Hands Across the Border

I was a boy back in the 1950s and went into town often to watch Roy Rogers movies. I found a DVD at my public library with five old, B&W Roy Rogers movies, this is the first one I watched, running under an hour.

As an aside, I recently found out his horse Trigger started out as a rental horse called Golden Cloud and appeared in "The Adventures of Robin Hood" in 1938, ridden by Olivia de Havilland. Then in 1938 he was bought and became Roy's Trigger.

This movie is set in the 1800s and is about horses and competition for a military contract. As the movie starts Roy is in the brush and approached by a man intending to rob him. Roy smiles at the man, doesn't cooperate, basically says "You're not going to shoot me" and together they end up at a shindig where Roy sings.

In fact in many respects the movie is a musical with several production numbers, all light-hearted fun. The sound is excellent for a 1944 movie, the B&W picture is fine but not very sharp.

I enjoyed the viewing, as a nostalgic look back to my childhood activities.

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.

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.

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.