BLOWING WILD no stars

Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck must really have been down on their uppers when they agreed to do "Blowing Wild", a profoundly third-rate tale of oil prospectors in South America. Cooper and Ward Bond are partners trying to strike it rich. Anthony Quinn is an old pal who's already made it and Stanwyck is Quinn's wife who once had a fling with Coop and wants to start over. Actually, both Stanwyck and Quinn are very good and there's a nice supporting turn from Ruth Roman as the girl Cooper falls for.

There's enough talent on display for this to have been a much better film than it is but in the end it's only a very pale imitation of the likes of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "The Wages of Fear" and about a dozen other better pictures from Hollywood's Golden Age. Of course, director Hugo Fregonese didn't have much imagination to start with or maybe it fails because Philip Yordan's screenplay was well below his usual standard. Either way, the best I can say for it is that it just might tolerably pass a wet afternoon.