Tulsa

'Smart, ambitious and hard as a driller's fist.' Add a confident sexuality and ferocity of spirit, and Cherokee Lansing is well in the mainstream of Susan Hayward heroines. One-quarter Indian, Cherokee begins the film seeking revenge on the oil tycoon responsible for her father's death. But along the way she's seduced by the establishment, and becomes Cherry, heedless socialite. Only after ex-boyfriend Armendariz is declared insane for refusing to have more oil wells drilled on his land does our heroine find moral redemption, during a fiery climax. As scripted, this is an unusually fretful gloss on the American Dream. But it takes a worried man to sing a worried song, and Heisler clearly didn't have a worry in the world.