The Burning Hills ** (1956, Tab Hunter, Natalie Wood, Skip Homeier, Eduard Franz, Earl Holliman, Claude Akins, Ray Teal, Frank Puglia) – Classic Movie Review 7,272

The 1956 Western film The Burning Hills stars Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood as young lovers fighting off the murdering bad guys who killed Tab’s brother Jerry and a crazy ex-lover.

Director Stuart Heisler’s 1956 American CinemaScope Western film The Burning Hills stars Tab Hunter as Trace Jordan and Natalie Wood (with weird Mexican accent) as a courageous half Mexican woman named Maria-Christina Colton, a pair of young Western lovers fighting off the murdering bad guys who killed Tab’s brother Jerry and a crazy ex-lover.

Heisler’s modest romantic Western is adapted from cult writer Louis L’Amour’s 1956 novel by screen-writer Irving Wallace.

The young stars are as earnest as they are attractive, but the meatiest role goes to veteran Eduard Franz as the fatherly half-Indian scout Jacob Lantz, and when he is off the screen it quickly loses a lot of its interest. However Skip Homeier as Jack Sutton, Earl Holliman as Mort Bayliss, Claude Akins as Ben Hindeman and Ray Teal  as Joe Sutton are all very watchable.

The Burning Hills is an obvious attempt by Warner Bros to interest teenage audiences in Westerns, but the screenplay is rather poorly handled by writer Wallace and the burningly eager popular stars look a little charred by the whole experience.

Tab Hunter stars in The Burning Hills (1956).

However, it was one of the movies that made Tab Hunter one of cinema’s most popular male stars in the mid to latter stages of the Fifties decade, following Track of the Cat (1955) and Battle Cry (1955).

The Burning Hills also features Skip Homeier, Earl Holliman, Claude Akins, Ray Teal, Frank Puglia, Hal Baylor, Tyler MacDuff, Rayford Barnes, and Tony Terry.

Louis L’Amour said he wrote the novel for Gary Cooper and Katy Jurado, and Warner Bros bought the screen rights in May 1955, but cast Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood instead. The movie was popular. The stars were popular. The book was popular too, selling more than a million copies.

Hunter and Wood immediately re-teamed for The Girl He Left Behind (1956).

‘Most Handsome and Special Man’ Tab Hunter died from heart failure on 9 July 2018, age 86. Hollywood’s boy next door became a star who survived both the studio system and Hollywood homophobia, and then became a gay icon.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7,272

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