Alan Hale Jr.

A 1951 MGM drama directed by Arthur Pierson. Defeated for re-election to the state legislature, Blake Washburn (Jeffrey Lynn) blames local manufacturer John MacFarland (Donald Crisp) and takes over his uncle's small-town newspaper to crusade against big business. When tragedy strikes his own family, Blake is forced to reconsider his crusade. The film is best remembered today for an early role by Marilyn Monroe as office secretary Iris Martin — a small part, but one of her first credited screen appearances. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Drama

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.

Western · Drama