Be Kind Rewind

Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind is blessed with such a deliriously silly premise and such heartfelt execution that it's easy to overlook its many shortcomings and simply enjoy the ride. It's a film about two video store clerks (Jack Black and Mos Def) who accidentally erase all the videocassettes in their store. Yes, they're the last VHS holdouts in a DVD marketplace, a fact that becomes important in light of the film's implicit (if somewhat confused) critique of mainstream Hollywood and the decline of personal, creative experiences in the movies. In any case, faced with a video store full of suddenly blank tapes, the duo of course decides — what other logical response, really? — to remake every film in the store themselves, in makeshift 20-minute versions where all the parts are played by themselves and some local friends, and the special effects are as improvised and shitty as possible. These hilarious remakes of course turn out to be a massive hit in the neighborhood, and the guys are catapulted to local stardom.

The film is at its best as long as it focuses on the remakes themselves, which are unfailingly a riot. The guys put their own unique slant on RoboCop, Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, Driving Miss Daisy, and dozens of other Hollywood flicks, each one accomplished with a combination of visual ingenuity and real old-fashioned technical improvisation. What's great about these recreations, as opposed to recent movie parodies like the utterly disposable Scary Movie franchise, is that the original movies are pretty much left alone, treated with respect and genuine affection. In this case, it's not the original films that are being mocked; the humor arises from the way these two goofy, naïve friends flub and stumble their way through a grand tour of mainstream cinema with all its warts and ridiculous genre exercises. It's a tribute to good old-fashioned mechanical know-how, the moviemaking instinct that leads filmmakers to continually think up new ways to shoot convincing action scenes or achieve particular effects. That ingenuity is there when these two amateurs use a fan threaded with strings, placed in front of the camera, to give the effect of a scratchy old black-and-white film, or when they switch the camera to negative mode to shoot day-for-night. In many ways, the film feels like an impassioned plea for the return of this kind of mechanical creativity in films, a more personal touch for achieving special effects than the slick surfaces of CGI animation.

Gondry is also evoking nostalgia for an older era in which movies were a true communal experience, when there seemed to be an utopian potential in the movies that has long since departed — killed, ironically, at least in part by the prevalence of home-viewing formats. The film's finale is a warm and touching tribute to the power of watching movies in large groups, a fantasy about the potential for movies to draw entire communities together in celebration and pleasure. As Gondry pans across the faces of the neighborhood people, illuminated by the flickering blue glow of a cinema projection, the real affection he has for the movies as a communal experience is immediately apparent. This is even more true of the final scene, which expands the movie-going experience into the streets of the city, where people from all over the neighborhood gather in groups to watch the flickering screen and rejoice in it. They are of course watching a film which is itself a piece of nostalgia, a recreation of an imaginary jazz age New Jersey that never existed, in which Fats Waller figures prominently, not as he really was in life, but as he might be in fantasies, tall tales, and legends.

Be Kind Rewind is also a fantasy, and a totally unabashed one. Its villains, evil Hollywood lawyers, storm into the video store with impressive but totally off-base legal jargon, confiscating everything in sight, and then actually running over the amassed videocassettes with a steamroller. It's an inspired bit of comic book villainy, to be sure. But it's also indicative of the film's somewhat confused stance towards Hollywood, part of a love/hate relationship with the mainstream that never quite resolves itself. On the one hand, Gondry wistfully recalls an imaginary Hollywood past in which the movies actually brought people together in communal joy, and his remakes of even recent Hollywood fare shows a real affection and appreciation for the simple pleasures of an enjoyably stupid genre flick. It helps that, in the process, he's made an enjoyably stupid genre flick himself. But Gondry is simultaneously undercutting the studio system, lambasting the destruction of communal values in cinema — although why this should be ascribed to DVD and not VHS is not at all clear — and protesting the suppression of creative voices by a slick mainstream apparatus. This ambivalent stance towards Hollywood is never quite resolved, and neither is the contradiction inherent in Gondry's appreciation of the community while he actually slights the film medium in favor of home-viewing media like videotapes.

