Dale, Trigger, and Roy

I found this picture at The Official Roy Rogers – Dale Evans Website, which is a fun read. (I have to say, though, that I am deeply disappointed that the Roy Rogers Museum moved from Victorville, California–just a few hours from Los Angeles–to Branson, Missouri, where I am unlikely to find myself anytime soon.)

I love that beautiful smile on Dale’s face! Roy’s funny pose must be how he told Trigger to rear.

 

Come On, Rangers – Will’s Thoughts

Roy Rogers is back–In Time!

Well, not really, but Come On, Rangers came out in ‘38 and our last Double-R feature was from ‘41. The joke is forced, yes, but so is all of the humor in this oater. (Rimshot!)

Roy Rogers plays Roy Rogers (convenient, that), a singing captain of the Texas Rangers. It seems the Civil War has come to a close and Texas has been readmitted into the Union–and the Governor is shutting down the Texas Rangers. Roy and his pal Jeff (Raymond Hatton, who doesn’t look fresh creased and pomaded like all the other cowboys in these movies, so I like him plenty) are skeptical about the US Cavalry being sent into Texas to enforce the law.

Led by Colonel Forbes (J. Farrell MacDonald), the Cavalry means well but has no experience as a police force; all the outlaws come pouring in, including the dreaded “white horse gang.” Well, I think we all know that the Rangers are gonna be re-instated to get the guys what got Roy’s brother Ken (Lane Chandler), and that the cute daughter of the Colonel, Janice (Lynne Roberts, here a breathtaking 19-year-old and billed as Mary Hart) is gonna fall for Roy instead of that well-meaning but stuffy Cavalry Lieutenant–oh, and Roy is gonna sing a passel of songs.

A lot is made of the Cavalry being ineffective cops which I find funny, because at this point in history the Texas Rangers were still a paramilitary organization that fought a particularly vicious running conflict with the Comanche and routinely rode across the border into Mexico to hang horse thieves (and people accused of such, Mexican people).

This is even illustrated in a sequence where the Cavalry refuses to give chase to horse thieves, and Roy & Jeff (Roy has enlisted in the Cavalry to be close to Janice and Jeff has hung around as a scout) are aghast. The gist being that “The Rangers wouldn’t let anything as small as a border get in their way of chasing down horse thieves!”

I enjoyed Come On, Rangers! (it needs an exclamation point) more than Bad Man Of Deadwood. The plot was still unnecessarily convoluted, and there were a few extraneous characters that just padded out the (admittedly brief) running time. Roy Rogers had a fine singing voice and a magnetic screen presence–it’s fitting that he chose the stage name Rogers as a tribute to the charismatic Will Rogers.

The BEST part of the movie takes place when Roy and the Cavalry ride to his brother’s ranch to find Ken and his family dead–wait, no, that part wasn’t the best (a good sequence though and I admit I was surprised that the film killed off–even off-screen–a woman)–and the barn is on fire, a whinnying horse inside.

Well Roy is a hero, so he rushes through the fire to save a beautiful horse- and I say to Annika: “Aw man, if that is Trigger and they become best pals, I am going to love this movie forever!”

Well guess what he names the horse?

Trigger was the R2-D2 of the Roy Rogers westerns, he had character and was even given set-pieces. In this flick, when Roy is captured by the outlaws at one point Trigger escapes and there is a “thrilling” chase sequence where Trigger outwits and outruns the outlaw chasing him–it’s kinda awesome.

Trigger’s show biz career started off with the awesome The Adventures of Robin Hood- named Golden Cloud, trigger was Maid Marion (Olivia de Havilland)’s horse! It wasn’t until 1943’s Silver Spurs that Trigger would get his own credit in the pic’s opening scrawl…

 

Hey, Remember Us?

That month really got away from us. We did watch a few movies, though!

