Les corsaires de la terre

This is the original custom combining movie, made not long after the original Massey-Harris Harvest Brigade of World War II, back when men were men and work was work and movies were movies. Every custom combining movie should have a fire or a tornado, and this one has a fire. It's rather realistic. Alan Ladd is famous for Shane. Robert Preston is famous for The Music Man and has had a lot of roles. This movie proves that a good man doesn't need an extravagant, spoiled, lazy, conniving woman. The climax of Wild Harvest is releasing a combine off the back of a speeding truck. Massey-Harris collectors have a magazine called Wild Harvest.

Alan Ladd and his pals may not know farming, but they do know machinery. So the numbers from buying six combine harvesters and following the ripening wheat from Texas to the Canadian border seems likely to make this bunch of roughnecks a good chunk of money.... even after Ladd pays off the balance. But Will Wright has his own harvesters and crews, and he's willing to undercut Ladd's prices, bad-mouth him, and occasionally stick an iron bar or two in the gears. But is he any worse than farmgirl Dorothy Lamour? She makes a play for Ladd, but when he's all business on the job, she marries Robert Preston. And she has a scheme to make some extra money.

Director Tay Garnett has a fine cast, with Lloyd Nolan and Griff Barnett, but this transposition of itinerant railroad workers and/or oil wildcatters looks a bit played out. Happily, he has DP John Seitz in charge of the cameras. Seitz had been doing this since the 1910s, and seems to have been Ladd's favorite cameraman. He was lighting cameraman on Ladd's breakout in THIS GUN FOR HIRE, and his last time in the position was on another Ladd vehicle in 1960. Then he retired. He died in 1979 at the age of 86.

I believe, if you check,you will find that there were location shots done in Washington state also, somewhere around Moses Lake area. Lamour refused to do location shots so every time you see her from a distance or from the back it is her stand-in, Jo Chilcott (sp.). If I remember correctly my dad said that Ladd, Nolan and Preston were all there on location.

For years my dad carried a newspaper clipping about the location filming and Jo,because they were thinking about getting married at the time. I saw the clipping several times because Jo was a Washington native and they were proud that one of their own was involved in the film.

Good adventure drama from Paramount Pictures with the bulk of its stars: Alan Ladd, Robert Preston, Lloyd Nolan, and a movie that can be seen as a western where wheat replaces cattle, but without guns. In this kind of story, farmers and harvests, you can think of later movies such as THE RIVER, starring Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek, Terence Malick and his DAYS OF HEAVEN, or Richard Pearce's COUNTRY, all made in the late seventies or early eighties. But this one, made by Tay Garnett, a director with much of John Ford's DNA, is not an intimate movie, or social oriented one either, as for instance COUNTRY was. No, it remains rough, a men's story mainly, it could have taken place in Texas, among the oil fields, in a manhood atmosphere. It's not GRAPES OF WRATH either, though the settings look like the same. It is above all a virile story of men in harvest business. To summarize Tay Garnett gives here his pure trade mark, such a this terrific fist fight scene; the kind of sequence in many Garnett's films. But this one is a pure masterpiece. In a John Ford's film, there would have been John Wayne, Victor mcLaglen and Ward Bond or Harry Carey Jr.

Wild Harvest was the first movie made to portray the life of a transient harvester. However, I felt the inclusion of the "highgrading" issues and the fights between farmers and their harvesting crews, does go to extreme. The footage of the Massey-Harris 21A's is very nice. I also liked the opening footage of the varied combines/harvesting scenes, which also included the original Massey-Harris 21.

Hooray for the comment on the Wild Harvest newsletter! I'm the one who initially launched the newsletter, but am no longer connected with it.

This is one movie that needs to be re-released on both DVD and VHS! There are many farmers and custom harvesters among us who still want to either see this for the first time, or simply see it again after such a long time.