Thunder Bay (Universal-International, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I checked the Turner Classic Movies schedule to see if there would be a movie on worth watching, and I found a pretty good one in Thunder Bay, a 1953 Universal-International production that marked the fourth of eight collaborations between star James Stewart and director Anthony Mann. Their professional relationship had begun with a bang with the 1950 Western Winchester .73, for which Universal president Lew Wasserman agreed to pay Stewart a percentage of the profits in addition to a salary because he couldn’t afford to pay Stewart his going rate up front. The film was a huge success commercially (and an artistic masterpiece as well; i've often described it as "a film noir inim Western drag") and Stewart’s income from that one movie was over $1 million. Wasserman put Stewart and Mann together for two more Westerns, Bend of the River and The Naked Spur, and then for thier fourth movie together Wasserman and Universal producer Aaron Rosenberg decided to do something more contemporary. They chose an original story by John Michael Hayes (later a frequent collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock) based on an “idea” by George W. George (who would later co-direct a documentary on James Dean with a then-unknown collaborator named Robert Altman) and George F./ Slavini, with Gil Doud also listed as co-writer of the screenplay.

The story deals with the clashes between oil drillers and shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico pff the coast of Louisiana in 1946. Two seemingly penniless grifters, Steve Martin (James Stewart) and John Gambi (Dan Duryea), show up in a small Louisiana fishing town to promote a wildcat oil drilling operation. The local fisherfolk are almost literally up in arms against it, not only for the obvious reason that they’re worried that oil from the rig will spill into the gulf and ruin the shrimp catch on which they depend for their livelihood, but also because they’re fearful of the lowlife people who will come into town to work on the oil rig and what that will do to the town’s moral climate. The opposition is led by two rival fishing-boat captains, Dominique Rigaud (Antonio Moreno, a Rudolph Valentino wanna-be in Hollywood in the 1920’s and leading man to Greta Garbo in her second American film, The Temptress) and Teche Bossier (Gilbert Roland, billed third ahead of Duryea and another Valentino wanna-be from 1920’s Hollywood who had made an unexpected comeback as a character actor after John Huston cast him in his 1949 film We Were Strangers). The town’s opposition to the oil men is led by the two captains and Rigaud’s two daughters, Stella (Joanne Dru, whom I’ve never thought much of before but she turns ini a vivid, acid-etched performance that’s arguably the best acting in the film) and Francesca (Marcia Henderson, who unlike Dru is terrible, she gives the sort of performance that makes you wonder, “Whom was she sleeping with to get the role?”).

It turns out that Stella’s determination to drive the oilmen and their heavy equipment out of the community is fueled by her disastrous attempt to relocate out of her community and go to Chicago, where in elliptical Production Code-mandated way enforced on them were able to suggest a great deal. She tells her dad, “You didn’t think I could afford to send all that money home on a secretary’s pay, did you?” Elsewhere she alludes to the promises she heard from a man in Chicago whom Stewart’s character reminds her of, which he was unwilling or perhaps unable to keep. Of course my mind flashed back to the 1931 film The Easiest Way, about a woman who hires herself out as a mistress and uses the money to help fund her poor, innocent family back home, and maybe the reason Stella got screwed in both senses of the term is her sugar daddy a;ready had a wife and was either unable or unwilling (or both) to divorce her to marry Stella. Steve’s and John’s financial backer is former oil wildcatter Kermit MacDonald (Jay C. Flippen), who had already spent $1 million of his company’s money on leasing drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico and needs $2 million more to build the equipment and actually drill for oil. Steve offers him a revolutionary new drill and platform design based on driving pilings to support the rig, and MacDonald reluctantly agrees to back him despite the opposition of jos assostamt amd bisomess manager Rawlings (Henry Morgan, one of my all-time favorite character actors, who would work with Stewart and Mann again as Glenn Miller’s pianist Chummy MacGregor in the 1954 biopic The Glenn Miller Story). Rawlings represents the board of directors of MacDonald’s company, and he’s laboriously researched Steve’s previous record of failure in Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela.

