Oil Slick

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

OKLAHOMA CRUDE

Directed by STANLEY KRAMER Screenplay by MARC NORMAN

Oklahoma Crude is a dry hole. Handsomely shot, with a textbookish attention to period details, it is the story of a foulmouthed female wildcatter (Faye Dunaway). Against the depredations of the big oil interests, she defends a well that she is convinced is worth a fortune. In this she is aided by a tough drifter (George C. Scott) and her gentle father (John Mills), and besieged by the senior tough on the gang trying to overrun her claim (Jack Palance).

Neither suspenseful nor novel enough in its action sequences to make it as an adventure film, Crude is also not funny enough to make it as a comedy. Director Kramer and Writer Norman attempt to jerk it to life with sadism (Dunaway beaten almost to death by Palance's mob), vulgarity (Scott urinating on Palance's boots during one of their confrontations) and an excess of bawdy language. But the prissy and self-consciously liberal Kramer seems, in this attempt at lustiness, rather like a college chaplain deliberately swearing in order to seem like one of the boys; you don't believe what you're hearing, and you end up feeling rather sorry about his sellout.

Even walking through a standardized part, Scott has enough natural presence to compel an audience's attention, and it is always pleasant to see Palance doing his thing as an oily heavy, though no one will ever accuse him of being an actor who has grown with the years. Dunaway, however, is inadequate, and Mills is stray-sheepish. In the end, one is reduced to admiring the scenery while puzzling over the disparity between the film's slick physical production and smoothed-down dramatic style, and the historical moment it purports to examine: a time that was down and dirty and -- well, crude. qedRichard Schickel

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