Timber Queen

Timber Queen is an old movie from way before I was born that is good. Telling the story of a WWII veteran who decides to help a widow of a man he served protect the rights to the timerlands she inherited, it is a nice film with a good story and the actors all doing a good job. The film is more a comedy, but it does has some action scenes. This is a good movie to check out.

The title role in Timber Queen is played by Mary Beth Hughes who could lose her crown and realm due to the machinations of logging mill owner Charles Anthony Hughes. Fortunately for her she gets rescued from an unexpected source

Said source is Richard Arlen who was a Navy flier and who was invalided out of the service due to war wounds. Hughes is the widow of his best friend who was killed in the same action that Arlen received his wounds.

It's the usual kind of plot for these films, Charles Anthony Hughes is holding a note on the property and the trees there on and she has a set time to deliver logs or he takes them. With the help of Sheldon Leonard who is a shady character himself, Arlen takes on the task.

Timber Queen is from the Pine-Thomas B picture unit at Paramount and their product was always good. Even the worst of them are generally better than items from Monogram or PRC.

Acting honors here go to Sheldon Leonard who departs from his usual sinister image and plays the tough club owner for laughs. Leonard has a sidekick in George E. Stone and the two are quite funny together.

And Mary Beth Hughes is enough to keep up anyone's morale during the war years when Timber Queen came out. June Havoc is in this also and she has some good lines as she and Leonard strike a few sparks. This may be the only Sheldon Leonard ever got the girl in a film.

"Timber Queen" is a B-movie from tiny Pine-Thomas Productions. Not surprisingly, it stars Richard Arlen...not surprising because Arlen was one of the owners of this small studio and he often made films for them.

When the story begins, Russ (Arlen) stops by to see the widow of an army buddy. At first, Elaine (Mary Beth Hughes) treats him badly...mostly because while he was away, Russ' partners took advantage of his absence and have done a lot to hurt the lumber company owned by Elaine's dead husband. When Russ realizes this, he decides to help the ladies to make a success of this business. Oddly, their new partner is a ganster-type (played, naturally, by Sheldon Leonard) and he enlists the help of his friends to act as lumberjacks. Can they make a go of it...especially when sabotage and naughtiness is afoot?

This is the epitome of a simple and modestly enjoyable B-movie. Like other Bs, it runs about an hour in length and was inexpensively made...but also worth seeing. Not exactly brilliant but solid and entertaining.

This outdoor action B movie from the Pine-Thomas stable has an unexpected ingredient – humour. The manly deeds of our stalwart hero are neatly laced with the misadventures of a group of Runyonesque hoodlums.

Russ Evans (Richard Arlen), to whom flying a plane comes as naturally as shinning up a giant fir tree, is invalided out of the army and sets about rescuing young war widow Elaine Graham (Mary Beth Hughes, B movies' answer to Shelley Winters) from the machinations of an unscrupulous business man seeking to fleece her of the logging interest she inherited. To make ends meet she is singing in a night club managed by Smacksie Golden (Sheldon Leonard, in a delightful send-up of his usual gangster roles) with the ineffectual assistance of his sidekick "Squirrel" (George E Stone). Lil Boggs (played by June Havoc in a performance worthy of Joan Blondell and Lucille Ball combined) is both Smacksie's long-suffering girlfriend and Elaine's cynical wise-cracking confidante. When Russ whisks Elaine off to fell trees, the others follow, leaving their natural night club habitat to work in a logging camp in the great outdoors, motivated by a heady blend of self-interest, patriotism, and sentimentality.

This is an under-rated film, ignored or dismissed as vapid by most film cataloguers. It is a quite superior B movie, with a talented cast and a witty script adding extra value to the standard outdoor action on which the producers' reputation was based.

Richard Arlen is invalided out of the Army Air Corp, so he goes to tell the widow of the pal he saw die about it. It's Mary Beth Hughes, who inherited the buddy's timber holdings, with $40,000 in mortgages held by Arlen's company. But his partner won't let go, so Arlen and associates help her fulfill a contract she has that will clear the debt. Not that his partner won't try to sabotage the efforts.

It's a Pine-Thomas production, which means it's filled with stars a bit past their primes, or on the rise. With Frank MacDonald directing, there's some good comedy, provided by June Havoc, Sheldon Leonard, and George E. Stone; Dick Purcell is the stalwart logger who knows how a camp actually operates. Fred Jackman Jr. Offers some good cinematography, and there's a competent second unit director at work for a sequence of breaking up a logjam.

The Dollar Bills, as they were known around the Paramount lot, never produced great movies. They did, however, take dependable plots, adapt them a bit for their superannuated stars, made sure the production came in under budget, and released a movie that would please the audience and make some money. It's not a great movie, but it is a well-told tale in 65 minutes.