FLOWING GOLD (1940)

Johnny Blake is a roaming roughneck (oil well worker) at the front of a line of men looking for jobs at an oil rig. But when a man arrives to put up a wanted poster with his face on it, he takes off. Heading west, he winds up at another oil field and finds work on a roughneck gang headed by foreman Hap O'Connor. When Hap fires a drunken worker, the man tries to kill Hap and Johnny jumps in and saves Hap's life. Soon, cops start sniffing around looking for Johnny, and he confesses to Hap that he killed a man in self-defense but ran because he figured he couldn't get a fair trial. Because Hap owes Johnny his life (and because Johnny is a good worker and they've become friends), Hap agrees to hide Johnny from the law. Soon, Hap and his crew have joined up with the eccentric Wildcat Chalmers and his daughter Linda trying to stake a claim. They must strike oil by a certain date to hold onto the property, but they keep getting thwarted by Chalmers' old rival. Still, they make progress, and both Hap and Johnny fall for Linda. When Johnny is arrested in a bar fight and flees, and Hap sustains a serious leg injury, it looks like Chalmers is done for. But don’t count our heroes out for too long…

Both John Garfield (Johnny) and Frances Farmer (Linda) felt this assignment was beneath them (and, honestly, no one's acting abilities are challenged much), but for me, this is an enjoyable example of the grand Warner Bros. B-movie house style: relatively short, fast-paced, a good supporting cast, and strong production values, including here some well-staged fights and explosions. Garfield is fine in a variation on his tough guy loner persona, and Farmer provides a fresh new slant on the B-movie love interest, though her life would soon go off the rails (see the Jessica Lange movie Frances for details). Pat O'Brien, a Warners stalwart, is the eternal nice-guy loser in the love triangle, a role he could play in his sleep (not really a spoiler, since with Garfield around, O'Brien doesn’t stand a chance), but he still manages to give it some good energy. Raymond Walburn as Chalmers and Cliff Edwards as a ukulele-playing roughneck provide fine comic relief. It's an unpretentious B-movie adventure/romance: predictable but fun. [TCM]