Despite these problems, the film as a whole is an enjoyable diversion. When it's not focused on the film-making exploits of Black and Mos Def, the film does fall apart a bit, and the ancillary characters are barely developed. Danny Glover, as a wise old black man stereotype, is particularly egregious in the film's early scenes, a few of which are nearly unwatchable, while the great Mia Farrow is simply wasted as a mildly quirky neighborhood woman. Whenever the characters aren't making or showing one of their creations, one inevitably wishes they were, just because the film crackles and sparkles during its creative scenes and too often fizzles otherwise. Towards the middle of the film, Gondry provides a hilarious montage, structured like one of the music videos that originally made him famous, a patchwork construction of scenes from various remade movies. Some of these gags are so good — like the refrigerator they use to approximate HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the cardboard cutout animals for The Lion King — that one wishes the film had lingered longer on some of these moments and trimmed the excess surrounding details a bit. As it is, Be Kind Rewind is not necessarily the comic masterpiece promised by its very original conceit, but it's entertaining enough and rich enough in warmth and humor that it overcomes even its considerable structural and thematic flaws.

Here

In searching for some information about the comic artist and designer Richard McGuire — mainly hoping for an update on the long-rumored book-length version of his seminal comic strip "Here" — I stumbled across the above YouTube video. I don't usually post such ephemera here, but this seemed like an interesting enough link that it might be worth a look. It's a film adaptation of McGuire's "Here," apparently made by two upstate New York amateur filmmakers, Timothy Masick and William Trainor, in 1991, just two years after the original comic strip was published in Art Spiegelman's anthology magazine RAW.

For those who don't know, McGuire's comic "Here" is one of the masterpieces of the artform, a beautifully conceived manipulation of panels, space, and time in which form and content are perfectly wed. But don't take my word for it, you can read it yourself, because this Spanish comics site has posted the entirety of the six-page comic as GIF images. So go ahead, then come back here, and if you like it as much as I do you'll probably also want this issue of Comic Art magazine that reprints the complete comic along with an enlightening profile of McGuire. Surprisingly, this audacious masterpiece is one of the few pieces of true comics work McGuire has made in a long and wide-ranging career that has encompassed design, children's books, and animated film. The comic's ingenuity is its use of multiple frames and panels within panels in order to convey the passage of time across centuries. Each panel frames the exact same physical space, a corner of a room in a house that is built in 1902 — though McGuire also shows events that happen in this same physical space both before the house was built and after it's destroyed. Within this static space, time moves freely, overlapping as multiple events spanning throughout time occur in different panels and sub-panels. Sometimes, McGuire's division of space into time makes a simple joke — as when he hilariously overlays images of cows from 1860 onto the faces of women talking in a living room in 1944 — and at other times the effect is more poignant and evocative. A character named Billy, who lived in the house as both a young boy and a grown man, is seen traversing several time periods in the house's lifetime, and later revisiting his former home as an old man. The comic economically condenses eons of action into just six pages, and its convention-shattering use of panels and the concept of comics "time" remains one of the most original and exciting uses of the medium.

This brings us to the film linked above. In many ways, adapting "Here" into a film is an odd and quixotic endeavor. The genius of McGuire's work is exactly its extreme specificity, the extent to which it interrogates and remakes the conventions of the comics form and re-imagines the basic unit of comics structure: the panel. This specificity is certainly lost in the translation, and make no mistake, it's a great loss. Nevertheless, the film version is interesting in other ways, namely the way it introduces the concept of motion into the story. McGuire's comic is, of course, necessarily static, and its stasis is an integral part of its meaning — the comics panel is a static block of space, and within this space McGuire breaks down time as a series of further static blocks. This is contrast to the usual comics conception of time, in which time progresses in a continual forward motion from one panel to the next, similarly to how time progresses between frames in a traditional narrative film. McGuire's innovation was to take this basic tenet — one panel is a unit of time — and play with it by overlaying panels so that time becomes jumbled, communicating a sense of a continuous flow of time.


The film complicates this notion by disrupting the comic's stasis. The moving transitions between different time periods have some relationship to the traditional film grammar of wipes used to transition between time and place, but the overlapping "frames," duplicating McGuire's compositions, bear little relationship to the usual cinematic conception of time and place. The "transitions" are not actually transitioning anywhere, but rather introducing new blocks and new combinations of blocks that overlay each other and comment on each other. At some points, transition lines are fluidly and quickly moving across the screen, often in different directions, so that they selectively reveal parts of the room at various eras. A block of the screen from 1944 may be moving left, while a block from 1963 moves right; they meet in the middle, swap, and sweep across the screen to be replaced by still more time fragments. The film's fluidity and motion contribute to a much faster pace than McGuire's comic. Where the comic is elegiac and contemplative, the film has a much more frenetic, energetic pace, despite the fact that both works are fairly similar in terms of their compositions and basic content.

