Thunder Bay

Jimmy Has Green Eyes

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Kino Blu-ray.)

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As in quite a few of Anthony Mann's pictures, Thunder Bay [1953] involves building a basis for new opportunity and wealth. Here, Jimmy Stewart and Dan Duryea have fixed upon a Louisiana location where oil's projected for the construction of a rig and for their — and the town's — enrichment. It's 1946, Thunder Bay by name, Thunder Bay by Stewart's dynamiting the waters and inadvertently killing off a native economic staple of the town in the native shrimp population.

Every fiction involving a boat introduces pain-in-the-ass malfunctioning, the heroes' skill at jerry-rigging a fix, and at least two cantina fights. Often in the American cinema an observer as Melville's figures, rather the point-of-view comes straight from those whom immediately will suffer from the market indignities.

When they find the oil the white-bearded bastard turns his daughter over to Dan Duryea in a suit from a Burberry outlet-store.

Thunder Bay through its exaggerated tone and Stewart's dirty white fedora subverts the American ideal of economic progress through sheer industriousness. Stewart wins Joanne Dru before driving off in the end credits.

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Pieces on Anthony Mann at Cinemasparagus:

T-Men [1947]

Corkscrew Alley / Raw Deal [1948]

Bend of the River [1952]

Thunder Bay [1953]


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