Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Blowing Wild Blu-ray Movie Review

Well it blows, anyway.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 23, 2013

When Paul Thomas Anderson brought his uniquely skewed vision to There Will Be Blood, he helped to resurrect a curiously untapped subgenre in American film, namely pieces devoted to the supposed “romance” of oil drilling (those who have seen this particular Anderson opus may want to debate about exactly how “romantic” oil drilling turns out to be). While Baby Boomers grew up to the subtext of “Texas Tea” in such silly outings as The Beverly Hillbillies, the film world has strangely been fairly sporadic in exploiting this aspect of American life and not so coincidentally American wealth. Just as oddly, there have been regular films that dealt with the environmental impact of drilling in one form or another (Promised Land, the fascinating 1948 Robert Flaherty film Louisiana Story), as well as films with some tangential relationship to oil or drilling that otherwise wouldn’t be thought of as purely about the industry (Armageddon, The Road Warrior, The Abyss, The World is Not Enough). 1940 saw two films come out within just a few days of each other which highlighted the world of so- called wildcatters (one might almost think one of the competing studios caught wind of the other project in the—ahem— pipeline and rushed their version into production, but that would never happen in Hollywood, right?). Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer had one of its biggest hits of the year with Boom Town, starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr, and if Warner Brothers didn’t have quite the same level of success with Flowing Gold, which starred John Garfield, Frances Farmer and Pat O’Brien, the film still did very brisk box office. Since both of those films did at least reasonably well, one would have though the Hollywood bean counters would have started rushing out one oil film after another, but that wasn’t the case. In fact it was more than a decade and a half until the next really big film about oil appeared, and by really big I of course mean Giant. But a couple of years before George Stevens’ sprawling saga hit the silver screen, a lesser remembered film came out that may not specifically be about American oil (unless one isn’t quite as chauvinistic about “America” referring only to the United States) but which proved to be a rather popular film in 1953. Rather interestingly, Blowing Wild also has at least a couple of similarities to a very well remembered film from 1953 that had an oil angle, the classic The Wages of Fear (one might almost think some enterprising American film industry type saw the Clouzot film when it came out in the spring of 1953 and then lifted at least a couple of salient plot points for a domestic version, but that would never happen in Hollywood, right?).

Though Blowing Wild hedges its bets by offering a generic “South America” setting, there’s little doubt that wildcatters Jeff Dawson (Gary Cooper) and Dutch Peterson (Ward Bond) are in fact in Mexico. That becomes increasingly clear when a ragtag bunch of banditos shows up and decimates the partners’ operation when they refuse to pay “protection” money (mostly because both of them are flat broke, having sunk every last dime into their oil lease and equipment). The two make it back into the nearest town, where Jeff soon is approached by scheming expat American Sal Donnelly (Ruth Roman), who wants Jeff to not only let her pretend to be his wife so that she can get a half price fare back to New Orleans, she wants Jeff to pay for the privilege as well. Jeff relents, but Jeff’s offer of his oil lease as collateral for tickets is met with a hearty sneer by the ticket agent.

Jeff leaves Sal in the dust, only to see Dutch begging for spare change, something that rubs Jeff the wrong way. When he forces Dutch to return a coin to another scheming expat American, the guy asks the partners if they need a job. It turns out, shades of Wages of Fear, that the guy has a load of nitroglycerin that needs transporting over some treacherous territory. Jeff negotiates twice what the guy initially offers, and the two erstwhile oil drillers think they’ve got it made—at least if they can survive the trip. At this point Blowing Wild has already taken a couple of left turns, and there’s yet another to come. The two guys get involved in a brawl late at night but soon discover their fighting nemesis is actually Jeff’s old buddy Paco (Anthony Quinn). Paco offers them yet another job, but a wrench is thrown into the works when it turns out Paco’s long suffering wife, Marina (Barbara Stanwyck), was a former paramour of Jeff’s.

It should be fairly obvious by this point that Blowing Wild seems to have a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a quasi- noir, especially once Marina makes it known she wants Paco out of the way so that she can reunite with Jeff? Is it a straight out adventure film, where two ragtag buddies have to survive marauding banditos, only occasionally aided by cans full of nitroglycerin? Or is it a Sirkian melodrama where tamped down sexuality threatens to burst through the fetid environment and erupt like—well, like a gushing oil well? The problem is that Blowing Wild is all three of these, and more to boot. This is a film where the two main females are both devious in their own way, and where only Jeff seems to have a fairly cogent code of morality. It’s also a film where Marina can spend an entire scene totally berating Jeff, only to (of course) fall into his arms and engage in passionate smooching. Later, it’s also a film where Paco and Jeff resort to shooting a torpedo down a well (that is not a typo) and even later it's a film where Paco rather hysterically (in every sense of that word) pulls out his pistol and begins shooting an oil well to get it to stop pumping. In other words, there's a definite camp factor at work here which may in fact recommend this feature to those with certain discerning tastes.

Blowing Wild has some fairly serious star power going for it, but it’s a frankly pretty tired exercise. Cooper and Stanwyck had aged quite a bit since their famed 1941 pairings in Frank Capra's Meet John Doe and Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire, and the result is a kind of middle aged melodrama that has humidity more than heat. Roman and Bond are quite enjoyable, and it’s fun to see Quinn in a pretty constant state of manic frenzy. But like Marina in the film’s climax, you may be doing everything you can to stop the sound of the ubiquitous oil wells.

Blowing Wild Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Blowing Wild is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. With one notable exception, the elements used for this transfer are in remarkably good shape, with really strong contrast and only the expected amount of age related wear and tear slightly detracting from the image. That one notable exception occurs at around 7:09 in the film and lasts for around 30 seconds. It appears that one brief scene was sourced from a far inferior dupe element. Weirdly, the fade in starts with a freeze, as well as what sounds like a pretty shoddy sound edit, and when the film returns to its better looking baseline, there's another loud splice pop on the soundtrack. I frankly have no ready explanation for this anomaly, but I highly doubt it's peculiar to this particular release. Otherwise, though, things are very nice looking, with good clarity and stability.

Blowing Wild Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Blowing Wild's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track presents what is arguably the film's most memorable feature, yet another rousing score by Dimitri Tiomkin, with decent if occasionally just slightly problematic fidelity. As seems to be the case with some of these older catalog titles Olive has been releasing, there's some very minor distortion in the opening theme music. In this case, it's the typically hyperbolic Frankie Laine singing "The Ballad of Black Gold", an obvious attempt to recapture the magic of "High Noon". As stated above, there's a very loud pop at one moment when a dupe element ends and the film returns to whatever the main source for this transfer was. There are occasional other pops and cracks along the way, but nothing very distracting. Dialogue is cleanly presented and dynamic range is really rather wide. There's some fun quasi-low frequency action in one of the film's big set pieces, when Jeff and Paco shoot the torpedo down a well.

Blowing Wild Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.

Blowing Wild Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Blowing Wild might have been a "must see"—whether for honorable reasons or not—had it come a few years later with a younger cast and direction by someone like Douglas Sirk. But as it stands, it's a weird hodgepodge of ideas from several other films that goes down one rocky road for a minute until it just decides on a whim to detour down another. Fans of the cast may well want to check it out, for it's certainly a unique outing, albeit a uniqueness achieved by knitting together weirdly disparate elements like a sort of cinematic patch quilt. The Blu-ray offers generally solid video and audio.