At this time in his career - he was emerging from his Hopalong Cassidy years into adult mainstream cinema - Robert Mitchum had his share of offbeat female co-stars and if you thought Mitchum and Katherine Hepburn (Undercurrent) was a tad off-the-wall how about Mitchum and Judith Anderson, the Hamlet-playing distinguished stage actress. In a plot that makes a pretzel look like a breadstick with a ramrod up its spine they are cast as orphan and self-appointed 'mother' (don't ask); Mitchum grows up on a ranch with no male role-model as the 'outsider' of three children - the others being the biological son and daughter of Anderson. The plot unfurls - and boy, does it take its time - in that familiar device that enjoyed something of a vogue at the time, the flashback, so we begin with Teresa Wright - Mitchum's wife and longtime 'sister', given she's the biological daughter of Anderson and has grown up with Mitchum - riding out to join Mitchum, who is holed up and being pursued by a gang of what we don't yet know. In one of the most wacky uses of the flashback on record - these two grew up in the same house from very early childhood, remember - he starts to tell her of his past and as she knows most of this by definition, he mentions a consistent nightmare involving a man's feet wearing distinctive spurs. Via this and subsequent flashbacks we get a picture of a disturbed child, Jeb, who is never accepted by the other boy, Adam, in the family whilst clearly loved by Wright. He doesn't get many breaks, a psychopath, Dean Jagger, who hates him unrealistically, attempts to kill a ten-year old but succeeds only in killing his horse; when confronted by Anderson, he spews out his hate for the boy and the 'family' he springs from and then, equally unrealistically, agrees to back off and wait til the boy grows up for his revenge. When the army needs men and the ranch can only spare one the decision as to which one will go is left to the toss of a coin and Mitchum loses; this is pretty much the pattern of his life until the denouement but the problem is that Mitchum doesn't do tormented, he does Brutal, Laid-Back, but Angst isn't in his palette. You can call this noir, a psychological western, a mystery but in the end it is all these and none of them whilst remaining interesting and watchable.
Review of Pursued
