Gene Autry and the Mounties (1951)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Just what I expected

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

I guess the title says it all. Gene Autry And The Mounties finds Gene and sidekick Pat Buttram as US Marshals pursuing bank robbers across the Canadian border. Upon meeting with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police they learn that the guy they're chasing Carleton Young is wanted by the RCMP for much more than bank robbery.Their are a lot of plot elements similar to the great Cecil B. DeMille film Northwest Mounted Police. Young is the right hand man of a charismatic Meti leader named Fontaine really Louis Riel. So it's Canadian politics that Gene and Pat get involved in.The emphasis here is on action and Autry is limited to only one song in this film. Action there is a plenty as the megalomaniacal Young is determined to go down fighting.Gene's fans should be pleased.

Gene Autry and Pat Buttram pursue some bank robbers, who are French Canadian, from Montana up into the Canadian Rockies. They wind up meeting a French Canadian family named Duval, the father of which is in league with chief bad guy Pierre LaBlond. His daughter, Marie, is kind and law-abiding, while his teen-age son, Jack, hates Mounties and has a big white dog who is hostile to strangers.Gene befriends the dog after extracting a large thorn from the animal's paw. When Gene sings a song while sitting at the Duval kitchen table, the dog rears up and puts its front paws on the table, the better to hear. Gene can now do no wrong, in the dog's eyes.Later, when Autry has tracked the LaBlond gang to their hideout in the woods, and has defeated LaBlond in a knock-down, drag-out fight (doesn't appear that doubles were used, either), LaBlond's henchmen seize Gene, and LaBlond knocks him out. They leave him lying on the ground, roped and woozy, while they move away to plan their next robbery.The big dog has followed Gene to the scene, and he sneaks over to his new friend, licks him affectionately, and goes and fetches his steed Champion as directed by Gene. Rider, horse and dog all manage to escape the outlaws.In the climax of the movie, as a village burns to the ground, both LaBlond and the senior Duval, who has turned on him in disgust, die a horrible mutual death (not caused by Gene or Pat).The movie is unique to my eyes because of the obvious excellent chemistry between Autry and the big canine. An excellent film, with plenty of action.

When it comes to Gene Autry westerns I tend to approach them with some trepidation. Autry himself was a likable, low-key screen personality with an agreeable singing voice, a pleasant 'watch', unless the singing overwhelmed things to such an extent as to literally 'stop the show.' Happily, in "Gene Autry and the Mounties" it does not. A tightly scripted duster, "Mounties" has Gene and sidekick Pat Buttrum chasing some baddies led by Carleton Young into the Canadian rockies via the San Bernardino forest east of L.A. Along the way they assist a wounded Mountie (Richard Emory) who falls for the pretty girl who helps dress his wounds. (Elena Verdugo plays that pretty girl before moving on to be the title character of the early 50s TV sitcom "Meet Millie" and 1969/1976 reception nurse to "Marcus Welby.") Autry gets to play kindly mentor to a wayward- thinking youth (Jack Frasher) and Buttrum's sidekick silliness is mercifully kept to a sensible, almost minimalist level.With its requisite fisticuffs and gun-play, the brisk direction of John English is complimented by the San Bernardino location nicely masquerading as the Canadian rockies. An unpretentious horse opera, this one should appeal to all B western junkies even if some of us aren't necessarily on board with its interpolated, overtly neo- conservative political moment. Viewed as the lower half of a personally designed Columbia Pictures double bill headlined by the innocuous noir, "Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard", this was just the sort of film package I loved to see at the long, lost Granada Theatre, whose demise I have always lamented, along with the demise of the B picture programmer. Ah yes, those were the days!

Gene Autry takes to the north country in this tale of Northwest Royal Mounties, and this is one of those few black and white old Westerns I would like to have seen in color, not only for those great Mountie uniforms, but also the rugged, though simulated wild woods of the Canadian Rockies. Pat Buttram's along for this ride as Gene's partner Scat Russell, and together they're on the trail of a gang of robbers who've been raiding border banks in Montana. There's also a secondary story involving the Canadian outlaws, led by Pierre LaBlond (Carleton Young), who are attempting to seize a couple million acres of Hudson Bay Company land to declare a Republic of the Northwest.I was somewhat surprised to hear how frankly the picture dealt with a topic that's particularly hot in the political arena today. The unseen leader of the Canadian brigands in this picture is Louis Fontaine, and his goal is described as setting up a welfare state, with money and resources taken from the rich financial interests and 'redistributed' to the less well off. The concept doesn't get a lot of play beyond being merely mentioned, but it did catch me by surprise.The picture has some light moments provided by a hefty Indian squaw (Jody Gilbert) who takes a fancy to sidekick Russell. After he wins a game of marbles against the young boys of Silver Lake, Big Indian wants to marry the 'Great White Ram of the Mountains'. I thought Scat made an impression with the story about his wife and ten, no, twenty kids, but she was still after him at the end of the picture.Even though Gene doesn't get to wear a Mountie uniform in the story, it's cool to see him in a change of pace venue, even though when you get right down to it, this one's a Western with a French accent. I don't know how many cowboy stars wound up in Mountie stories, but one that comes immediately to mind is a Charles Starrett programmer from 1934 called "Undercover Men". It's not as lively as this one, but he does fill out the uniform nicely.