Robert F. Hill | Rip Roarin' Buckaroo / 1936

a lover and a wife

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Buchanan (screenplay), Robert F. Hill (director) Rip Roarin' Buckaroo / 1936 

 

By the time Tom Tyler appeared in this 1936 picture, he had already more than 12 other westerns under his hat, and would do many more before he finally was able to escape the genre later with The Adventures of Captain Marvel and The Phantom. But even after those popular works, the handsome box office hero of Lithuanian heritage would continue playing cowboys, becoming well known as the king of the grade-B westerns. Far more handsome than most of the genre’s heroes, including the popular Tom Mix and the rising singing oater Gene Autry, Tyler later appeared with the actor whose gentle manner and quiet-voiced intonations were closest to his own, Cary Grant’s lover Raymond Scott—also a much better actor than many of the roles which he played.

     Given the fact that Rip Roarin’ Buckaroo sports one of the most improbable plots ever concocted, it’s not a bad movie given Tyler’s mild-mannered approach to the breaking a wild horse and beating up the evil men with whom he finds himself surrounded.

      Scotty McQuade (Tyler) begins the movie as a heavyweight boxer, a shoo-in for the championship except that he is unknowingly drugged by his opponent’s manager and stumbles out the last rounds not quite comprehending what’s happening until he wakes up with a headache and the realization that most of his followers will now see him as a crooked boxer who threw the game. A true believer, he gives up the boxing racket and inexplicably hightails it to the desert where, by sure chance, he meets a man who’s also been taken by crooks who stole his money and left him a car that doesn’t quite drive right and a driver that doesn’t know how to steer it straight, Frozen-Face Cohen (the famed former vaudevillian and popular movie comic often billed as the “Hebrew comedian,” Sammy Cohen).

     Fortunately, Scotty knows how to drive, and Frozen-Face, immediately recognizing him for who he is, suggests there might be a job for a cowhand at the local Hayden ranch. Begging him not to reveal his true identity, Scotty drives him off to the ranch, creating a kind of traffic jam as they make their way through a narrow path between two pilings of rocks, where Scott manages to make an enemy of the impatient driver behind him, who just happens to be Betty Rose Hayden (Beth Marion), the willful daughter of the rancher for whom he hopes to work. From that moment on, Scotty and Betty are involved in range warfare that anyone who has ever seen a romance knows has to end up in marriage.

     In the meantime, he has to ride a wild horse in order to be able to keep his job—and the horse which no one else has been able to tame. He gets the horse, but the ranch keeps the rights to run him as a racing horse as well. The latter stipulation causes serious problems when his new employer, the honest rancher Colonel Hayden meets up with fight promoter Lew Slater (Forrest Taylor) who finds a willing pigeon in Hayden ready to bet for a fight between two men, both of them secretly controlled by Slater.

     Scotty recognizes Slater as the same crooked fight promoter that destroyed his own career, but Betty Rose, like her father seems to perceive him as a gentleman of their own kind, as Slater gets Hayden to bet everything on the fight, the Colonel hoping to raise the money by winning the race with the horse now owned by Scotty.

     Slater, of course, also recognizes the new ranch hand and makes certain that the Haydens find out who he really is, the man whom the Colonel believes threw the fight and showed the world he was a fraud. Scotty is fired, forced to take the horse with him and thus making it so that Hayden will now lose everything to the evil Slater.

     Of course, Scotty secretly tries to return the horse, while Betty now realizing the truth, insists he run the thoroughbred the next day at the town celebration. Even though Slater tries to get one of his fighters to kill the rider, Scotty is saved by Frozen-Face and wins the race.

     But at that very moment Slater arranges with the local Sherriff to arrest Scotty, and we see no way out of the inevitable outcome of the Colonel still losing his fortune and the ranch on the crooked match. But Frozen-Face saves the day once again.

     Earlier in the film, in one of its few ostensible “comic” moments, Frozen-Face entertains his fellow cowmen with a rope, pretending that he is Cleopatra and the rope a two-headed asp which—as he rolls his buttocks in the manner of a movie version of the Egyptian temptress—he puts to his breast, crying out in mock agony with his untimely death due to her love of Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony.

     He now arrives at the jail house dressed as a woman, Scotty McQuade’s lawful wife, pleading for the return of her husband. Sympathizing with the situation, the sheriff opens the cell for the wife to enter, as Frozen-Face grabs his gun and demands Scotty’s freedom, at the very same moment forcing the sheriff to recognize that his prisoner was the famous boxer on his way now to get rid of the false contender and once again, this time for real, fight Bones Kennedy (Charles King) the heavyweight champion of the West.

     Scotty wins obviously, and politely pleading with the headstrong Betty, asks for a kiss, which he receives along with the predictable promise to settle down and marry.

     Even though by 1936, Joseph Breen had cleaned the film industry of any possible homosexual inferences, two drag performances by a Jewish comedian in one movie was evidently seen as completely wholesome, which only substantiates my argument that drag is perhaps more popular with heterosexuals than the gay community who created and embraced it.

     I should add, the boxing scenes as filmed by cinematographer William Hyer are not only quite well done, but with Tyler’s buff physic, fairly homoerotic.

 

Los Angeles, December 5, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).