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Saturday, September 03, 2022

"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

13 comments:

  1. I went to my Blogger dashboard this morning looking for an Alan review and I was not disappointed. ;)

    "...he's not picky which, so long as whatever he becomes is Tough and Manly." LOL.

    This sounds like a fun Western! And I do oddly love the disintegrating friendship trope, even if it sounds like this movie doesn't go into a lot of depth with that. I'll have to see about watching this sometime.

    Happy Alan Ladd's birthday! =)

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    1. Eva, lol! Well, I'm glad I did not disappoint you :-)

      It is not a deep or intense western, but it's an enjoyable one.

      Also, wishing me "happy Alan Ladd's birthday" is EXACTLY what I didn't know I needed someone to wish me. That's precisely what I mean by celebrating the birthdays of specific actors/performers/authors whom I love -- it's like happy Their birthday to Me.

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  2. Happy Birthday, Alan Ladd! From this review, this sounds like a movie I would not enjoy. I did not know it was a lumberjack movie! I had a totally different image from the title. I'm fascinated by the difference between book and movie... that's really quite the flip. Love the picture on the website of L'Amour and Ladd chatting together.

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    1. DKoren, I think you wouldn't watch it more than once. Unless you were going through a Gilbert Roland phase again, because he is Mighty Fine here.

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  3. Happy birthday, Alan Ladd!

    Fascinating to hear what a different story the movie tells compared to the book, even though they have the same name. I like what you said, Guns of the Timberlands is "a movie inspired by a book," rather than a movie adaptation per se.

    You're right, the loggers and lumbermen are definitely portrayed as the Bad Guys in the book. I liked how L'Amour made the connection between the head logger guy (what was his name??? the villain?) and other "captains of industry" of that era. The villain believes in enforcing his own will on nature, ruthlessly exploiting it by any means necessary, and steamrolling any actual human beings who happen to be in the way... which was a very common mindset for industrialists of that period. So he makes for a strong, realistic antagonist.

    But the book portraying pretty much every single lumberman working for him as a Bad Guy maybe took things a bit too far, lol. "Lumbermen are naturally bad, cowboys are naturally good" doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Although that was a memorable if chilling scene when the lumberjack fatally wounds the kid in that bar fight. I was sad when he died :(

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    1. Katie, isn't it interesting, how different and yet similar they are?

      I need to reread the book, but I definitely recall that all the loggers were just Bad Guys. Which made me not want to watch this movie for a while because... what if Alan was playing one of the loggers? And then, when I did watch it, and he WAS one of the lead loggers, I was really worried for a bit.

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  4. Thank you for providing the necessary Alan Ladd fix today.

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  5. I can't believe I didn't think of Alan Ladd's birthday Saturday... Shows that I am under considerable stress right now (or rather have been for some time). Stress-related forgetfulness, oh my... I never saw this movie but read about it. It does have relevance especially for Switzerland and the Alps, what with cutting down trees and the dangers associated with it for villages. Right now I try to help a guy on my favorite mountain (where my parents had a holiday home, where I spent a lot of quality time, which makes me very protective). A cable railway company actually wants to cut down lots of trees to build a second cable railway to transport even more tourists up to that relatively small mountain. Now, we know mudslides, but of course, this being Switzerland, we've also got snow and the danger of avalanches (although I'm sure you've got snow and avalanches over there in the US, too ;-). That's why some of the forests on the mountainsides are "protective forests", vital indeed for protecting the farms and villages below. And now they want to cut down a substantial amount of trees (too many) in very sensitive areas of that protective forest. And I'm afraid there is no Alan Ladd nor a happy ending in this real-life timberland story! (BTW the stickers and the surprise arrived, thanks so much!)

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    1. Andrea, I found your comment! As you can see. Blogger sent it directly to the spam file for some reason. But I rescued it.

      I'm sorry you missed his birthday, especially since you've been under so much stress :-( But I'm glad the stickers and little surprise arrived, at least!

      It's such a tricky balance sometimes, doing what would make things better for one group without making things worse for another. Or deciding how much of a trade-off is wise.

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  6. Strange, I left a comment, saw it exactly like the other comments, and now it vanished... Might take some time until it's visible (sort of "check for trolling / foul language etc.)? But it WAS and now isn't anymore...

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    1. Andrea, this IS odd because the email came through to my email just fine. Let me check the comments section online and see if it's randomly stuck somewhere, even though this is a new post and shouldn't ask for my approval for comments....

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  7. Help, what's happening here?? I left a lengthy comment on the relevance of the plot because I am supporting a guy who's fighting a cable railway company which wants to cut down trees in a "protective forest" on a mountainside (which happens to be my favorite mountain), with mudslides and avalanches as a real danger for farms and villages _ and the comment just vanishes?? :-(

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