... with manly men and the women who love them, from Universal and director Anthony Mann. James Stewart stars as Steve Martin (???), a broke oil wildcatter who arrives in the Louisiana fishing village of Port Felicity. He and his best bud Gambi (Dan Duryea) want to build the first off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and they convince rich company man Jay C. Flippin to finance it. They run into trouble with the local fishermen, led by a swaggering Gilbert Roland, who resent the damage the oilmen are doing to the already fragile shrimp beds. Fisherman's daughter Joanne Dru also dislikes the outsiders, due to her bad experience spending "3 years in Chicago". But Steve Martin won't let some dumb yokels stop him from getting the oil, of which "there's enough to lubricate the universe!".
At times this seems sponsored by Exxon-Mobil or some other oil company, with the pro-oil exploration rhetoric laid on thick, usually by Stewart during lengthy, righteous speeches. Duryea tries to liven things up as his devil-may-care friend, but he often seems to be trying too hard. Both Dru and Marcia Henderson, as poor fisherman's daughters, always appear in thick garish make-up, standard for the 1950's working woman who spends all day trawling for shrimp. Roland seems about as Cajun as he does Swedish, and his outfit is almost as silly as the women's makeup. Flippin is good as the helpful financier and former wildcatter. This was the last of the Mann-Stewart collaborations that I hadn't seen, and now I know why it's seldom shown.
As for presentation, the color is starting to bleed and smear, and although it was filmed in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio, it was released in widescreen and Universal ended up cropping part of the image. Thus there is one scene in which there is a fuse burning down toward some dynamite, and it is not visible in the cropped image. At any rate, this one is overdue for a restoration.
