Tulsa (1949)

Seynatawnee means Red Hair, but to him it means Boss!

Tulsa is directed by Stuart Heisler and adapted to screenplay by Frank S. Nugent and Curtis Kenyon from a Richard Wormser story. It stars Susan Hayward, Robert Preston, Pedro Armendáriz, Lloyd Gough and Ed Begley. Music is by Frank Skinner and cinematography by Winton C. Hoch.

It's Tulsa at the start of the oil boom and when Cherokee Lansing's (Hayward) rancher father is killed in a fight, she decides to take on the Tanner Oil Company by setting up her own oil wells. But at what cost to the grazing land of the ranchers?

Perfect material for Hayward to get her teeth into, Tulsa is no great movie, but it a good one. Sensible ethics battle greed and revenge as Hayward's Cherokee Lensing lands in a male dominated industry and kicks ass whilst making the boys hearts sway. She's smart, confident and ambitious, but she's too driven to see the painfully obvious pitfalls of her motives, or even what she has become. It all builds to a furious climax, where fires rage both on land and in hearts, the American dream ablaze and crumbling, the effects and model work wonderfully pleasing.

Slow in parts, too melodramatic in others, but Hayward, Preston, Gough and the finale more than make this worth your time. 7/10

This has a slightly incongruous conservation slant to it as it follows the battle between the oil drillers and the local, largely indigenous, Oklahoman farmers. Now forgetting the terrible song at the start from "Pinky" (Chill Wills) - who provides us with the optimistic narration; we are introduced to the honorable "Cherokee" (Susan Hayward) who is after compensation when her father is killed by flying debris from an oil derrick owned by "Tanner" (Lloyd Gough). Nothing doing says he, but when she comes into some oil leases that she can ill afford to exploit, he has enough of a fair-mined (and venal) spirit about him to lend her the cash. The remainder of this drama is all quite predicable, and though Hayward does enough as the woman conflicted by both the ecology of what they are doing and also with would be husband "Brad" (Robert Preston) versus the admiring local lad with a conscience "Jim" (Pedro Armendáriz), the rest of the cast just go through the motions. There are some decent visual effects towards the end as things hot up and there is an underlying message of reconciling progress with nature that shows even in 1949 people were thinking about balance. It's watchable enough.