Gary Cooper and Ward Bond are wildcatting for oil in Mexico. Banditos ride up and demand to be paid. There's no money, so they blow up the derrick. Cooper and Bond trudge back to town, where they meet stranded Ruth Roman, and old buddy Anthony Quinn. Who has a string of oil wells. Eventually Cooper starts working for Quinn drilling his new well, and that when the trouble starts. Quinnis married to Barbara Stanwyck, who left him and the altar and now regrets it.
It has a script by Phillip Yordan, which makes me think he was fronting for another writer. It starts out borrowing incidents from THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE, and parallels to the contemporary LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR. By the time it settles into its soap-opera phase, there's an awful lot of subtext here about obsession, and it comes out during the night sequences, highlighted by Sidney Hickox's strikingly lit shots of masculine oil derricks and pumps. Quinn is obsessed with his wife to the point where he loses the bravery he used to have; Miss Stanwyck desires Cooper, the bandits want gold so they can purchase guns and explosives -- more phallic symbols, naturally -- and there's the sequence in which the well they're drilling starts spewing, with a live, nitroglycerin-loaded torpedo. While Quinn cowers at a safe distance, Cooper catches it as it comes spurting out of the wellhead and tames it, recovering his control over his impulses so to speak, and realizes what he really wants.
Cooper and Quinn won Oscars while this movie was in production, and gave their typically excellent performances here. Warner Brothers responded with some excellent work in post-production, including a score by Dimitri Tiomkin. The past seventy years have not judged this movie too highly; it has faded into obscurity. I think it's an undeserved obscurity and deserves to be better known.
It has a script by Phillip Yordan, which makes me think he was fronting for another writer. It starts out borrowing incidents from THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE, and parallels to the contemporary LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR. By the time it settles into its soap-opera phase, there's an awful lot of subtext here about obsession, and it comes out during the night sequences, highlighted by Sidney Hickox's strikingly lit shots of masculine oil derricks and pumps. Quinn is obsessed with his wife to the point where he loses the bravery he used to have; Miss Stanwyck desires Cooper, the bandits want gold so they can purchase guns and explosives -- more phallic symbols, naturally -- and there's the sequence in which the well they're drilling starts spewing, with a live, nitroglycerin-loaded torpedo. While Quinn cowers at a safe distance, Cooper catches it as it comes spurting out of the wellhead and tames it, recovering his control over his impulses so to speak, and realizes what he really wants.
Cooper and Quinn won Oscars while this movie was in production, and gave their typically excellent performances here. Warner Brothers responded with some excellent work in post-production, including a score by Dimitri Tiomkin. The past seventy years have not judged this movie too highly; it has faded into obscurity. I think it's an undeserved obscurity and deserves to be better known.