Canadian Lancers

This RKO Sportscope short is about a riding club in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They model themselves on the Bengal Lancers, to the extent that they play at lancing rings and wearing outfits that suggests the dress uniform of the Anglo-Indian unit, complete with wide-brimmed pith helmets. While the minimum age is 8, there's a small girl called Heather, aged 6, who wants to be a Lancer.

The second half of the short concerns the group's appearance at a celebration in Annapolis; not the American port, but the senior city in Nova Scotia. It's well-shot by Douglas Sinclair, a cameraman and director who specialized in these open-air shorts.

The RKO Sportscope shorts would not last much longer. The major studios were cutting down on their unprofitable shorts. Efforts like this would find a more welcome home on television.

This could have been an interesting short doc on the Junior Bengal Lancers. We get a few glimpses of what it could have been when the Lancers are seen performing some of their maneuvers. However, instead of focusing on the training, or on the riders, or even on one rider, the "documentary" wastes at least half of its short time on an improbable story about a little girl who is too young to join the Lancers yet.

The real child riders are all shown from a distance, performing their duties and their trick riding skills. That part of the documentary lets us realize what has been left out. We never get any insight into what it is really like to be a part of this very special troop.

Canadian Lancers (1952)

** (out of 4)

Another boring entry in RKO's Sportscope series, which takes a look at a wide range of lesser known sports. This one here takes a look at the Junior Canadian Lancers and one six-year-old girl who wants to join them. The only problem is that you've got to be eight so the girl is two years shy of that so we see what "other" job she is given. I'm sure the lancers would make for an interesting documentary but sadly this here isn't it. I've seen at least a dozen of these Sportscope shorts and for the life of me I've never understood how they could take something possibly interesting and drain it of any sort of entertainment. We really don't learn anything about lancers other than the age requirements and the fact that you've got to ride a horse. The rest of the film just seems to drag on without any purpose other than to add up to eight-minutes so that the studio can send it to theaters.