Wonderfully offbeat film!

Sick Product of a Sick System

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This adequate programmer about the logging industry focuses on three pals fighting against the efforts to sabotage the business. Leo Carrillo, Andy Devine and a young Dan Dailey are each completely different, but are reunited when Dailey arrives just as foreman Devine has fired a group of men not pulling their weight. They vow revenge, seemingly already having caused trouble, and it's up to the trio to prevent further disaster when one of their logging truck drivers is killed after being forced over a huge embankment. While the scenes of the trucks going off the road are brutal, the dark photography that occurs during those scenes lessens the impact. The usually over bombastic Devine softens his tones a couple of times to express somber emotions, and that's a refreshing change. But the names of the three men: Arizona, Kansaa and Quebec, gives a gimmicky feeling to the script, and the clichés just overpower the film as a whole. The visual of the tiny toy dog popping out of his house when called was cute but pointless. I've seen better movies on this industry that profiled the cinematic aspects of the outdoors and rustic setting so much better.As far as the cast, they're all commanding, although heroine Marjorie Lord with a Spanish accident seems a bit bizarre. A cat fight between her and crooked secretary Jean Phillips never pulls the intended heat, and other than the tragic deaths, the intrigue surrounding the attempts to destroy the company never fully grabbed me as all that interesting or suspenseful. A trailer that accompanied the print I saw of this focused mostly on Dailey, obviously made for a later re-release when he became a star in musicals.