Walking.

Back in 1949, The Walking Hills was obviously considered one of Columbia's minor efforts - seventy eight minutes running time and black and white - a B movie knock-off of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (gold hunters fall out in the desert). 

I still had a full head of hair when I discovered this one and after decades it's interesting to come back to the film I rated a find - the first western by John Sturges, director of cowboy movie high points in my then expanding experience of film. I considered Sturges a big man after his The Law and Jake Wade and Bad Day at Black Rock.

 The film gets attention straight away. Rather than the old west, its setting is unfamiliar Mexicali on the then present day U.S. / Mexican border.  This registers as a scaled down version of Touch of Evil’s Tijuana (which was actually filmed in Venice California). Investigator John Ireland and agitated client Houseley Stevenson (Dark Passage's plastic surgeon) have followed young cowboy William Bishop, who pauses in front of Ella Rains' souvenir shop. The old man prompts that Bishop could escape them into Mexico without the one dozing border control officer taking any interest 

 Ireland follows Bishop, who takes his beer into a neighborhood bar’s back room two dollar poker game. There Columbia's resident genial character actor Edgar Buchanan (star of Sturges' Best Man Wins) is regaling the players with his account of the historic wagon train that got lost in the walking hills sand dunes. Card players, horse breeder Randolph Scott, young Jerome Courtland (later to direct series TV), sullen Arthur Kennedy and guitar playing Josh White aren't all that interested until their conversation alerts them to the fact that Courtland has stumbled on the location of the lost wagons and suddenly the room goes into lock down with the prospect of  “five millions in gold, already dug out of the ground” that loose talk could lose to a hoard of treasure hunters. Bishop warns that no one is going to stop him going through the door and bar man Russell Collins’ offer to stay silent is dismissed. They all have to keep together.

Scott adds his associate, horse wrangler Charles Stevens, to the expedition. Stevens, still billed well down the cast, even under black folk singer Josh White, at least gets to do a rounded sympathetic character instead of his usual murdering savage or drunken Indian. Race is more sensitively handled here than most of what was done around it. Josh White’s colour is never an issue in the film.

When store keeper Ella Rains, who has a history with both Scott and Bishop, comes riding over the dunes following them, Kennedy, complete with a knife strapped to his wrist, objects to a further split, with shares now also including Stevens. Randy downs him summarily. "That's one way of settling an argument" Ireland observes.

 The most memorable segment has the party fanning out, digging in the sand radiating "like spokes of a wagon wheel." from the point where they found a vintage ox bow.  Throw in a heliograph and signals from the distant hills.  Further complications with Courtland injured and Scott’s mare foaling. The script gets away from the makers at this point. However when the action arrives, the film does assert with a striking fight using shovel fulls of sand after Ireland’s pistol is disposed of.

Rains, Bishop & Scott.

 Randolph Scott is still a plausible cowboy hero here, even without his shirt. His stunt action is doubled by Jock Mahoney but Randy does ride his horse in the sand storm which couldn’t have been easy. Though he’s the star-producer, his character is allowed to lose the girl to a younger man. The way Scott gradually emerges to dominate the group is particularly skillful. His performance here is notably more plausible than in the run of his films under directors like Edward Marin or Bruce Humberstone and the difference must be credited to Sturges at the point where he emerged from the ranks of B movie directors, after his stark 1944 war documentary  Thunderbolt, co-directed by William Wyler, finally received distribution.

There’s a flashback to  Rodeo Rider Bishop winning Rains (“All week I’d batted off cowboys with a short club”) and a nasty turn in a Denver rain storm which takes the film into the noir world of Sturges' crime movies. His The People Against O'Hara with Spenser Tracy was particularly deft. There’s a flashback to  Rodeo Rider Bishop winning Rains (“All week I’d batted off cowboys with a short club”) and a nasty turn in a Denver rain storm which takes the film into the noir world of Sturges' crime movies. His The People Against O'Hara with Spenser Tracy was particularly deft Sturges will go on to be be one of the promising fringe directors absorbed into Dore Schary's MGM, only to be let go. When they wanted him to direct Tracy in Black Rock, the studio had to hire him back at a substantially increased fee.

White gets a couple of his folk numbers which do add resonance. The music, credited to Arthur Morton normally an orchestrator, echoes White's singing "I Gave My Love a Cherry" in the background scoring.

Scott, Bishop, Rains, Buchanan, White, Collins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cameraman Charles Lawton jr. never achieved a major profile despite a long credit list that ran from the Marx Brothers to John Ford and Orson Welles. He worked regularly with Scott. His monochrome group shots immediately distinguish The Walking Hills from other films at it's level of ambition.

As with their previous The Gunfighters, the first of Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown's independent films, writer Alan Le May's work is both the strength and the weakness of Walking Hills. A western specialist, he had moved to scripting for Cecil B. De Mille, including Reap the Wild Wind, and Raoul Walsh on Cheyenne and San Antonio. We can see his struggles to solve the script problems. After we hear about the difficulty of moving a pack train into the desert and not attract attention, there's a cut without explanation to shots of the group riding in the Death Valley National Monument. The picture has set itself a big ask in providing so many characters. Le May has the work party conveniently divide during the storm, getting support players off screen. Giving multiple characters unexpected reasons to fear Ireland's connection with the law is clumsy. The production was able to secure A feature performers when Ireland and Kennedy tuned up on the lot needing work but was stuck with splitting the villain role between them. The script clearly should have gone through Le May's typewriter another time. He is now best known as the source of John Ford's The Searchers and the John Huston The Unforgiven.

The wry ending does just about get by. “You know Shep would never be able to think straight with a hat full of money.”

Not unlike High Noon and Bad Day at Black Rock, with all its limitations I prefer The Walking Hills to it’s ponderous Sierra Madre model, where the shift to studio built desert is more distracting.  I can now see that the film has taken on board  Victor Seastrom's classic The Wind, drawing on the menace of the approaching blizzard, where choking sand will cover activity, a major dramatic element set up by the discovery of the Ox skull ground bare or the account of  the car high polished by the blown sand blasting away paint and trim.

Sturges & Lee Remick - The Halleluja Trail

 

As a record of the re-shaping of the Hollywood scene and emerging talents and for its  memorable central concept The Walking Hills deserves more attention than it has had. The film remains agreeable entertainment and occasionally more. It crackles with the energy of talented people getting a chance to escape their work routine.

The You Tube copy is excellent.

Barie Pattison - 2022