Boom Town (1940)

There Will Be Blood - Lite is perhaps the best way I can think to describe Jack Conway's oil tycoon epic Boom Town. Certainly less taxing on the senses, Boom Town is something that P.T. Anderson's oil epic isn't - intentionally funny.

Boom Town is the story of two Johns - "Big John" McMasters (Clark Gable) and "Square John" {"Shorty" for short} Sand (Spencer Tracy) - with Claudette Colbert as Betsy, the woman they both love. Big John and Shorty are wildcatters, oilmen prospecting in sketchy territory. When Shorty's girl comes out west to see her beau, she ends up marrying McMasters. The grudge Shorty bears eventually kills the partnership, but the ill will doesn't stop there. It all builds up to an anti-trust federal case... and a surprise exercise in making things right.

Now, any movie with these three stars - and Hedy Lamarr thrown in for good measure as one of the oil men's lovers (I won't reveal whose) - can't be all bad. And it's true: Boom Town isn't all bad. The Gable/Tracy chemistry (for lack of a better word) is stellar, with Tracy as the perfect straight man to Gable's jovial amigo-to-all. Ditto for the Gable/Colbert chemistry, which panned out so well in Capra's 1934 It Happened One Night, the screwball comedy/road picture to end all others.

The special effects are, for the time, enthralling, but there's never a moment where we really believe Gable and Tracy are approaching a burning oil derrick - something I suspected Daniel Day-Lewis really did in TWBB. But you don't come to this movie for stellar special effects; it's the acting firestorms you'd be looking for, and the movie delivers. Unfortunately, though, the film builds to a climax that comes too early, in a fistfight that precedes the court battle. Maybe it's the jaded filmgoer in me, but I was expecting a tragic Wuthering Heights-esque ending to the Big John/Shorty partnership, but the movie outdoes Ian McEwan in terms of atonement here and ultimately disappointed me, the guy looking for an unhappy ending.

Ah, the simpler times, when buddies were buddies no matter what. Kind of makes me nostalgic. Kind of makes me want to go build an oil derrick. Who's with me?