The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)

Seen a good Western lately? It's tough these days. They just don't make `em anymore. Frequent readers already know of my love affair with Roy Rogers movies. Well, I'm afraid I have to admit that it extends to all Westerns. I'm just a sucker for them. But, as I say, they don't make very many of them these days. Fortunately, Hollywood has a rich history of Western movie making and a plethora of Westerns worth watching. And The Sons of Katie Elder is one of the best. Directed by Henry Hathaway, it tells the story of four brothers who come back to their home town of Sweetwater, Texas, for their mother's funeral. John Wayne plays John, the eldest, a gunslinger wanted in several states. Dean Martin plays Tom, the next in line, who went off and became a gambler. Earl Holliman plays number three son Matt, and Michael Anderson, Jr., plays the youngest brother, Bud, who their mother was intent on sending to college. Once there, they discover to their shame that their mother was destitute the last years of her life, living on the kindness of strangers. The brothers set out to determine who murdered their father 6 months prior to Katie's death, and they uncover a trail of deceit and treachery that leads back to a shifty gun-smith who cheated their father out of his ranch. The sheriff is murdered and the brothers are arrested. As they're being sent to Laredo for trial, they're ambushed. Much gun play ensues. Some dynamite is employed. Matt gets himself skewered. Bud gets shot. So does Tom. But in true Western fashion, the weaselly-eyed varmint what caused all the commotion gets his come-uppance in the end.

I first saw this movie when I was about five years old, and it's one of those films that has formed a part of my world view. In late-era Westerns like The Sons of Katie Elder, there's good and there's bad like in all of the best Westerns (movies not motels), and then there's the bad that sometimes does good for all of the right reasons. The Sons of Katie Elder is, at heart, a redemption movie, a story about how a bunch of boys who all went South can turn their lives around and do something good, even if it is just getting one of them through college and into a decent life. In this film, the Duke plays - well - the Duke. That's all there is to it. And Dean Martin pretty much plays the same character he always played, only this time he's wearing a cowboy hat instead of a tuxedo. Earl Holliman - several years away from Police Woman fame but several years beyond Forbidden Planet, puts in a serviceable portrayal of Matt. The weak link is Michael Anderson, Jr. - he overacts to the point of inanity. The rest of the cast is pretty incredible: George Kennedy as the evil gunslinger Curly; James Gregory as the bad guy, Morgan Hastings; Denis Hopper as Hastings' whiny son, Dave; even the squeaky-voiced Percy Helton as the local store owner. The film was shot on location in Mexico and Colorado, and the scenery is breath-taking - first clue that we're not in Texas. "Those are my favorite mountains in Texas," I said to my wife. But who cares. The geography of the cowboy movie has never been faithful to the true American west. Roy Rogers fought North Dakota bad guys on the same SoCal rock formations that James Kirk fought space aliens on decades later. It doesn't matter. If you're making a movie about cowboys and gunslingers and such, you've gotta have craggy rocks and mountains looming in the distance, even if you are in North Dakota. Or Texas. Or wherever. If you're in the mood for a good shoot-em-up Western, check this one out.

The Sons of Katie Elder is rated G. It's filmed in widescreen Technicolor and has a running time of 122 minutes.

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.