Man of the Forest (1933)

Man of the Forest (1933)

Plot Summary

Beasley, (Noah Beery) who is after Gayner's (Harry Carey) land, plans to kidnap his daughter Alice. (Verna Hillie) But Brett Dale (Randolph Scott) overhears their plan and kidnaps her himself. When Gayner arrives to retrieve his daughter, Beasley kills him and makes the Sheriff (Tom Kennedy) arrest Dale for the murder.

We continue on in our survey of Randolph Scott's career with another early B Western based on Zane Grey novels. This boasts most of the cast from The Thundering Herd so the acting is uniformly good in this though the story leaves a bit to be desired. At least in this one Scott actually DOES combat Beery but it's a bit limp wristed. That being said this did have some enjoyable elements and one particularly grisly scene that shocked me for it's violence in 1933.

One of these enjoyable elements is the entire section where Scott is taking care of Hillie at his cabin after "kidnapping" her. She clearly thinks he's the bad guy but in reality Scott is keeping her away from Beery and his goons who've infiltrated Carey's ranch. The interplay between Scott being nice and caring for Hillie and her trying everything she can to escape is pretty good and believable though Scott's line about not liking women and never will like them can come across very differently in this day and age.

Some of the eccentricities of this movie is the fact that Scott owns THREE mountain lions and he actually plays with them at times in the movie. It's pretty damn surreal but not as surreal as one of Carey's ranch hands early in the movie actually wrestling a young mule!

So overall this was a bit of a dud but it kept enough of my interest for me to watch it all the way through and again, the grisly scene near the end with the mountain lion was a shocker. I give this about 1 1/2 *.