George Reeves Double Feature DVD

My DVD of two George Reeves "classics" arrived in the mail today.

It is a two-feature set of movies from 1948 produced by Lippert Pictures of Thunder In The Pines and Jungle Goddess. They are both very low budget movies that Reeves made three years before the Adventures of Superman.

Above, the DVD case. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

I've seen both years ago on the late, late show on television. Those were the days when Los Angeles still had independent stations that played old movies in the middle of the night.

Tonight, I watched Thunder In The Pines featuring Reeves with Ralph Byrd (who played Dick Tracy in the movies). The movie was presented in "glowing sepia-tone".

According to IMDb:

Loggers Jeff Collins [Reeves] and Boomer Benson [Byrd] compete for a mail-order bride by means of a timber-cutting contest. 

The "bad guy" in the movie was played by Lyle Talbot (as Nick Roulade).

The movie is a light-comedy that was set in a forest area where logging was taking place. However, there are no actual forest location scenes and the scenes of actual logging were all stock footage with Reeves or Byrd superimposed in some. The rest of the movie was shot in a sound stage at Nassour Studios on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.

One laughable scene was when the French mail-order bride arrived at the train station. Stock footage of a locomotive in a forest area was used until the train's arrival. No studio train was shown, the only indication of its arrival (or that there was even a train there) at the station were some smoke (or steam) at the bottom of the screen.

Still, despite the low budget production (a few notches above anything Ed Wood produced), it was still entertaining and Reeves and Byrd were good in their light-comedy roles.

The DVD has some biographical information on Reeves by some friends of mine as extras. The DVD was produced around 2007.

About the DVD: I bought it used (but in great shape) through a private party via Amazon.com for $8.00. A "new" (I don't know just how "new" it really was) copy was listed for over $160! It is a rare DVD put out by a small independent company. For $8.00, I figured I'd take my chances and ordered it. It played just fine.

I plan to watch Jungle Goddess (also starring Reeves and Byrd) tomorrow evening.