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…
