The Heart Of The Rio Grande Download
yelaiharoThe Heart Of The Rio Grande Download
http://urllio.com/r2ho5Gene and Smiley help an all-too-proper girl Connie in her attempt to run a cattle ranch.
As foreman of a dude ranch, Gene has two problems. One is a guest, the spoiled daughter of a millioniare, and the other is the disgruntled ex-foreman that Gene replaced, now just a ranch hand. Gene eventually gets the daughter straightened out but has to fire the ex-foreman and this leads to trouble when he returns intent on revenge.
"Heart of the Rio Grande" must be one of the least entertaining pictures Gene Autry ever made. Never have I seen such obvious substitutions of doubles for the principal players, nor such an inept use of the process screen. The direction throughout could not justly be described as merely routine, for this level of mediocrity represents the peak of Mr Morgan's achievement. At its nadir, the handling is embarrassingly inept for example in the way Morgan has heroine Fay McKenzie grin inanely at the camera in a reaction shot to Mr Autry's serenade. <br/><br/>Alas, the defects of the direction are not the picture's only handicap. Probably its chief blot on the average fan's barometer is its fatuous script. As the synopsis makes plain, the story winds around an old, tiresomely familiar theme. Worse, it's encrusted with reach-me-down dialogue and patronizing platitudes, such as Gene Autry's "Don't forget what I said about bein' pardners with your horse when you go ridin' the trail!" and "Maybe other parents don't put their business ahead of their children!"<br/><br/>But even worse still, "Heart of the Rio Grande" rates just about zero on the action scale. Admittedly, near the start, Gene's stuntman gallops after a train and then rescues Miss Fellows from a runaway truck. But that's the end of any action spots until five minutes before the end when the script suddenly stages a revenge shooting practically out of nowhere. The gun-shot activates a wild horse stampede, but it turns into a very mild affair with a couple of stuntmen playing leapfrog a fair distance away from the not-too-wildly onrushing herd.<br/><br/>Oddly enough, despite the dearth of action, there's also little comedy relief. Smiley Burnette's foolery is mercifully constrained. But sandwiched in between all the sermonizing twinkle are eight or nine songs. Autry handles most of them, Burnette has one, Miss Fellows one, The Jimmy Wakely Trio one, and even Miss McKenzie joins Gene in a duet.<br/><br/>Needless to say, Miss Fellows lays it on as the spoiled brat. Jean Porter hovers around in the forefront of the background. Haade emerges as a quite likable villain which makes his sudden and unexplained action at the finish all the more incredible. Rounding out the cast are Sarah Padden in a tiny role, Eddie Cobb in a one-line bit, and Smiley's horse, "Ring-Eye", in a brief scene.<br/><br/>"Heart of the Rio Grande" is billed as a so-called "modern" western. Realistic! Yet the cowboys all wear Victorian six-shooters and a full orchestra suddenly sprouts up, audible but invisible, in the middle of the desert to accompany a chance song.<br/><br/>Sadly, production values rate as exceptionally mediocre. The photography is so flat as to make even the picture's actual locations look uninteresting. Sound recording comes over as tinny, art direction drab, costumes unattractive, and film editing heavy-handed.
"Heart of the Rio Grande" (1942) is probably the most lyrical of Autry's movies and therefore has held up better than his more action oriented films. When ranch owner Skipper Forbes hires Gene as her new foreman, the old foreman Hap Callahan (William Haade) is allowed to stay on as a ranch hand. Hap resents Gene and his plans turning the place into a dude ranch. There is a lot of friction between them culminating in a fight and Hap's dismissal. He plots revenge.<br/><br/>Early in the film a girls' school arrives at the dude ranch for the summer. The teacher Alice Bennett (Fay McKenzie) serves as both Gene's tame romantic interest and his sidekick Frog's (Smiley Burnett) unrequited love. Their dueling serenade of Alice is the best of a whole bunch of pretty good musical elements in the film.<br/><br/>All the girl students look about high school age which gives the film a lot of charm that would be missing if they had populated the cast with 20 something starlets. The most prominent of the students is Connie Lane (Edith Fellows best known as Polly Pepper in all those Pepper films of the 30's), the spoiled daughter of a rich businessman. At first Connie makes a lot of trouble for everyone but eventually she takes to Gene and works to improve his opinion of her. <br/><br/>Burnette can lay claim to originating the mini-me concept. In "Heart of the Rio Grande" Frog Millhouse is shadowed by a fat little boy, appropriately named Tadpole (Joe Strauch, Jr.). Tadpole dresses just like Frog including the same hat style (front brim turned up). He has a lot of precocious lines and a very bass singing voice. Jean Porter plays another of the students (mysteriously named Pudge) and soon becomes young Tadpole's first crush. The vivacious Porter is drop dead gorgeous, in the image of Vargas redhead Jean Dean.<br/><br/>"Heart of the Rio Grande" is mostly music and comedy, what action there is consists almost entirely of Gene rescuing Connie from an assortment of dangers. This is not a bad thing. <br/><br/>Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.
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