Branded (1950)

Second viewing; the first one was on January 6, 2005.

According to IMDB, this film is based on the novel Montana Rides!, by Max Brand (as Evan Evans), first published in 1933. According to Wikipedia, it was based on Montana Rides Again, by the same author, first published in 1934.

A young man known as Choya, approached by an outlaw, agrees to his proposition to impersonate the son of a wealthy farmer, who disappeared when he was a child. The plan is to steal the farmer's fortune, I think, although the exact way they were going to do that is unclear to me right now. A mark is tattooed on Choya's shoulder, identical to the disappeared son's birthmark.

The nominal plot is juvenile-minded, mainly relying on a main character who just does not act like an ordinary person, but rather takes heroic decisions. This may become annoying for an unimaginative viewer (and I like to consider myself one, by temperament and even conviction) who will see in it just the piling up of wishful thinking and ad hoc solutions (in my first viewing I did precisely that). This film, however, makes it easy, even for me, to misread (in the Bloomian sense) the whole thing as an incest fantasy. More than one person have. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, whom I would not consider an imaginative viewer (but I may not know him well enough), has this revealing passage in his review: "But it seems that his [Choya's] purpose is confounded when the rancher's beautiful daughter throws her brand upon his heart, making brotherly deportment toward her clearly impossible." Notice two things: one, instead of "brotherly", an unimaginative viewer would have said "deceitful" or even "criminal"; two, he, perhaps out of wit, sheds some metaphorical light on the movie's title (nobody else I read has). Crowther still didn't like the film, though. Now consider Christopher Mulrooney's take: "Now, it should be clear that Keith and Calleia play the same role, and there is only one son, real or contrived, who has a mark on him." He has gone further than I could, adding a whole structure to the hallucination (note: Keith plays the villain who proposes the scheme to Choya, and Calleia plays a Mexican who has adopted the real son). More recent cinema has played upon these notions in an explicit manner: Performance (1970) has two characters who merge, or exchange places, in a very ambiguous manner. In The Other (1972) there are two characters who are actually one. In Lost Highway (1997) one character is morphed into someone else. In Fight Club (1999) it is the same scheme of The Other, basically.

Rating: 45 (up from 27)