BOOM TOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 113, 22 August 1941, Page 16

BOOM TOWN

(MGM:)

N seeing Boom Town it strikes you (or perhaps I’d better stick to the first person singular) that providing five maior stars for the picture

-Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert, Hedy LaMarr, and Frank Morgan — put such a strain on M.G.M.’s budget that they couldn’t afford to pay for a story, so just made one up as they went along. M:G.M. is such a wealthy company that that can’t, of course, be true, but that’s how it strikes you (or only me?) It also strikes me as rather amusing that M-G-M (at that time a major defendant itself in an anti-trust suit involving the cinema industry) should have seized on Boom Town as a chance to make a covert attack on the Sherman

Anti-Trust Act by setting up Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, two oil magnates, as noble examples of that rugged individualism which M-G-M apparently thinks all good Americans should venerate. Prosecuted under the Sherman Act for trying to corner the oil industry, Gable is whitewashed by his former bitter rival, Tracy; but the latter’s eloquent plea from the witness box about America’s debt to men of Gable’s stamp might have impressed me more if I hadn’t had a mental " flashback " to the opening scenes of the picture and realised just what this particular variety of rugged individualism has involved. It has involved, in the first place, highway robbery and the theft of equipment by the two "heroes" in order to develop an oil well. It has involved a prolonged feud between the two which originates from a cause so futile that; by the time it is half over, the audience, if not the principals, has almost forgotten what started it. What starts it, in actual fact, is the rugged individualism of Gable’s love-life. Not content with having walked off with Tracy’s girl (Miss Colbert) and married her, Gable has to go and neglect the poor girl, thereby rousing all the quixotic qualities of Tracy’s unrequited passion. In a mood of embittered devotion he gets busy making fortunes in oil wells and losing them, with Gable going up and down at the other end of the see-saw. From the derricks and mud of the boom towns, the rivals eventually move to the plush carpets and high finance of Wall Street, where the monotonous game continues until Tracy gets a chance to prove what a loyal friend he really is. The only thing that kept even a spark of interest in the picture alive in me was the prospect of seeing Hedy LaMarr (as advertised). But her eventual appearance as a Wall Street siren who again arouses Gable’s rugged individualism and Tracy’s protective instincts is as disappointing as almost everything else in the film. Gable’s performance as the loudmouthed go-getter may please his staunchest admirers, but I found him myself both boorish and boring. And Tracy’s portrayal of square-jawed, self- . sacrificing friendship has become too familiar to be very exciting. Boom Town, in brief, is all noise and hardly any substance.