Veteran director Raoul Walsh was known for his action-packed adventure and crime films in the 1930s and 40s. These films usually starred James Cagney, Errol Flynn or Humphrey Bogart. In 1947 he directed “Pursued,” a unique Western/film noir melodrama that has been labeled as one of the first post-war psychological Westerns that dealt with a Freudian approach to character development. This intriguing story was an original screenplay written by Niven Busch, the novelist who wrote the famed Western “Duel in the Sun.” The film is shot in glorious black and white by cinematographer James Wong Howe.

The film’s leads were somewhat of an unusual match of the rugged Robert Mitchum, as Jeb Rand, and the usually sweet and innocent Teresa Wright as Thorley Callum. Wright was fresh off her Oscar for best supporting actress in “The Best Years of Our Lives.”  Mitchum was appearing as one of his earliest leading parts and beginning to define his own special kind of complex tough guy. The film’s co-stars included Judith Anderson, Dean Jagger and Alan Hale.

The movie opens with a wide vista of the cliffs and deserts of New Mexico territories at the turn of the 20th century.  A lone female rider with wavy black hair (Wright) rides up to the abandoned, torn-down remains of a ranch house and begins calling, “Jeb, where are you?”

Jeb appears from the shadows, embraces her and begins telling her about his haunting memories as a young orphan and how Thorley’s mother, Mrs. Medora Callum (Anderson), rescued him from this same old ranch house. The widowed Mrs. Callum sheltered Jeb and raised him with “Thor” (as she’s called) and her young son Adam. These memories are all revealed by Jeb’s flashback voice-over narration.

So adding to the film’s complexities, the story contains an involved romance between Jeb and Thor. Although they were raised as brother and sister, yet unrelated biologically, they grew to love each other in more special ways. Thor reveals that she never felt like just a sister to Jeb.

Another rather disturbing flashback reveals the troubled Jeb, now in his early 20s, as he’s drafted into the army to fight in the Spanish-American War, which breaks out in early 1898. The widow Cullum’s brother-in-law Grant Cullum (Jagger), a prosecutor from Santa Fee, appears as a menacing character dressed in a black hat and shirt. When Jeb is wounded in the war, he suffers more nightmarish memories of his early days – visions of hiding under a trap door watching his family murdered. When he returns home, he’s awarded the Medal of Honor and resumes his romance with Thor.

Grant reappears, always seeming to cause trouble for Jeb. Tensions arise between Jeb and his stepbrother Adam over the running of the family homestead, which leads to Adam shooting at Jeb and Jeb killing Adam. Although a jury acquits Jeb of murder, Mrs. Cullum and Thor are forever bitter toward Jeb. Thor still loves Jeb but plans her own secret revenge for her brother’s death.

The story comes full circle when Jeb reveals to Thor how he now finally pieces together the horrible events and nightmares of his boyhood past and reveals how Grant Cullum was involved.

Much of the audience’s empathy for Jeb comes through Mitchum’s impassioned voice-over narration, a technique he’d use in many of his famed detective roles throughout his career. In fact, Walsh would pay Mitchum the highest compliment in his 1974 autobiography calling him “one of the finest natural actors I ever met.”

Many of the film’s outdoor scenes are shot under cloudy skies and gloomy weather conditions, while numerous interior scenes are lit only by lamplight, showing the visual flair of film noir.

Director Martin Scorsese is a huge fan of “Pursued.” He praises how Walsh created an unusual hybrid of the traditional, usually bright, wide-open natural vistas and simple morality of the Western, blended with the moral ambiguity and claustrophobic darkness of film noir.

On a note of more unusual trivia, “Pursued” was the movie that The Door’s singer Jim Morrison watched the night before his untimely death in Paris in July 1971.