source: The Walking Hills

Moviecut—The Walking Hills

The Walking Hills is directed by John Sturges and written by Alan LeMay. It stars Randolph Scott, Ella Raines, Arthur Kennedy, Edgar Buchanan, John Ireland, William Bishop, Josh White and Jerome Courtland. Music is by Arthur Morton and cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr. Upon hearing a chance statement about lost gold, a disparate group of people head out in search of it to the desert plains of The Walking Hills... Whipping up a sandstorm. A sort of contemporary Western film noir fusion, The Walking Hills is a darn fine drama that is acted accordingly. Though blessed with action, tension and passion, it's as a character study where the picture excels. True enough to say it's not overly complex stuff, the greed is bad motif a standard narrative strand, as is the tricky love triangle that resides within the sandy tale, but with the wily Sturges and the shrewd LeMay pulling the strings this plays out always as compelling. With the great Lawton Jr. adding his considerable skills as a photographer - ensuring the Alabama Hills and Death Valley locations are key characters themselves - the production shines. Often mentioned in reference to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it of course is not as good as that superb picture. That it earns its right to be considered a baby brother to it, though, is testament to its worth in itself. 7/10

Despite presence of cowboy vet Randy Scott, this is not really a western. Instead it's a modern adventure tale of gold fever. A bunch of disparate saloon characters goes hunting for buried treasure amid treacherous sand dunes of the Southwest. Each has his own reason for going and his own past, so naturally conflicts develop. And, oh yes, lovely Ella Raines shows up on horseback as relief from the ugly guys. Scott's the most level-headed of the bunch, but he's no paragon— is his willingness to abandon the wounded Johnny because of hard-headed realism or selfish greed. It's an unusual collection of distinctive Hollywood players, including a shifty Kennedy, a nasty Ireland, a sneaky Collins, and, of course, a jovial Buchanan. Too bad the star-crossed William Bishop died too young to establish a screen persona. And how unexpected for blues singer Josh White to turn up as one of the fortune hunters. His musical interludes may seem artificially inserted but are pleasantly entertaining. For me there are two highlights. The sandstorm, of course, is really well done-- on a set I would assume, but still a marvelously staged effect. The other is that battle of shovels atop a swirling dune, (move over Japanese martial arts). It's like nothing I've seen. Then too, the location staging in Death Valley may send you out for water, so bring a canteen. Including flashbacks, the narrative itself is pretty crowded for a 78-minute runtime. So don't expect a tight format. Action and characters tend to be sketched through the proverbial glass darkly. Nonetheless, the movie's an unusual production that's remained oddly memorable since my first viewing, lo, so many years ago.

Since 1945 when Randolph Scott decided to concentrate almost exclusively on westerns only one of his westerns was set in the modern west and that is this one, The Walking Hills. Shot on location the film holds it own with such gold hunting classics as The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre and Lust For Gold. Sitting around a poker table one night Edgar Buchanan starts recounting a tale in which a wagon train loaded with sacks of gold dust got lost in the desert in the great Southwest. They're quite an assortment of characters in the place, they include at least one private detective in John Ireland and he's after one of the people in the room. But more than one of them has a reason to fear the law. So all that were in that small barroom set out to the desert fueled by another story that Jerome Courtland tells about coming across an old wagon wheel that would have been contemporary with that gold train. Quite an assortment go besides those in the cast I've already mentioned the guys include William Bishop, Arthur Kennedy, Joe White, Russell Collins and Charles Stevens. Bishop adds an additional plot component, not only is he a suspect, but he's wooing Ella Raines who used to go out with Scott. As for Scott he's concerned with a mare in foal and he brings her along as well. Later on Ella Raines declares herself in on the gold hunt. Although with a lot more cast members out in the desert some people's true nature starts to surface. Quite a few of the cast meets their doom. As for the gold, just about the same ironical ending as in The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. In a book on the Films of Randolph Scott there's a story told about Ella Raines's husband Ransom Olds who was an air ace from the recent war and would be one again in Korea and Vietnam. It seems as though for a joke he buzzed the company on location. He thought it was funny, but the roaring jet passing over frightened all the horses and the wranglers spent the rest of the day rounding them up. Ella was not amused either, nor I'm sure was Harry Cohn. Not as good as Lust For Gold or The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, The Walking Hills still holds its own with the others and holds up well for today's audience. Greed is a timeless and universal theme.

It doesn't take $175 million to make a good movie. Hollywood just squandered $175 million on a stupid comedy called Evan Almighty, which garnered scant public attention. I doubt that John Sturges and Columbia Pictures spend as much as $175 THOUSAND making The Walking Hills; but people are still searching for it on eBay some 60 years later. Sand dunes are "walking hills" as my family found out in North Carolina when I was 8 years old and we found our motel room at Nags Head 90% buried under the sand, following a gentle storm. Eight men playing poker in a bar's back room meet a young guy who accidentally blurts out a king sized clue on the whereabouts of a gold carrying wagon train that legend says disappeared in the desert a hundred years earlier. Eight men and one woman (Ella Raines) band together and quietly head out into the desert --- just 8 miles from town --- looking for the gold. The men will battle Mother Nature and each other seeking the gold --- in a story which is relentlessly compelling. Find this movie and watch it.

