A family saga: In a stunning mountain valley ranch setting near Aspen, complex and dangerous family dynamics play out against the backdrop of the first big snowstorm of winter and an enormous panther with seemingly mythical qualities which is killing cattle. An arrogant, pitiless son (Robert Mitchum) and a rigid pharisaic mother side against a moral eldest son and and a defeated alcoholic father while the youngest son tries to lay low, hoping against hope to persuade his family to allow him to marry a girl he has brought to visit. The girl however draws venomous condemnation and the two elder brothers set out in the midst of a violent snowstorm on a dangerous mission to kill the deadly panther.
Synopsis by IMDb
A brilliantly realized ambitious dark, brooding Western set in the 1880s in northern California on an isolated snowbound ranch.
A magnificently dark, brooding Western - Wellman's second adaptation of a Walter Van Tilburg Clark novel (he also wrote The Ox-Bow Incident) - set during the 1880s on a small, isolated ranch in the Californian mountains, where the depredations of a mountain lion bring simmering family resentments to a head. The god-fearing puritanism of the matriarch (Bondi) has turned sour in her favourite son (Mitchum), brought up to ignore feelings and simply grab what he wants; another son (Hopper), a gentle soul, is mystically in tune with nature; the rest of the family have retreated into a variety of repressions and resentments. Scorning the idea that the marauding beast might be the 'black painter' of legend (spirit of the agelessly old, dispossessed Indian kept about the place as a handyman, Hopper suggests), Mitchum sets out to hunt and kill it. A little perfunctory compared to the novel, where the hunt turns into a dark night of the soul as the hunter gradually realises he has become the hunted, these scenes nevertheless have an extraordinary charge (and weird beauty, with the snowy landscapes shot by William H Clothier in black-and-white on colour stock), reinforcing the subtextual theme that the virgin land is at last exacting revenge on the pioneer who raped it.
An odd but rather wonderful account of a family forced to confront their deepest fears when a mountain lion decides it wants to have them for lunch. Mitchum's performance as the paterfamilias determined to track down the intruder is a tour de force. The hunt reveals his true character as he fights to protect his family from a power which doesn't always seem of this world. While occasionally Track of the Cat is a little too busy with its own sincerity to work, the magnificent cinematography, clever pacing and sharp writing make for gripping viewing.
In this experimental 1954 Western, director William Wellman uses black-and-white backgrounds with occasional splatches of color on certain characters' bodies and clo