One sense in which the film is a real disappointment is in its use of sound, which doesn't quite go far enough in expanding upon the comic. Comics are obviously limited in their use of sound, and word balloons are a compromise solution to an otherwise intractable problem for the artform. The film, in translating McGuire's texts into real sound, reveals the tantalizing possibilities opened up by the different medium, but doesn't really embrace the change. There are isolated moments, like when a radio from 1922 plays some melancholy old jazz to indicate the era, or when people shout at each other across "panels" representing different times, when the film suggests that the use of overlapping sound might have been a key component in making this work a truly essential and original adaptation, rather than just an intriguing companion piece. The filmmakers don't pursue this possibility much further though, preferring to stick relatively close to McGuire's original conception and no more. Still, it's an interesting little film, and well worth considering, especially in relation to the comic that inspired it.

The Odds of Recovery/The Head of a Pin/Ulysse

With The Odds of Recovery, experimental filmmaker Su Friedrich continues to explore various facets of her life through autobiographical films that deftly balance the personal and the objective. As always, Friedrich's greatest gift is for stepping back from deeply personal subjects with a formal distance that allows her to comment on her experiences without becoming sentimental or maudlin. This danger is especially real in this recent film, in which Friedrich traces the development of her own health over the years, recounting in a video diary the six operations she underwent, for various maladies, between the ages of 20 and 46. Her battle with a massive cyst on her spleen, several knee operations, problems with her breasts and hormone levels: all are explored with candor and directness. Characteristically, Friedrich illustrates scenes obliquely, relying on a dense and poetically structured combination of diary footage, voiceovers, and on-screen texts to communicate the essence of the story, while the visuals often detour into disconnected shots of nature scenes or domestic interiors, with the kitchen and the garden especially emphasized. Friedrich's long-suffering partner, who taught her how to both cook and garden, is absent from the film, spoken about but never seen. Nevertheless, her presence is strongly felt in these scenes, which are reminders of her influence and importance in Friedrich's life even as the medical struggles tend to push them apart into their own separate worries.

Friedrich is often inclined to express things in such indirect ways, a tendency that can also be seen in her use of text and voiceover. Throughout much of the film, the spoken word is used primarily to communicate objective or medical information, giving the film the veneer of a scientific documentary at times. The narration reads from medical textbooks, describing the function of various organs and the root of problems, or from Friedrich's own post-operative medical charts which describe her progress, or from various self-help and psychology books that she turned to in order to deal with her rocky relationship. The scientific thrust of the narration keeps the specificity of Friedrich's problems at a remove, at least for the first half of the film, and she increases this distance by filming her video diary from a static, low position that cuts off people's heads. The bulk of the film's frames are focused at around the mid-section, and also in close-up, so that people, both doctors and patients, tend to become abstracted arrangements of torsos and hands, sometimes engaged in conversation in hospital examining rooms, sometimes cooking or gardening at home.

If these elements contribute to the objective tone of the film, Friedrich often undermines this distance with her use of text, which she uses to express the more personal and emotional reactions which she mostly denies or suppresses in her narration. While her own voice is only rarely allowed to shake or express frustration or bemoan her fate, the texts, flashed up onto black screens periodically, have a more personal, introspective tone far removed from the medical jargon and objectivity of the voiceovers. These texts sometimes also take on the objective quality of the voiceovers — especially to present lists, like a numbered list of the precepts of t'ai-chi — but more often they're personal comments, relating Friedrich's timeline of diseases or her partner's reactions to her constant illnesses. The combination of the dispassionate narration with these written evocations of domestic distress and anxiety allows Friedrich to examine her emotions and her medical history in a way that's introspective without being self-indulgent.

