Blowing Wild (1953)

7/10

planktonrules21 June 2017

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.

12 out of 13 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

Magnificent Cast in a Reasonable Film

claudio_carvalho28 January 2010

In a hypothetical country in South America, Jeff Dawson (Gary Cooper) and his partner Dutch Peterson (Ward Bond) have invested all their savings in a lease contract to explore oil. However, their expectation ruins when bandits blow the derrick of the oil well with dynamite and they get stranded in the town without any money. In despair, they accept the risky transportation of nitroglycerin to raise US$ 800.00 and Dutch is shot in the leg by road thieves; but Jeff discovers that their employer is a trickster and they area not paid for their job. When their former friend Paco Conway (Anthony Quinn) meets them, Jeff finds that he is a local tycoon and is married with Marina Conway (Barbara Stanwyck), who had a past with him. Paco hires Jeff his foreman to help him with his eighteen oil wells while Dutch is recovering in the hospital. Meanwhile the criminals press Paco to pay US$ 50,000.00 otherwise they will blow his wells and Marina revives her love and desire for Jeff, leading the trio to a tragedy.

"Blowing Wild" is a reasonable film with a magnificent cast. The writer is visibly inspired in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Le Salaire de la Peur" and combines with elements of film-noir, with Barbara Stanwyck performing a "femme fatale". The idea of a hypothetical South American country is silly and dull. In the end, "Blowing Wild" is an entertaining little flick that wastes the huge potential of a dream cast. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Sangue da Terra" ("Blood of the Earth")

14 out of 16 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

Good Cast in a Watchable Product

ragosaal20 September 2006

Blowing Wild is some sort of modern times western, unpretentious but interesting.

Ruined friends Jeff Dawson (Gary Coooper) and Dutch Peterson (Ward Bond) are stuck in a small South American city after bandits blow to pieces their only oil well. As they wonder around they run into wealthy Paco Conway (Anthony Quinn) a former close friend of Dawson who is in the oil business and hires him to give him a hand. Dawson takes the job just to raise the money that will bring him and Dutch back to the United States. Paco's wife Marina Conway (Barbara Stanwyck)has had something with Dawson in the past and she seems willing to revive it. Bandits are also around menacing Paco's oil wells. Circumstances mix up and the plot turns out interesting as it shows the disturbing relationship between Jeff, Paco and Marina.

The film was shot in black and white by Argentine director Hugo Fregonese who makes a good job here in a story about friendship, ambition, passion and murder. Frankie Lane sings the adequate title song.

Cooper is very good as the straight minded Dawson as also is Anthomy Quinn as the self made man that really loves his wife. Barbara Stanwyck's character is the center of the plot and she renders an outstanding performance in another of her many "mean woman" roles. Ward Bond and Ruth Roman -Jeff's romantic alternative- are a strong support. There's also Ian McDonald playing one of his usual unsympathetic characters and meeting Cooper again after High Noon (1952).

Blowing Wild is an acceptable product in its kind. You won't miss a great movie if you don't see it, but you'll enjoy it if you do.

24 out of 25 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

7/10

Wildcatters

jotix1004 June 2008

Warning: Spoilers

"Blowing Wild" showed unexpectedly the other day on cable. Seldom seen these days, this film reunited once again Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Alas, they are not as effective in it as they were in either "Ball of Fire", or "Meet John Doe", two of the best comedies of the 40s, bar none. The film was directed by Hugo Fregonese.

The setting is an unnamed Latin country, which must have been Mexico. It focuses on the people that wanted to get involved in the oil business because of the wealth it generated. There is a sequence that parallels Henri-Georges Cluzot's "The Wages of Fear" as Jeff Dawson and Dutch Peterson are asked to transport a crate full of dynamite to a nearby oil drilling site. It's a rustic route full of dangers and local bandits. Probably this was purely coincidental since both films came out in the same year in two continents apart.

Gary Cooper, who appears as Jeff Dawson, a wildcatter, seems to be acting on auto pilot. He was always a minimalist actor. He was not too expressive a man on the screen. Playing opposite Ms. Stanwyck, whose character showed an explosive nature, he did not show any emotion to speak of. Barbara Stanwyck, in contrast shows a talent for impersonating an ambitious Marina Conway, who had a romance with Dawson in the past. She is now married to a Paco Conway, a man she feels disgust for. She tries to rekindle whatever they shared in the past with bad results.

