Blowing Wild

I have been an avid Turner Classic Movies viewer and cannot recall them ever playing this obscure Gary Cooper film. It's a shame, as it's pretty good. The film is a remake of the Cagney film "Torrid Zone" and it's also a bit similar (at least in the early part of the movie) to "Wages of Fear"...a film that also came out in 1953.

Jeff and Dutch (Gary Cooper and Ward Bond) are stuck in Mexico*...broke and with no prospects after bandits dynamite their oil rig. They get a crazy job transporting nitroglycerin but it turns out that the guy hiring them is a crook. Fortunately, at least at first, an old friend, Paco (Anthony Quinn), discovers their plight and hires them. Unfortunately, his wife, Marina (Barbara Stanwyck), is a total screwball...a femme fatale in the most vivid sense. She doesn't appreciate that Paco is handsome, loves her and provides her with anything she wants...she wants Jeff...mostly because it's wrong! What's to come of all this?

This is a decent film that gets better later due to Stanwyck's florid character. She's bad...really, really bad...and although she was not the lead, she easily dominated the film. The only negative is that you KNOW what's going to happen to her due to the notion enforced at the time that the evil must ultimately pay. Exciting and well worth seeing.

This is a far cry from the two undisputed classics which had paired Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck twelve years earlier and Hugo Fregonese is not in the same league as Messrs. Capra and Hawks whilst Philip Yordan's script is way below his best.

The old chemistry between Cooper and Stanwyck is still there of course and as a bonus we have the strong presence of Anthony Quinn, one of Cinema's genuine characters who worked very hard to develop and improve his craft whilst Ruth Roman's subtle sensuality offers a much needed contrast to the film's machismo and Miss Stanwyck's passionate intensity.

The film benefits from Dimitri Tiomkin's score, the cinematography of Sidney Hickox and most particularly its momentum for which editor Alan Crosland merits a special mention. In effect this opus represents a prime example of talented, professional artistes rising above their material.

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!!!

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!

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 ****