Deep Valley

Another of the movies that I recently watched off the DVR thanks to its being on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Deep Valley.

Ida Lupino, really much too old for the part, plays Libby Saul. She's the adult daughter living on an isolated northern California farm together with her parents Cliff (Henry Hull) and Ellie (Fay Bainter). Ellie has some sort of illness which has her spending a lot of time in bed upstairs, while Libby's problem is that she stutters, which really ticks off Dad. Well, that, and the fact that she doesn't seem to want to do her share of the work around the house. Instead, she'd rather go off to an abandoned cabin in the forest which borders on their farm.

It's on one of those sojourns to the cabin that she sees something the presumably hasn't seen before owing to her family's isolation and her speech impediment. It's a prison work gang building a new road along the coast down the hill from the cabin. And these being prisoners and with the hot weather, a lot of them have stripped down to the waist and aren't wearing shirts. No wonder Libby's heart is set all aflutter despite her not having much prospects for a man.

The head of the work gang, Jeff Barker (Wayne Morris), shows up at the house one night, to talk about purchasing some land for the road project, and is immediately taken with Libby, not yet knowing about her speech problem, and certainly not knowing she's seen all those prisoners. Later that night, a fierce storm comes through, shaking the Sauls' house violently, and causing a landslide on the hill where they're building the road.

The landslide killed several prisoners and left a couple missing and presumed dead, including Barry Burnette (Dane Clark). He had gotten in trouble with the guards and put in the tool shed as a sort of makeshift sweatbox, and when the landslide came, it knocked over the shed. The logical thought might be that he died in the landslide too, except that his dead body is not found in the shed, so Barker thinks Burnette has escaped, and sure enough he has.

As you can probably guess, Barry makes his way through the woods, and finding that abandoned cabin, thinks that's not a bad place to stop for a bit while he tries to plan his next movie to figure out how to escape. You can also probably guess that Libby is going to go back there and find Barry. And then, on top of all that, you can fairly easily figure out that naïve Libby is going to fall in love with Barry, and the feeling will be mutual. Libby hasn't had a man, and here's Barry, fit from all that work and good enough looking. Barry hasn't had a woman in years, being a 10-year manslaughter sentence, and he wants Libby, filling her head with all sorts of nonsense of how they're going to live together in the big city, never mind from films like Dust Be My Destiny that fugitives are always going to feel themselves the prey.

So with all that story in mind, it's not surprising that there isn't much new in Deep Valley. There are shades of lots of other movies here, some earlier, like the aforementioned Dust Be My Destiny and also High Sierra, and some later, like Johnny Belinda (although of course here Barry has no intention of committing rape). The actors do the best they can with the material, and the acting isn't bad at all. But the material is trite and, in this case, also has any number of plot holes. There was also the extremely obvious rear-projection photography in the climax. And the Production Code means there's only one possible ending.

Overall, however, Deep Valley is definitely woth a watch the next time it shows up on TCM. I'm not certain I'd pay standalone DVD prices for it, but some people probably would.