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Wednesday, April 10, 2019

FLOWING GOLD (1940)

This halfhearted Warner Bros. programmer for John Garfield, Pat O’Brien & Frances Farmer ought to be better. But B-Team director Alfred E. Green & scripter Kenneth Gamet just go thru the motions on a better than average story of boom-to-bust oil mavericks betting on a longshot claim. Buffoonish Raymond Walburn is Farmer’s dad, a blathering oil promoter who hires Pat O’Brien’s indie outfit in a race-against-the-clock oil dig. (The drill gang, a nicely varied gaggle of rough, lesser-known character actors, is the best thing in the pic.) Also on board, after briefly working for the guy who’s trying to shut them down, is man-on-the-run John Garfield, hiding out on a murder charge. You’ll guess every move from the start, but there’s some good fun on the edges: a muddy boomtown, fiery derricks, a nifty model truck on a collapsing road, a dance hall sequence. And while Garfield would soon rise to the A-list as O’Brien largely stayed in B-pic trenches, Farmer all but disappeared a year later from mental issues. Even here, there’s already something ‘off’ about her.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: A 1924 silent version of FLOWING GOLD is lost, but its three leads (Milton Sills, Anna Q. Nilsson & Alice Calhoun) suggest a different story behind the oil drilling.

DOUBLE-BILL: Jessica Lange salvaged a bruised early rep playing the tragic Farmer in FRANCES/’82.

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