Ridin' Down the Canyon (1942)

The rustling of wild horses being tamed for use in the fight for freedom is the subject of this way above average modern western. Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers get a bunch of upbeat numbers as Rogers tries to find who is stealing the horses trained by William "Buzz" Henry and romances Henry's pretty sister, Linda Hates. Don't make the same mistake I did. Upon hearing the name of Henry's character (Bobby Blake), I assumed that the future Baretta was playing the part, being under contract at the same time to MGM. One of the key songs is "In a Little Spanish Town" which was sung comically in different films by Buster Keaton and Virginia O'Brien. George "Gabby" Hayes gets lots of laughs, especially when he pulls off a car steering wheel to presumably let it drive itself. Everything works just fine here, one of the better B westerns I've seen, and that's been quite a few of them.

Ridin' Down The Canyon strikes a proper balance in a Roy Rogers western with singing as well as action. In this film Roy and the Sons of the Pioneers are entertainers as well as cowboys and have signed for a gig at the Lariat Lodge owned by Addison Richards and hosted by Lorna Gray. But that's only a blind because Richards makes his real money in horse rustling. Which puts him in opposition to Forrest Taylor who is leading a reclamation project to save the wild horses and preserve them in their natural habitat. If you remember The Misfits you know what some view the wild horse as good for.Young Buzz Henry is a big fan of Roy on the radio and after his own horse named Trigger Jr. is rustled by these varmints and he runs into Roy he asks for help. Roy if nothing else is obliging to his fans.Music for Ridin' Down The Canyon is culled from several sources. Roy sings My Little Buckaroo which was introduced by Dick Foran over at Warner Brothers and Herbert J. Yates must have plunked down some big cash to get it for this film. The old Twenties classic In A Little Spanish Town is sung nicely by Roy. And the title song is also sung well and also was a nice record for Bing Crosby.Gabby Hayes who says he's a professional rustler catcher has some nice moments with future Rogers sidekick Pat Brady who is starting to work his way up from The Sons Of The Pioneers as Roy himself had. Brady was a very funny fellow both in film and in the Roy Rogers television show.Nothing like having a child shown that his hero is all he thinks he is. Those are the happiest endings of all for the front row Saturday matinée kids yesterday and today. Which is another reason why Ridin' Down The Canyon still holds up well.

If you've seen many Roy Rogers films, you probably noticed that many of them involve kids. This was an image Republic Pictures cultivated--and over the years, his films became more and more kids-oriented. For me, this is a problem. His earlier films seemed less schmaltzy and I really didn't like the cute kids and schmaltzy plots (such as one where he stops bad guys from stealing Christmas trees!). However, "Ridin' Down the Canyon" managed to have a very kids-oriented plot but it still worked very well. I think one of the big reason was that the music was much better than usual--with Roy's Sons of the Pioneers at their very best.The plot involves a boy, Bobby, and his sister. Their horses keep getting rustled (a VERY common plot in the Rogers films) and the boy sneaks off to find Roy because he KNOWS Roy can help him. However, in an odd case where art and real life converge, in this one Roy is a movie and radio star and because it's NOT the old west, he's not sure what he and his band can do. Will Roy just give up on the kid or will he somehow find a way to restore the child's faith in the wonderfulness of the Rogers mystique? So, the film has great music, great support from Gabby Hayes and it's fun. So, even with the cutesy kid, it's still among the better films of the genre.

I got a kick out of this Roy Rogers film, and mostly for elements not even connected to the story per se. For example, the name of Buzz Henry's character in the picture goes by Bobby Blake, and I thought to myself, wouldn't it have been cool if the REAL Bobby Blake (Robert Blake, that is) was cast as a character with his own name? It would have been possible too, since the young Buzz Henry was eleven years old when he appeared in the picture. At the time, Blake (the real one) would have been nine, so it probably wouldn't have been too much of a stretch to make that happen. Instead, Blake (the real one) made his mark in Westerns as Red Ryder's sidekick in the series of movies that started with "Riders of Death Valley" in 1944; Blake was Ryder's sidekick Little Beaver.Then there's Roy Rogers' title song that's first heard as a recording when Bobby spins a couple of tunes on his record player. I thought that was pretty unique, at least it was the first time I'd seen that done to introduce the lead player. Rogers himself doesn't appear for a few more scenes, so that was a cool way to get his presence into the movie a bit earlier.A good deal of the fun in this one is provided by a running feud between Gabby Hayes and Pat Brady as a member of the Sons of the Pioneers. Each believes the other is deaf based on false information intentionally planted by Roy and Bob Nolan, so they go through the picture shouting at each other in comic fashion. Brady provides some more merriment when he gets to sing lead in a jail house tune later in the story. As for Gabby, he tries hard to build on his reputation as a 'professional rustler catcher', even if one wonders how many rustlers there might have been in that hazy modern Western era where 1880's sensibility collides with such technology as automobiles, radio and electrical appliances. The 1940's was a curious time for Westerns as this stuff pops up all the time in the films of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but it usually turns out fairly entertaining as it does here.If you hadn't figured it out by now (unless you've seen the film), the story involves a gang of rustlers operating in a milieu where wild herds are being rounded up on reservations and bred with ranch thoroughbreds as part of a government experiment. The rustlers spring into action whenever a particular song is played during the Lariat Lodge entertainment broadcast. Inadvertently, the Pioneers are drawn into this ruse when they perform "Blue Prairie" during a one night stand at the Lodge. That actually rounds out another interesting point about the movie's principal players - when introduced, the singing group is introduced as Roy Rogers and the Sons of The Pioneers. I hope Bob Nolan didn't feel too bad about that one!