Psychodrama on the Frontier in Nashville

On Saturday afternoon, Anthony Mann’s The Furies will post up at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre, where it will screen as part of the cinema’s Essential Westerns series. With the 1950 film, starring Walter Huston and Barbara Stanwyck as a father and daughter bitterly feuding over the future of the family’s New Mexico ranch, Hollywood filmmaker Mann smuggled a dark domestic psychodrama, shrouded in film-noir shadows, out to the nineteenth-century frontier. Though the westerns he made with James Stewart (The Naked Spur, Bend of the River, Winchester ’73) remain better known, the underappreciated Furies burns with the dramatic intensity and formal poise of Mann’s finest work. At the Belcourt screening, viewers will have the chance to take in a fuller introduction to the singular film, as Middle Tennessee State University professor Elyce Helford speaks before the houselights go down.