Anthony Quinn makes an impression with his Paco Conway, the man that had the good fortune of striking rich with the oil he found. Mr. Quinn has a great scene at the local watering hole where he dances with a young woman and later pretends to be a matador with another. Ward Bond is also seen in the movie as Dutch Peterson, Dawson's partner. Ruth Roman has an important supporting role and she does well. Ian McDonald, who was in "High Noon" with Mr. Cooper has a small part.

It's easy to see why the film has kept its appeal. The copy shown was of superior quality. Sidney Hickox's cinematography was memorable, and the same can be said about Dimitri Tiomkin's musical score. Frankie Laine is heard with the theme song throughout the movie.

6 out of 6 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

South American oil wells are blowing wild...and so are the tempers between the stars!

moonspinner5524 September 2009

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 ****

7 out of 8 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

9/10

Great early 50's movie

Terry Weldon4 January 2007

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.

19 out of 20 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

3/10

Blows Hot and Cold

bkoganbing26 September 2007

In a film that is partially taken from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, two down on their luck Americans, Gary Cooper and Ward Bond, run into an old pal, Anthony Quinn who has become richer in the oil business than these two wildcatters have. Quinn's also married Barbara Stanwyck who at one time had a thing for Cooper.

It's over for Coop, but Stanwyck ain't taking no for an answer. Even the presence of Ruth Roman one of those beautiful woman that are stuck in exotic places in films who's really got Coop's attention, doesn't faze her a bit. She says she'll do whatever she has to, to win Coop back and pretty much does as the film concludes.

Blowing Wild only holds interest because of the star players involved. When you consider that back in the day Cooper and Stanwyck did classics like Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire, Blowing Wild looks like something they did in their spare time on a holiday in Mexico.

Everybody overacts outrageously to keep the film afloat even Gary Cooper if you can believe that.

13 out of 19 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

8/10

The Churning Oil Wells of Madness

barney_holmes17 June 2008

Warning: Spoilers

From the acting of Anthony Quinn to the exquisitely overblown melodramatic elements, Blowing Wild is a great relatively unknown gem of a modern western.

In the current trend of films that must have happy endings and uplifting themes I found it just so refreshing to watch something where it all goes wrong. The heroic sensible character does not win the day, there is no overcoming of difficult circumstances although there is certainly bravery and doggedness.

The art of the tragedy bares it's garish colours in Blowing Wild. With so many of today's directors chasing the ghosts of "modern" themes, trying to speak to "modern" audiences, they would do well to study a film such as this, and other's of the older period. They seem to have far more to say to us "moderns" than current offerings that seem to have regressed to some kind of prepubescent state.

7 out of 7 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

7/10

Decent action/drama

xrellerx21 March 2002

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!

14 out of 18 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

There She Blows!

mark.waltz29 March 2013

Warning: Spoilers

She is Barbara Stanwyck, the hot-blooded and high maintenance wife of oil rig baron Anthony Quinn, as well as former lover of Gary Cooper, and she is desperate to get rid of a husband she hates and get back a former lover who makes her oil crude. Stanwyck's characters has never been someone you'd see grocery shopping (unless she was plotting a murder with Fred MacMurray) or attending social functions, but here, she is aging but still very much on the prowl. She's definitely a cougar, and while her prey may not be a young buck, she's roaring loudly with desire. Cooper, though, isn't buying her brand of spitfire anymore, and is now ready to settle for the sultriness of Ava Gardner look-alike Ruth Roman who purrs her lines like a kitten compared to Stanwyck's raspy and claw-clad alley cat. Quinn, too, underestimates his wife's hatred, finding out the hard way her real desires.

This is the third variation of this story at Warner Brothers-1935's "Bordertown" and 1940's "They Drive By Night", all told extremely similar stories with different professions for the hero and equally wild leading ladies in the Stanwyck role: Bette Davis ("Bordertown") and Ida Lupino ("They Drive By Night") both got to be dames to be reckoned with. Roman takes on the Margaret Lindsay and Ann Sheridan roles with Cooper replacing Paul Muni and George Raft, Quinn taking over for Eugene Palette and Alan Hale.

An unusually large over abundance of music dominates this version, including a theme song ("Marina Mine") sung by Frankie Laine, obviously influenced by his hit recording of "Do Not Forsake Me", the theme from Cooper's Oscar Winning success "High Noon" the previous year. Quinn's seemingly macho coward fights cowardice as a result of harassment from Mexican bandits, seen at the start of the film attempting to rob Cooper with stereotypical racist dialog. Ward Bond gives a sympathetic performance as Cooper's mentor. While the romance may focus on Cooper and Roman, it is Stanwyck who dominates the film. She may be melodramatic, but she's somebody you'll never forget.

