Movie review – “Wild Harvest” (1947) ***

What do you do when you’ve already had your biggest tough guy star play a private eye, army hero, hired gun and truck driver? You put him in charge of a crew of wheat combine operators. Yeah, that’s right – the bad lands of wheat. That’s what Alan Ladd’s in charge of, a motley gang and rough and tough men who harvest wheat and where he says things like “rule number one – no dames.”

I’m being flippant, but actually this is good, tough fun which I liked a lot. The sheer novelty of the setting alone makes it watchable (you could imagine a similar Aussie film made about cane cutters or shearers): there is a real feel for the camaraderie of the workers and the stuff about stealing grain on the side is decent enough stakes. It’s the sort of thing you imagine would be made at Warners during their great days with Bogart, Robinson, Cagney or even Raft, or at MGM with Gable and Tracy – but Paramount do a pretty good job with Ladd, who is in strong form.

For whatever reason Ladd always seemed to be especially good in scenes with solid male actors; here he’s got Robert Preston and Lloyd Nolan (I was just about to ask “where’s William Demarest” when he pops up too). Dorothy Lamour is perhaps a bit too nice to be the femme fetale who is a sort of Yoko Ono figure for the wheat harvesters, but she’s very pretty - and quite sexy in some bits, such as when she lounges back on a haystack. (Some of her scenes with Ladd are very sexually explicit, even if Ladd did struggle in his romantic moments.)

There are some good tough scenes, like when the rival crews square off against each other at a dance (Ladd gives a code word and his crew gathers ‘round him). The ending sequence where Ladd leaps from truck to truck in a convoy like a cowboy going from horse to horse in a wagon train is exciting, but a little bit silly (they’re not in such a hurry for him to take such risks; also they are farmers with a legitimate grievance chasing thieves so it’s not like we’re totally on their side).

There’s a love triangle which was later flipped for Whispering Smith: Ladd is best mates with Robert Preston, who is brave but a bit unreliable and prone to turning evil; the two of them fall for the same girl, who really wants Ladd but goes off with Preston when Ladd rejects her. Only this time the girl is Bad so it’s Preston who gets redeemed. He and Ladd go off into the sunset at the end, arms around each other leaving Lamour behind… but only after bashing each other up in a fight that feels very John Ford and John Wayne (not to mention homoerotic and/or misogynist). There was something a bit Aussie about this story, with its macho men, troublesome women, comic alcoholic – Rod Taylor would have loved to make it.