Romance on the Range (1942)

Roy Rogers. That's right. You read it correctly. Roy Rogers. The King of the Cowboys. When I was a little kid in the early sixties, we would go to the theater on base every Saturday morning and watch Roy Rogers movies. We loved them. Back then, before the world came crashing in, we all wanted to grow up to be cowboys. Some of us still do. But as Paula Cole points out, the cowboys are all gone now. Roy Rogers is dead. Trigger is stuffed and in a museum. The Lone Ranger hung up his mask. And cowboy movies are a dying - if not already dead - species. But once they were Hollywood's bread and butter, and folks like Rogers were the master bakers.

Romance on the Range is standard Roy Rogers fare. The plot is almost identical to the plot of every other Roy Rogers movie. There are bad guys who are terrorizing the local farmers. Squeaky clean homeboy Roy Rogers shows up on the scene and immediately takes up the challenge to save the locals from the desperadoes. The bad guys are tricky, ruthless varmints, but Rogers is smarter than all of them. And he's good - ya can tell cuz he always wears the white hat. And in a Roy Rogers movie, good always triumphs over evil. And there's always a girl, young, pretty, who falls for Roy. She'll play hard to get at first, but Roy's down home goodness and charm will always win her over in the end. Oh, and of course there's singing. Lots of singing. In fact, I wondered at times how Roy and his trusty pals managed to get any work at all done on their ranch, given how much singing they were doing.

In Romance on the Range, the bad guys are stealing fur from traps and selling it. The dirty, rotten scoundrels! The traps are owned by the ranch that Roy and his pals - Gabby Hayes and the Sons of the Pioneers - work on. The ranch is owned by a young woman - Sally (Sally Payne) - who lives in New York City. Sally notices that the number of furs being sold has dropped suddenly and decides to go out in disguise to find out what's happening. She and Roy fall in love, but of course she plays hard to get. One night - oh, yeah, all night scenes are filmed in broad daylight and the film is darkened during development - the bad guys kill one of Roy's friends who happens to stumble across them. In time, and after many mishap - including Roy's arrest for rustling pelts - the bad guys are defeated and the ranch is saved.

Think all of this sounds really stupid? Well, it probably is, but who cares? Look, Romance on the Range is not a great movie. It's not even a really good movie. It was filmed on the same Western backlot and desert locales as just about every other Roy Rogers movie (I said to my wife, "Look! Those are the same rocks Roy climbed in Sons of the Pioneers). The dialog sounds like it was written by a twelve-year-old kid. And there are holes in the plot that are big enough to drive a covered wagon through. But none of that matters. Set all of that aside. These movies are fun. So put down your preconceptions and your notions about what a movie has to be. As Elton John once sang:

Roy Rogers is riding tonight
Returning to our silver screens
Comic book characters never grow old
Evergreen heroes whose stories were told
Oh, the great sequined cowboy who sings of the plains
Of roundups and rustlers and home on the range
Turn on the TV, shut out the lights
Roy Rogers is riding tonight.

Feeling stressed? Feeling down? Let yourself drift back to a more naive time when every little boy dreamed of being a cowboy and every little girl wanted to be Dale Evens. You may even find out that there's a little bit of cowboy still left in you.

Romance on the Range is rated G (of course) and is filmed in black and white.