3 out of 4 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

7/10

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets Stanwyck covered in Oil

nelsonhodgie17 January 2023

Basically a re-make of the Bogart film with a little wildcat oil action thrown in plus just to top things off Stanwyck at her nastiest. The setting is so similar to Treasure that Bond even begs for some coin off a man in a white hat. I never quite bought Babara as the object of all men's desire but she's so good at playing a possessive power mad heap of trouble that she overcomes any defecits in sex appeal. Cooper is 53 in this movie, looks 73, and moves like 93. Ward Bond is the annoying hen of a halfwit sidekick. Quinn great as always. But what's really good is the back drop of oil gushers, banditos, conman and Barbara blowing it wide open!

3 out of 3 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

8/10

Could have been an excellent film

jromanbaker6 July 2020

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!!!

2 out of 2 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

Black gold.

brogmiller29 August 2022

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.

1 out of 1 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

avoid women

SnoopyStyle20 August 2023

Jeff Dawson (Gary Cooper) and Dutch Peterson (Ward Bond) are wildcatting in South America. Bandits blow up their well and they are left with nothing. They are forced to deliver dangerous nitroglycerin for the money. They run into former partner Ward 'Paco' Conway (Anthony Quinn) who had hit it rich. Paco offers them jobs, but Jeff refuses due to Paco's marriage to Jeff's former flame Marina (Barbara Stanwyck). When the nitro money goes away, Jeff is forced to work for Paco.

It's amazing that this came out in the same year as The Wages of Fear. This movie basically wraps a love triangle melodrama around a tiny bit of Wages. I love The Wages of Fear. I don't care that much about this love triangle. Jeff is better off without Marina. Run away, boy. Run fast. I know that right from the start. Sal is only a bit better. He should avoid women altogether.

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

8/10

You Can't Always Get What You Want

boblipton23 September 2023

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.

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

A United States Pictures Production

richardchatten4 July 2020

Anthony Quinn for once plays his actual nationality in this Hollywood hokum shot in Mexico but which cautiously declares it's setting 'South America'.

The title song by Frankie Laine set to music by Dimitri Tiomkin was probably added to liven up the film; but keeps promising more than the film can deliver and gets annoying after a while. The basic situation of 'The Wages of Fear' is dashed off in just fifteen minutes before the movie finally fully displays it's biggest asset - Barbara Stanwyck on horseback in jodhpurs with a riding crop - when it finally gets interesting. (But your attention still wanders during the continued, dismayingly lengthy, stretches when she's not about.)

1 out of 2 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

3/10

Would YOU cheat on Anthony Quinn?

HotToastyRag17 May 2018

I'll tell you the problem with Blowing Wild: the casting. Barbara Stanwyck is married to Anthony Quinn but falls in love with Gary Cooper. Yes, you read that correctly. She's married to the passionate, ruggedly attractive, warm Anthony Quinn, but she'd rather have the wooden, cold, clueless Gary Cooper. It doesn't make any sense, and since that's the main plot of the movie, the movie doesn't make any sense.

There's another woman in the picture, Ruth Roman, and while Barbara is clearly drawn out to be the "bad girl", I didn't think Ruth was much better. She meets Gary and immediately tries to con him out of a hundred dollars, then pulls the same scheme on his business partner, Ward Bond. Why are we supposed to root for her instead of Barbara?

The love triangles aside, the plot isn't terrible, but the oil rigs and bandits and transportation of nitro bombs aren't really that captivating, since they're given a backseat to the scenes with the ladies. You can give this a shot if you like the cast, but just know you've been warned. I mean, would you cheat on Anthony Quinn with Gary Cooper? I don't know anyone who would.

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

8/10

hell hath no fury like a

ksf-21 June 2021

Talk about an all star cast -- Cooper and Bond are oil rig wildcatters, hoping to hit it big in oil. But they run into trouble with the local bandits. So they take a job transporting explosives. Great pay but dangerous work! Cooper runs into an old flame (Stanwyck), who is married to an old friend. Stanwyck was pretty busy in the 1950s... this is just one of FIVE of her films released in 1953. It's a good one. All the challenges the guys face; the bandits, dangerous work, and a very aggressive married woman who keeps throwing herself at Coop. Showing on the Cinemoi channel. Directed by argentinian director Hugo Fregonese, and written by Phil Yordan. He had some pretty big things made into film. Even an oscar for Broken Lance.

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

9/10

Explosive oil business with a lady ruining more than the bandits

clanciai7 September 2023

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.

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

3/10

One for a wet afternoon, and even then....

