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A purely abstracted image from Moby Dick, and there's Huston two years later doing his own color experiments. Northern California in winter, fin de siècle or thereabouts, far from "the amenities of civilization." Religion and alcohol are twin toxins in the family ranch, brimstone matriarch (Beulah Bondi) and sodden paterfamilias (Philip Tonge) comprise a corroded old order. Middle son (Robert Mitchum) rules the valley in his own mind, dominates the gray surroundings in red coat, pushes aside the youngest (Tab Hunter) to hungrily eye his sweetheart (Diana Lynn). "Monk" brother (William Hopper) and harrowed sister (Teresa Wright) know their place, a marauding cougar "big as a horse" shakes things up. "It stands for the whole business of being run out by the whites," according to the ancient Paiute played, in a characteristic bit of strangeness, by Carl Switzer under old-age pancake. The author of The Ox-Bow Incident adapted by the Kiss Me Deadly screenwriter, William Wellman translates the curious venture with a bitter complexity of images. The bullying heir on his mount is dwarfed by august location filming, black trees against endless snow evince a jagged symmetry promptly thrown off by the diagonal of a slanted trunk. The house by contrast is demonstrably a soundstage and all the more suffocating for it, compact arrangements of blank walls and staircases and shotgun racks dotted with hidden whiskey bottles (one is stashed behind the "Honor thy mother and thy father" plaque). Dreyer severities, O'Neill disintegration. Hopper dies off a dull character but is reincarnated as a couple of arresting visual effects, feet sticking out from behind a dark oaken headboard and a casket's view of a funeral that carves the screen into a rhombus of negative space. Ozu's Floating Weeds, Ford's 7 Women, the Mitchum cool that cracks before a page of Keats. "The place is just crawling with dreams." Cinematography by William Clothier.
--- Fernando F. Croce |