Blowing Wild

I remember seeing this as a14 year old in England when it was first released. It has stuck in my mind ever since. The combination of Gary Cooper's world weary persona, Dimitri Tiomkin's evocative score, the great rendition of the title song by Frankie Laine and the powerful sense of loss and what might have been all combine to make a fantastic couple of hours. One thought did occur when I watched it again last night was how old the characters all were... We take it for granted today that most roles are played by 25-35 year old actors (and actresses)that to see Cooper, Stanwyck, Quinn, Bond etc. brings one up with start. Lovely film, though, and I look forward to seeing it again.

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!!!

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.

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.