Boots and Saddles (1937)

Intro.

I know I've probably mentioned this before, but I love the television channel Encore Westerns.  I love it not for the lesser known movies or reruns of Gunsmoke, but because every Sunday at noon they have a salute to Gene Autry, and play one of his films.  I know it isn't a well known or even very popular station with people my age, but one of my simple pleasures is to curl up with a cup of coffee on Sunday mornings and watch another Gene Autry Western.  They have commercials for it to, and my favorite shows clips of Gene singing and throwing punches as the voice-over calls him the original American Idol.  It's easy to see why so many young boys and girls looked up to him.

Overview

Boots and Saddles is a pretty standard Gene vehicle, and like his other pre-WWII films, it's heavy on the singing, followed by equal parts comedy and action.  This time Gene's the foreman of a ranch whose owner has just died.  The owner's pre-teenaged son Edward is coming from England to collect his inheritance, but unbeknownst to Gene, the boy intends to sell the ranch.  Gene and Frog then face two problems - first is to get the prim and proper boy to fall in love with the West and the ranch.  Second is to find a way to make the ranch more profitable so that they can pay off the owner's debts.  Jim Neale (played by Bill Elliot) wants to buy the ranch to raise horses to sell to the Army.  Gene takes his idea and sets out to sell the ranch's horses to the Army instead.  A lot of good humor results from a series of misunderstandings when Gene mistakes the Colonel's daughter for his maid and Frog gets mistaken for a new recruit.  It all winds up with a race between Neale's horses and Gene's horses - Neale's riders wear black hats and Gene's wear white (naturally).

Highlights

Gene does sing a few great numbers in here, namely the song that lends itself to the title, "Take me Back to My Boots and Saddles."  Gene also serenades the colonel's daughter Bernice (played by Judith Allen) with "The One Rose (That's Left in My Heart)."  He is nicely backed up by the locals in both songs, unlike the comedic song "Why Did I Get Married?" that he sings to Bernice once he figures out who she really is.

The other point worth mentioning is the relationship between Gene and Bernice.  She's upset with him because he's just a cowboy, and her boyfriend happens to be Neale.  They start out on a bad foot because Gene and his boys block the road with all their horses, preventing she and her father to pass on their surrey (which makes for some funny Western road rage).  Well, when Gene shows up and mistakes her for the maid, she plays along.  She even tells him that the Colonel is deaf and likes it when people shout at him (which, of course, Gene does, causing the Colonel to think Gene is hard of hearing).  Later Gene goes to pick Bernice up for a date and she tells him she has to clean the room first.  He discovers a family photo of she and the Colonel and realizes what he had suspected is true.  So he gets even by finding all kinds of things needing to be cleaned, including how awful the floor looks and how she'd better scrub it.  It's a funny give and take that adds not only humor but a good dynamic to the film, even if it is a bit stereotypical. 

Review

Definitely one of Gene's better pre-WWII pictures, Boots and Saddles is very entertaining and wholesome, with some good, clean fun.  Yes, it's dated and pretty old-fashioned, but the film doesn't take itself seriously and neither should its viewers.  I recommend it as a good, solid singing cowboy film that doesn't disappoint its genre or Gene's fans. Oh, and Champion of course steals the show, making the film even better.