John Farrow wasn't by any means a great director but he was a very interesting man and he made some very interesting movies. A devoted Catholic and a serious student of Catholicism -- he wrote a book about the history of the Popes -- he was also known as a mean son-of-a-bitch on the set who liked to bully his actors and crew. After shooting wrapped on California (above), star Barbara Stanwyck demanded that he make a public apology to everyone who worked on the production.
On the other hand, she gives a terrific performance in California, way better than the mediocre script deserves, and the film is filled with surprising passages, notably a number of extremely long and complicated scenes played out in single takes with extensive camera moves. None of these, however, is framed or choreographed dynamically, so they don't have the excitement of the long takes found in the films of Welles or Renoir.
California doesn't have a coherent tone in any respect. It has odd, grandiose montages with opera-like chorales playing under them, and conventional Western musical interludes in which characters sing improbably. The gritty, sexy frontier hustler created by Stanwyck seems to be from another movie.
Farrow didn't seem to have a good feel for genre or for script. Plunder Of the Sun (above), filmed entirely, and very evocatively, on location in Mexico has one of the most stylish and promising film noir openings ever concocted, but the story just dribbles away, turns into a conventional treasure-quest adventure. Again, a superb central performance -- this time by Glenn Ford, tense with understated despair -- is wasted.
Still, there's usually something in a John Farrow movie worth paying close attention to -- some flight of inspiration that redeems the clunkiest programmer. He had a kind of ambition, a kind of vision, but it seems to have come to him in fits and starts. Maybe the frustration of that was the source of his on-set rages.