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.