It's only towards the end of the film that Friedrich begins addressing the camera more directly, allowing her face to enter the frame instead of just her scarred body, and speaking directly in her own words instead of limiting her speech to the recitation of medical texts. This switch to a more direct, diaristic approach isn't entirely successful, since it disrupts the film's formal flow and adopts a much more conventional stance in relation to autobiography. Friedrich's best films, such as Sink or Swim and Rules of the Road, have always channeled autobiographical detail into something larger, with the formal rigor of her editing and conceptual framework shaping the raw materials of her life into an aesthetic work. Odds of Recovery has the potential to do the same thing, as its subtle subversion of the medical documentary form comments on the health care system and the mysteries of medicine for the average person. By the end of the film, though, the film has become a much more straightforward autobiography, something Friedrich has usually been at pains to avoid in her work. It's still an interesting film, and a heartfelt examination of a lifetime's worth of illnesses and the long process of recovery.

---

The Head of a Pin is another very personal, idiosyncratic documentary from Su Friedrich, but of a very different type from The Odds of Recovery. This shorter film, less than half an hour long, documents a visit to a friend's country house, where Friedrich brings her camera along in order to chronicle the trip and photograph the beauty of nature. The result, though, is a very strange sort of nature document, which contrasts the typical sort of nature documentation — eagles flying, the weird hovering of hummingbirds, a multi-hued sunset peeking through clouds, a lake, abundant foliage everywhere — against the starkly photographed drama of a spider fighting with a large fly that is trapped in its web. This small-scale natural event takes place against an entirely white backdrop, the two insects showing up as near abstract forms in an empty space, and Friedrich keeps her camera in close to document this battle, as the spider and the fly continually bat at each other with their limbs, struggling together, suspended in the air by the spider's entrapping web. Friedrich films this struggle in eerie near-silence, with only occasional interjections from those watching, who speculate about what's going on and make uninformed guesses about nature and its workings. So this is a nature documentary, but not in the usual sense: the commentators are non-scientists with little knowledge of the natural world, and the images shown are largely not very spectacular or impressive.

And yet, despite this stark, minimalist construction, the film is oddly mesmerizing. Friedrich has located a primal struggle at a level usually below the threshold of human perception, the kind of natural micro-drama that occurs in millions of small ways every day without much notice. By highlighting this moment, and transforming it into an abstract dance of death, Friedrich focuses in on a natural truth far deeper than the surface beauties usually captured by nature photography. This rumination on the brutality of nature isn't exactly an original observation, but Friedrich infuses it with a sensibility that makes this simple natural tale into dark poetry. The film unfolds in a quiet and stillness that's very much of the country, a real change of pace for the city-dwelling Friedrich. Consequently, there is no trace here of her characteristic voiceover or her use of on-screen texts. The events and images here are presented largely without commentary, other than the hushed musings of those watching the spider and the fly.

In contrast to the imagery of the spider/fly struggle, the other images Friedrich chooses are much more conventionally beautiful, evoking the traditional wonders and mysteries of nature. Particularly dazzling is the moment when she frames a birdhouse with hummingbirds fluttering back and forth around it, hovering in midair in their uncanny way. Elsewhere, in between green vistas and beautiful shots of a shimmering lake, she again dives down to the microscopic world for a shot of mosquitos skimming across the water in a small alcove in a rock. There's a whole world beneath the surfaces in this film, as Friedrich makes clear with the film's majesterial final shot, which spends a very long time watching the spider, now victorious, finally descend on its slaughtered prey and carry it away up into the web. After the spider reaches the top of the web, Friedrich begins pulling back, leaving this drama behind, and panning upwards as she steps back, to reveal that the entirety of this drama was taking place under a kitchen table. The camera pauses on the table, which is laden with ripe-looking food, then pans away towards the window as the image fades away. Throughout the film, the shots of the spider and the fly had remained static, locked on their fatal combat, and the gesture of moving the camera towards the end of the film is one of dismissal, as though Friedrich is saying, "OK, I've seen that, time to move on." The camera leaves this insular underground world behind, but the fascination of the images captured from it remains.

