![]() ![]() Selznick in 1946) and would return to the genre with “The Furies,” which was filmed by Anthony Mann in 1950. ![]() The project seems closer to the heart of its screenwriter, Niven Busch, who had touched off a vogue for Freudian westerns with his novel “Duel in the Sun” (turned into a hallucinatory Technicolor epic by David O. It may be a bit too thick for the director, Raoul Walsh, a supreme Hollywood classicist who specialized in bodies in motion more than psyches in torment. With a mysterious stranger (Dean Jagger) seemingly bent on murdering Jeb as revenge for an unknown crime, the atmosphere is thick with suppressed passion and thwarted desire. ![]() Rescued by a neighbor, Ma Callum (Judith Anderson, perhaps the definitive scowling face of Hollywood Freudianism), he has been raised to think of himself as a brother to her two children, but now that they are adults, Adam (John Rodney) has begun to begrudge Jeb for his share of the family estate, while Adam’s younger sister, Thor (Wright), has developed feelings for Jeb that go beyond brotherly love. Mitchum, who was just climbing out of B pictures and bit parts on his way to stardom, is Jeb Rand, a rancher who returns from the Spanish-American War to find himself still haunted by nightmarish visions of the night he was orphaned as a child. Filled with enigmatic dreams to be deciphered (“Spellbound,” 1945) and family romances to be untangled (“Mourning Becomes Electra,” 1947), many of these films seem solemn and naïve today, but one that still works is “ Pursued,” a 1947 western featuring Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright that has just been released on a handsome Blu-ray from Olive Films. In the late 1940s Hollywood was besotted with Sigmund Freud, perhaps because psychoanalysis was entering the American mainstream along with all the emotionally shaken veterans returning from World War II. ![]()
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