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Waste of time

Pretty Good

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The Plot: It's Tulsa, Oklahoma at the start of the oil boom and Cherokee Lansing's rancher father is killed in a fight with the Tanner Oil Company. Cherokee plans revenge by bringing in her own wells with the help of oil expert Brad Brady and childhood friend Jim Redbird. When the oil and the money start gushing in, both Brad and Jim want to protect the land but Cherokee has different ideas. What started out as revenge for her father's death has turned into an obsession for wealth and power.This is a very dated movie. I mean there's a guy riding horseback in a suit! It was interesting to me to see Chill Wills from the 40s. I know him from his 60s and 70s Westerns when he was a craggy old son of a gun.The movie is rather slow and the topic is not really explored in a smart or effective way. It's not that it's a bad movie, it's just rather trivial.After a while you just kinda space out because it's not all that compelling.

Yes, it's true, the quality of the print seen on TCM is disgraceful. To some extent it ruins the closing minutes of the film. But, that's a not uncommon fate of the smaller production companies of the past (and after all, how familiar are you with Walter-Wanger Productions and Eagle-Lion Films. We can only hope that someday there will be a restoration of what is a darned good film.There's nothing particularly unique about the plot -- cattle rancher's father is killed by an oil rigging accident and she vows revenge. Although, we never quite understand why she ends up becoming a willing partner to the man she blames for her father's death; and that is, perhaps, the one great flaw in this film. There's the interesting sub-plot about which man will ultimately win her? The Indian (who I think most of us today would root for)? The high-minded "professor"? The man who was responsible for her father's death? It would be interesting to see how the story would be changed if it were being filmed today, instead of over 60 years ago.Susan Hayward plays Cherokee Lansing, the cattle rancher daughter who becomes an oil woman (in Oklahoma). But, in reality, Susan Hayward plays...Susan Hayward. And she (and we) can revel in that. Lest you think is this is one of her early films, no...actually her 27th credited screen appearance.I enjoyed seeing Robert Preston here as "the professor", and one of the two consciences of the cast. Pedro Armendáriz, who was actually Mexican, plays the Indian cattle rancher...the other conscience in the film. Overall a good performance, with a few missteps. I didn't care for Lloyd Gough as the heavy in the film. I'm no fan of Chill Wills, although every once in a while he would turn in a performance that I enjoyed, and this is one of those times. In fact, I wish he had had more screen time in this film. Although he doesn't get much screen time, it's interesting to see Ed Begley (senior) in a very different role for him.If we had a good print of this film, the closing scenes would be down right spectacular. With this bad print, they look cheap. But, the conflagration scenes earned the film an Oscar nomination for special effects.I recommend this film despite the poor quality of the print. Not a gem, but a rhinestone in the rough.

It's perhaps ironic that I chose to watch this film on the day it was announced that Larry Hagman died, the iconic J.R. Ewing of TV 'Dallas' fame who became the poster child for greedy oil barons everywhere. I'm curious why this film doesn't have more reviews, as most folks writing about it express their surprise at how intriguing the story line is. It's not like the movie is hard to find, it has a ubiquitous presence in bargain bins and large film compilations to make it quite readily available.Susan Hayward is the dominant force in the story, daughter of a cattle baron who alternates loyalties as the picture progresses between cattle ranchers and those leading the charge in the fledgling oil industry. The character who surprised me the most was old Charlie Lightfoot (Chief Yowlachie) who quickly abandoned his native culture's pride in the land to capitalize on a quick buck. Robert Preston, Pedro Armendariz and Lloyd Gough are all effective as on again/off again business allies and rivals, as well as competitors for Cherokee Lansing's (Hayward) affections.From today's standpoint, it's interesting to examine the mindset that once existed regarding oil as a finite resource subject to running out at a particular point in time. Modern day discoveries and new technologies are set to insure that our country's vast untapped resources will soon make us the new Saudi Arabia in both oil and natural gas production with hundreds of years of supply at current usage rates. Plenty of time to develop alternative energy resources if left to private enterprise entrepreneurs instead of the government picking winners and losers, or as is mostly the case - losers.

(Some Spoilers) It's when cattleman Neise Lansing, Harry Shannon, found his prized cows poisoned from oil emitted from a nearby oil rig belonging to Tanner Petrouloum that he threw a fit. Mindlessly charging at the rig and yelling obscenities it suddenly started gushing crude with the top platform of the oil rig dropping down to earth on Lansing's unprotected, in him not wearing a regulation hardhat, head killing him.With her father dead Mr. Lansing's red headed and hot blooded daughter Cherokee, Susan Hayward, who's also a quarter American Indian demanded that the CEO of the oil company Bruce Tanner, Lloyd Gough, pay her for her father's dead cattle who were poisoned by spillage from his oil rig. With Tanner not being too cooperative in her dispute with him Cherokee later runs into oil man John Brady, Ed Begley, who had one two many at the local saloon. Brady too drunk to know whet he's doing handed Cherokee his deed to the land that's adjacent to that of the land that native American's Charlie Lightfoot, Chief Yowlachie, and her cousin Jim Redbird, Pedro Armendariz, own. By the time the evening was over Bradly was killed in a bar brawl with him not being around to sober up and take his land deed back!Seeing her chance of getting back at Tanner by beating him at his own game, the oil business, Cherokee started to turn her sights on the oil that she knew was under the ground in the late John Brady, now her, land and went to work on it! Not getting anywhere at first it wasn't until handsome and sure of himself Princeton rock specialist Brad Bradly, Robert Preston, the late John Brady's son showed up at Cherokee's rig that things started popping! Popping so much that within the next six months some dozen oil well popped up from under Cherokee's land that no one, including oil baron Tanner, ever figured were there!It's later when Cherokee decided to drop her square and not too greedy, in not wanting to make millions by polluting the land, fiancée Brad Brady in order to go into business with Tanner as his partner in the oil business that things started to get hot and gushy in and around Tulsa! With her and Tanner having oil rigs popping up all over and polluting the grazing lands and streams outside the city. With the environmentally conscious Jim Redbird refusing to have any oil-well drilled on his land Turnner decides to have the court declare him mentally incompetent thus taking his land away from him. This leads to Jim losing it when he finds his cattle, like those of Neise Lansing's, dead from poisoned water that both Tanner's and Cherokee's oil rigs polluted.**SPOILERS*** We soon see how dangerous it was for Tanner together with his new partner Cherokee to pump the land dry of its oil with the stream that Jim's cattle drank from catch fire when Jim just lit a match and threw in it to see if there was any oil let in it. In what looked like an end of the world fire and brimstone ending both Cherokee who finally saw the light, by seeing her entire land go up in flames, and her now back again boyfriend Brad risked their lives in dynamiting the burning oil wells before they spread into Tulas itself.P.S It was that fiery incident that thought everyone involved in the oil business to cool it and not go overboard in pumping the land dry of oil when in the end there wouldn't be, due fires and pollution, any land left to pump oil out of!