This is John Sturges' movie. It is beautifully directed, with some shots that are truly stylistic, artsy, and beautiful...all the more so since this is in black & white and one can enjoy the symmetry of the shots instead of running the risk of being distracted by vibrant colors. The cast is loaded with big name B stars and is more of an ensemble piece than a traditional Randolph Scott film. Scott has some of his nicest on-screen moments in this film, along with the always fantastic Edgar Buchanan. Two actors I had never seen before, Jerome Courtland and William Bishop, both give very good performances...especially Courtland. John Ireland, and even moreso Arthur Kennedy, are completely wasted in roles that are one-dimensional and truly go nowhere. The worst of the entire group is Ella Raines. She is not a strong actress, had no chemistry with either Scott or Bishop, and there was really no reason for her to be in the film at all. This leads me to the script, which is where the movie falls down...it is a collection of missed opportunities. The plot is simple, the motivations extremely flimsy, the tension non-existent, and the ending unsatisfying. A similar "group stuck in the desert" film, James Stewart's version of "Flight of the Phoenix", had some real uncomfortable moments, surprises that worked, deaths that we felt, characters we were interested in, plot twists that pulled us to the edge of our seat...and their group was all focused on a common goal! In "The Walking Hills", the group is ostensibly working toward the same goal (uncovering the gold), but there is the added plot element that they are actually competing against each other at the same time. That element is never fleshed out in a satisfying way. The relationships don't go anywhere, the conflicts never reach a crescendo, the plot twists fizzle out, the promise of double-crosses and triple-crosses never materialize, everyone's hidden agendas don't pay off as they should, and out of the entire group only one character has any kind of arc where something is learned, personal growth takes place, and he is a different person by the end of the film. It's just a boring trek through the desert, with lots of digging, and not a lot of much else going on. Actually, one other thing does go on: a lot of singing. Fortunately, it's good singing. Josh White sings a few original songs and accompanies himself on the guitar. They are pleasant songs, but do not move the plot along, reveal character elements, or underscore on-screen action, so they are strictly time-killers meant to draw out the running time. As musical numbers, they are fine, but they certainly do nothing to advance the film. "The Walking Hills" is not what I would necessarily call a bad film...it's just an uneventful so-so experience. As stated, several of the actors do have a moment or two where they shine, and the directing is beautifully done, but the film on the whole is a bit of a dud. Randolph Scott, Edgar Buchanan, and John Sturges fans will enjoy this, others will fall fast asleep.

John Sturges, later to direct The Magnificent Seven and Bad Day at Black Rock, does extremely well with this little sleeper about modern day westerners hunting for a lost gold caravan in the California desert. William Bishop isn't bad as the honest murder fugitive, and John Ireland and Arthur Kennedy are strong as usual as a couple of not-very-ethical types. Randolph Scott gets to play some interesting notes here as a horse rancher caught up in the hunt, and the supporting parts are all well played. The sandstorm in the last act is really terrifically exciting, and speaking as one who's filmed during a sandstorm, it's hard to believe the stars put up with filming such a long sequence in those conditions. My hat's off to them and to Sturges for a fine little movie, written by Alan Le May (of The Searchers and The Unforgiven fame).

We have been seeing this on the TV Westerns channel. It's a very film noir western. Beside the always sturdy and moral Randolph Scott, there were two special delights. Ella Raines is my long favorite among the older actresses, with her bright eyes and rather sarcastic manner always seeming to be laughing at some private joke. I feel a personal connection to her in that she was born a month after my father and followed him by a month in death. She first captured my fascination in "The Suspect" with Charles Laughton and then in "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry" with George Sanders. Josh White is the really special feature here. How often do you find such wonderfully played Delta Blues inexplicably inserted into the plot of a 1949 western? It's not a truly great movie but still a must-see because it is so ahead of it's time. "Bad Day at Black Rock" meets "O Brother Where Art Thou."

I was not particularly impressed with "The Walking Hills". Apart from the fact that hills do not walk, the film was rather dull and the same sort of material was handled MUCH better in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre". The film is about a motley group of folks in the modern west who go searching for lost gold. For some inexplicable reason, they brought along a guy who LOVES to sing folk music. By the time he began singing "I Gave My Love a Cherry", I was about to kill myself because I hated the music so much. Plus, he was a MAJOR distraction and this only would have worked if everyone else beat the guy to death to shut him up. Instead, there's some plot about folks hiding from the law and perhaps a lawman among them. But the film was drawn out so long and was so uneventful, I simply didn't care. All in all, a rather grim and boring film. One of the few Randolph Scott pictures I've seen that really didn't entertain in the least due to a dull script. By the way, at one point, a guy claims to have found a finger from a skeleton. The bones were completely articulated even though they'd been there for years and all the flesh had been eaten away for most of this time. For your information, after the flesh disintegrates from a body, the individual bones soon fall apart and do NOT stay magically connected to each other in much of the body.