Come On, Rangers is another Roy Rogers flick, and includes the origin story of his famous partnership with Trigger! As seems to often be the case, I couldn’t find the trailer online but did find the opening four minutes or so:

Here’s the synopsis from the box set:

Come On Rangers, 1938
After Texas is admitted into the Union, the famed Texas Rangers are disbanded and the U.S. Cavalry moves in to keep the peace. Bandits take advantage of the Cavalry’s unfamiliarity with the territory and crime runs rampant. After bandits kill his brother, an ex-Ranger convinces his former fellow Rangers to reorganize and rid the new state of the bandits.

We also watched Below the Border, one of six or seven movies starring The Rough Riders.

And the synopsis:

Below the Border, 1942
The Rough Riders, three friends who work on bringing justice to the West, are embarking on their new case involving a murderous criminal with eyes on a family’s fortune in jewels. Each of the Rough Riders poses as complete strangers to each other, in order to better investigate the case. When one of the Rangers goes under cover in the criminal’s gang, he finds himself in great danger and in need of his fellow Riders.

We’ll post full reviews shortly, but I just have to mention that this synopsis gives away the big reveal. I suppose in 1942 moviegoers already knew who the Rough Riders were, but there is no indication given then the men know each other until more than halfway through the movie. It’s marvelous.

 

Dead Aim – Will’s Thoughts

My deep love for the cinematic output of the Italian Western boom – the mid 60s to mid 70s, just over a decade – is well documented (and you can examine said documentation here and here and here and here and here and also here).

At the time of their releases, the Spaghetti Westerns were usually the B-movies, but some of them started a minor revolution in visual storytelling. And, some would argue, ushered in the death knell of the “classic” western.

Dead Aim looks like an Italian Western. The style and the approach have Almeria stamped all over it: the tight close ups, the sweat and dirt, and the amoral killers all resemble the popular Spag Westerns of the time. Except it looks so remarkably different from Southern Spain that Annika and I were wondering if this WAS a Spaghetti Western – and it turns out, it isn’t. In fact, it was shot in Mexico. Though the influence is heavy, even to the point of Nino Baragli editing – Baragli did a great number of the most important Spag Westerns including Once Upon A Time In The West, Django, and The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly. 

The film features some surprisingly wonderful performances.

Glen Lee plays Johnny, the man who, as a toddler, was rescued from a rattlesnake by a whip-wielding gravedigger. Johnny is a bit fucked up, so good at killing and yet so uncomfortable with violence that he hears a rattlesnake’s rattle whenever tensions are raised.

James Westerfield, a veteran TV and screen actor, plays John Applebee, the above-mentioned gravedigger and mortician. A macabre figure, trundling through the southwest in his hearse, finding any body he can (and asking his adopted son to create some where there are none) in order to gather up receipts, which will be paid off by the territorial governor. This was one of Westerfield’s last performances, and it is a really fine one. He gives such a warmly affectionate turn to his speeches about death and burial that you can’t help but like the creepy old coot; as when he and Johnny come across a pile of corpses (the historically bizarre gist is that – as in the Spag Westerns – the Civil War is being fought somewhere in the desert) and gives the following monologue:

“A mountain Johnny, a beautiful mountain of gold. Oh Johnny we are truly rich, we have all the gold of Yucca and now this. Why there must be a hundred of them, maybe a thousand… how beautiful they are!”

Remember, the gold is unburied and bloodied corpses, chalk white with dust, strewn across the road.

