Romance on the Range

Romance Rides The Range has Roy Rogers and the Sons Of The Pioneers as foreman and ranch hands for absentee owner, society girl Linda Hayes. The place has a sideline in fur trapping, but it's poaching those furs and not cattle rustling that Roy's concerned about.

So is Hayes and she decides to go to her ranch to investigate herself, but go incognito. She and her maid Sally Payne go and tell no one who Hayes is. As it turns out Payne has a correspondence boy friend among the hands in Pat Brady.

There are some clever poachers that Roy has to deal with that include perennial western villains Roy Barcroft, Harry Woods, and Glenn Strange. They also have a really thick sheriff in Hal Taliaferro as well.

Some of Roy's banter with Linda Hayes was nice, but would work far better when Dale Evans was cast as his leading lady in film and in life. Still Roy and Hayes have some nice dialog between them.

This maybe the first time Pat Brady was prominently featured in a Roy Rogers western. Pat was a funny guy and stroked a mean bass fiddle. But seeing him out on the range accompanying the Sons Of The Pioneers was a bit much. The tradition of the singing cowboy has a basis when cowboys were riding herd especially at night, they would sing to the cattle to keep them calm. But I doubt that anyone would pack a bass fiddle on the range.

This is also a change from 19th century to 20th century settings for Roy Rogers films. And he used a good film to do it in.