---

Ulysse is Agnès Varda's film-essay, from 1982, on a photograph she took in 1954, of a man and a young boy, both naked, on a beach with the body of a dead goat. From this single image, arranged and composed by Varda with the two models after she was struck by seeing the goat's corpse on the beach, she spins an interrogation of memory, image-making, and the meaning(s) of art. The film represents Varda's grappling with this single image, forming various interpretations and angles of approach at the picture, experimenting in order to discover what might be thought and said about this photo from her own past. She begins this process of discovery by visiting with each of the photo's subjects thirty years later, in a series of playful interviews that don't really shed any light on the image other than to emphasize the vagaries of memory. The man from the photo, an Egyptian who Varda lost touch with shortly after it was taken, is now a magazine editor, and Varda films him in his office. Hilariously, she has him strip for her camera yet again, interviewing him in the nude, with a pile of books strategically positioned across his hips. He barely remembers the day the photo was taken, providing her with only sketchy memories.

This is more than the boy from the photo, Ulysses, can remember, since he says the day is a total blank for him, and that consequently seeing the boy on the beach is not like seeing himself at all. The relationship between photos, memory, and the conception of identity is one of this film's key themes, as Varda interrogates the relationship that what we see in an image — even one we don't remember being taken — has to who we are, or were at the time. The Egyptian man also says he doesn't remember who he was at the time the photo was taken; when he sees himself in other images Varda took back then, he remembers the clothes he's wearing in the photos, but not what he might've been thinking or what he was like. Varda concludes her study of the photo's subjects with a joke, by showing the image to a goat, as a representation of all goats confronted with an icon of its own mortality. The goat, of course, simply eats the picture, while Varda wonders what kinds of memory animals possess.

Her next angle of inquiry is to explore what else was happening in the world on the day this picture was taken, so she combs through newspaper and newsreel records, another kind of memory, this time a societal memory bank. But these fragments of world events don't enlighten her any more than revisiting the photo's subjects did, so her next recourse is to place the photo in the context of her own work from that time. To this end, she shows other photos that she developed at around the same time, and briefly discusses her work on her first film, La pointe courte, which she made despite the fact that she never went to the cinema or watched TV. Finally, having decided that all such efforts at contextualization result in something outside of the image itself, Varda turns to straight interpretation, disregarding everything she actually knows about the circumstances of the photo's creation and imagining stories and ideas to go with the image.

The results of this inquiry are also outside the image, of course, which is where Varda seemed to be aiming all along. The film is about the understanding that images — all works of art, really — once they are created, exist independently of the one who created them and apart from the circumstances in which they were created. The image of the man, the boy, and the goat is, thirty years later, not just a document of a particular place and time and the particular entities within the frame, but an aesthetic work with multiple potential meanings and associations. This multi-layered quality of artworks is Varda's subject here, and her film draws out a wealth of possible meanings and ideas from this one picture, ranging from the literal and historical to the fanciful and imaginative. In the process, she's also created a whole new work of art in a new medium, completing the cycle as the original image is expanded upon and further explored in this new context. It's a typically fun, witty, and intelligent short from Varda.

Eastern Promises/Pursued

Eastern Promises is David Cronenberg's very conscious follow-up to his previous film, A History of Violence, which also starred Viggo Mortensen, and which also represented the idiosyncratic director's engagement with mainstream conceptions of genre and violence. Both films place Mortensen dead-center in a gritty, violent action plot, and both films are undeniably much more straightforward and polished than the wild horror and sci-fi films that earned Cronenberg his reputation. But if History was a typical man-with-a-past thriller, adorned with only traces of Cronenberg's style and depth, tacked on like so much set decoration, Eastern Promises is something entirely different, a grand accomplishment that builds on and improves its predecessor in every way. Cronenberg has effectively reversed the formula — instead of sneaking in elements of his style into a formulaic thriller, here he makes only token nods towards the purported narrative. This is a deeply strange film that only pretends to be a gangster flick, when it's patently obvious that so much more is going on.

Mortensen is typically smoldering and intense as Nikolai, the right-hand man for Kirill (Vincent Cassel), a drunken lout who is nevertheless a key figure in London's Russian mob because of his father Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). The film's drama and action surround this trio of gangsters and hitmen, but the heart of the story lies elsewhere, with a young baby who's delivered at the beginning of the film by an obstetrician, Anna (Naomi Watts). Cronenberg signals the film's essential concerns early on, when he has the two opening scenes encompass both birth and death, and in equally gory detail. In the first scene, a barber (who doubles as a mob hitman) forces his retarded son to kill a customer, with a slit-throat blood geyser worthy of Sweeney Todd. Cronenberg follows this with the birth, which is if anything even more disturbing in its focus on viscera and blood, as the baby takes its first hesitant breaths while her mother dies on the operating table. These two scenes initially seem unrelated, but they turn out to be connected to the same underground world of Russian mafia, prostitutes, and killers. Through her determination to find out about the baby's origins and the whereabouts of its relatives, Anna is thrust into this world, as well as perversely drawn to it.