That could be a story in of itself, but writer/director Jose Bolanos was ahead of his time and it’s an interlocking story of four groups, all of whom want money and comfort and to put the violent west behind them. The mortician and his gunhand son; a retired hooker and her low-rent thief paramour; a deserting Black cavalry trooper (again, the time period, as is typical in the Spag Westenrs, is creatively anachronistic, with 1890s carbines, 1880s revolvers, fashions of the turn of the century and constant references to “the damn war” while shot in the Sonoran desert); oh, and the corrupt Territorial Overseer, played with greasy relish by the wonderful Jorge Russek- he was one of the lead Federales in Mapache’s fortress in The Wild Bunch, you’ll recognize him…

The script is good, actually very sharp, if a bit far-out. It definitely helps that, unlike with its Italian kin, Dead Aim (or Arde, Baby, Arde as it was released in Mexico, dubbed in Spanish) was written by someone with a more than rudimentary understanding of English, and performed by actors for whom it was more than a phonetic line delivery – Virgil Frye as the robber Poggin and Venetia Vianello as the belegaured ex-whore are particularly naturalistic and fun.

“Well I can’t imagine you with tears. You didn’t even cry when your mother died!”
“How would you know, you didn’t come.”
“Ah, I hate funerals.”

The delivery brings the dialogue up several notches- the only lead who doesn’t come across as completely comfortable is Lee. He was probably cast because he resembles what a Spag Western star should look like- seriously. I thought he looked like Franco Nero, Annika thought he had an Eastwood vibe going, and another researcher I came across thought he was cast because he resembled a bearded Peter Fonda – all these may be. The other lead who doesn’t quite crackle is Evaristo Marquez who played Lucius, the deserter cavalry soldier. Marquez wasn’t much of an actor, but he had a natural gravitas and nobility – and frankly, that’s all he has to bring. There are a number of scenes with Lucius being flogged or chained or dragged around in cages – the “political” message, sensationalism and frankly, sexing up of the Civil Rights movement was prevalent in Mexican cinema as well as in the US.

The movie gets pretty weird by the end, not quite El Topo material, but going a bit spiritual and metaphysical. And in the end, only one man can ride away with all the gold, of course. The answer to who it will be might surprise you, it sure did me. Well, surprise is the wrong word, it more evoked a: “Huh, I didn’t see that coming. Why the hell did they do that?” which is more in line, again, with the Italian Westerns that Bolanos obviously was aping.

And I certainly can’t fault Bolanos’ instincts. The Spag Western is a unique and wonderful creature. This entry, I suppose a Tortilla Western, is a memorable slice of inventive weirdness. Which is as it should be.

 

Dead Aim – Details

I only watched the first 20 minutes or so of this one – I was plum tuckered out. My impression: it was dusty.

Here’s the basic information I include with all my reviews:

Dead Aim (1971)
Johnny (Glen Lee) has been raised by John Applebee (James Wasterfield), an undertaker since he was rescued by him as an infant from a rattlesnake. Applebee has raised Johnny in the quiet, yet grim lifestyle an undertaker lives and would prefer him to stay that way. Things get complicated for Johnny when he starts to spend time with a married woman. Throw in some stage robbers, bounty hunters, and an African-American cavalryman into the mix and you have a western full of excitement and action.

Once again folks, I do not write these summaries. I just transcribe them.

IMDb
Amazon – Dead Aim
Amazon – 100 Western Classics

This clip is from the opening:

Stay tuned for Will’s review.

 

Rollin’ Plains – Will’s Thoughts

Tex Ritter was John Ritter’s dad!  Who knew?!

Tex Lawrence (Ritter), with his faithful steed White Flash (as himself)  and his two kinda useless sidekicks Pee Wee (the wonderfully over-the-top former Keystone Kop Snub Pollard) and Ananais (Horace Murphy), head on into a small town fraught with much violence to “help out” with the war between the sheepherders and the cattlemen. 

In town they find the very cadaverous “Gospel” Moody (silent and sound veteran Hobart Bosworth, who appeared in over 250 movies from 1908 to 1942, directed 44 known pictures from 1911 to 1915, wrote 27 and produced 11 known pictures from 1911 to 1921!!!), a non-violent, non-ordained preacher-man (and staunch cattle supporter) who stands against them scurrilous rapscallion shepherds, headed by his own brother, Cain Moody, and the violently named Trigger Gargan.  

