Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch (1976)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

This here is a rather interesting tribute to the countless "B" Westerns that were so popular back in the day. The gimmick of this film by Robert Patterson is that he took clips from dozens of movies and edited them together into one movie so that the various cowboy heroes of the past could be in one movie, working together to get the bad guys.

John Wayne, Rex Allen, Gene Autry, Don Barry, William Boyd, Johnny Mack Brown, Buster Crabbe, Eddie Dean, Hoot Gibson, Tim Holt and Monte Hale are just some of the stars that are show here and we also get some famous sidekicks too.

MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH is a film that I respected more than I really enjoyed. I say that because it was pretty fascinating seeing them do a Frankenstein type of picture meaning that they took clips from dozens of other movies and made their own out of them. There's some new narration that is meant to help us know what's going on and I thought this was an interesting way to tell a story.

With that said, the film simply doesn't work because the footage is obviously from different movies and it just never really flows as one movie. Again, on a technical level I thought they did a good job but it was just impossible to really get a flow to the picture when you know you're watching one movie this second and then another the next. The gimmick was an interesting one but I just don't think it fully worked in the end.

I will say that fans of these "B" movies will want to check it out as a curio but that's about it.