by Stephen Vagg
Timber-sploitation from 1937
Following on from our piece on Lovers and Luggers, we thought it was time to revisit an Australian film made by the same team immediately beforehand: Tall Timbers.
If Lovers and Luggers falls into the category of pearl-sploitation, Tall Timbers is very much timber-sploitation. That was a real sub-genre at the time, by the way, although filmmakers didn’t use that word – they were more commonly described as “timber” or “lumberjack” movies, tales centred around the picturesque timber industry, featuring tough heroes climbing up and knocking down trees. The best-known example was Come and Get it (1936) from Howard Hawks and William Wyler – other examples include God’s Country and the Woman (1916/1937), The Drifter (1930) and Rough Romance (1930). There had been an Australian timber film too, Tall Timber (1926), as well as local documentaries like Among the Hardwoods, The Timber Getters and Timber Town.
Tall Timbers was from Cinesound Productions, the leading film studio in Australia in the 1930s, run by producer-director Ken G. Hall. In the early 1930s, Hall directed five feature films in a row, four of them hits, before he went to Hollywood to buy some fancy equipment and sign new talent, after which he returned home and made three more movies, all successful. Tall Timbers was to be Hall’s ninth feature and with it, he was determined to try something different… to a point.
Hall wanted to do some timber-sploitation, in part because he was attracted by the idea of ending a film with a timber drive; also, after a lot of comedies, we get the impression that he was keen to do something with mostly action.
The original plan was to film William Hatfield’s novel Big Timber, but for whatever reason, this fell over, and Hall decided to do an original story by famed cameraman Frank Hurley, which was adapted into a script by Cinesound’s in-house writer Frank Harvey.
Well, it was ostensibly an original story but the narrative seemed to owe more than a little to The Squatter’s Daughter, a 1907 stage play by Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan that had been a huge hit back in the day; Bailey and Duggan ripped it off themselves in their plays The Man from Outback (1910) and The Native Son (1913), and the play was filmed in 1910 and 1933, the latter version directed by Ken G Hall – so, he would’ve been very familiar with it.
Indeed, we wonder if Hall had worked extensively on the original story for Tall Timbers with Hurley (a whole script was written) – but that’s speculation, and Hurley was a writer in his own right.
The hero of Tall Timbers is Jim Thornton (played in the film by Frank Leighton), a forestry school graduate who rescues a young woman, Joan (Shirley Ann Richards), out of the ocean while lifesaving at the beach. Jim is looking for work in the timber industry, and lucky him, Joan turns out to be the adoptive daughter of timber baron Stephen Burbridge (Harvey Adams) (this life-saving-rescue coincidence is the weakest part of the story and was probably put in there to justify the surf beach sequence).
Jim goes to work for Burbridge and discovers that one of the latter’s employees, Darley (Frank Harvey), is in cahoots with Burbridge’s rivals, Rich (Ron Whelan) and Blake (Campbell Copelin) – even though Blake is engaged to Joan, while also sleeping with Darley’s sister Claire (Aileen Britton) on the side.
Matters come to a head during a big timber drive needed to secure an important contract. Darley attempts to sabotage the drive, Jim turns out to be Burbridge’s long-lost son, Joan falls in love with Jim, Darley shoots Blake over Claire then dies in the timber drive, which almost kills Joan and Jim. They live and Joan and Jim are married.
It’s a very solid story – plenty of conflict, romance, comedy, twists and turns. As mentioned, a lot of the tropes came from The Squatter’s Daughter: struggling rural business, heroic male lead who turns out to be a long-lost son, woman in love with baddy, comic servants, subplot of tragic forbidden love, female lead who can ride a horse but actually doesn’t do that much.
Years of treading the boards gave Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan a thorough understanding of characterisation and structure, as it did for Frank Harvey. Frank Hurley not so much – we’ve read a copy of the original script years ago at the National Film and Sound Archive, and from memory, it was all told in chronological order, encompassing years, and took forever to get going – the final version is a lot more condensed and tighter. You probably didn’t need the long-lost son aspect – it doesn’t add anything to the story, because Jim gets Burbridge’s respect through his actions, and it’s a bit yuck that Jim winds up marrying his adoptive sister.