Do you think Cain turned out bad because of his name, or …

The Sheepherders are vicious bastards, gunning down one of Gospel’s friends, a good and clean cowboy, and blaming Gospel for the murder.  Look, the plot makes zero fucking sense, but it is good and clean cowboy fun.

It’s also a hilariously “classical” western in the sense that “the victors write the history books”. 

The Johnson County War, the Pleasant Valley War, the Lincoln County War: there were numerous real-life violent feuds that spilled over from small factions into entire regions of the American West.  And a number of them did involve sheepmen vs. cattlemen.  The humor in this, as far as I am concerned (and this is as the great-grandson of cattle folk from West Texas) is that the cattlemen were the Big Businesses of the time period.

The sheepherders were predominantly Eastern European or Mexican immigrants, living a migratory life on the open range, while the cattlemen had more permanent spreads – also relying on the open range that they “traditionally” held. 

The big cattle companies often had private clubs (as in Wyoming and Montana) that sported liveried butlers, private dining rooms, gourmet meals, Parisian wines and Italian crystal-ware; the sheepherders often lived out of sod huts and had to hire from the Chinese and Mexican communities to muster enough men to load the sheep onto trains once a purchase had been made because the normal roustabouts and loaders wouldn’t take such “dirty” work.

Legends sprang up enabling the Cowboy to feel superior over his ancient enemy. That the stink of the “woollies” would stick to the water and drive away cattle from drinking.  That the cloven hooves of the sheep would cut the grass too short for the cattle to be able to eat any but the least nutritional part.  Ministers would give sermons about the “down-cast eyes” and “shameful deportment” of Sheepherders vs. the Good and Clean Drovers…

And this is where the unintentional comedy lies.  The sturdy and upright law-abiding Texas Rangers aiding the poor downtrodden ranchers, whose land is being invaded by the deadly gunhand sheepmen.  It’s like doing an action movie set during the 1890s where the bright and upstanding Pinkerton Men come to help the poor overwhelmed industrialist defend his built-by-hard-sweat-and-determination businesses from those dirty rat workers in the union… Or a contemporary film about the loyal and patriotic Blackwater PMCs coming to the aid of the unappreciated Halliburton executives…

All that politico nonsense aside, Tex Ritter (and his associates) are pretty awesome.  I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of all of them – and if the quality of this film is an indication, we’ll be enjoying those return visits.

 

Rollin’ Plains – Annika’s Thoughts

Folks, here’s the truth: I think Tex Ritter is hot.

Frankly, I think that clip tells you everything you need to know about the movie, except the part where the sheep men are the bad guys (I’m certain Will’s review will explain why this is note-worthy). Here’s the summary from the box set:

Rollin’ Plains (1938)
Ranger Tex Lawrence (Tex Ritter) is hot on the trail of a trouble maker who is stirring things up between the cattle ranchers and the sheep farmers. All the signs point towards gang leader Trigger Gargan, but the real culprit is upstanding town elder Barrow. The duplicitous Barrow is secretly informing the gang of Tex’s every move.

IMDb
Amazon – Western Classics
(By the way, if you buy through our links we get a small percentage for the referral.)

I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about this one, but that doesn’t mean it was bad. (Well, it was bad, but it’s a good-bad.) I was tired when we watched it and didn’t pay a lot of attention. I loved Tex’s sidekicks, and the climax made me giggle a lot. Also, it made me want to watch Open Range because I mistakenly remembered that range war being with sheep farmers (it wasn’t). The end!

