Men with Steel Faces

"Men with Steel Faces" ("Radio Ranch") is a sort of picture I've seen before...and don't like them. This film, as well as several Buster Crabbe flicks, were actually originally movie serials and the studio later decided to splice the 4 plus hours of story down to about an hour...and then re-release it! Not surprisingly, taking out 3/4 of the story generally results in a confusing mess of a movie...and this one is no exception.

The story is about some unscrupulous baddies AND some folks who live about five miles under the Earth working to try to hurt Gene Autry and get his radio show off the air. But Gene and a group of kids called 'The Thunder Riders' work to stop these baddies and make the west fit for everyone...not just troglodytes.

Until well into the story, Gene seems to only be on hand to sing a few nice songs. The main stars were Frankie Darro and the other kids...as well as the underground folks. Confusing, silly and tough to enjoy with so much of it gone. See the original!

In this film Gene Autrey stirs the loins as Gene Uterus, half brain damaged (I think) cowboy singer who plays as part of Radio Ranch, a radio programme/subliminal mind control experiment. Gene's all about the community, so he allows bizarre kid/adults to go onto his show and gibber on about the thunder riders, who happen to be underground alien types with their own kingdom who turn up far to often in these thirties serials for me to give an absolute sh*t about.

Gene's also got other grief from some guys trying to Scooby Doo the surrounding land so they can get to some radium and all that crap. Basically, Gene gets into a scrape with some folks, has to get to his regular radio show unless he 'loses the contract', and has to kind of...well not save the world, but save his scrotum.

This is the kind of film where people survive plane crashes, there's loads of bluegrass music, and basically blah blah don't care why do i do this.

Kill me. Seriously. What kind of life leads to watching this kind of stuff.

I loved this film. Kill me. Loved it. I give it a ten.

This is an oddly entertaining film. Odd, because I had never seen one of these old westerns with Gene Autry or any of his contemporaries like Roy Rogers before and I was expecting a straightforward western. Instead, I got to see a crazy blend of sci-fi and western.

The film has Autry, and the two juvenile characters of Betsy and Frankie, discovering the underground empire of 'Murania' far beneath Autry's ranch. This empire is ruled by an evil queen, who along with an altogether creepy contingent known as the 'Thunder Riders', threaten civilization as we know it.

Autry sings a lot and his acting is pretty cornball but he's extremely likable and, hence, manages to entertain. The two juvenile actors are very likable too and the film is generally enjoyable. It's also strangely fascinating as the Thunder Riders I mentioned previously bear an eerie resemblance to the KKK and every time I saw them appear I wondered whether this was intentional or accidental.

Anyway, the film was fun, mainly due to the unexpected weirdness of it all. Well worth a viewing.

Sometimes when you look back on an old movie, its central idea appears so strange to modern sensibilities as to make it appear almost surreal. Radio Ranch is one such film. On the one hand it is about a singing cowboy who operates a radio station from his ranch. Now if that idea wasn't bizarre enough in itself, there is a second plot-line about an underground city called Murania which is ruled over by an evil queen and her steel helmeted minions. The above synopsis makes this an early example of that most specific of sub-genres, the western/sci-fi hybrid. Perhaps its random weirdness is a result of it having been cobbled together from various episodes of a serial called 'The Phantom Empire'. I've found that any films edited together from episodes of series always seem to be terrible though and Radio ranch quite frankly is no exception. Its strangeness only takes it so far really and tedium eventually sets in. Certainly an oddity but one with limited interest or entertainment value ultimately, if I am being absolutely honest.

I never really got into westerns (at least these low budget ones) but I did cut my teeth on the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid. There always seemed to be such a sameness about them. As I watched this film, I was lulled into indifference. I never realized how odd these things could look. For some reason, there are a bunch of kids who ride around with flower pots on their heads. There are aliens trying to take over the earth. Gene has only one concern and that is that he get to sing on his radio show or he will lose his contract. Everything is thrown together. The aliens prove ineffectual as do the bad guys. The thing I noticed is that everything is done in a single take. If a character has trouble getting on his horse, they go on with him flopped over the saddle. If someone trips on a rock, he just keeps on going, though he looks silly. This is just a disjointed mess, but must have been made for about ten bucks. I always found these singing cowboys a little hard to take. Roy Rogers was a lot smoother, but it was more of the same. Anyway, a Western with aliens. I guess we could expect about anything.