To compensate though, there are some first-rate characterisations. Not the characters of Jim, Joan and Burbridge – they are basically just “nice” and “heroic” (although the actors playing those parts are all very good, especially Richards). But the support characters are standouts and all are superbly played.
Aileen Britton is heartbreaking as Claire, the quiet girl hopelessly in love with the bounder Blake – Hall directs this with tremendous sympathy; Copelin is huge fun as Blake, who offers plenty of humour amidst his villainy; Harvey is excellent as the hard-bitten, ruthless Darley, softened by his genuine affection for his sister. We love that Harvey wrote himself the best role and he knocks it out of the park – in his other Cinesound appearances, Harvey typically played rich toffs, but Tall Timbers shows his range and demonstrates just how good an actor he could be. (Bert Bailey would write himself a big fat part in his plays too.)
There are some comic servants who stroll in and do their bits, as played by Letty Craydon, George Lloyd and Joe Valli – they are an acquired taste, though Craydon demanding Valli kiss her is very funny, and her insisting that he give up smoking is unexpectedly touching because in real life Valli would eventually get throat cancer that robbed him of his voice and acting career. Incidentally, in Hurley’s original script, these servants were written as comic Aboriginals (as per the original stage play, given an Australian Stepin Fetchit spin) – it’s grim reading and it was a very good thing that was changed.
There are great old school melodrama moments in the film, like Blake thinking that he’s talking to Claire, then discovering that it’s Joan, and Darley shooting Blake then locking Joan and Jim in a cabin as explosions are about to go off.
Tall Timbers is also very adult about sex (far more so than Hollywood films of this era), without being judge-y – Claire is pregnant to Blake, Joan clearly has sexual desires for Jim (Richards was always very good at playing flirtatious good girls with a twinkle in the eye), and if we’re not mistaken, the film implies that Joan and Jim sleep together (they kiss while she’s in his dressing gown in a deserted cabin, then the scene fades out… that means sex in 1930s cinema!).
The whole film is infused with warmth and good fellowship found in Hall’s best movies. Well, to a point: there’s a scene where an “agitator” working for Darley tries to get all of Burbridge’s workers to defect to the opposition until Jim comes along and punches the agitator, which is fairly typical of how Hollywood movies at the time depicted on-screen union disputes… but having said that, Jim then gets the workers back onside by offering them a ten percent pay rise. So, it’s not super anti-worker.
The timber drive which inspired the film is, to be fair, a little dodgy, but it all moves at a fast clip. And we love how Claire and Joan become friends rather than enemies. If you want to know more, we’ve done an audio commentary here.
Tall Timbers made decent coin at the box office and was released in the UK and US (in a shortened version called Timberland Terror). It was showing in Australian cinemas as late as 1953. The lead actor Frank Leighton was best known at the time as a song and dance man for JC Williamsons (he sings in the movie); after Tall Timbers (where he’s a solid hero), he moved to England to further his career – Leighton had so-so luck, working mostly in theatre, and going bankrupt; he began a voyage home in 1962 after 25 years away, not long after having appeared in the TV play Reunion Day; he died on the boat, of a brain haemorrhage, aged 56 years old.
Timber-sploitation continued to be popular through the 1940s and 1950s (Men of the Timberland, Riders of the Timberline, Big Timber, Big Trees, The Blazing Forest, Romance of the Redwoods, Timberjack, etc.) The subgenre went out of fashion as people became increasingly uneasy with movies about trees being knocked over (with some occasional exceptions eg Sometimes a Great Notion).
Tall Timbers stands as a very fine example of the genre, easily one of the best Australian films of the 1930s, a tribute to the skill of Hall and the team at Cinesound.
Unlike many Cinesound movies, it’s relatively easy to see a copy online.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley for his assistance with this article – unless otherwise specified all opinions are the those of the author