MOscarbradley13 August 2020

Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck must really have been down on their uppers when they agreed to do "Blowing Wild", a profoundly third-rate tale of oil porspectors in South America. Cooper and Ward Bond are partners trying to strike it rich. Anthony Quinn is an old pal who's already made it and Stanwyck is Quinn's wife who once had a fling with Coop and wants to start over. Actually, both Stanwyck and Quinn are very good and there's a nice supporting turn from Ruth Roman as the girl Cooper falls for.

There's enough talent on display for this to have been a much better film than it is but in the end it's only a very pale imitation of the likes of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "The Wages of Fear" and about a dozen other better pictures from Hollywood's Golden Age. Of course, director Hugo Fregonese didn't have much imagination to start with or maybe it fails because Philip Yordan's screenplay was well below his usual standard. Either way, the best I can say for it is that it just might tolerably pass a wet afternoon.

0 out of 1 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

Out same year as WAGES OF FEAR, pity it blows wild a great cast

adrianovasconcelos24 December 2023

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.

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

7/10

AN Action Film Only

januszlvii10 March 2022

Blowing Wild works well only as a Gary Cooper action film, with him against the banditos throughout the film. Cooper on a horse and with a gun work well as always, As for Barbara Stanwyck she offers up one of her worst performances here, insane and over the top ( Close to Charles Laughton ( an actor who generally does not appeal to me for that very reason)) . It is quite different then her bad women performances such as Double Indemnity and The Violent Men). While I did not expect Ball of Fire or Meet John Doe ( both with Cooper), we know she can do better( even later in her career( see The Big Valley)).. Anthony Quinn is the walking definition of pathetic ( loves wife Stanwyck but she hates him). Ruth Roman is a love interest but only to a slight extent. "What does she do for you." ( Stanwyck). ""Nothing, but I can trust her." ( Cooper). About says it all. Better off seeing Roman with Cooper in Dallas made three years earlier ( she was hot there). The one irony is the bandits who made Cooper's life miserable ( including in the first scene), are in the end the ones who indirectly saved him. Finally I saw this on YouTube which allowed me to skip through any scene with no action, which was a necessity (especially avoiding Stanwyck scenes) At least I got to see a Cooper rarity that escaped me for years, and the action scenes are well done. 7/10 stars.

0 out of 1 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

Watchable Potboiler

nigel_hawkes22 November 2021

We in the UK can thank again the Free-to-Air channels that put out these otherwise lost little movies, and once again here is one that is not at all bad. Set in 1930s Mehico with Coop and Ward Bond as oil bums down on their luck; Anthony Quinn in a typical rough, lusty role who's a dupe husband of mad Barbara Stanwyck (who's an old flame of Coop); the lovely Ruth Roman is in it as a con woman with a heart of gold; great Frankie Laine title song pops up constantly; nasty banditos about....

The fun is in comparing with other films; I immediately thought of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre", "Gilda", "Wages of Fear", "High Noon", "Warlock"; even dangerous trek/buddy films like "Vera Cruz"....

Script was by Philip Yordan; music Dimitri Tiomkim..a film with those credentials will always be worth a look.

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

6/10

3 Big Time Stars in sub-par effort

JVIRT998 April 2022

It's been many years since I watched Blowing Wind. One of those in-between films that a cast of fine actors can't turn into a memorable entertainment effort. Even the great Barbara Stanwyck couldn't save this one. Cooper and Quinn were coming off their Oscar wins for High Noon and Viva Zapata, respectively, yet neither actor rises above mediocre. Two quality character actors, Ward Bond and Ruth Roman, were wasted in this film. I would expect more from a Philip Yordan script too. I think this one might have shown better in color. The drabness of the cinematography and the lackluster script makes for a forgettable movie. The direction is nothing to brag about either. Worth a look, nothing more.

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

4/10

Miscasting - average movie-

twridge29 August 2023

Interesting locale , But Anthony Quinn so enamored by wife Barbara Stanwyck - really ? Don't see that at all - Actually I think Barbra Stanwyck was always Miscast when they tried to make her the femme fatale of any movie she was in . Here no different. Always the same hairdo , always the same cold fish type performance . Anthony Quinn is usual gregarious character - little too over acting here and Gary Cooper tries but nothing special here. The banditos with no badges and a few other derivative comparisons - Ruth Roman good as usual .. Like her in whatever role she has But overall kind of boring exercise .

0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

User Reviews

See also

Opinion

Details

Storyline

Did You Know?

Photo & Video

Related Items

User Lists

Recently Viewed