Good adventure drama from Paramount Pictures with the bulk of its stars: Alan Ladd, Robert Preston, Lloyd Nolan, and a movie that can be seen as a western where wheat replaces cattle, but without guns. In this kind of story, farmers and harvests, you can think of later movies such as THE RIVER, starring Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek, Terence Malick and his DAYS OF HEAVEN, or Richard Pearce's COUNTRY, all made in the late seventies or early eighties. But this one, made by Tay Garnett, a director with much of John Ford's DNA, is not an intimate movie, or social oriented one either, as for instance COUNTRY was. No, it remains rough, a men's story mainly, it could have taken place in Texas, among the oil fields, in a manhood atmosphere. It's not GRAPES OF WRATH either, though the settings look like the same. It is above all a virile story of men in harvest business. To summarize Tay Garnett gives here his pure trade mark, such a this terrific fist fight scene; the kind of sequence in many Garnett's films. But this one is a pure masterpiece. In a John Ford's film, there would have been John Wayne, Victor mcLaglen and Ward Bond or Harry Carey Jr.
Review of Wild Harvest