 

Bells Of San Fernando – Will’s Thoughts

Sometimes a B-Movie is better than it has any right to be. Sometimes it is elevated by one or two performances or the score, sometimes by a decent hook.  What is the hook of Bells of San Fernando?  I’m not sure!  It can’t be lead Donald Woods, though he was by all accounts a solid actor throughout the 1930s and well into the ‘70s – and eventually a solid real estate broker in Palm Springs.  His “Oirish” accent is so atrocious that I kept mumbling over my breath every time he spoke, like an over-ramped Barry Fitzgerald.  It couldn’t have been Gloria Warren, the incredibly bland love interest (this was to be her last film before, presumably, retiring from the pictures).  Could it have been Anthony Warde as the hissable Mendoza?  Probably not, he was good but nothing amazing.  Shirley O’Hara left an impression as the sultry Nita – not only because she looked relatively Spanish, but also because she had a great presence – but was that enough?   I did love Paul Newlan as the man-mountain Gueyon, partially because his Pittsburgh accent was so out of place, not to mention his Canadian courier du bois hat … hey, maybe he was supposed to be a Quebecois mountain man? But one or two strong performances is rarely enough to get a big rolling feeling of love for a movie like this did…

And I did love Bells, or at least I liked it a whole hell of a lot.    The photography does get some kudos; unlike may of the Oaters, I always knew what was going on in any given scene – in a lot of them it’s hard to tell who is where during shootouts or chases – but maybe that’s because there were very few shootouts or chases?  In fact, I think there were two shootings and one tepid chase, and none of the heroes were directly involved in them!

Glory be! Did we have us a little character piece here?  We kind did.  But “Gringo” O’Brian and his boring love affair with the blacksmith’s daughter, Maria, certainly wasn’t the character being studied (though we did chortle a bit at all the references to O’Brian and Maria loving each other “like a brother loves his sister”).  Nor was it about the despicable Mendoza, or the big-hearted Gueyon, or kind Garcia the blacksmith who is carefully and lovingly crafting the bells that will adorn San Fernando mission… not even the sultry Nita was the riveting factor…

No, somehow all of these characters, the mediocre and the more engaging, came together with an interesting and (most importantly) well-crafted script, solid direction, and a certain timeless heroism and the end result is one of those entertaining pieces of craftsmanship that you can’t help but admire – kind of like those Bells that Garcia makes for the Mission.

Obviously I’m skipping the plot, since Annika covered that in her review.  But more interesting than the plot were the two screenwriters, Jack DeWitt and Duncan Renaldo. 

Renaldo was better known as a matinee idol and movie star in his own right, playing O’Henry’s Cisco Kid from 1945-1956 in a series of movies as well as on TV.  Renaldo was of Spanish origins, and worked as an actor and producer as well as a writer (his mini-biography at IMDb is fascinating) – I wouldn’t be surprised if he had written Bells as a Mexican piece, only to have the Studio insist on revamping it for a “White” lead.   Making the lead an Irish adventurer who is happy to live in a Spanish state was a nice touch, especially considering that during the early 1800s Mexico offered homestead rights to Catholic immigrants and a large number of Irish immigrants to the US headed south and west. 

DeWitt was no slouch to frontier writing either. He went on to write a great number of Oaters and adventure pics, but will always be most remembered for penning the monumental revisionist westerns starring Richard Harris: A Man Called Horse, Man in the Wilderness, and Return of A Man Called Horse.  Man In the Wilderness I’ve wanted to see for years: it’s a fictionalization of the Hugh Glass story, which is a great one.

Bells of San Fernando is a movie that left us feeling glad we’re doing this project.  It isn’t a movie either of us would have sought out or been particularly inclined to see, but it shows that not all “Cowboy Classics” and Western pictures are the same.

 

Bells of San Fernando – Annika’s Thoughts

OK. This is so strange for me to be saying that I’ve got to just get it out of the way upfront: this movie would be an ideal candidate to remake.

Bells of San Fernando (1947)
A ruthless land baron controls the town of San Fernando and the surrounding area by guarding the only entrance to the valley. When the land baron announces his intention to marry the local girl loved by another man, it forces the boyfriend to make a daring plan. The boyfriend looks to escape with his girl out of the valley and get word to the Governor on what the land baron has been doing.

