Hopalong Gets Wood
With logger Jim Kerrigan (J. Farrell MacDonald) winning a big contract he finds he has trouble on his hands as Preston Yates (Edward Keane) hires Ed Petrie (Hal Taliaferro) to convince the loggers to walk out. Fortunately Jim's daughter Elaine (Eleanor Stewart) is resourceful and shows up with a whole new crew whilst Hoppy (William Boyd), Johnny (Brad King) and California (Andy Clyde) arrive in town to see old friend Jim. It doesn't stop Petrie from trying to stop Kerrigan and his new crew from completing the contract and even plans to blow the dam to flood the place but with Hoppy aware of things not being right he sets out to save the day.
Here is a lesson I have learned from watching old movies; if you have the chance of watching several movies in a franchise spread them out over a few weeks. The reason for this is simple because by the time you get to the fourth movie even if you only watch one a day it can become monotonous. That is what happened to me when I started to watch the old Hopalong movies as the first was good, the second was okay and by the third day I was begin to tire of their familiarity. As such when I got to watch "Riders of the Timberline" I was ready to hop off the current Hopalong binge I was on.
The thing is that "Riders of the Timberline" is an okay little Hopalong movie with are hero helping out another friend by trying to prevent sabotage of his logging operation. But it feels a little to formula bound as we have Andy Clyde bringing the comedy, Brad King doing the flirting and William Boyd delivering little for the first two thirds of the movie before he then turns on the hero side of his character. Yes there are some nice scenes revolving around the logging operation which provides a different playground to your usual western but the end is as usual as ever.
What this all boils down to is that "Riders of the Timberline" is probably one of those movies which might have some sort of nostalgic charm for those who grew up watching the heroics of Hopalong Cassidy but watched now it is only average at best.
