by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Old
Corral, a 1936 Republic production
that was one of the early Gene Autry vehicles after the success of the serial The
Phantom Empire made him a star — and just
as Autry had got his start as a supporting player in Ken Maynard’s serial Mystery
Mountain and then taken over the
lead in The Phantom Empire after Maynard and Mascot production head Nat Levine had a falling-out,
so Roy Rogers reportedly made his film debut in The Old Corral as one of the minor villains (!) and then went on
to his own successful series of starring vehicles at Republic — though he’s not
listed in the credits and I didn’t recognize him (I didn’t recognize Lon
Chaney, Jr. either and he was listed in the credits). What’s amazing about this movie is the sheer
multiplicity of plots the writers, Bernard McConville (story) and Sherman Lowe
and Joseph Poland (script), were able to crowd into a 54-minute running time,
and their obvious tongue-in-cheek awareness that this was a fundamentally silly
movie and they weren’t going to take it at all seriously even though they
weren’t going to make it an outright parody either.
Like most of Autry’s and
Rogers’ films, it actually takes place in contemporary times, and it begins
with a gangster scene that approaches film noir — gangster Tony Pearl (Buddy Roosevelt) is shot
and killed at the Chicago nightclub he owns by rival gangster Mike Scarlatti
(John Bradford), and singer Eleanor Spenser (Hope Manning, who later changed
her first name to Irene and remade a couple of Bette Davis roles at Warners,
including the lead in Spy Ship in which she played a character based on real-life aviatrix and
isolationist speaker Laura Ingalls). Spenser flees West, changes her name to
Jane Edwards and hides out in the town of Turquoise City, Arizona after her bus
is forced to stop there by bandits, the O’Keefe brothers (played by the
real-life singing group the Sons of the Pioneers), who stick up not only the
bus passengers but also the local sheriff, Gene Autry (as usual, he’s using his
real name as the name of his character), who’d been driving a buckboard with a
heavy-set man he was arresting for domestic violence against his wife. The bus
had crashed into the buckboard, driving it off the road and breaking it in
pieces, and the driver had picked up Autry and his prisoner — and as if that
weren’t enough plot for you, Edwards has been cruised on the bus by Martin
Simms (Cornelius Keefe), who’s trying to hire her for his saloon/gambling house
in town — only he’s really after the money he can get from turning her in, either to the
authorities (she fled the scene of Pearl’s murder and therefore became a
suspect in it herself) or to Scarlatti, who wants to kill her.
As if that weren’t enough plot for you, a customer of Simms
pulls out a gun in the middle of the saloon floor and threatens to kill him —
only Autry, who just happens to be there, takes the gun away but refuses to take
Simms’ complaint on the ground that Simms is running crooked games in his
back-room casino and therefore the man, who’d lost big at Simms’ rigged tables,
was justified in going after him even if he did so the wrong way. What’s more,
the residents of Turquoise City are about to hold a jubilee celebration in
honor of the new dam that’s being built in their town, which will provide them
water and electrical power (this was the 1930’s and big infrastructure projects
like that were “in” in those days, a part of the Zeitgeist that produced this film that’s almost unimaginable
today!), and part of the celebration is supposed to be a big concert which
Autry will MC as well as performing himself. Three of the O’Keefe brothers are
in jail but demand to be allowed to perform at the concert, explaining that the
holdup was just a publicity stunt for their vocal group — but they won’t play
unless Autry arrests the two other brothers who got away, on the ground that
their vocal arrangements are for five people and won’t sound right with any
fewer. The whole thing builds to a climax at what’s called “the old corral” —
though it looks just like an old ranch building with no sign that it was ever
used to pen a herd of cattle (which is what a “corral” actually is) — in which
Gene arrests both Scarlatti and Sims and looks headed for a happily-ever-after
finish with Jane née Eleanor
(he even kisses her at the end, after previously having shown no discernible
romantic interest in her at all!).
Interspersed in all of this are more songs
than I could keep count of, as well as some familiar strains in the backing
music (their rent-a-score included some classical bits that both Charles and I
thought familiar, though we couldn’t place them — nothing as obvious and
jarring as “The Moldau” used as a backdrop for a fleet of Polynesian outrigger
canoes in Murnau’s Tabu!);
Manning tries one duet with Autry but their voices don’t blend for shit (and it
didn’t help that Republic kept the level of her voice well below his!) but
overall the music, like Autry’s performance, is nice and comfortable (and he
does a number with yodels, accompanying himself on guitar, reminding us that
before he ever made a film Autry was already a recording star: Columbia had
signed him as a yodeling country balladeer to compete with Jimmie Rodgers on Victor!)
— and the movie as a whole is respectable light entertainment, made by all
concerned with tongues firmly in cheeks and an awareness that this good-natured
formula was incredibly popular with audiences of the time.
