Upton Sinclair Movies

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson steps outside his contemporary world of dysfunctional Angelenos to explore a very different dysfunctional man -- an oil pioneer whose trailblazing spirit is equaled only by his murderous ambition. There Will Be Blood is Anderson's loose adaptation of the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair, and it focuses its attentions on Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a miner who happens upon black gold during a disastrous excavation that ends in a broken leg. Pulling himself up from the bowels of the earth, both literally and metaphorically, Plainview embarks on a systematic and steadfast approach to mastering the oil business. Using plain-spoken and straightforward language, Plainview launches a campaign to convince small-town property owners they should let him drill their land. Without him, they won't have the equipment to access the profit beneath their feet. He builds an empire this way -- and gradually becomes obsessed with the intrinsic value of power, growing increasingly irascible and paranoid in the process. Plainview meets his match in Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a teenage preacher in the small California town of Little Boston, whose brother tipped Plainview off to the town's plentiful supply of untapped oil. To fully reap the benefits of the land, Plainview must suffer the opposing whims of this "prophet," whose legitimacy is questionable at best. And it's unclear if either man is prepared to pay the humiliating price the other wants to exact. There Will Be Blood features an anachronistic soundtrack by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, and it was shot in the same town where the James Dean epic Giant was filmed. ~ Derek Armstrong, Rovi

In 1931, famed Soviet filmmaker Sergei M. Eisenstein travelled to the Western Hemisphere to make his first non-Russian film, Que Viva Mexico, a project financed by muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair. The project withered and died when Sinclair became impatient with Eisenstein's meticulous shooting methods, whereupon Eisenstein returned to Russia and Sinclair assembled the completed footage into a quasi-documentary, Thunder Over Mexico. Distributors were not forthcoming for this cobbled-together film, which was then consigned to oblivion until 56 minutes' worth of Sinclair's cut were reassembled in 1941 as Time in the Sun. Beautifully photographed, the film as it stood was little more than a glorified travelogue, and would probably have disappeared from sight had not the strength of Eisenstein's reputation brought in an audience of wine-and-cheese cinema enthusiasts, who alternately applauded the film and condemned the distributors for crassly commercializing the director's original vision. As for Eisenstein himself, he was still angered over promises broken by Upton Sinclair, and wouldn't have promoted Time in the Sun even if Stalin had allowed him to do so. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi