Er kam, sah und siegte

I wanted to like this movie, but it was really a total mess. Alan Ladd had sadly lost his looks. He looked very tired, puffy, bloated, stiff and wooden. Seemed like he was just going through the motions. Frankie Avalon had his collar up and his hair in an Elvis cut without the sideburns. He looked like he belonged in a 1950s teenager rebelling flick and not a western. His acting was pleasant, but mediocre at best..Alana Ladd, Alan's daughter, at seventeen was cute enough to be Avalon's love interest, but the poor girl was not much of an actress and by twenty two her acting career was over. Only thing of any interest was the final show down between Ladd and Gilbert Roland using rifles.

Alan Ladd and Gilbert Roland are partners in cutting down some trees. The community of ranchers next to the stand opposes them, led by Jeanne Crain. Over the hill is another ranching community, ruined when clear-cutting produced a torrent of mud that ruined the grazing grounds.

Stories about logging, when they were not concentrating on the burly loggers, often had a strain of ecological anxiety, all the way back to Nell Shipman. Certainly, no one likes a forest fire. Gilbert Roland is a lot of fun as always, and Miss Crain does an honest job. 20-year-old Frankie Avalon has a role that was written for someone 14. The real problem with the movie is Ladd. He's paunchy, hand spends most of the movie with a meaningless smile on his face and his eyes shut. Director Robert Webb has cameraman John Seitz shoot handsomely, but the star is at his worst. With Noah Beery Jr. And Regis Toomey.

After watching yet another tinny product come off the Alan Ladd Western assembly line, accompanied by this factory's usual flaccid acting and writing and irrelevantly pretty cinematography, it's fair to ask if, aside from "Shane" or, if you're generous, "Badlanders", did this guy ever make a decent movie in this great genre? Cool flannel shirts, though. Wonder if Ladd got to keep 'em? Probably, since he was the co producer of this turkey, (along with future and eternal schlockmeister, Aaron Spelling). C minus.

PS...Moss Grimmick (i.e. George Selk) with what looks to be a tomato and lettuce sandwich? Works for me.

Alan Ladd is cast as Jim Hadley, who, with his crew of lumberjacks, is looking for a new forest to cut... But Hadley and crew soon find that they will have to fight for their next load of wood...

The residents of the valley town of Deep Wells, led by Laura Riley (Jeanne Crain), realize that without the natural protection provided by the surrounding woodlands, their ranches and homes would be buried by mudslides during the first heavy rains...

The interests of the inhabitants to drive out the intruders start with their refusal to give horses or supplies of any kind, and increases to blow out the logging road...

Although the obligatory spark of romance lights up between Hadley and Riley (as the lady rancher is called), the two remain at cross purposes. The efforts of the townspeople to force the intruders to move on begin with denials of horses and supplies and escalate to the dynamiting of the logging road...

Hadley, bracing himself for a fight, still insists on legal means to reach the lumber. But his hotheaded partner, Monty (Gilber Roland) favors a more direct approach...

The fast friendship between the two loggers is strained to the breaking point when Monty decides to open the road by the method that closed it: dynamite...

The film, set against some spectacular scenery, and climaxed by a forest fire, remains a routine and simple outdoor melodrama... Frankie Avalon's musical numbers are among the more ludicrous moments in an already sorry film... As Avalon's love interest, Alana Ladd is cute but makes no great impression as an actress...

Of the five reviews contributed here for GUNS OF THE TIMBERLAND so far, four are quite negative, so today, on the date of Alan Ladd's centennial, please allow me to balance out the critical consensus. I'm a big fan of Ladd and a huge fan of westerns (I've reviewed a few dozen on IMDb) and I had a good time with this film, which I watched on TCM when it aired last week. Sure, Ladd was old and tired and near the end of his career, but he still has that movie star quality that put him at the top of the box office chart so consistently in the 1940s and early '50s. There's a sense of sincerity and conviction he brings to every role he played. We believe him. Here he plays the fair-minded boss of a logging crew at odds with neighboring ranchers in timber country. The ranchers have powerful arguments against logging and one can't help but agree with them. One of the ranchers, a pretty but tough lady named Laura Riley (well played by Jeanne Crain), even gives Ladd a tour of a ghost town that was made uninhabitable by flooding after logging on adjacent hills led to erosion and mud slides. Ladd listens to the arguments and eventually gets into a confrontation with his stubborn partner, Monty, played by Gilbert Roland, leading to an action-packed forest fire climax.

The plot moves well, is reasonably suspenseful, and boasts lots of action. We see plenty of train action, trees falling, and the dynamiting of a mountain pass at one point, all enhanced by extensive location shooting. The townsfolk present a united front against the loggers, leading to a big brawl in town in one sequence where the loggers have come on a Saturday night to take over the saloon. One of the ranchers is played by Lyle Bettger, who usually played particularly vicious heavies in westerns throughout the 1950s. (He's Ike Clanton in GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL.) He masterminds a couple of devious maneuvers against the loggers here, but he's actually, overall, a good guy, which is quite surprising.

Ladd would have turned 100 today (September 3, 2013), but died 50 years ago, in January 1964, from a lethal (and probably accidental) combination of alcohol and pills. He had a good run in Hollywood for 20 years and made far more films I like than films I didn't. He was a quintessential Hollywood movie star, studio-created but fan-supported. He may not have had much range, but was very dependable within his range and always gave the fans what they wanted.