Collines brûlantes

Louis L'Amour novels make good reading and fine western cinema and The Burning Hills is no exception. Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood who were a screen team and studio public relations created off screen romance star in this film which has Tab Hunter on the run and Natalie Wood helping him.

Hunter's got plenty of reason to run, his brother was killed and he shoots Ray Teal who is the overlord of the local Ponderosa. The wounded Teal who really doesn't have title to a lot of the land he runs roughshod over and he sends his rotten son Skip Homeier and foreman Claude Akins with some of his riders after him. At no time are they a legally constituted posse and Homeier and Akins can't stand each other and have many issues between them.

Skip Homeier ever since he shot Gregory Peck in the back in The Gunfighter made a good career of playing some really nasty punk villains and he's certainly at his nastiest here. Eduard Franz has a strange and interesting part also as a mixed race tracker that Akins insists on having in the posse. He's a person of interesting and shifting loyalties.

Wood and Hunter were certainly an attractive pair and the teens and Tweens in the audience got some thrills as Hunter had to appear topless as Wood nursed him with his injuries. The Burning Hills has a lot of tension in it as the posse closes in and Hunter is a pretty resourceful man. Wood has a few tricks of her own to baffle the posse and not all of them involve sex.

The Burning Hills is a nicely constructed western that I'm sure Louis L'Amour took some pride in the screen version of his work.