Flowing Gold

On the run after killing a man in self-defense, John Alexander hires on for the anonymity and toil of an oil field roughneck. But the law is closing in on him. Again cast as a troubled outsider, john Garfield portrays Alexander in a drama that offers powerful depictions of the boot-sucking quagmire of boomtown streets, the desperation of men who hire themselves as taxis to piggyback fares through the mire, the dangers of working the rigs, the determination of workers to tap the black gold lying beneath the arid ground and the race to find it before the company's land lease expires. Pat O'Brien, delivering another of his effective man-in-charge performances, is the tenacious dri11-crew foreman. Frances Farmer plays the woman who finds her affections shifting from the foreman to the handsome roughneck. Some of Farmer's experiences in Flowing Gold were later dramatized in the biopic Frances, starring Jessica Lange.

• adventure
• drama