Critics reviews

Mitchum seems out of his element, an odd mix with such gothic archetypes as Judith Anderson and Dean Jagger. Yet the contrast works. As Jeb Brand, a man haunted by a past he doesn't understand, he evokes the classic outsider of Greek tragedy. But while the plot's resolution never quite dissolves the Oedipal tensions aroused, Mitchum's Brand, like Oedipus, remains steadfast in his search for truth, free from the anger, envy, and thirst for revenge that consumes everyone around him.

Cinematographer James Wong Howe gives the film a brooding look, darkly livid as a thundercloud, and captures Mitchum at his most beautiful—with a sculptural glamour to match the towering rock formations of the Southwest.

Unusually solemn and self-conscious for Walsh (at least until he is able to introduce one of his favorite character actors, Alan Hale, as a lovably roguish gambler), the film does contain some powerful and inventive imagery.

As a total menu of Mitchum's various modes, it's an uneven mix of the young, beefy neurotic with a few too many shirt buttons undone, the high-riding titan who would star in The Night of the Hunter, and the varnished-oak elder statesman who still has a few moves left in him, in Farewell, My Lovely and The Friends of Eddie Coyle. But it's an unevenness that's part and parcel with the scrambled, genre-hopping style of complicated übermensch auteur Raoul Walsh.

Is this dated? Busch's ideas are certainly reflective of his moment, but there's something more. There's a scene in PURSUED when Teresa Wright wills herself to become ruthless and evil. Wright's face in this shot perfectly registers the totalizing clarity (intellectual, artistic, historical) that Busch and his cohorts sought in Freud. Today, the clearest psychological profile is Busch's own.