The Blazing Forest

The strong performances of Agnes Moorehead as a widowed country land owner and William Demarest as her suitor are the best things in this colorful adventure, which stars John Payne. Some familiar supporting players also help move the movie along, and Susan Morrow plays Miss Moorehead's niece,and Mr Payne's love interest, of course. There is logging scenes, wide open country shots, and as the title implies, a big fire. A fairly good 90 minute 'B' movie action adventure (good drive-in material).

The logging industry gets a look in The Blazing Forest as Agnes Moorehead wants to sell off some timber acreage to give her niece Jo Morrow a start in life. For that reason she hires John Payne and Bill Demarest to bring in the logs.

Demarest contributes the financing from a settlement involving a logging accident, but Payne is the hard driving crew chief of the loggers. He has a need for money and it has to do with a no good reprobate of a brother played by Richard Arlen.

The film is shot in some nice color and the climax involving a forest fire is well staged. This Pine-Thomas B film from Paramount is a credit to all involved in the making.

I don't know why, I always think that this movie is from Lewis R Foster. I don't know why.... Do you? Because, I think, those two directors - Edward Ludwig and Lewis R Foster - were both Paramount Studios and Pine - Thomas productions faithful film makers and if you watch closely their filmographies, they are very similar: westerns, adventures in Technicolor, some film noirs, and the likes of John Payne, Arlene Dahl, Rhonda Feming in the casts.... So this one is a pretty enjoyable programmer, colorful, typicall of those magical fifties in Hollywood, the Hollywood that I really loved; nothing to do with the garbage junk from now. A milestone on timber or forests on fire genre. Amazing, imptressive timber avalanche scenes. At least better than Joseph Kane's SPOILERS OF THE FOREST.

This begins tolerably well since the focus is on the ever-reliable Agnes Moorehead who, needing money to send her niece to the city, decides to sell off 200 acres of timber on her land in Nevada. Moorehead hires John Payne to oversee the work. Yes, he's tough and irascible and hard-driving -- maybe too hard-driving -- but he'll get the job done. Payne hires a ragtag group of timberjacks and the set-up is complete.

Unfortunately, the story at this point drifts into "personal drama." One of the timberjacks knows Payne from "way back" and they obvious have a troubling history and Payne grows to resent the way this timberjack begins to woo Moorehead's niece. None of this is particularly compelling and it leaves a dead spot in the middle of the movie.

Things pick up toward the end with the Big Forest Fire but the movie never quite gets back to the modest but encouraging promise it showed in its opening reel.

Note to fans of John Payne's chest -- and they are legion! -- despite all that hard, sweaty work involved in chopping down trees, he never once takes his shirt off.