Plenty of other stuff happens, including a big bar fight between John and Philippe Bayard (Robert Monet – presumably no relation, though throughout the film I thought I was hearing his character name as “Felipe”), who was promised to Francesca when they were both children and who naturally resents John’s attentions to “his” girl. There’s also a massive hurricane that precipitates a crisis in which Philippe determines to blow up the oil rig with several sticks of dynamite he’s stolen from the oil crew, only Steve happens to be sleeping in his quarters the night of the hurricane. Stella shows up and demands that he shelter her as well – she and her dad have had an argument – and in the middle of the night Steve catches Philippe, who not only can’t get the fuse to the dynamite lyt but falls to his death in the water below, thereby predictably eliminating John’s rival for Francesca’s affections. Meanwhile Stella confesses to Steve that she’s been attracted to him from the beginning, even though she’s been fighting it because she doesn’t want to be hurt again. John sneaks off the rig to marry Francesca, and in his absence there’s a salt-water blowout on the rig and this threatens the safety and profitability of the whole project. At one point MacDonald announces that the entire project is broke, with just eight days left to get the oil out of the ground before they forfeit their lease. When Steve asks MacDonald why he can’t continue the drilling with his own money, MacDonald says that they have been doing just that for the duration of the project, since the company board authorized him to drill but refused to fund the project and voted to cut their losses and cancel.

This forces Steve to give a speech to the men, who are understandably reluctant to work without pay, to go into the familiar James Stewart “persuasion” mode from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life, promising them a $200 bonus (later raised to $300) when the well comes in and keeping them on the job. Unexpectedly (well, maybe not so unexpectedly if you’ve seen more than three or four movies before in your life), the oil well’s intake valves keep getting clogged with giant shrimp – what Teche Bossier (whose character name seems to defeat the best efforts of the other actors to pronounce it) calls the elusive “golden shrimp” they have been looking for all these years – and the oil well spurts the expected gusher. It turns out the oil drilling is actually going to be good for the fisherfolk as well, and Steve successfully fends off a flotilla of fishing boats led by Dominique (why did the writers ghve the paterfamilias of the family a character name usually associated with women?) to kidnap Dominique’s daughter Francesca away from her lawfully married husband.

As a movie, Thunder Bay is preposterous as all hell, and our attitudes towards offshore oil drilling today are considerably more,shall we say, nuanced than the ones in this film. In fact, they were more nuanced in 1953, too; the year Thunder Bay was made there were Congressional hearings on the safety and security of offshore drilling, which had not been successfully done anywhere in the world until 1946. It seemed odd, to say the least, to watch a movie in which James Stewart, teeth gritted in his usual attempt to look convincing as a tough guy, insists that “oil ls life” and without it the entire economy would grind to a halt in an historical era in which we’re reaping the whirlwind from our two centuries of dependence on fossil fuels. It was an odd movie to watch on the day the California government announced that through executive action by the state’s Air Resources Control Board, it will ban all sales of new gasoline-powered cars in 2035 and thereafter – that’s Californiaa, which brought the freeway to the United States and, more than any other state, birthed the “car culture” that now threatens the very existence of humanity (https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3614147-california-to-approve-2035-ban-on-gas-powered-car-sales/). Thunder Bay is at once an historical curio, an ode to machismo in the face of social change (it’s no accident that the U.S. opposition to acknowledging and doing something to stop human-caused climate change is, I think, bound up with sexism and the sense that “real men” dig their energy out of the ground as coal or drill for it as oil, and only effeminate wimps build windmills or set up solar panels) and a fascinating movie even though it’s pretty much a minor film in the Mann-Stewart canon (they made eight films together, as many as Douglas Sirk and Rock Hudson and two more than John Huston and Humphrey Bogart).