Prairie Chickens

In the late 1930s, the Hal Roach Studio did something which seems inexplicable today....it sold off The Little Rascals to MGM, and it refused to renew the contracts of Laurel & Hardy as well as Charley Chase! Instead, the studio wanted to concentrate on B-movies...'streamliners' to be specific. A streamliner was a short B-movie...running at about 45 minutes. The decision was purely financial but it is hard to imagine the studio getting rid of the folks who made them rich.

One short-lived streamliner series were the western comedies starring Jimmy Rogers and Noah Beery Jr.. They made three of them and they are okay to watch...but reallly lacks the laughs you'd expect in a Roach film. "Prairie Chickens" is the final of these three movies.

Jimmy and Pidge (Rogers and Beery) are stranded on their way into town. They are picked up by a chauffeur for Henry Lewis-Clark III and the town assumes one of them is this rich man. So, after a bit of celebrating, things go sour when the chauffeur tells folks that neither of the men are his boss.

The pair, along with the real Henry Lewis-Clark III, make a run for it to the Lewis-Clark mansion. What they don't realize is that crooks are staying there and the crooks try to scare them away by dressing up like ghosts. There also are a group of pretty women staying there as well...and they are scared as well. It all ends with some hog-tying and branding...and I am not kidding.

While the film is VERY silly, it's just not all that funny. You also can't help but think Laurel & Hardy or Charley Chase could have used this same material and gotten more out of it. Watchable but not much more.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised viewing this film in the early AM and finding out how good this 48 minute feature film was for something done on a sandal string by Hal Roach, Jr.

Jimmy Rogers (who was the younger son of Will) and Noah Beery, Jr. are a pair of down on their luck cowboys that I don't think we saw anything close to until Burt Kennedy's The Rounders over 20 years later. These two galoots don't even have horses, they're getting around the country in an old clunker that one still has to start with a crank.

They get themselves hit by a chauffeur driven car with Jack Norton as the perpetually soused multi-millionaire who's visiting one of his properties, a ranch that Joe Sawyer has been running for him and skimming the profits off. Norton may very well have been the inspiration for Dudley Moore's Arthur.

No use to go any further in describing this film, but it's a lot of laughs as only Hal Roach studios knew how to manufacture them on a dime.

It's also notable for the fact that Noah Beery, Jr.'s character name in the film is Pidge which was a nickname he was known by among his friends.

This film is really quite a scream.

Prairie Chickens (1943)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Third and final film in Hal Roach's series features Jimmy Rogers and Noah Beery, Jr. once again playing cowboys who get mistaken for a guest of honor and chaos follows. I've now watched all three in the series and I've also now seen four films from the short career of director Hal Roach, Jr. Needless to say, his directing style isn't worth a damn so it's rather sad his father hired him over D.W. Griffith for One Million B.C.. With that said, this third film is weak throughout with an incredibly boring screenplay that doesn't give the actors a thing to do. The final third of the film takes place in a haunted house setting and everything here falls flat on its face.

I've owned this film on 16mm for 37 years or so. It's always been a big hit with kids and most adults whenever I've shown it. There are plenty of familiar faces and old time second-string actors to jog the memories of older folks. The plot is silly, but who cares? If you like goofy comedies, you just might like this one. Kids in the family love it and have always requested this film to be shown at our gatherings; in that respect it is somewhat timeless. No polished humor or dialogue here, just a lot of smiles and quite a few laughs. At 45 or so minutes running time, it's just long enough to be very enjoyable without dragging on. Don't know if this is on VHS or DVD, but it might be worth checking out if you find it.