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Flaherty has the dilemma in Louisiana Story, and the 1946 setting is salient: "You gonna have another war already?" Port Felicity, LA, latest pit stop of the entrepreneurial dreamer (James Stewart). Him and his partner (Dan Duryea) get off on the wrong foot with the community by stiffing the fisherman who gave them a ride (Gilbert Roland), the treasure they seek is not the mythic golden shrimp but "just some very old oil." The tycoon (Jay C. Flippen) agrees to finance their offshore drilling operation, the skipper's daughter (Joanne Dru) meanwhile has no use for the interlopers, "stop trying to thrill me." Nothing beats Anthony Mann on location, filming aboard barges so that Gulf of Mexico detonations splash actors and lenses alike. The seaside burg is centered around a tavern with beer geysers and a chalk circle on the floor for chummy scuffles, the sheriff (Fortunio Bonanova) can often be found passed out in the backroom. The hero is driven enough to negotiate an angry mob with sticks of dynamite, and grows rapt when describing the antediluvian side of fossil fuels. ("I can imitate a movie star," he replies when asked about any special talents he might have.) Mann pans for a lateral view of aquatic horizons, then slowly tilts down to take in the verticality of the derrick, an elongated metal pyramid made to withstand a mighty storm and subtly connected to the leading man's own gangling frame. The climactic gusher appropriately mingles exaltation and mania, a conflicted screen blackened ahead of Stevens' Giant. The punchline-resolution is a matter not of losing a daughter but of gaining a son. "Progress is not without faults, my friend." The form transposed from the Western is transposed back into The Far Country. With Marcia Henderson, Antonio Moreno, Robert Monet, Harry Morgan, and Mario Siletti.
--- Fernando F. Croce |