LIVE FILM PROGRAM (ALSO AVAILABLE ONLINE THROUGH ZOOM & VIMEO)

The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950, 109min.)
Linda DeLibero, senior lecturer and special advocate for alumni and outreach, and former director of the JHU film and media studies program

The successful and prolific Nevin Busch was a writer of both screenplays and novels whose most notable credits include The Postman Always Rings Twice and Duel in the Sun. Like the latter, The Furies is an adaptation of his novel and features enough Freudian psychology to make its 1950 audience gasp.  Director Anthony Mann, a master of both the Western and film noir, highlighted the book’s bold take on domestic melodrama and infused it with his own love for Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky. The result is one of the most remarkable—and at the time of its release, underappreciated—films of its era, featuring a rare portrait of female empowerment (and folly) embodied in Barbara Stanwyck’s towering performance as Vance Jeffords, daughter of T.C., the tyrannical ranch owner she both loves and loathes. That the blustering monomaniac is played by Walter Huston in his last role makes this father-daughter duel an unmissable treat. Daring, outrageous, and vastly entertaining, The Furies was years ahead of its time, ushering in the era of the anti-Western.

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Film Series Overview - Take 2: Cinematic Adaptations of the Written Word

Adapting any creative work from one medium into a vastly different one is always tricky. Readers of literature, in particular, tend to feel a very strong ownership of any source novel or story that gets the cinematic treatment, and often complain about how much the book has been altered—usually not for the better—in its transformation. But writers and film directors work under vastly different imperatives, and what is good as text may not be good as image, and vice versa. The best adaptations are often those where, faithful or not to the book, the director has a vision, and the movie has a raison d'être beyond the mercenary. Join us as we examine six provocative literary adaptations and explore how the written word translates to the screen. And don’t worry: if you don’t have time to read the original text, we’ll explain how the films compare and contrast with their sources. In order, our movies are Luce (Julius Onah, 2019), Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950), Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960), Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995), and Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018).