Billed as the first “Western noir,” Raoul Walsh’s gripping 1947 film Pursued belongs to the small but distinctive tradition of misbehaving Westerns—Duel In The Sun and Johnny Guitar are others—that defy genre dictates in favor of fevered intensity and dark psychological undercurrents. In his introduction to the new Blu-ray version, which has been ported over from the old VHS edition, Martin Scorsese talks about how brilliantly the film reconciles two genres that would seem diametrically opposed by rejecting the wide-open spaces and simple morality of traditional Westerns and introducing the claustrophobia and pessimism of urban noir into a new setting. In Pursued, the common denominator is the concept of a marked man, here played by Robert Mitchum, who spends a lifetime dodging bullets that come at him from every direction, even from his own family. And in a prairie locale where the law is applied informally, to put it mildly, the sense of danger is heightened considerably.
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