Dudes Are Pretty People

In this, the first of three Roach streamliners starring Noah Beery Jr. as 'Pidge' and Jimmy Rogers as, well, Jimmy, a pair of trouble-seeking cowboys wandering around the modern west, we see the middling mix of comedy and western story telling that was the hallmark of this modest series. Noah Beery Jr. later turned into a fine supporting character actor, best known today for playing 'Rocky on THE ROCKFORD FILES. Mr. Rogers career fubbled out in a few more years.

In this one, they get mixed up with a dude ranch. The movie is no masterpiece, but its good humor carries it along for the short hour it takes.

In the 1940's Hal Roach Sr was famous for producing the Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang comedy shorts, began producing a string of features and "streamliners. Most of these films are jaw-droppingly bad and done with so little imagination or skill to make Roach something of a forerunner to Ed Wood, albeit a family friendly filmmaker. In the 1940's he began producing mini-western comedies starring Will Rogers' son Jimmy and Wallace Beery's nephew Noah Jr. Noah clearly had comic talent although it took his career some 30 years to recover from these fiascos before he hit his stride costarring with James Garner in THE ROCKFORD FILES. Jimmy Rogers, like director Hal Roach Jr., appears to have none (and judging by his 1940's features any papa Roach had had evaporated at this point.)

This lame little comedy with no laughs has the boys as earthy Montana cowboys out west briefly proving their worth with the local cowboys only to have Noah to be sidelined by a "girl dude" (in case you didn't know it, "dudes" here refers to the city slickers who vacation at the local dude ranches with their glamorous western outfits that are more country-western star than bona fide cowboy. The girl in question is played by Marjorie Woodworth, a pretty if unmemorable blonde who also had a brief career as a Roach leading lady (Hal Roach brazenly tried to hype this girl as the new Jean Harlow although she's more a Ginger Rogers type.) So this faux Harlow is teamed with Wallace Beery's nephew are they are no Kitty & Dan Packard that's for sure.

The movie goes nowhere but it's over in under 50 minutes (!!) so you won't waste too much time on it. The few well-known players among the supporting cast are character actress Marjorie Gateson, famed for playing snooty society women, here cast as Woodworth's aunt and totally wasted but she has more to do than poor Grady Sutton who incredibly has only one line of perhaps four words and is no more than an extra in two other scenes, one of which he is only briefly spotted among the many at the dinner table.

The opening credits are cute and are probably the best thing about this film from Hal Roach Studios. The film is the first of three so-called 'streamliners' featuring Jimmy Rogers and Noach Beery Jr. Playing roustabouts in the modern west. This one isn't the best of them nor the worst.

Most of the film consists of Pidge (Beery) chasing a pretty woman who is staying at a dude ranch. Jimmy doesn't want his friendship broken up by the woman, so he spends about half the movie trying to break up his friend and this woman. Most of these antics aren't very funny.

This film really has a different sort of overtone in 2024 than in 1942. Seen today, it sure looks as if Jimmy is gay and is afraid he'll lose Pidge to a woman. I wonder how many folks thought this in '42? It makes for a strange sort of film and if it were funnier (like it was intended to be), it would be a strange but watchable curio. As it is, it's okay at best and easy to skip.

Dudes Are Pretty People (1942)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Hal Roach comedy directed by his son was the first of three films in the "Streamliners" series. Jimmy Rogers and Noah Beery, Jr. play cowboys who lose their horses in a poker game so they end up working at a "dude" ranch where Beery falls in love with a woman. Having seen Brokeback Mountain, there's a lot of jokes that could be made about this film but that would be giving it too much credit. While I somewhat enjoyed the second film in this series, this one here is poor from the start. The screenplay is poor and doesn't allow the actors anything to work with but I doubt either of them could have done much anyways.