Dark Mountain

The Pine-Thomas production division of Paramount specialized in low-budget B movies like Fear in the Night (1946), Manhandled (1949), and this one, William Berke’s Dark Mountain, the first Pine-Thomas film to (loosely) meet noir qualifications, even if its tone is more quaint than bleak (just like in Fred Zinnemann’s Eyes in the Night two years earlier, a dog saves the day!). Robert Lowery stars as forest ranger Don Bradley, residing in a cabin on the titular mountain with fellow ranger Willie Dinsmire (Eddie Quillan), who passes the time by knitting sweaters and playing checkers with his dog. The criminal element arrives in the form of Steve Downey (Regis Toomey), a ruthless racketeer recently married to Bradley’s former girlfriend Kay (Ellen Drew), who’s unaware of her husband’s career choice until she’s forced to go on the run after be murders a government agent. When Kay turns to Bradley for protection, he sets her up in a neighboring cabin, but it won’t take long for Downey to track her down. The incomparable Elisha Cook, Jr., is on hand as a fellow racketeer named Whitey, and Ralph Dunn plays Bradley’s supervisor, Chief Sanford. Dark Mountain is strange, sweet, cheap, and entertaining, nowhere near a must-watch but a pleasing curiosity for open-minded noir fans.