Timberjack

Lesser Hoagy Carmichael is better than the top drawer effort of a lot of composers. And Hoagy and the songs he does with and without Vera Hruba Ralston is the best thing about Timberjack. Which as you probably gathered is a story about logging.

Sterling Hayden comes home after the murder of his father and finds that dad's rival David Brian is ruling the roost there and eliminating competition. Originally Hayden was going to sell, but he and his father's foreman Chill Wills decide to stay and fight.

Timber isn't all that Hayden and Brian are scrapping about, they've also got saloon entertainer Vera on their minds and on their libidos. Vera is as wooden as ever, but she's something to look at in a low cut dress.

But the real treat is Hoagy Carmichael, playing the piano and accompanying Ralston and himself. Several songs were written for this film and Carmichael is always a treat.

There is also an adroit performance by Adolphe Menjou as Ralston's father, an attorney with a drinking problem. He's never bad in anything he does even if the film isn't top drawer.

Timberjack also features some good location cinematography, especially in the forest scenes and the logging scenes. Fans of Sterling Hayden and Hoagy Carmichael should like this, most especially the latter.

When he hears of his father's death, Tim Chipman returns to the family logging territory and company to help run it. However he walks back into a losing battle where rival logger Croft Brunner bought up the railway line and refused Chipman to remove his logs on it, forcing them to be moved the longest and costliest way; Brunner then followed this with an offer to buy Chipman out. When Chipman throws the offer back in Brunner's face he ends up dead in suspicious circumstances. With Tim taking over, Brunner hopes to get his offer accepted but Chipman Junior has no intention of giving the company to a man he suspects had a hand in his father's death.

From the opening credits alone (a hilariously corny song with some real gems in the lyrics - "hurry back, hurry back, timberjack") my hopes were not high but I decided, in the name of continuing to put off more important things, to watch it anyway. The film quickly moves into the standard patter for this type of film by running a series of songs, fistfights, romance and melodrama in a cycle that builds to an ending that more or less mixes them all together. This is hardly anything new and is typical of the "entertainment for all" ethos of similar films and it doesn't really do any aspect of it well enough to stand out or make any sort of lasting impression. The plot has an enjoyable tension between Chipman and Brunner and also produces some unspectacular but fun fight scenes; the romance aspect is badly done and reduces parts of the film to the level of poor melodrama. The songs are perky and lively but none of them stuck in my mind longer than the numbers themselves. This mix did enough to entertain me on a basic level, which was all I was really expecting it to do. The most interesting parts for me were the sections that showed the loggers in action – either up the top of a massive tree or floating logs down a river; it was fascinating to see it being done although I wouldn't watch the whole film again for that reason.

The cast is mixed but are part of the all-round entertainment value of the film. Hayden is a good screen presence in even the most average films and so he is here – just sticking out his chest and jaw and letting them do the work. Brian is a reasonable foil and, despite having less of a presence gives almost as good as he gets. Ralston is a bit bland but is good in the musical numbers; Carmichael provides a small bit of comic relief. Noir fans will probably be as surprised as I was to find Elisha Cook Jr in a tiny role hidden behind a wisp of whiskers! Overall this is a fairly average film that doesn't really excel at anything but does the usual mix of action, melodrama and music together to produce an enjoyable film. It isn't anything special but it has just about enough going for it to be a watchable 90 minutes if you are in an undemanding mood.

Vera Ralston in the Dietrich role gets to sing three songs, while Hoagy Carmichael has only one. But this Republic 'A' feature in Trucolor surrounds Mrs Yates with majestic treescapes, vintage locomotives and Sterling Hayden as her leading man flanked by a classy supporting cast; so you get your money's worth.

Ah yes, the Republic treatment for logging movies shot in glorious 'funny looking' Trucolor. One must be very forgiving of Republic constantly making silent movie western melodramas even if they were produced 1955 and in color. It is as if they just kept making the same (sort of) films year in and out until the doors closed in 1959. Vera, the singing wife of studio head Herbert Yates moans a few songs and swings her Hungarian hips about the saloon warbling through her ZsaZsa sounding accent. Somehow, all this is great fun. There is great outdoor scenery, some fantastic railroad location footage and genuinely interesting logging train scenes. Adolph Menjou and Hoagy Carmichael are added to the cast of character actors who look as thought they are there to earn enough to afford a long holiday. Some scenes outside the saloon doors are clearly shot in the corridor at the entrance of a sound stage which all makes TIMBERJACK more quaintly fascinating. As with Johnny Guitar, someone returns to slug it out with someone and fix the bad guys. However we have Vera instead of Joan in this one and a competent serial director. In fact if it was chopped up into 12 minute episodes, that is exactly what TIMBERJACK would be. Very watchable for all the above reasons.

The gear engine and operation of the log train make this movie a must see and have. It provides an examples of life and operations methods of a small logging operation and the underhanded means used to gain control of the RR and timber. The train operations couple the story line and characters. It is also interesting to see that even the hired thugs have some ethics.