, John Bromfield, Wallace Ford, Charles Evans, Louis Jean Heydt, Frank Ferguson, and Arthur Hunnicutt. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |