A young woman faces her darkest fears with seven other unwilling participants in a deadly game — a game that can only have one winner.
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CinemaSerf
7
By CinemaSerf
“Vance” (Barbara Stanwyck) has been brought up, with two brothers, on the “Furies”. An enormous New Mexican cattle ranch owned by her father “T.C.” (Walter Huston). It’s fairly clear that he has plans for her to succeed him, but it’s not going to be plain sailing. For a start, he is running out of cash and with a mortgage payment looming and 20,000 head of cattle needing to be rounded up and hopefully sold, he hasn’t his work to seek. There are also some pesky squatters on their land, and one of them “Herrera” (Gilbert Roland) is a lifelong friend/admirer of “Vance” and then finally we also have the embittered “Darrow” (Wendell Carey) who is determined to regain a piece of land he thinks the old man stole from him. He thinks that by playing up to “Vance” then maybe he can con both her and “TC” out of it, or at least a large “dowry”. Now she also realises that they have money worries and so is concerned when the clearly gold-digging old flame “Flo” (Judith Anderson) appears and rekindles a relationship with her father that she knows is going to spell a trouble that’s only exacerbated by a tragedy that really drives quite a wedge between father and daughter. Still with me? Stanwyck is at her feisty best here and dominates the story alongside Huston, the obviously scheming Anderson, and a supporting cast that keep this taut and intriguing. This is much more of a cat and mouse type of Western that’s light on the gun toting and heavier on the characterisations, the plotting and what “romance” there is is about as unsentimental as you could hope for - even by code standards, the kissing looks entirely perfunctory. It’s another fine example of this genre moving away from it’s wildness to a more sophisticated theme and is well worth a watch.