IMDb
Amazon: Bells of San Fernando
Amazon: Cowboy Classics

It’s a good story with interesting themes that translate to modern times; the cast is primarily Mexican (or I should say, the characters are) and we need more multi-national movies; the original is almost totally unknown; it would be (in my non-professional opinion) relatively inexpensive to make. And most importantly, the original fails to quite live up to its potential and could be improved upon.

Don’t get me wrong — I actually quite enjoyed Bells. But…

The “Mexicans” make Charlton Heston look convincing. (Touch of Evil is one of my all-time favorite movies, but seriously, WTF?) The most Mexican-looking actor of the whole bunch is Shirley O’Hara. Yes, really. Meanwhile, the least convincing Irishman is Donald Woods (the boyfriend). He sounds like the Lucky Charms Leprechaun. And let’s not forget the Mexican thug from — wait for it — Pittsburgh.

The love triangle (actually more of a rhombus) would work better for me if it were allowed to be a little racier. Mendoza (the land baron) makes love (to use the vernacular) to Nita, who is in love with him, while plotting to marry Maria and kill the Gringo she loves. But he is at times quite tender with Nita, which opens unused opportunities for a sort of pathology that was missing from the character. He was just bad, with no nuance — to be expected, I suppose, from the white hat westerns of the 40s, but a good chance to update the movie for a modern audience without changing the basic story.

I guess it isn’t much of a review to outline my plan for a remake, but that’s what I’ve got. (And, ahem, we’re available to write an updated script.)

 

Bad Man of Deadwood – Will’s Thoughts

Professor Blackstone’s medicine show – including a trick shooter and an “Indian Princess” – descends upon Deadwood mining camp.  The local crime boss, a saloon-keeper who doesn’t wake up until early evening, is less than pleased when the trick shooter gets embroiled in a shootout with some of his henchmen.  And there is a local newspaper with a high-fallutin’ editor…

Sadly, nobody calls anybody else a cocksucker.

Bad Man Of Deadwood, obviously shot on back lots in Southern California (possibly near Pioneertown, some of the rocky canyon/exterior sequences [editor's note: Pioneertown was built five years later -Annika]) is a pure Oater – a term once used by the trade magazines to refer to any and all Western-themed product, but now relegated to the “harmless” era of Singing Cowboys, white hats and black hats, and evil money-grubbers trying to cheat hard-workin’ folk out of their land claims…

Roy Rogers, who was sometimes billed as “King of the Cowboys”, plays trick-shooter/crooner Bill Brady, our Hero (who actually switches from a black hat to a white hat in order to “fool them fellas that shot at me,” though it sadly doesn’t work).  He has a mysterious past as a gun-hand named Brett Starr, which doesn’t really payoff other than as back story.  I think that was thrown in so that the kids in the matinee audience could nod sagely at each other in their Davy Crockett coonskin caps and corduroy jackets and say “See?  Roy Rogers is the best, he used to be  Brett Starr but now he’s Bill Brady”.

And Roy pretty much was one of the rootin’est, tootin’est cowboys in the wild, wild west of the 30’s and 40’s. He took the crown of the primo Singing Cowboy from Gene Autry when Autry went off to war (the two men had worked together but ended up as professional rivals post WWII) – and while Gene has a much more successful recording/songwriting career, Roy gave all us East Coasters lots of good fried chicken and cheeseburgers… and Roy was more good lookin’.  He had an easy charm to him. (Incidentally, contemporary actor Chris Mulkey – remember Hank Jennings from Twin Peaks? – looks eerily like Roy.)

Movies like this are pure fluff, usually coming in at less than an hour, with a pretty standard formula and stock characters- but they can be a lot of fun.  I’ve never been a huge fan of the simplistic “Cowboy Code” morality movies, but I enjoy them for what they are.  The good guys win, the bad guys loose, Roy sings a song or two, Gabby gets all flustered and says “Consarn it!” or the like… it’s an Oater.   Which is what it should be!