But Anna is, despite her narrative importance, something of a sideline character here. Her charater is important insofar as she represents the outsider, the audience surrogate exploring an unfamiliar world, but despite Watts' top billing she is not a main character. This is a distinctly male film, because it's a very male genre that Cronenberg is tackling here, and the violence at the film's core is not only masculine, but an expression of masculine sexuality. The links between this violence and male sexuality are underscored again and again within the film, as is the ambiguous link between Nikolai and Kirill. The latter clearly idolizes his supposed underling, and there's a real current of homosexual desire in this worship. This desire finds expression in Kirill's continued attempts to dominate and subjugate Nikolai, as in the scene where he forces Nikolai to have sex with an underage prostitute at his father's whorehouse, he says so that Nikolai can prove that he's not a "queer." But the way Kirill watches this joyless, violent sex, and the way he praises Nikolai's performance afterwards, only proves that Kirill is the one who's queer, an assumption that's borne out in the many gestures of friendship and joking camaraderie that pass between the two men, gestures that are constantly threatening to transform into caresses or even embraces. When Nikolai is finally accepted as a full member of the mob and marked for initiation, they do embrace, and the framing and posing seems to be setting them up for a sweepingly romantic Hollywood kiss — a formulation that's mocked in the denouement when Nikolai and Anna briefly fall into the same pose, adopting a more conventional movie combination (father, mother, baby) only to emphasize just how much this film rejects such pat familial dynamics.

If violence and sexuality are intertwined in the relationship of Nikolai and Kirill and the linkage of new life with murder and death, this theme comes to its head in the film's climax, already justifiably famous for the scene where Viggo Mortensen conducts an entire, very bloody fight completely in the nude. This bathhouse slaughter is the film's undeniable centerpiece, and it's here that Cronenberg completely lets any pretext of a conventional genre thriller fall away along with Mortensen's clothes. In the course of this masterfully choreographed sequence, a great deal of blood is spilled, and yet Cronenberg emphasizes the sexualization of his star, the way his body bends and contorts, the sexual poses he falls into in the midst of this brutal struggle. It's a truly harrowing and potent sequence, evincing Cronenberg's characteristic interest in the body and the changes wrought on it by violence and sexuality. This interest in the body also extends to the film's recurring motif of tattoos, which are markers of identity — when Nikolai pledges his loyalty to the mob, he must denounce his family and his past, and be tattooed with the markings of the gang — as well as guides to an individual's life and history. The body can be "read" through these tattoos, and the bearer's persona can be inferred from the story told by these symbols. Bodies can be read, especially dead ones, and all the film's corpses have messages to pass on. The girl who dies giving birth in the opening propels the film forward with her diary, excerpts of which are read in voiceover, commenting obliquely on the action, periodically throughout the film.

Likewise, the story of Cronenberg's film — the real, underlying story lightly disguised by its genre trappings — can be read from the abundant symbols he employs. It's a story of the traditional family undermined by both homosexual desire and explosive violence — a brief that sounds surprisingly conservative on paper, except that Cronenberg clearly takes such gleeful pleasure in disrupting the placid surfaces of Hollywood conventionality that it's hard to take the film as anything but a radical critique of the normative structures it sometimes apes. Unlike A History of Violence, where Cronenberg seemed to disappear too readily into the conventional surfaces of the genre narrative, Eastern Promises is a prickly, genuinely disturbing and potent film that may indicate a fresh new development in Cronenberg's oeuvre. Certainly, it's his most perverse and exciting film since the delirious high point of 1997's Crash, and that alone is reason enough to celebrate this return to form.

