Er kam, sah und siegte

Physically ,Alan Ladd was becoming the ghost of himself:His puffed up face had lost most of its charm;it was even worse in "duel of champions" (aka "Horatio E Curazio"),his Italian sword and sandal,the following year.In his final years ,only "the carpetbaggers"-in other respects an average movie- gave him a prophetic role worthy of himself ,an aging actor down on his luck.

This is a western which displays ecological concern : lumberjacks versus farmers (the best scene shows Jeanne Crain taking Ladd to the ghost town :"you would ruin our village too ").The cinematography is fine ,with a good use of the wide screen which enhances the splendid landscapes ,particularly in the scenes of the fire.But the characters are cardboard .For those whose taste runs that way,Frankie Avalon sings two songs ,the first one in a ball and the second after a quarrel with his girlfriend.

A conflict boils over in a small western community between newly arrived loggers and the local ranchers. The lumberjacks led by Jim Hadley (Alan Ladd) are looking for new forest to cut while the ranchers fear the lost of the trees would lead to land degradation.

The most interesting name in the credits is Aaron Spelling. He's the writer and a producer. It's an early movie for him. It's interesting to see his work but it's hard to tell how much of it is on the screen. This is not breaking any new ground and is nothing to write home about. At least, it looks professional. It's old fashion and not that great.

The biggest name in the cast is Alan Ladd but the hottest name may be Frankie Avalon. Frankie sings a couple of songs. Alan is the lead and he gets to wear the one bright red shirt. Well, he does change shirt later on. It is interesting to see real man climbing up the trees and doing old-style real logging. They are really cutting down trees for the movie. Logging is rarely done in movies and it's rarer still when they actually do it for real. That alone is probably worthwhile enough to watch this movie. The plot is another story. The directions are stiff and the pacing is a bit slow.

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.

Kirk Douglas said the worst film he ever did was The Big Trees, in fact he did it for no salary in order to buy his way out of a Warner Brothers contract. Like Guns Of The Timberland, it's a logging story and was a bad step in the career of both stars.

The problem with Alan Ladd, producer and star of Guns Of The Timberland was that there weren't too many steps left for him. Douglas did his timber disaster at the beginning of his career, Ladd towards the end.

Ladd and Gilbert Roland are partners in a timber concern and they've got a contract to cut logs in the territory of Jeanne Crain's ranch. The problem for Jeanne and the rest of the valley is that it will leave no watershed for flooding and as her foreman Lyle Bettger so aptly puts it, her cattle will be eating mud next year.

Of course the sight of Jeanne in a nice tight fitting cowgirl outfit was enough to make Ladd only concerned about one log in his life. But Roland wants to fight and therein lies the conflict.

Like Douglas in The Big Trees, Ladd's conversion to the cause of environmentalism is a bit too unconvincing. And Gilbert Roland going berserk is not the Gilbert Roland I'm used to on the screen. I really hated him in this and Gilbert Roland is one of my favorite players.

Ladd produced as well as starred in Guns Of The Timberland and in order to get a little box office from the young, he had current teen heart throb Frankie Avalon make his screen debut opposite his own daughter Alana. I don't think Frankie got any big hit records out of Guns Of The Timberland, he did sing two forgettable songs here.

But this was not the worst film Alan Ladd made. That would be next year in Duel Of The Champions, but he was definitely tobogganing down career wise in Guns Of The Timberland.

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.