A Film Canon

This idiosyncratic Western takes place predominantly at night, or in darkness, grafting the recesses of the noir cityscape onto the New Mexico backwater that entraps protagonist Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum) in a recurrent, fragmented nightmare. To this end, Walsh and cinematographer James Wong Howe complicate the horizon with cliffs, steep passes and, above all, the confines of Jeb's house, which he shares with his adopted mother (Judith Anderson), sister (Theresa Wright) and brother (John Rodney), in an arrangement that recalls the semi-incestual claustrophobia of Wuthering Heights, but without any analogy to the liberating moors. Yet this doesn't occlude the horizon so much as equate it with the summits of the surrounding mesas, reifying it in a manner that both makes the imminent arrival of Jeb's mysterious pursuer particularly oppressive, and recalls the low-angle, point- of-view shots that are the hallmark of his nightmare, as if Walsh's ultimate aim were to create a Western dreamscape, replete with atmospheric condensations and displacements, but frequently lacking in naturalistic characterisation or  coherent narrative structure. That said, Wright and Anderson are allowed more charismatic scope than any Western women to date, while Mitchum's trademark sombience nicely contextualises this unusual approach.