---

Raoul Walsh's Pursued is a lurid, frankly ludicrous Western that infuses a noir sensibility into the oater genre. Sometimes, the combination is awkward and unevenly realized, but it's always intriguing, and the concept (with the help of leads Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright) generates enough sparks to keep the film engaging even when the machinations of its plot threaten to send it careening off the tracks. Mitchum plays Jeb Rand, the last scion of a family that's been obliterated from the earth following a deadly and mysterious feud with the Cullum family. Ironically, then, it's a branch of the Cullums who take him in as a boy following the death of his parents, and he grows up under the protection of his adopted mother (Judith Anderson) who accepts him into the family and treats him as one of her children along with Thorley (Wright) and Adam (John Rodney). The film's most interesting aspect is the relationship that develops between Jeb and Thorley, despite their mother's best efforts to cultivate a healthy brother/sister bond in them. This relationship, though not incestual in the least, is somewhat strange nonetheless, especially since Jeb persists in calling their mutual mother "Ma" even as he's making out with his adoptive sister. The weirdness extends to their brother, with whom Jeb has a competitive, antagonistic relationship — in one scene, Adam lets slip that he's so enraged with his sister because she always thought of their family as consisting of the three of them, while he wants to winnow it down to just himself and his sister. While Thorley wants to get married and have a husband, Adam's vision extends only as far as his mother, his sister, and the ranch they own; if the incestuous subtext can't really exist with Jeb, it's in full flower here.

Unfortunately, though the film has a great setup and some marvelous scenes, it's hampered by structural flaws that drain a lot of energy out of the film's most interesting sequences and seriously undermine the darker emotions at this story's core. Chief among these failings is that the bulk of the film is related in flashbacks, which is a clumsy device even in the best of circumstances, and totally unnecessary in probably nine out of ten films that use it. The flashbacks here are especially egregious. They're told by Jeb to Thorley, supposedly as a way of tracing where they went wrong, even though she's already intimately familiar with most of the incidents he's recounting, and even though he tells stories about things that he didn't and couldn't witness for himself, and in some cases probably couldn't even know about. It's a ridiculous structure, and it would call attention to itself even if its effect on the actual narrative arc was minimal. But it also serves to drain a great deal of the tension out of the film's second half, because the film opens with a present-day sequence where Thorley and Jeb are obviously in love, even if external troubles are putting pressure on them. Their love is by no means certain in the flashbacks that form the film's second half, though, and in fact events drive Thorley into a hatred of her former love so deep that she becomes a kind of black widow, marrying him out of spite and planning to murder him on their wedding night.

This turn of events results in some of the film's most powerful material. Thorley as a hate-filled murderess is a thing to behold, and the angel-faced Wright does a surprisingly good job of conveying the churning emotions beneath her calm exterior. In the scene where she reveals her plot to her mother, her eyes glint maniacally, caught by the flickering light from a lantern that she holds up to her face, casting sinister shadows across her visage. It's the film's truest homage to the noir visual style, which recurs periodically in scenes like this, bathed in deep shadows with characters held as silhouettes. Walsh admirably captures the film's inner darkness in scenes like this, but he perhaps does too good a job considering the narrative's subsequent direction. Wright is far more believable (and interesting) when she's spiteful and bent on revenge, than when, just minutes later, she's abruptly reconciling with Mitchum and declaring her love for him. This turnabout, though telegraphed from the opening and the flashback structure, is never adequately explained, and it represents Walsh backing away from his momentary embrace of full-fledged noir aesthetics, retreating into horseback melodrama that grows way less interesting once Wright's anger has inexplicably fluttered away. Worse yet, even in the film's best scenes, the flashback structure undercuts the characters' powerful emotions, since we already know where they're going. Wright's rage, no matter how brilliantly conveyed by both her performance and the director's mise en scène, is impossible to reconcile with the doe-eyed, vapid movie heroine who's introduced in the opening scenes, so what might've been a compelling transformation from lovestruck young girl to raging femme fatale becomes a mere interlude in the film's essential love story.

Walsh is continually sabotaging his own storytelling in this way, so that a film that could have been a true classic is only fitfully interesting, and then mostly in the scenes that work against the film's overall thrust. For its innovative combination of a Western action setting with the psychological darkness of noir, Pursued remains an intriguing and entertaining genre-blender, but Walsh's failure to really commit to this film's best aspects unnecessarily hampers it as a whole.