The Forest Rangers (1942)

That was an excellent one.

hyped garbage

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Whoever thought the beautiful, sexy Susan Hayward would start her career playing a character named "Butch"? In The Forest Rangers, she's not the romantic lead. Paulette Goddard is the beautiful love interest to forest ranger Fred MacMurray, with masculine Susan Hayward waiting in the wings. This love triangle is amusing enough to justify renting this movie, so if you're as much a Susan Hayward fan as I am, I recommend watching it one afternoon for a good laugh.With tons of special effects combined with real footage of forest fires and controlled burns, The Forest Rangers is a pretty impressive movie for 1942. Stunt doubles are used and abused, and the blue-screen effect is very well edited for the time period. The plot is interesting and fast-paced, and there's both a surprise and a good laugh in the end. It's a little more light-hearted than you'd expect, but it's pretty cute. Plus there's a funny scene between Fred MacMurray and Eugene Pallette straight out of any classic comedy: Fred has been out all night with Paulette, Eugene's daughter, and neither man knows who the other is. So, while Eugene is laughing about Fred's conquest, he has no idea that the girl in question is his daughter!

I was a forest ranger for over 30 years, so I have a special affinity for this film professionally, but I've also loved old films for nearly my entire life, so I also love this as a glorious misfire.The cast and crew are sterling. George Marshall directed. Fred MacMurray, Paulette Goddard, Susan Hayward, Eugene Paulette, Regis Toomey and lots of the Paramount stock company such as Jimmy Conlin and Albert Dekker, wonderful photography, high production values, cooperation from USDA Forest Service; first use of a song that would become an ersatz standard, what could possibly go wrong?I think that it's horribly miscast, for starters. Paulette Goddard was at her most beautiful in 1941 when this was shot, but her character is so whiny and self centered that it's really difficult to see what the Ranger finds attractive about her. And if you think that Susan Hayward and her upper crust accent and clipped phrasing could possibly be a timber beast somewhere in the mountains, then you're delusional.Marshall's direction really confuses me. He was a great talent and made many wonderful films, but he apparently couldn't decide if this film was a melodrama, romance, spectacle, slapstick film or murder mystery. It tries to be all things, but doesn't work at any of them very well.Warning: Spoilers and plot points trickle out below: Still, it's fun to watch. The fire scenes are amazing; I've watched this repeatedly for over twenty years yet I'm still trying to figure out how they were staged. The locations are amazing, ranging from the Ranger Station at Big Basin State Park in the coast redwoods near Santa Cruz to what seems to be some pine forests in the Shasta Trinity NF, some 250 miles northeast, Ranger Fred has one heckuva lot of acreage to take care of.There's also a really bizarre sort of subplot involving a retired logger, "Jammer," who takes care of the rangers and the ranger station. To watch Jimmy Conlin essentially bitching off Paulette Goddard about her marrying Ranger Fred while cleaning up the living quarters, and to literally exclaim "What's he need a wife for when he's got me?" with a name like 'Jammer' is just way too weird to take seriously in the 1940s.Smoke jumpers were relatively new in 1941, and Paramount made sure to show this new firefighting technique off; indeed, it's central to the plot, but when Ranger Fred isn't jumping out of planes or preaching the virtues of sustained yield, he's too dense to be properly hit on by Susan Hayward and oblivious to his spoiled brat of a wife who is trying to take him out of the woods. Only extreme melodrama can save the day, and indeed, a murder-arson mystery is thrown in just to give the filmmakers something else entirely to work with.The film ends so abruptly that it reminds me of an old joke I used to hear about what you do when writing a short story and you run out of inspiration-- you just have everyone get run over by a truck. That's not what literally happens here, but it's just about as subtle. Bosley Crowther, in his NYT review, called the film "Technicolor Arson" which seems to sum it all up pretty well.I've not found anything definitive about its business, but suffice it to say that it was not one of Paramount's top grossers in 1942, and in its re-release in the mid-1950s, it was at the bottom of a double bill. Maybe on its first release it got lost in the confusion of the first months of WWII, but it really is in so many ways, a really stupid film, albeit a great deal of fun. I'm pretty sure that movie- goers in early 1942 had much more important things on their minds.

Fred MacMurray is the chief of a forest ranger crew who get plenty of action fighting forest fires. Susan Hayward runs a logging operation down the road a ways. She has her eye on Fred but he thinks of her as one of the boys. When Fred meets extremely cute Paulette Goddard riding in a parade over in town, he falls for her quickly and they are married in a snap. Poor Susan isn't too thrilled and sets about figuring a way to send Paulette packing for the city she came from. Okay, so it's kind of a lame plot....Luckily, it really isn't developed too seriously. A typical scene is the one in which our main characters get stuck overnight in the woods with only one blanket for the three of them: lying on the forest floor, they jockey for position for about five minutes, both of the women wanting to cuddle up to Fred. It's kind of amusing in a silly way.A subplot involves the rangers' investigation into a rash of forest fires—is logger Albert Dekker the local arsonist? The supporting cast also includes Lynne Overman as MacMurray's old-timer right hand man and Regis Toomey as a pilot who flies over fires and radios in intelligence. Despite the mediocre story line, MacMurray, Goddard and Hayward all look great and give lively performances. The Technicolor is gorgeous and there are some intense forest fire scenes—so why bother about plot? Also entertaining: As far as I can tell, that really is Fred MacMurray singing a ballad called "Tall Grow the Timbers."

Fred MacMurray (Don) is a forest ranger who works in a tight-nit forest ranger community that deals with the preservation of the forest and lots of fire-fighting. Particularly now that an arsonist is setting off fires. The local forest ranger girl is Susan Hayward (Tana) and although she is fondly nicknamed 'Butch', she definitely isn't. She sees MacMurray as her catch. However, one day at a parade in a local town, MacMurray meets and marries Paulette Goddard (Celia) before returning with her to his community. Everyone is shocked. And Hayward is not happy… The film is shot in Technicolour which adds to the enjoyment and the cast are good although I wish retired ranger Lynne Overman (Jammer) spoke properly. WTF is he saying? We get a mystery as to who is starting deliberate fires played alongside some comical situations as Goddard and Hayward spar with each other. And it's all good entertainment. This film was better than I expected. MacMurray leaves me indifferent, rather like his attitude towards both these women in his life. The interest in the film comes from the 2 female leads. There is also the bonus of hearing snippets of the song "Jingle Jangle Jingle" at various moments. Always nice to hear a tune. Can you guess who the arsonist is? I doubt it.If you look at the credits you will notice a Keith Richards in the role of a Ranger. That guy really has had a varied life. This was in the days before he plugged in a guitar and joined the Rolling Stones and then fell out of a mango tree.