The director Anthony Mann often told interviewers that he dreamed of making a western “King Lear.” He died in 1967, before he could realize the project, but had already come close in one of his first westerns: “The Furies” (1950).... Mann gives the action a metaphysical dimension that overwhelms easy psychoanalytic readings. As in his films noirs (“Raw Deal,” “Desperate”), he systematically composes his shots to create a sense of instability, using lines of perspective or boldly massed foregrounds to pull the images off balance. The titanic struggle between father and daughter has knocked the world off its axis.

The frontier comes off as positively Elizabethan in this roiling, hard-edged Western melodrama, from 1950. Walter Huston plays T. C. Jeffords, a swaggering self-made rancher whose willful pride leads to financial imprudence....Anthony Mann, stages the action as a series of mighty, clangorous confrontations; the movie’s jarring violence pales beside the titanic clashes of immense egos and the disputes between new banking interests and long-standing claims on the land. His stark images provide a fitting stage for the splendid actors’ brazen rhetorical battles and grand romantic flourishes.

In 1870s New Mexico Territory, megalomaniacal widowed ranch owner T.C. Jeffords butts heads with his daughter, Vance, a firebrand with serious daddy issues, over her dowry, choice of husband, and finally, ownership of the land itself.