"Guns of the Timberland" (1960)

It's Alan Ladd's birthday today, and you know I usually mark that occasion by reviewing a movie of his :-)  This year is no different!

Guns of the Timberland (1960) is based on the Louis L'Amour book Guns of the Timberlands (which I reviewed here).  Well, sort of.  The book is about a guy who owns a lot of land with good timber on it, and someone is trying to cut down his trees without his permission, which leads to a lot of trouble.  The movie is about a guy who has a contract and government permission to cut down trees on a specific mountainside for the railroads, but people in the area don't want him to because then the mountain will erode and ruin their farms and ranches.

It's like the same story, but flipped.  And with a different point.  The point of the book was that personal rights should not be impinged on by the greedy and powerful.  The point of the movie is that progress should find a way to go forward without hurting people in the process.  The cool thing is, both stories are quite strong and interesting!  But it's not like a movie adaptation of a book so much as a movie inspired by a book.

What's especially interesting about this is that Louis L'Amour, actually hung out on the set of the film, where he made friends with Alan Ladd!  (Check out the photo of them together here on the L'Amour website.)  In fact, L'Amour later dedicated his book The Broken Gun to Alan Ladd and his best friend William Bendix.  (My review of that one is here.)  So, I guess L'Amour was okay with the changes made to his story for the movie.  Maybe he was used to that by then.

Anyway, the movie is about two friends, Jim Hadley (Alan Ladd) and Monty Walker (Gilbert Roland) who bring a team of loggers to a small town called Deep Well.  They have a contract to cut timber to make into railroad ties for the railroad that's coming through the area.  They plan to clear-cut a specific mountainside and then move on.

They bring a jolly crew of lumberjacks to town for that purpose, played by the likes of Noah Beery, Jr. and Johnny Seven.  They're loud and rowdy, but they're mostly very nice guys here to do their job.

Trouble is, the people of Deep Well are Greatly Displeased by this idea.  They know from past experience (via a nearby town that's now a ghost town) that clear-cutting a mountainside like that will bury their ranches and farms in the valley with mud the next spring and ruin them.  They do everything they can to undermine the loggers, from sabotage to delaying tactics to outright violence.

Now, you and I know that the sensible thing to do here would be to only cut down SOME of those trees.  There's plenty of timber on the other side of the valley too, so surely they could take some trees from one side and some from the other, and that would leave enough trees still standing to keep the mountainside from washing away.  But nobody suggests that in the movie.  It's cut all or cut none, as far as everyone's concerned.

Right in the middle of this conflict are two ranchfolk: Bert Harvey (Frankie Avalon) and Laura Riley (Jeanne Crain).  Bert is a young kid who wants to be either a cowhand or a lumberjack, he's not picky which, so long as whatever he becomes is Tough and Manly.  He works for Laura Riley on her farm, which is right below where the loggers plan to cut timber.  Bert has an unfortunate habit of breaking into song now and then, since he's played by a teen heart throb of a pop star.  The first time I watched this, I sat through his songs, but the second time, I just fast-forwarded them because, well, I'm not here for Frankie Avalon. 

Laura Riley is very Anti-Logger, except when it comes to Jim Hadley, when she's extremely Anti-Logger.  Probably because she can't stand the fact that he's actually a nice guy, and he's always polite and well-behaved around her, which clearly any woman would hate.  

When they first met, before she knew Jim was an Evil Logger, she took quite a shine to him.  Which is probably why she spits fire at him for the bulk of the movie.  I bet she feels betrayed by him turning out to be someone she feels she shouldn't like so much.  So she makes a point of being ornery and mean and taking every opportunity to show Jim that she'd much rather hang out with her foreman, Clay Bell (Lyle Bettger), who is kind of snappish and quick-tempered, but not such a bad guy himself.

If you feel you're about to faint of shock from learning that Lyle Bettger is playing a non-villainous character in this, you're not alone.  I nearly did myself.  He's actually not a bad dude.  Nobody in this movie is a Bad Guy!  They're just antagonistic toward each other because they have opposite needs and wants and desires.  Which is probably why I like the movie, because everyone is actually quite nice.

Well, mostly.  They do mean stuff sometimes.  Clay Bell dynamites the road the loggers need to use so they have to go really far around to get to the timber.  And then Jim Hadley starts to think the townsfolk might be right and they shouldn't cut ALL the trees down, which makes his partner Monty Walker get Very Angry and go do some sabotaging of his own, which somewhat accidentally leads to young Bert Harvey getting into Mortal Danger.  And Monty almost comes to a rather horrifying end, and does end up dying, which makes me sad.

I really wish they had delved more into the disintegrating friendship between Jim and Monty.  They're jolly pals at the beginning, a good team who work and play and brawl well alongside each other.  And then, they start disagreeing, and the next thing you know, people are blowing trees up and yelling insults and having huge fights and considering axing each other.  It could have had a lot of juicy character development in there, but it didn't, and that's a bit disappointing.

In the end, the town does not get buried in mud.  In fact, the loggers and the townsfolk work together to stop a big forest fire, and they all get to be good friends after all.  (Any wonder why I like this movie?)

The loggers leave... but someone jumps on the train with them at the last minute, and it's not Bert Harvey, it's Laura Riley, who has decided loggers aren't detestable after all.  Or, at least, Jim Hadley isn't.

And we all go merrily off to cut timber on some other mountain and ruin someone else's town, or something.  But at least we saved the ranches and farms around Deep Well.  Yay!

Also, who knew Lyle Bettger had such a nice smile?  I didn't!

Is this movie family friendly?  Yup, though there's a scene with people trapped in a burning forest that is pretty intense and might scare young kids.  There are some fist fights and shooting incidents, too.

There aren't many westerns about loggers (I can only think of one other that even includes them: North to Alaska [1960]), which is weird because logging was such a huge part of western expansion.  I'm really glad this movie exists to fill that gap a little.  And most of the loggers in this are jolly fellows, singing on their way to work and going about their business with enthusiasm mixed with the necessary caution such dangerous business requires.  

One other interesting note: the screenplay was co-written by Aaron Spelling, who also produced it.

Happy birthday, Alan Ladd!  <3