Le Souffle sauvage

Basically a re-make of the Bogart film with a little wildcat oil action thrown in plus just to top things off Stanwyck at her nastiest. The setting is so similar to Treasure that Bond even begs for some coin off a man in a white hat. I never quite bought Babara as the object of all men's desire but she's so good at playing a possessive power mad heap of trouble that she overcomes any defecits in sex appeal. Cooper is 53 in this movie, looks 73, and moves like 93. Ward Bond is the annoying hen of a halfwit sidekick. Quinn great as always. But what's really good is the back drop of oil gushers, banditos, conman and Barbara blowing it wide open!

Shotgun-toting, dynamite-wielding banditos in South America shake down local oil-drillers for cash; they run strapped American Gary Cooper out of business, forcing him into partnership with an old friend whose oil-site is doing well--but whose steely-eyed wife is a real wild-card. Surprisingly cheapjack production featuring three top stars (Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and Anthony Quinn), all of whom acquit themselves well with a script which seems half-finished. Ruth Roman is a con-artist who runs into Cooper a few times--and before you know it, she's declaring she loves him. Stanwyck puts forth a lot of heat, and gets us to believe in the tempestuous marriage she shares with Quinn, but there's little motivation for what comes next. The finale, which should have been as emotionally explosive as the effects, plays curiously flat, and there's no reasoning for why the bandits are so extreme in their destruction, nor why they choose the opportunities to strike when they do. From a narrative standpoint, the picture is a mess; however, it is quickly-paced, torrid in spots, and is frequently entertaining in spite of its flaws. **1/2 from ****

Fregonese was a good director, the cast is good ( although Gary Cooper always seemed a bit monotonous and cold ) but Anthony Quinn makes up for him with his own special form of excess. Barbara Stanwyck sadly walks through it as a ' bad woman ' and pulls out all the cliched, familiar gestures of the stereotyped and underwritten ' nasty female '. Ruth Roman has at least a rounded role and acts superbly. and in my opinion saves the film. As for the plot it is overblown and psychologically superficial. But as a superficial film it is watchable and has its fine moments, one of which is a scene between Stanwyck and Roman. I cannot tell what they made of each other, but a film that was theirs would have been great chemistry. The macho feel of the film is tedious and the song which was a great hit in its day that opens the film has a drive to it that the film sometimes follows. It could have been excellent, but falls too often into the excess that only Quinn makes believable. The end is literally hysterical!!!

Director Hugo Fregonese, argentine-born but active in Hollywood and Europe after 1950, never impressed me. In BLOWING WILD he has the benefit of a superior cast - Gary Cooper, fresh from winning his second Best Actor Oscar the previous year with HIGH NOON; Antony Quinn, whose role in VIVA ZAPATA had won him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar only months before BLOWING WILD came out; Barbara Stanwyck, who never won an Academy award but came close several times; Ward Bord, a most dependable character actor; and Ruth Roman, a beauty who had come to notice in Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN two years earlier.

Unfortunately, BLOWING WILD begins by paying homage to the first minutes of TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE, with two hardup Americans stranded in a Mexican town begging another American (who even wears a white suit, like John Huston in TREASURE) for meal money, and it carries on with a blatant ripoff of the nitro-carrying shenanigans of WAGES OF FEAR (LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR, 1953).

As tough as that situation is, it gets tougher when the American fails to pay them, and has a lot of other creditors on his back. It becomes even more problematic when aging but still handsome Cooper catches Ruth's eye, and meets up with former partner Quinn, now a very rich 18-oil well owner who has married... you guessed it, Barbara, who feels nothing but contempt for Quinn and has never stopped loving former flame Cooper.

It's a small world and one about to explode with the active participation of banditos demanding large sums to leave the wells undamaged. Sadly, the action sequences show the Mexican outlaws just using their bodies to stop bullets but do not lose sight of venomous Barbara...

Pity that Fregonese could not make more of a hollow script trying to stay alive with the ideas of other recently made films, and even more that he could not draw better acting from such a star-laden cast. 6/10.

Gary Cooper is looking for work somewhere in South America when he meets an old friend with a succesful oil-digging company. His wife, however, is an old love from Cooper and the tension can only lead to bad things. On top of it all, the country suffers from bandits who destroy and rob all material. The story has a negative undertone about the failure Americans have when trying to make it big outside their motherland just like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Bogart. The characters are well thought-out and all of them have a solid background. Gary Cooper's character has a past he'd rather forget and it made me think about his character in High Noon. Unfortunately the movie seems to be made in a rush, but due to the story, drama and character studies I give this a 7 out of 10! And for me that's rather a lot!