La fièvre du pétrole

This film has four big stars perfectly cast and appearing at their very best in a very entertaining film about "wild catting" in the American oil industry.I rated it 7/10.First up is Clark Gable playing the "mans man" role he made so famous in "Gone with the Wind".Next up is Spencer Tracy giving one of his speeches in court where he seems so comfortable, ("Judgment at Nuremburg", Cass Timberlayne" etc).Next up we have Claudette Colbert giving one of her best sympathetic "tea and sympathy" performances e.g. "Since You Went Away" and finally there is the gorgeous Hedy Lamarr playing to her strength of a sophisticated, intelligent and beautiful business associate who knows how the oil industry business is is transacted in the New York corridors of power.The film was made one year before the U.S. entered WWII so the budget could afford to be generous.Fot its day, the scenes and special effects of the oil well fire were very realistic.One reviewer remarked that Clark Gable in his youth worked on a "wild cat" oil site, if so this gave his performance added realism.What about those muddy roads.I felt like asking the town corporation to pave them over with some of that oil money flooding into the oil barons' coffers which presumably would attract some local taxation!

This was the biggest film of the year for MGM in 1940. They used four of their biggest stars, any one of whom could have starred in their own films.

Clark Gable already had an Oscar for It Happened One Night, another nomination for Mutiny on the Bounty, and was nominated in the 1940 Academy Awards for Gone with the Wind.

Spencer Tracy, a nine-time Oscar nominee, already had a nomination for San Francisco, a win for Captains Courageous, and a win the previous year for Boy's Town.

Three-time Oscar nominee Claudette Colbert already had a win for It happened One Night, which she did with Gable, and a nomination for Private Worlds.

Frank Morgan had gotten one of his two nominations for The Affairs of Cellini.

And, our Star of the Month, Hedy Lamarr, was just beginning her career.

This was a raucous film with all the excitement that you would expect in one about wildcatters in the oil business and featured barroom fights, streets of mud, and stories ripped from the headlines. It was an amazing love story about two men in love with the same woman. It was pure entertainment.

Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert and Hedy Lamarr star in "Boom Town," a 1940 film directed by Jack Conway. It's about wildcatters and friends, played by Gable and Tracy, who make money as partners, love the same woman, go their separate ways, reunite, all under the specter of oil rigs.

Gable has a role he owned, that of Big John, a tough guy, a man's man, kind of Rhett Butler goes wildcatting. Tracy is Jonathan Sand, his buddy, with a girl back home.

Big John meets a lady and falls for her - except it's Sand's girlfriend Elizabeth (Colbert) who's just arrived in town. Well, she had to choose between Clark Gable, matinée idol, and Spencer Tracy, a character actor whose talent gave him leading man status. She chooses Big John. Sand accepts it as best he can.

By now the two have struck oil and are in the big money. Eventually, Big John loses his part of the business to Sand, and he and Elizabeth leave the area in order to rebuild - and they do, big time. The couple end up in New York, where Big John meets a Big Beauty named Karen (Lamarr) and goes for her, threatening his marriage.

Everyone is very good in this absorbing movie, with Lamarr's knockout beauty a real asset. This is nothing against Colbert, who is stunning as well and excellent as Elizabeth. Gable and Tracy have good chemistry - in the end, this is really a buddy movie, and they're a good match. Gable is very sexy and at his peak here.

Very enjoyable, with great special effects - no expense spared for the four huge stars.

Portraying a friendship similar to the one they shared in the earlier "San Francisco," Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy play two oilmen or wildcatters in "Boom Town," an entertaining saga directed by Jack Conway. Gable is the colorful Big John McMasters, a Rhett Butler from Texas, who lives large and romances big. Tracy is the more solid, down-to-earth Jonathan Sand, who is Gable's moral conscience, much like he was in "San Francisco." The pair meet cute while heading in opposite directions on a narrow board walkway across a muddy street. Despite a damp start, the two men bond, and their friendship endures for years through fights, jealousy, and competition over business and women, particularly Claudette Colbert. The mud is barely washed off their clothing when Gable unwittingly steals Colbert from Tracy, and the jilted platonic lover carries a torch for his lost love throughout the film. When not womanizing or swindling, Gable and Tracy make and lose several fortunes separately and together without breaking a sweat. Oil gushers, well fires, and fistfights, the action wanders all over the MGM back lot from Texas to South America to New York.

Gable anchors the film with his larger-than-life personality, while Tracy underplays in deference to his more charismatic co-star. Although re-teaming the Oscar-winning leads of "It Happened One Night" must have seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, Colbert, unfortunately, often seems out of place in "Boom Town." Her manners, poise, and dress do not mesh with the Texas oil fields or the South American hovels. She is on firmer ground as the well-dressed lady of the manor. The sight of perfectly made-up Colbert scrubbing clothes on a washboard with a big grin on her face strains the story's credibility. Although the enigmatic Hedy Lamarr has a flawless face and incomparable beauty, she rarely wrinkles her professionally applied cosmetics to show any trace of an emotion. However, she is certainly believable as the object of any man's lust and physically perfect as an "other woman." Fortunately, a fine cast of supporting players, such as Frank Morgan, Chill Wills, and Lionel Atwill, surround the leading stars and further enhance the lively proceedings.

First class production values, a fast-moving story, and appealing stars make "Boom Town" a solid entertainment, if not a masterpiece.

When one thinks of roles identified with Clark Gable, Boom Town does not immediately come to mind. Yet this film, done at what most would consider the high water mark of Gable's career (after Gone With the Wind and before Carole Lombard's death) was possibly his most personal role. Before he was actor Gable worked in the oil fields with his widowed father. After that he decided acting was a far easier way to make a living. But he actually lived the life that he and Spencer Tracy portrayed in Boom Town. He brings more to the part of Big John McMasters than any other part he ever did. I'm sure he was an unofficial technical consultant on the film.

The film is also an ode to laissez faire capitalism, maybe one of the most right wing films ever done in Hollywood. You will never hear Herbert Hoover's rugged individualism better justified than in Spencer Tracy's speech to the jury in Gable's anti-trust trial. One half of the script writing team was James Edward Grant who later did many of the more propagandistic films that John Wayne did.

Frank Morgan is his usual befuddled self, he had a patent on those parts. Claudette Colbert is fine as the woman both men love and Hedy Lamarr was her usual alluring self.

Great entertainment all around.