Valley of the Giants (1938)

Director:

William Keighley

Writers:

Peter B. Kyne (novel)
Seton I. Miller (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

17 September 1938 (USA)

Genre:

Adventure

Plot:

Plot Keywords:

Forest | Lumberjack | Remake | Arson | Banker

Cast

Wayne Morris	...	Bill Cardigan
Claire Trevor	...	Lee Roberts
Frank McHugh	...	'Fingers' McCarthy
Alan Hale	...	'Ox' Smith
Donald Crisp	...	Andy Stone
Charles Bickford	...	Howard 'Steve' Fallon
Jack La Rue	...	Ed Morrell (as Jack LaRue)
John Litel	...	Hendricks
Dick Purcell	...	Henchman Creel
El Brendel	...	Fats
Russell Simpson	...	'Mac' McKenzie
Cy Kendall	...	Sheriff Graber
Harry Cording	...	Henchman Greer
Wade Boteler	...	Joe Lorimer
Helen MacKellar	...	Mrs. Lorimer

Runtime:

79 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Finland:K-16 | USA:Approved (PCA #4399)

Filming Locations:

Eureka, California, USA

Company:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Trivia:

Nitrate and safety prints of this film survives in the UCLA Film and Television Archives.

Movie Connections:

Remade as Trial by Trigger (1944)

Soundtrack:

A Bird in a Gilded Cage (1900)

Wayne Morris, He-Man

This overproduced Big Trees Epic from Warners in 1938 is given the full production treatment: Technicolor, script by Seton Miller and a cast so immense that Charles Bickford is placed near the bottom of the on-screen cast list. But the actor at the center of this epic is Wayne Morris, who was a reasonably capable actor whose specialty was the Naive Young Stiff.... and a role like this calls for a sense of power and confidence that he does not not show in this role.

As for the other actors, the pleasures of watching them is muted. Charles Bickford is given a limited range of emotion: he runs the gamut from greedy to mean and back again. Claire Trevor plays her usual hooker with a heart of gold, and the other actors, given their fourteen seconds of screen time each, cannot do much. Given my general level of irritation even the Technicolor winds up annoying me: the working loggers always seem to be wearing fresh-laundered, crisply maintained clothes.

Director William Keighley was an effective director for the fast-moving Warner Bs, but he always seemed out of depth in these super-production. Look at stuff like BULLETS OR BALLOTS or the crisply turned farce of BROTHER RAT, not this.