Big Timber

Roddy McDowall stars in this Monogram B film as a preppy kid with a degree in forestry who gets a job at a logging camp where he calls trees by their Latin names, befriends the girl cook (Jeff Donnell), and makes an enemy (Ted Hecht).

Lots of location shooting at Lone Pine, California, the film has a documentary feel as it depicts the various stages of logging big timber, which the loggers call "sticks." One of a series of films that McDowall starred in and produced for Monogram. Co-stars include Lyle Talbot, Gordon Jones, Robert Shayne, Lyn Thomas, and Tom Greenway.

Main problem is that the villain (Hecht) is too obvious. Pretty mild and not the best of the Monogram bunch.

Roddy McDowall comes up to lumbering territory with a college degree and a willingness to work, so of course he is called 'Doc'. His boyish manner and high-falutin' vocabulary does not endear him to most of the other loggers, although it does to the two women around the camp: Jeff Donnell, who runs the diner, and Lynn Roberts, who's the daughter of the company's owner, Robert Shayne.

It's one of several movies that McDowall co-produced at Monogram, and it's a decent little movie, with some dialogue that indicates that writer Warren Wilson took the trouble to talk to actual loggers to find out how they talk. It's too brief for anything more than the basic story of how a kid with book learning finds out how to operate in the real world, but that short length keeps it from getting too big for its britches. With Gordon Jones and Lyle Talbot.