Rent Tulsa (1949)

Bad copy - Tulsa review by LC

The picture quality is very poor and the is equally bad [lots of crackling]. A real shame as it is a nice story.

Expect a poor print. - Tulsa review by Steve

After their success in Smash Up in 1947, Stuart Heisler and Susan Hayward re-teamed for this routine drama about the early days of the oil boom in 1920s Oklahoma. Indeed it gives the impression of being financed by big oil, emphasising how well regulated their industry is. There's even a voice over telling us how green they are!

It's a film about the transformation of farmland and territory occupied by Native Americans into oilfields. It has a startlingly liberal view of their rights and cultural traditions for 1949. Susan Hayward is Cherokee Lansing, whose ancestors occupied the land appropriated by American western migration.

Hayward is the best part of the film, playing a feisty, ambitious landowner who is changed by her good fortune from a small scale cattlewoman into a ruthless capitalist willing to destroy the territory to satisfy her relentless greed. And she will alienate Robert Preston as the studious, ecologically minded geologist who helps her locate the liquid gold in the first place.

Chill Wills provides sardonic commentary and country songs in the style of Hoagy Carmichael. There's a pretty impressive oil fire action climax in Technicolor. It's worth seeing for fans of Hayward's star vitality but otherwise, it's entertainingly bizarre to see the oil industry presented as the virtuous blood of America's future.