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.
Review of Timberjack
