The Big Trees

Kirk Douglas plays a timber baron who arrives in California's redwood country in 1900 planning to strip it bare, only to run up against a Quaker community whose land sits on the biggest trees. The land scheme he builds with the help of a saloon singer and a treacherous foreman slowly collapses as he falls for the widow who leads the settlers and starts to see what the forest is worth. Directed by Felix E. Feist for Warner Bros and shot in Technicolor among the real redwoods, it is a conservation western a generation before that was a genre. It entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.