"The drama of The Furies has been played over many times in many genres. It is the struggle for identity and power that takes place between a parent and a child; it could be Mildred Pierce, Psycho or The Magnificent Ambersons. But here the characters wear cowboy hats, ride horses and belong to a ranch named after the unforgiving fates of Greek tragedy, the Furies. Although the picture never says this outright, it is about a father and a daughter who dream of sleeping together, and thus it takes us into a whole category of Western in which a woman desires the strength and status of a man: not just the Belle Starr story, but Wellman's Westward the Women, Bonnie and Clyde, Bloody Mama, Fuller's Forty Guns and the relentless Pearl from Duel in the Sun, all of them affected by Scarlett O'Hara from the first feminist Western. "The Freudian, sexual Western owes a good deal to the writings of Niven Busch: he worked on The Westerner, wrote and produced Pursued, and wrote the novels on which Duel in the Sun and The Furies are based. In this case, the struggle is between a flamboyant rancher and his smoldering daughter. The passion of the relationship is as much concerned with psychological undercurrents as with control of the land. That level of interest allows it to be something nearly unthinkable in Hollywood: a Western film noir. Like Psycho, it is a pursuit nightmare about stolen money and a flawed hero, set in the territory of the desert between Phoenix and L.A., with an old homestead ruined by its furies." David Thomson