An American western musical directed by Joseph Kane, starring Roy Rogers and George "Gabby" Hayes.
A singing cowboy and his sidekick help a woman who owns a mine to summon businessmen to visit and hopefully invest in the enterprise. A city gangster poses as one of the cowboys in their riding gang and a kidnapping of the businessmen and hero cowboys takes place.
This was pretty standard. Plot, characters, audio and video as expected. The only thing to note is the live musical performance and wild dancing of a pair of kids. I rate it tolerable.
An American western directed by Joseph Kane, starring Roy Rogers and George "Gabby" Hayes.
A cowboy sheriff impersonates a corrupt sheriff to expose the leaders of a town as criminals.
This was pretty much what I've come to expect. Some vagueness of plot and few clearly defined characters, lo-fi audio and video that are still audible and can be seen. there were not many musical numbers in this one. Because it blends in with the crowd so well, I will rate it tolerable.
An American western directed by Robert N. Bradbury, starring John Wayne and George Gabby Hayes.
A singing cowboy encounters a shot sheriff and a young woman who has just robbed a stage coach in the desert. He lends the woman his horse and leaves the sheriff for dead, sneaking aboard the stagecoach against the will of it's drivers who want to kill him. In town, he finds that there is a dispute over water and land rights involving a corrupt businessman.
According to Wikipedia, this was the first pairing of John Wayne with Gabby and featured a soon to be abandoned dubbed singing theme because Wayne was not a singer. The plot and characters were clearly presented and it kept my attention through the whole 52 minutes. The audio and video were decent, given the early production date. There were some instances of breaking the 180 degree rule, with characters moving one way, cut, they're moving the other direction. The most notable was when the male and female leads were leading their shared horse to the barn. The title sounds like it could be a Rhapsody of Fire song. Overall, it was not too bad, but definitely not good. I rate it tolerable.
An American western directed by Harry L. Fraser, starring John Wayne and George Gabby Hayes.
A cowboy finds several men dead in a bar, including the man whom he was sent there to meet. The outlaw responsible alerts the sheriff so that he will find the innocent cowboy among this destruction. The dead bar owner's daughter helps the cowboy to escape and he helps her to defeat the outlaws who killed her father.
I did not recognize Gabby when he wasn't playing the old sidekick role. At first, I thought the film would be silent because of the primitive video and speeded up horse riding, but it turned out to be a talkie. Throughout the duration, this silent film visual style could be seen. The pacing was fast to fit a complex plot into 52 minutes, but the plot and characters were clearly presented. I'm not spoiling the ending, but in the last shot, the cowboy and bar owner's daughter turn away from the camera with arms around eachother instead of kissing. A kiss would have required tall Mr. Wayne to bend down quite a bit to level his face with Alberta Vaughn's. I rate it adequate. It was pretty good, but not a keeper.
An American western directed by Frank Mcdonald, starring Roy Rogers, George Gabby Hayes, Trigger and Bob Nolan.
A cowboy rides his mare to a ranch where a stallion is being shown and the two fall in love immediately, disrupting the show and angering the rancher. The cowboy tries to get permission to breed the stallion and mare, but is denied. When the escaped stallion is shot after copulating with the escaped mare, the cowboy is blamed.
This was pretty much standard fare. I do recognize that the film had a different plot than most westerns of the time because it focused on horses, rather than the men riding them. However, the shooting style and sound were so similar to standard American cowboy flicks that the difference doesn't matter quite so much. The characters were identifiable and easy to keep track of and the pacing was alright, bordering on moving too quickly. I rate this tolerable because it is so similar to so many other films in the genre.
An American western musical directed by Frank McDonald, starring Roy Rogers, George Gabby Hayes and Trigger.
An old man runs a dated rodeo show that is losing popularity. The owner of a more successful rodeo proposes to the old man's daughter in hopes of combining the two rodeos. A singing cowboy steps in to sort things out.
The video was amazingly clear for this early date and I liked the hokey, old music. In fact, I'm beginning to like the Roy and Gabby team. The plot was not communicated very clearly and was vague in some places. The recycled characters from every other singing cowboy western were pretty stale, but worked alright for this one. It seems that there were many 55 minute westerns created around this time that are hit and miss based on luck. Some have a hokey charm and others are just shoddily crafted filler. I rate this o.k.
An American western directed by David Howard and Joseph Kane, starring George Gabby Hayes, with a musical appearence by Gene Autry.
A cowboy and his sidekick are run off the road by a woman driving her car. She crashes as well and catches a ride on a passing stagecoach while the duo tow the car to town for her. The men from the stagecoach are villains who trick the cowboy's sidekick into gambling everything the duo owns on a horse race that the villains are planning to cheat at. The cowboy will not give up his horse until he finds who is responsible for injuring it and making him lose the race.
This was pretty standard for old westerns. The plot was easy to follow and the characters easy to keep track of. The audio and video were very primitive, but not bad. Gene Autry's musical numbers came as a set of 3 performed in a dance hall at about the halfway point of the film. Wikipedia identifies this as a screentest for singing cowboys that was successful. If you look closely, you will notice that Autry has a fretboard inlay of his name on the guitar. Overall, this was a very standard western of the time. It may have been a formative film in the singing cowboy genre, but 81 years later, it just seems to fit in with that crowd. I rate it o.k.
