Colorado Serenade

PRC must have mortgaged the studio to give this film color. Could it have been a birthday present to their cowboy hero star Eddie Dean? We can only speculate.

Eddie and sidekick Roscoe Ates are drafted into helping Judge Forrest Taylor bring and law and order to their town of Rawhide. There's a corrupt saloon and mine owner played by Warner Richmond who with his son Dennis Moore has the illegal activities pretty well organized. Taylor is going to be a kind of Judge Seabury and Dean and Ates are on the commission.

What is revealed by the film is a prior relationship with Taylor, Richmond and Moore that is the key to the whole film. In the end corruption is driven from Rawhide.

Dean has a couple of nice songs to sing including the public domain Home On The Range which every singing cowboy did a version of. Colorado Serenade is a pleasant enough film, quite a revelation for a PRC release to be done in color.

Eddie Dean and Roscoe Ates mosey into a town in, presumably, Colorado, where there's trouble a-brewing. Someone's been stealing gold shipments. We know at the beginning it's Dennis Moore, and it soon becomes apparent the reason he hasn't been caught is that he's handing it over to his father, Warner Richmond, who's been melting it down and then claiming it's from a new vein in a played-out mine. Dean joins the gang to investigate.

It's a PRC B western, which means you can't expect much, even if it is in color. The print was a fuzzy 16mm, the colors had faded, and Dean sings a couple of songs not under copyright. Roscoe, as the comic sidekick, gets a couple of old gags which he executes dully. It's a dull little movie with the usual riding and gunfire. There is a little interest in the relationship between Moore and Richmond.

When I see these old movies from the 40s, I have to wonder if an adult audience, at the that time, saw them with any critical thought, or just accepted them as being realistic. Example: Eddy Dean wears pristine pants, a clean and pressed totally Hollywood style "cowboy" shirt, modern style hat, a cute little frilly scarf and a double holster rig that was never used in the old west. Everything about it was so unreal. And then he rides his horse around the countryside with his friends singing.

I do like Western movies, but please give me a little bit of reality. And the script. As the stagecoach rumples into town causing people to move out of the street, our leading lady says, "The stage is coming!" Dah? Brilliant observation.

In typical Hollywood fashion, guns are fired (inside buildings) and no one even flinches, saloon girls are supper good looking and wear dresses fit for the London opera and the good guys can hit any target they aim at.

All in all, just not a very good monie.

Eddie Dean and his sidekick Soapy Jones (any relation to Fuzzy Jones?) foil an assassination attempt against a circuit judge being sent to clean up the outlaws' dirty town, leading to Eddie's recruitment into the judge's team of crime fighters.

This time around, Producers Releasing Corporation seems to have spent all it's budget on making the picture in color and not enough on the script or director, as this is too talky with not enough action.

The only thing in this slow moving film that works is the handful of musical interludes featuring Eddie singing, as he was a pretty bland action star and this movie is instantly forgettable.