When I was young, we piled into the neighborhood movie theater Saturday mornings for a playbill unimaginable today.
For 15 cents, we got previews, two or three cartoons, the Movietone News, perhaps a ”Pete Smith Special” or some other short subject, a serial, a main feature and a ”B” feature.
Often, the ”B” was a western. There were three big stars in the pre-TV sombrero set after the war, roughly 1946 through 1952: Hopalong Cassidy
(played by former silent-screen idol William Boyd), Gene Autry and ”King of the Cowboys” Roy Rogers. Big men in slick duds with big Colt .45
”Peacemakers” battling big bad guys like Roy Barcroft toward a big finish of instant justice.
As I watched Rogers kick the stuffing out of Barcroft the other night on one of the new videos of an old release by Republic Pictures, I marveled that we kids put up with all the singing, and ignored plots so thin you could substitute them for phyllo dough. Such is the tolerance for heroes.
Rogers` Republic Studios films were brief and, even with the singing cowboy fluff, action-packed. They were movies with only the good stuff left in. The ho-hum junk-character development, motives, establishing shots, plot- was compressed to nothingness. Bodies of bad guys were left by the wayside, unattended and unmourned.
In ”The Far Frontier” (Republic Pictures Home Video, 1949, black and white, 53 minutes, $12.98), there are five fist fights, five chases, two shootouts and approximately 13 corpses (some dispatched in sealed, 55-gallon drums).
The action centers on Roy and the boys-Foy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage, singers cum ranch hands-who rescue Rogers` childhood chum, Tom Sharper. Sharper (played by Clayton Moore, later TV`s ”Lone Ranger”) is a border patrol officer. He uncovers a plot to smuggle criminals into the U.S. over the Texas-Mexican border. The thugs had fled during World War II.
Young Sharper on horseback chases a truck loaded with the steel drums, and forces it to stop. As he clambers onto the truck bed, he gets thunked on the head with a monkey wrench. Oops. Amnesia.
The desperados` leader hates young Tom`s father, a former Texas Ranger. The crooks manipulate poor Tom into helping shoot a rancher and rob a bank. When Rogers finally nabs his pal, he beats the tar out of him.
”His amnesia was caused by a blow on the head,” Rogers explains in his sweet tenor. ”I thought the shock (of getting thumped) would bring him back to us.” It works, and in short order, the tables are turned on the bad guys. In the late 1930s, Rogers was groomed to take over for Autry, but Autry didn`t leave Republic until the early 1950s. They swapped supporting casts and staffs. Rogers averaged five pictures a year. A few of them even rose above the standard ”B” formula.
One of these is among the new Republic releases. ”Down Dakota Way”
(Republic Pictures Home Video, 1949, color, 67 minutes, $12.98), like other Rogers flicks, is set in a contemporary time, a wafer-thin amalgam of Old West and V-8 engine, cow pony and penicillin.
Roy and love interest Dale Evans investigate the murder of the Sun Rock veterinarian, killed because he knows the town`s biggest and shiftiest cattle rancher plans to sell the beef from a herd infected with the dreaded hoof-and- mouth disease.
The hit man is Steve Paxton, adopted ne`er-do-well son of Sun Rock`s old school teacher. Steve comes to a tragic end as Roy foils the rancher`s plot.
Other top titles in the new Republic releases you may wish to consider include ”Sons of the Pioneers” (1942) with Rogers` old sidekick Gabby Hayes (desperados poisoning cattle); ”Bells of Coronado” (1950) with Evans (a plot to sell uranium to the communists); ”Susanna Pass” (1949) with Evans
(crooked newsman discovers oil beneath fish hatchery); ”Trail of Robin Hood” (1950), with Jack Holt (Rogers and the gang help Holt get every kid a Christmas tree; strangest Rogers flick ever), and ”Trigger, Jr.” (1950) with Evans (foiled blackmail plot, and the teaching of a scared little boy to love horses). Each retails for $12.98.
Republic Pictures Corp. is at 12636 Beatrice St., P.O. Box 66930, Los Angeles, Calif. 90066-0930; phone 213-306-4040.
