The Royal Rodeo

John Payne's first feature film western was El Paso in 1949, but earlier on when he was under contract to Warner Brothers he did this Vitagraph Short about a Wild West Show that comes to a Ruritanian type kingdom in the Balkans. Young king Scotty Beckett is real enthusiastic about it, especially after Payne saves his life after he falls over from the royal balcony.

But Payne has to keep doing it because some of the king's adult counselors are planning a coup d'etat. Payne and sidekick Cliff Edwards foil the plans of plotters Stuart Holmes and Boyd Irwin.

The film is a cut down version of the Ken Maynard feature film Royal Rider and between all that life saving, several musical numbers get thrown into the bargain.

I'm betting that Jack Warner was trying out young contract player Payne to see if he might make a passable singing cowboy. In any event within two years Payne was doing A musicals at 20th Century Fox with Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and Sonja Henie.

And when he got around to westerns again, he sung not a note.

Royal Rodeo, The (1939)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Silly and rather predictable Western/Musical from Warner has a young King (Scotty Beckett) looking up to cowboy star Bill Stevens (John Payne). The King eventually gets to meet his hero when the traveling rodeo comes to town and sure enough, the King is going to need to be saved from a bad assistant. This film has a few nice things going for it but not the items you might expect. Payne, before becoming a star, manages to be pretty good here even if his line reading is a tad bit hollow. The rodeo stuff is rather bland as we've seen the stunts done various times before and there's really nothing new added to them here. Where the film does succeed is with the music, which includes tracks such as 'Yankee Doodle', 'Oh! Susanna', 'The Good Old American Way' and a couple others. Another plus is the Technicolor, which really looks nice even if the print on Turner Classic Movies is somewhat faded in certain scenes.

It was a Saturday and I was clicking through the channels when I came upon this starting on TCM. It had John Payne and as I am a fan, I stopped. At first I thought this might have been colorized as the technicolor was incredibly bright. I knew Payne had a good voice and you get an opportunity to hear him hear several times. The story here is incidental as the appeal to American patriotism in 1939. WW II was underway in Europe and Hollywood was trying to get the public geared up for the eventual entry of America; a fate sealed by Dec 7, 1941. If you, like me, stumble across this curio, give it a watch. Honestly, except for a few codgers, I doubt this will ever find an audience anymore.

Before the Beatles, there were COWBOYS. This cross between Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the Prisoner of Zenda (leveraging, I believe, a few raw materials from The Adventures of Robin Hood) and a Jeanette McDonald-Nelson Eddy film is an experience that is hard to explain unless you've seen it. Even in 1939, this would have been what the 60's generation would call Camp. But if you like the 1960's Batman, then you'll probably like this. It has all the moral clarity an 8-year-old could ask for, with the happy ending that only could derive from true Americanism, firewood chats, and the blunt purity of men on horses, unused to reducing their habitual life of songs to the prosaic form of prosaic conversation. "Trouble must have increase when troubles are resolved with a gun." Just put on your chaps, don your wide-brimmed hat, and it's dances and songs for everyone!

A Warner Brothers Short Subject.

An American cowboy tries to foil the abduction of the young king of Avania during THE ROYAL RODEO he's presenting at the castle.

This pleasant Technicolor diversion, a sort of Grustark Goes West, mixes the elements of court intrigue and rodeo performers with a couple of songs and a little action. John Payne plays the cowboy hero, Cliff Edwards (sans ukulele) is his sidekick, and Scotty Becket is the boy monarch.

Often overlooked or neglected today, the one and two-reel short subjects were useful to the Studios as important training grounds for new or burgeoning talents, both in front & behind the camera. The dynamics for creating a successful short subject was completely different from that of a feature length film, something akin to writing a topnotch short story rather than a novel. Economical to produce in terms of both budget & schedule and capable of portraying a wide range of material, short subjects were the perfect complement to the Studios' feature films.