Timberland guns

Another movie that I had on my DVR for a little while was Guns of the Timberland. TCM ran it I think in July, and then ran it again in August for Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars. But I had enough other stuff to post about that I didn't get around to posting about it then. Besides, I noticed that it was coming up again in September, for a daytime of movies starring Alan Ladd. That showing is coming up tomorrow, September 3, at 1:00 PM.

Alan Ladd plays Jim Hadley, and as the movie opens, he and a bunch of other men are on a seeming freight train, no passenger cars, heading to parts unknown. Or, more specifically, a place called Deep Well. Ladd and his business partner, Monty Welker (Gilbert Roland), have a contract from the government to do a lot of logging in the area because the train line that's getting built needs more wood for rail ties. Ladd is bringing a bunch of men with him, and a bunch of money to provision the men, which seems like it should be a good thing for the townsfolk. Yet all of them seem unhappy when Jim reveals that they're loggers.

The deeper reasoning behind their antipathy is revealed by Laura Riley (Jeanne Crain). She owns a ranch and a bunch of horses that Jim is hoping to rent for his men. But when she finds out that he's a logger, she's fearful, for an understandable enough reason. Her, and everybody else's cattle, need land to graze on, and that land needs topsoil to grow the grass. The trees up in the mountains lock in that topsoil, and if somebody clear-cuts the trees, which is pretty much what Jim is going to do, the ranchers think the land below will become much less nutrient-rich.

Jim takes his men up in to the forest, which is in part an excuse for the moviemakers to show scenery, although this movie was made in 1960. If this were one of the early Technicolor forestry movies from the late 1930s, the scenery might have worked better here. In any case, the weekend comes, and the men want to go back into town to blow off some steam, or at least to have a few drinks. They get to the saloon while the townsfolk are holding a dance in a different building, which is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to show off its new star, Frankie Avalon, singing a very out of place song. Avalon plays Bert Harvey, one of Riley's ranch hands, but winds up having a more substantial role.

The townsfolk learn of the loggers' entry into town, which gives them an idea to come up with some way to try to delay the loggers' progress. They eventually do this by dynamiting the access road back to where the loggers are working. They can walk back, but getting the logs out of the forest is going to be tough. There's another approach, but it goes over the Riley spread.

So the rest of the movie plays out like the sort of western that saw the relatively common theme of the rancher who wanted an open range versus the homesteade who wanted to fence in the land, only with ranchers versus loggers this time. Guns of the Timberland is one of the many movies where it's again easy enough to see why people were interested in the source material (a Louis L'Amour novel) that would give them the chance to film in some very pretty locations. But the plot winds up being a fairly tepid affair and slow going despite the film's putative action and shortish running time of only 91 minutes.

Ultimately to me, Guns of the Timberland felt more like the sort of thing that would in later years be made as a TV movie of the week.