Thu 26 Oct 2017
by Dan Stumpf
(Note: This was written in 1981, the early days of Cable Satellite TV, before there were on-screen video guides or anything like that; when cable stations bloomed and vanished daily, and they ran anything — anything — in the small hours of the night just to sell advertising. I was working Third Watch in those days, and on my nights off I sometimes flipped around the dial…)
“There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun…”
–Robert W. Service
Service would feel right at home with Cable TV. They do things late at night on television that no one ever talks about.
In those bleary hours after the bars close and before the doughnut shops open. Strange images flit across the screen, interspersed more or less at random between ads for Country Music and Diet Pills, and the black-and-white phantoms, transfixed for a moment on a flickering screen that is often the sole illumination in a sleeping house, are apt to go anywhere, do anything: murder, make love, or burst into song. Pictures of people long dead strut and fret their fearful ninety minutes or so at the whims of writers and directors who are mostly dust now.
These are the Ghosts of Old Movies, roaming the night, and the restless, channel-changing viewer who stumbles across them, be he insomniac, inebriate or both, may witness tales that he will relate at peril of disbelief.
It was at such a time that I, wide-awake, sober, and no higher than one can get from a glass of Diet Pepsi, chanced upon one of those works that re-define Surrealism; a fragment of one of those films that must have seemed so impressive to post-war French cinéastes and philosophers. Let me try to describe it to you as I saw it, coming in somewhere in the middle and thus caught unawares by the wonder of it all.
As the screen kindles into life, we see a jungle village, somewhere in Africa. A crowd of dark-skinned natives and a mustached Cowboy (?) are genuflecting in front of the Chief’s hut.
Inside the hut, a white man in a leopard-skin and top hat (??) is ministering to the Chief’s son. They are alone. The white man gives the black man a shot from a hip flask that knocks him stiff as a board, whereupon whitey blacks his face with soot, dons the son’s clothing, and passes as him, walking through the kneeling natives to where a mule is tethered on the outskirts of the village.
En route, the soot mysteriously vanishes from his face. He mounts the mule anyway and gallops off with the natives and the Cowboy, who have tumbled to him, in hot pursuit. The white man/witchdoctor rides past some potted palms, is thrown from his mount, and suddenly gasps in horror.
The scene shifts suddenly to a completely different-looking jungle where a lion is walking off in an entirely irrelevant direction. Cut back to the white witch doctor, who can apparently see the lion (wherever it is) and is frightened by it. He climbs a tree, the lion makes a few half-hearted jumps at some other tree, and wanders off.
Then a gorilla swings through the branches, lands next to our hero and starts making amorous eyes at him. The white man leaps from the tree and lands among the natives who have gathered beneath it. The mustached Cowboy has apparently wandered off unnoticed. Cut to commercial.
When we get back, the natives have escorted the captive honky back to their jungle village. Suddenly a group of Mounties (???) rides up. The head Mountie halts his men, turns to the captive and demands, “Where’s Gene Autry?”
I turn up the sound, wondering if I could have heard correctly and how the hell did Mounties ever get into Africa anyway. But the scene shifts to a trading post elsewhere in the jungle, where none other than Gene Autry himself is trying to convince a winsome heroine that he did not kill her father. Suddenly the mustached Cowboy enters and gets the drop on Gene, who is quickly escorted to a heavily-guarded hut and locked up with an old man whose function in the story seems somewhat indeterminate.
We now cut back and forth between the mustached Heavy, who is trying to get the heroine to sign something, and Autry in Durance Vile. Gene quickly subdues his native guards (by getting them to reach through the barred windows for beads and trinkets, then tying their hands together) and runs from the hut, which turns out not to have been locked after all.
Then a bunch of other stuff happens and before long Autry and his stuntman have freed the white slaves from the diamond mine (????) and the Heavy, seeing that the jig is clearly up, leaps into a covered wagon with the heroine and rides off, vigorously pursued by Autry’s stuntman.
