Watch Sing Cowboy Sing For Free

Thanks for the memories!

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Ridiculously bad western. So bad it's almost campy. Ritter was not much of an actor, and whoever wrote this was not much of a writer. Still, it's an interesting bit of pablum if you'd like to see what the boys were thrilling to in the Depression years.The songs are all forgettable,but virtue does triumph in the end.

Like any faithful B Western fan, I've seen my share of Tex Ritter films, so I'll have to be honest here and state that this isn't one of the better ones. A lot of it probably has to do with the age of the print I saw, with a lot of scratches and a real poor synchronization of speech and lip movement which got to be comical at times, especially during Ritter's songs. Speaking of which, Tex sounded absolutely terrible here, and the starry eyed Madge Evans (Louise Stanley) had to be lying when she said he sounded real fine after serenading her with one of his tunes.As far as the story goes, Tex and sidekick Duke Evans (Al pre-Fuzzy St. John) make their initial appearance by driving off an outlaw bunch led by Red Holman (Charles King), who've raided a freight hauling team with the intent of driving them out of business for their boss Kalmus (Karl Hackett). With the Kalmus gang in control, there'll be no rival freight outfit leaving them to jack up prices and drive the local ranchers into submission for their properties. It sounded a lot like vulture capitalism to me if I can draw a comparison to present day political debate framed in class warfare rhetoric.Anyway, you've seen the same story before with any number of cowboy leading men, but even so, there are a couple of unique elements here which managed to surprise me. For one, Duke takes out one of the bad guys with a slick pro wrestling move, a drop-kick to the chest! It would have been more effective if filmed horizontal to the viewer instead of head-on, but it still looked pretty cool. Then you've got that final battle chase between the good guys and bad guys, and there's a particularly nasty spill by a pair of horses pulling a wagon that appeared totally unplanned. I had to play it back a couple of times to see how they did it, but I think it was really just an accident during filming. Nevertheless, it looked very painful for the animals involved.

Tex Ritter and Al St. John protect a female freight line operator from being put out of business by the villains who murdered her father in an attempt to gain control the price of goods and the means of supply.Mostly typical, there's some good action scenes and music, including the terrific title song.Tex is great, as usual and St. John is an animated and entertaining sidekick, showing off his credible fighting and riding skills, though not as glib as he became in many of his later pictures.The most memorable scene of the picture is Tex's murder trial in a saloon courtroom with a bartender judge!

The director Robert N. Bradbury had done over 100 Westerns by time he did this one in 1937. He is not lyrical like John Ford, but he does know how to keep things moving and entertaining. The budget seems to be a bit higher than the ones he was working with when he did the great John Wayne early westerns in 1934 and 1935. Although this was on a Mill Creek DVD release of 20 musicals, there are only four songs and they are short and well integrated into the story, so it is really a Western more than a musical. Tex Ritter is charming as the lead and a bit more relaxed than John Wayne. Al Saint John, who worked with Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton in their early silent slapstick films, is delightful. Everyone else is competent.Growing up on a steady diet of television westerns in the late 50's and early 60's, it is fun to see these early forerunners of the genre. The early television Westerns like "the Lone Ranger" and "Zorro" really copied the style of the 1930's westerns like this one. The later Western series, like "Maverick," "Wagon Train" and "Bonanza" took after the more dramatic/serious and slower paced ones of the 1950's like "High Noon" and "Shane."