Pursued (1947)

Pursued is a 1947 western that sometimes gets described as a noir western. We shall see.

It was directed by Raoul Walsh and photographed by James Wong Howe so you expect it to be visually impressive, and it is. The movie was shot in black-and-white in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

It was written by Niven Busch, a fine screenwriter who also wrote some great western novels including Duel in the Sun and The Furies, both of which were made into excellent movies.

It opens with a man obviously on the run from someone. The man is Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum). A girl has come to him with some food and other necessities. She tells him he has to get as far away from here as possible but that he can’t go with him. We then get the backstory an extended flashback.

It begins in Jeb’s childhood. Something very bad happened. He was taken in by Mrs Callum (Judith Anderson) and raised with her son Adam and her daughter Thor (Teresa Wright) on a ranch just outside the town of Lone Horse.

Shortly afterwards, for no reason whatsoever, someone tries to shoot the young Jeb.

Jeb grows up. Mrs Callum’s ranch thrives. Then war with Spain comes. Jeb is sent off to fight and comes back a hero.

Jeb and Thor want to marry. Thor wants a long courtship. Jeb wants to get married straight away. He then wants them to move away. He doesn’t know why but he is sure something bad is going to happen. He is still troubled by bad dreams.

Jeb isn’t paranoid. There’s someone from his past who has spent years plotting against him, and he’s right here in Lone Horse.

There is tension between Jeb and Adam, which leads to a major confrontation.

There are shootings but Jeb can’t figure out why these things are happening. He ends up going into partnership with Honest Jack Dingle (Alan Hale) in a gambling saloon.

Things get weird between Jeb and Thor. There’s another shooting. And eventually Jeb ends up back at his childhood home for a kind of climactic showdown.

Some movies makes the mistake of revealing too much too soon. This movie perhaps conceals things for too long so that the behaviour of most of the characters is so incomprehensible that it’s hard to get engaged with the story.

There are obvious affinities with film noir, especially the use of the extended flashback. What strikes me much more forcibly are the film’s affinities with Spellbound. Hitchcock had made Spellbound just two years earlier and it was a major hit. Like Hitchcock’s film Pursued deals with a man haunted by traumatic childhood events which he cannot clearly remember or understand. And like Spellbound Pursued includes dream sequences.

Pursued also resembles Spellbound in being a muddled mess. Jeb has no idea what is going on in his head and nor do we. His behaviour is bizarre. Thor’s behaviour is bizarre. There’s a sinister character with a grudge against Jeb but the reasons for the grudge are obscure. When we find out the reason we can’t help thinking he’s been holding a grudge against the wrong person.

One interesting aspect to this movie is that there are several gunfights but not one of them is a fair fight. These are not the formalised duels you get in so many westerns. These are ambushes. You don’t give the other fellow a chance to draw his gun. You just plug him, preferably in the back.

Mitchum is OK. Teresa Wright is truly awful.

There really is nothing remotely film noir about Pursued. It’s more of an attempt at a psychological thriller western. Or a psycho-sexual thriller with the sexual bits left out. It has the hallmarks of a screenplay that had been butchered by the Production Code Authority or the studio. It just gives the impression that the characters’ actions are not sufficiently motivated. I suspect that there may been some more obviously Freudian themes that got watered down to the point of virtual non-existence.

For me Pursued is an interesting movie but a bit disappointing. It just doesn’t quite work. It’s still worth a look.

The Olive Films Blu-Ray looks great.