This film ranks high among the strangest works of the festival (as well as being a wonderful entry to tje section “In Search of the Color in Film”). The idea was a long cherished dream for William Wellman: to do a black and white film in color. It’s a western but more stylized and bolder than any European art movie. The director wanted to film the externalization of the characters’ feelings through a limited color range and by doing so mirror their spiritual and emotional isolation: “The black panther was the symbol of the picture. It was the black panther that represented all that was bad in Mitchum and that finally kills him. In a fit of sophomoric thinking, I decided that we should never see said panther killing our hero”. Track of a Cat has plenty of long takes and tracking shots, and amounts to a remarkable demonstration of the most original aspect of the CinemaScope, used in this case to explore an as difficult to leave as the one in Ángel exterminador) and thus illustrating the territories of the mind and emotions. It’s a film about an existential search and about the vanities of humans against the overwhelming presence of snow and nature and the mountains. It’s like a chamber play, with a sealed down color paletter, white, grey, black and the sensational red of Robert Mitchum’s jacket.

Robert Mitchum (whose first substantial film role was for Wellman in The Story of G.I. Joe in 1945) plays “the arrogant and selfish Curt”, and Beulah Bondi “the cold, self-righteous matriach of the troubled family”. Bosley Crowther, the most influential voice of the critical establishment of the times, perfectly described the films as “a sort of Eugene O’Neill-ized Western drama… at several points in the presentation the black enormity of the selfishness of man comes into the center of the picture like a gust of the winter outside… Then, a feeling of tragic frustration seeps out of the CinemaScope screen, and the shadow of an O’Neill character flickers on the fringe”.

The cinematographer of the film, William Clothier, adds another angle: “Never have I seen such beauty, a naked kind of beauty. Bill and I saw the first print back from the lab. We sat there together, drooling. We had it at last. It was a flower, a portrait, a vision, a dream come true – it was a flop artistically, financially, and Wellmanly”.

There is an explanation for the enormous director’s freedom? Because of the wild success of The High and the Mighty, producer John Wayne promised Wellman he could choose to film anything, that is, “even the telephone book”. Fortunately for us, Wellman chose instead a Walter Van Tilburg Clark story (the same writer of The Ox-Bow Incident).

Peter von Bagh