Hands Across the Border

When ranch owner Joseph Crehan is killed,his daughter, Ruth Terry, thinks about letting Onslow Stevens run the ranch, while she scurries back to her Broadway career. But Roy Rogers is willing to be her top hand if she sticks around, and three generations of ranching tradition impel her to try for an army contract that eluded her father.

Roy starred in nine westerns for Republic Pictures in 1944, and this good-natured effort was priced for success. There are no villains in this wartime western, just a bunch of people in friendly competition, with dance director Dave Gould running three production numbers. The lyrcs are by Ned Washington, the music for the title number was written by Hoagy Carmichael, and if it occasionally seems a little florid in those production numbers, the race to see who gets the contract is well shot by Reggie Lanning; the Alabama Hills have rarely looked so good. The supporting cast has Big Boy Williams, Duncan Renaldo, Mary Treen, the Wiere Brothers, and of course, the Sns of the Pioneers. The money shows n the screen, even if it's a far more introspective movie than you'd expect from a B Western; clearly, Herbert Yates knew who made money for Republic and was willing to spend some to bolster the brand.

The oater's an incredible mish-mash except for Roy and Trigger discovering one another in roughhouse fashion. It's only a cowboy flick in a really extended sense. There's some good eastern Sierra scenery and plenty of hard-riding, but no flying-fists, fast-guns, bad-guy showdowns, or other cowboy trademarks. Instead, there's plenty of stagey singing and dancing, and a story-line with all the film editing coherence of broken glass. For me, the best feature was the leggy chorus girls in the last part. But that's just my old-guy hormones kicking in. Anyway, the flick's no favor to Roy, except for pairing him up with the Wonder Horse Trigger, a pairing that would last a lifetime. Together, they would go on to a memorable career as a team, one that happily leaves this mess in the dust.

I read in a history of the movie western that at one point in his career the films of Roy Rogers were more musical than western. That was never more true than in describing Hands Across The Border. Republic might well have just dispensed with the plot and made this one a western musical revue.

The film has all kinds of numbers done by Roy Rogers, Sheila Terry, the Sons Of The Pioneers, dancing by Janet Martin and the Wiere Brothers and comic relief by Guinn Williams and Mary Treen. Even the sequences involving Trigger could just as easily been worked into a revue.

The very thin plot has cowboys Rogers and Williams hired by Joseph Crehan a ranch owner with a lovely daughter, Sheila Terry. Crehan and rival owner Onslow Stevens are competing for an army contract to sell cavalry horses. This mind you in an age of mechanization. Crehan gets killed trying to ride Trigger, but it's Roy who eventually rides Trigger and saves him.

Onslow Stevens's part is strange as well. He's built up to be the bad guy as he usually is. But when the film is over all this guy really has done is pay some attention to Sheila Terry in an effort to get that contract one way or another. He never really does anything all that villainous except look like one.

The last quarter of the film is simply a reprise of all the numbers that had been done before in the film. Later on Roy's films got a little more action in them. This one probably disappointed the kids.

Like so many of the Roy Rogers films, this one was trimmed to fit television time slots in the 1950s. Most of these films had about 8-10 minutes shaved off. However, "Hands Across the Border" was more heavily edited--with 20 minutes deleted. It also has a lousy print--very dark in some parts, very faded in others. My review is for this expurgated version. It's very possible the full-length version is better...or not.

Roy seems to have the magical ability to read people and animals in this outing. When he meets up with Guinn Williams' character, he's on the run from the law and threatens to shoot Roy--but Roy knows he's not a bad guy and comes to his aid. The same with Trigger. This horse reportedly killed its owner--but Roy just seems to magically know the horse is a winner and sets out to prove it to everyone.

In addition to the plot involving a competition in which Roy and Trigger compete, there is STILL a lot of singing and dancing in this one. I assume the full version had more...which is hard to believe! For instance, the last 12 minutes all is taken up by a singing, dancing pageant--and the plot itself is resolved only 40 minutes into the film! This makes for a very, very slow final portion of the movie. All in all, this film was so heavily hacked to pieces, it's hard to love.

In order to escape trouble in a town that doesn't take kindly to vagrancy, Roy Rogers and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams pretend to be entertainers hired for a party at a local ranch, where they talk themselves into a job. When the kindly ranch owner is killed trying to break a wild horse, Roy and company try to save the horse from being destroyed by the ranch's soon-to-be new owner.

An okay and offbeat (at least for Roy Rogers) cowboy melodrama, this is pleasant enough, with an unusual (and unusually loose) plot that does away with the usual "Roy versus armed heavies" storyline in favor of laid back horse-play and an abundance of song and dance numbers, some of which are pretty odd.

There's some really nice location photography and good horse-riding stunts that show why Trigger was so popular.

This is also a good showcase for co-star Duncan Renaldo, who a few years later would gain great fame as The Cisco Kid in movies and television.