Review of Blowing Wild

They are all outstanding, Gary Cooper as the experienced veteran from various disasters in oil fields, Anthony Quinn at home as a Mexican and doing well with his oil business in Mexico and his wife Barbara Stanwyck, who steals the show as usual. Anthony Quinn is the one who really lives it up and out, in the very element of his own kingdom of endless resources and generosity, while Gary Cooper is reticent and severely self-controlled but still the master of the situation, while all the passion is in Barbara Stanwyck fed up with a life of frustrations, never being satisfied and being in constant despair because of her loss of the only man she really loved, majestically aloof and waiting for her chance, while her competitor Ruth Roman never becomes more than an object of her contempt. Ward Bond is the sympathetic partner who wants to get out from the beginning but who has to go through some awkward trials to finally succeed, and the end is something of a sorry showdown, all passion spent, all loves gone and forfeited and a future promising nothing. It's a great drama but rather empty on the whole, an episode more than a story, and the Mexicans were not happy about this film. They threatened the film company with permanent banishment.