The 1950s were arguably the greatest years of the Western — the period in which clichés were sustained and destabilized through psychology, revisionism, high style, and the kind of grandeur that follows when the most durable clichés are reframed against classical paradigms. Consider “The Furies,” in which a baggy reworking of the Oresteia is played out in an agora that stretches to the horizon, encompassing endless cattle pastures, mountainous outposts, a city strip with a saloon and bank, and communities of squatters. Yet ponderousness has no place on this Ponderosa. Anthony Mann was a director who knew his Aeschylus well enough to keep the story front and center, goading it with efficiency and brio, confining the poetry to visual effects that make the story memorable and, in two instances of sudden violence, awful — but in a good, Greek way.

Even Brian Garfield, in his anti-auteurist, anti-revisionist encyclopedia, “Western Films,” conceded that “The Furies” may remind him of the 1950s joke about adult Westerns — the cowboy still loves his horse, but now he worries about it — but it remains “larger than life, and completely absorbing.” Darkly, vividly photographed by Victor Milner, every shot of the film is framed with purpose, advancing the melodrama (tragedy was unobtainable in the time of the Production Code) and underscoring revenge and doppelganger motifs. All the performances are good and three — those of Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Huston (his last), and Judith Anderson — are magnificent. “The Furies” is long overdue for reassessment.

Criterion’s typically munificent edition of “The Furies,” released today, coupled with last month’s “James Stewart: The Western Collection,” which includes “Winchester ’73” and two other superb Stewart-Mann collaborations (“Bend of the River” and “The Far Country”), encourages a look back at 1950, the seminal year in which Mann made his mark on the Western with three films. The prolificacy of directors in that period now seems otherworldly, especially in the case of B-list directors trying hard to make the top grade.

Mann (1906-67) made some 20 films in the 1940s, working his way up from the depths of Poverty Row with little-noted but savory fillers such as “The Bamboo Blonde” (1946), his valentine to Frances Langford, and a truer, less sentimental depiction of white “swing” as a middle-class cultural force than his egregious blockbuster, “The Glenn Miller Story” (1953). In that same period, he made his name as the stylish director of brutal, fast-paced crime thrillers, including “T-Men” and “Railroaded” (both 1947), which brought him professional and critical attention. Yet there was little reason to think that this master of urban nightmares would find his métier in the West.

Between August 1949 and March 1950, Mann filmed three Westerns, of which only “Winchester ’73,” his first film with Stewart (he made seven consecutive Stewart films between 1952 and 1955), was a critical and commercial hit. But “Winchester ’73” might not have come to pass had Mann not already shot “Devil’s Doorway” at MGM. This powerful study of legally racist iniquities visited upon Native Americans might have had the distinction of being the first film to revise the Hollywood portrayal of Indians. But MGM shelved it as unfit family entertainment — until Delmar Daves’s “Broken Arrow” made a fortune with its more pious treatment of Indian injustice that summer.

Stewart, who starred in “Broken Arrow,” had seen an early print of “Devil’s Doorway” and, impressed by its visual power, asked for Mann to direct “Winchester ’73,” a film that had been in preparation for several years as a Fritz Lang film. “Winchester ’73” opened nine days before “Broken Arrow,” inaugurating Stewart’s revived career, presenting him as a tougher, more neurotic hombre than he was in the best of his pre-war films. Meanwhile, Paramount rolled out “The Furies” in Arizona, where it was filmed, on the same July date that Fox opened “Broken Arrow,” guaranteeing its neglect.

By any standard, 1950 was a bountiful year for Westerns. John Ford released the third and most agreeable of his cavalry pictures, “Rio Grande,” and his alternately cruel and elegiac masterwork, “Wagon Master.” Sam Fuller made his second Western, “The Baron of Arizona,” and the veteran Henry King, always at his best when knitting samplers of Americana, made “The Gunfighter.” In the long run, however, it was Mann’s mastery of the idiom that carried the most influence. He drew on the genre’s most familiar devices: the journey between hero and unlikely sidekick, the faltering patriarch, and the passion for vengeance — which, in Mann’s films, is almost always animated by depredations in the past, never shown on-screen.

“The Furies” is based on a novel by Niven Busch that Criterion includes with the DVD. A long-forgotten generational saga with a subtext of miscegenation that had to be laundered for the movie, it is a reminder that the themes of fratricide and patricide that haunt Mann’s best films, as well as the infusion of Freudian motivations, were introduced to Westerns by Busch, as the novelist behind David O. Selznick’s production of “Duel in the Sun” (1946) and as the author of the original screenplay for Raoul Walsh’s “Pursued” (1947). Both of those films involve murdered fathers, fratricidal obsessions, and pasts that won’t let go.

Busch had nothing to do with “Winchester ’73,” yet the script, by Robert L. Richards and the redoubtable Borden Chase, has a justifiable claim to his title, “The Furies.” In the film of that name, the Furies refers to the cattle baron’s ranch, and familial slaughter is played out symbolically — no one actually kills a blood relation, the test for intervention by the mythological furies. “Winchester ’73” begins after a patricide, and details the murderous hunt of the “good” brother (played by Stewart) for the “bad” (played by Stephen McNally). Here and in the four subsequent Mann-Stewart Westerns, as well as in Mann’s 1958 Gary Cooper Western, “Man of the West,” the furies are in the maddened eye of the protagonist. Generational slaughter is either a stain that fratricide expunges or a necessity to cleanse the son.

Mann symbolizes the hierarchy of familial conflict by placing pursued and pursuer at different levels of mountainous terrain, usually ending in a fall from the heights. The staging of the mountain battle in “The Furies” recalls the storming of the cathedral in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” as boulders are dropped on the attackers, and the assault on El Sordo’s stronghold in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” with its vicious finale.

The last scene of “The Furies” is often criticized for its softening as a chastened Vance (Stanwyck) and her appeased husband, Rip (Wendell Corey) ride home talking of the children they will have. But what kind of home are they really driving to? The Judith Anderson character, who Vance disfigured with a pair of scissors, is drinking herself to oblivion in the bedroom. The deadly El Tigre (Thomas Gomez), who hanged Juan (Gilbert Roland), Vance’s lifelong friend and probable former lover, live on the premises. The marriage of Vance and Rip is less a love match than an accounting deal drawn up in hell.

“Winchester ’73” hyperbolizes the idea of the Western by fetishizing the gun in the title. The villain, Waco (Dan Duryea), who dies in a glorious frenzy of mincing dance steps, flirts wolfishly with a dance hall hostess (Shelley Winters), but his eyes really go glassy with desire when he sees the Winchester. The first 20 minutes involve an impossible shooting contest out of Robin Hood, presided over by a giddily flamboyant Wyatt Earp — a daring turn by Will Geer, 20 years too old and 50 pounds too paunchy for the part. (In the ’60s, Stewart would go him one further, with an even more outrageous Earp in Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn”.) In the end, though, the furies are unleashed on a mountain, after which the good son returns to an aging sidekick and a woman of dubious virtue.