Riders of the Timberline (1941)

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I had to do a double take when this picture started. My copy of the film has an opening title page that states "Riders of the Timberlane". That just doesn't sound right, and reading one of the trivia posts for the movie describes it as an error on a distributor's release. I tried picturing a timberlane and it just doesn't work.Victor Jory is back in another Hopalong Cassidy flick and this time he's a good guy, but just to stay in fine form as a villain, he's persuaded by his boss Jim Kerrigan (J. Farrell McDonald), to accuse Hoppy (William Boyd) of being a card cheat so that he and partner Johnny (Brad King) can be run out of camp. It's just a ruse to have the boys infiltrate the bad guy outfit run by Preston Yates (Edward Keane). The strategy works for a while, long enough for Hoppy to make the save for Kerrigan and his men operating a logging operation.I have to say, the neatest thing about this story was seeing Hoppy and Johnny ride that timber line in the sky, rocketing along looking like it was going about forty miles an hour! They didn't even look like they were hanging on for dear life until Johnny got winged by a bad guy bullet. That was a pretty cool sequence demonstrating how real loggers must have been able to move those massive trunks they cut down (at a much slower pace of course). I never saw anything like that before.You know it's funny, but for almost every Hopalong Cassidy movie on IMDb, you'll find someone who states it's the best one there is, and someone else that says it's the worst. For me, everyone is about the same in entertainment value as a B Western and this was no exception. Even though I enjoy the heck out of all of them, rating any one of them as more than a '5' or a '6' is pretty much an exaggeration.

Hopalong Cassidy and his young sidekick Brad King leave the Bar 20 ranch when the foreman Buck Peters sends them to help his old friend J.Farrell MacDonald and daughter Eleanor Stewart who are being sabotaged in their effort to fulfill a lumbering contract. It's not the same as herding cattle but Hoppy and Brad get the gist of it fast. In fact their old partner Andy Clyde was already working for MacDonald.There was a later Hopalong Cassidy film with a lumber setting and it seemed a bit better. Certainly Hoppy was more home on the range than home in a logging camp.Victor Jory is in this Hoppy film and usually he's a villain. Not here, he's MacDonald's strong right arm as a French Canadian foreman.I can't forget that crew of Jory's peers who come down from Canada to help MacDonald. They cut down trees as well as fight and sing and they have their own theme, The Kinkajou song. It's somewhat along the lines of Stouthearted Men.Not one of the better Cassidy westerns, but Hoppy aficionados will be pleased.

I'm surprised that this movie got such high user ratings and reviews. It is as though only Hoppy fans vote here and mindlessly give everything a 7 vote.I thought this was one of the worst Hoppy movies. I enjoy most of them. The story was uninteresting. The supporting cast was mediocre. Victor Jory should have remained as a bad guy; here he looked ridiculous with his silly accent. The singing was corny. Andy Clyde's antics was inane and juvenile. There was some decent camera-work and action.The final action scenes in the film demonstrate without doubt how poor this movie is. Hoppy gets word that the bad guys are on their way to blow up the dam with dynamite. So Hoppy returns to his camp, and with his sidekick Johnny they ride a log through the sky (the timberline of the title) to reach the dam and the bad guys, who shoot a fusillade of bullets at them, merely slightly wounding Johnny. So after miraculously arriving at the dam in the nick of time and unhurt, Hoppy (who happened to spot the bad guy planting dynamite with a lit fuse at the base of the dam near the water) dives off the dam into the water and swims to the lit dynamite. I couldn't believe he could dive that distance into the water with his hat on and swim to the planted dynamite, with his hat still on! Still immune to the fusillade of bullets, he conveniently throws the dynamite quite a distance to the bad guys blowing them up. The final scene in the movie was particularly embarrassing. As Hoppy and his pals are saying goodbye to all assembled, sidekick California says he forgot his hat, and everyone laughs as though it was the funniest thing they ever heard.

I have seen through the satellite so far 38 out of 66 Hopalong Cassidy westerns. This is by far the best one with not only lots of action but Hoppy is not afraid to pitch in with the workers and not wear his customary black outfit. He is seen with a checkered shirt and white cap most of the time. I would recommend this episode to anyone who has not seen a Hoppy movie.