The ensuing chase, however, is set not in Africa, but among the oversize boulders and dusty trails of Gower Gulch, California, a landscape familiar and overly-familiar to every viewer of B-Westerns. The Heavy wrecks the wagon, the stuntman rescues the girl, and the Mounties, who have apparently been following at a respectful distance, ride up with Smiley Burnette (for it was he, it turns out, who was the white witch doctor in leopard-skin and topper) having somehow learned of Autry’s innocence en route to this appointment in Samara.
The scene shifts again to the deck of a westbound boat. Gene Autry, Smiley Burnette and some miscellaneous Cowboys are serenading the heroine. The Mounties are gone, but the Native Chief and his children are aboard, dressed in western garb and singing Harlem tunes.
As “The End” settles across the screen, we fade out, and — seconds ahead of an appeal for Lee’s Press-on Nails — the title of this Jungle Epic dances across the screen. It is Round-Up Time in Texas (Texas?????)
Somehow it seems to fit.
I love this film and all films like it. There is an unconscious audacity operating in films as cheap as this one. I mean, when you watch a good movie, or even most bad ones, you generally have some inkling of what is going to happen next. Or at least you know it won’t be something totally off the wall. But there are moments in some books and movies that defy rationalization. They simply exist. And they restore to me that sense of childlike wonder that should always be present in one’s critical faculties. As long as there are films like this to be discovered I shall never grow old.
ROUND-UP TIME IN TEXAS. Republic Pictures, 1937. Gene Autry, Smiley Burnette, Maxine Doyle, The Cabin Kids, Champion. Director: Joseph Kane.
October 27th, 2017 at 4:23 am
Any chance of a remake?
October 27th, 2017 at 6:56 am
I remember those days of cable satellite TV in the 1980’s. During the day in the Trenton area the shows were unwatchable. They showed info commercials all day. But for some reason SPN(The Satellite Program Network) showed an old B-western at 3:00 am each morning.
The movies were all from the 1930’s and cut to fit into an hour with commercials. Back in the early 1980’s I had my first Beta video recorder and I’d get up at 3:00 am and tape the western without the commercials. Then at 4:00 am I would fall back into bed and rise for work at 6:00.
Now these movies are available without any problem but back then it was a treat to see the old films that I had last seen back in the fifties.
October 27th, 2017 at 9:00 am
I find myself completely out of agreement with the viewpoint of this post.
I’ve got a radical idea: How about watching good movies?
Hollywood made hundreds of them.
They are astonishing and in nearly ever genre, from slapstick comedies to sophisticated wit, from drawing rooms to Westerns, and every sort of detective and science fiction film.
The best guide to classic Hollywood: Andrew Sarris’ book THE AMERICAN CINEMA. You should have no trouble getting a paperback, or borrowing it from a library.
October 27th, 2017 at 12:12 pm
3. Mike, I disagree with you. There are times I enjoy a bad movie just for the surreal of it. How can you tell a great movie until you have experienced the opposite? This is why MST3K is so popular. One of my favorites is MONSTER FROM A PREHISTORIC PLANET. I can watch it endlessly when my brain needs a break from the quality films.
I have Sarris book. I wish I had spent my money on something else like a bargain DVD of just about any movie.
October 27th, 2017 at 1:46 pm
In the early to mid-80s I watched a lot of terrible movies, and with few exceptions, I enjoyed most of them.
October 27th, 2017 at 1:59 pm
I have often wondered why so many people I know love and enjoy what they know are terrible movies. The reason I wonder so often is that I confess that I am one of them.
The fascination with terrible movies is widespread. There may be as many books written about bad (“cult”) movies as there are books about good ones.
The Sarris book is one that any would be film critic not only has to own but has to have read several times. How can you have a point of view abut movies and movie-making, directors in particular, if you cannot respond to Sarris’s? If you can’t, you don’t have a point of view about movies of your own.
October 27th, 2017 at 3:30 pm
During my professional critic days, as well as my film school days, I was not a Sarris fan.
Back in the late 80s I worked for the AMC movie theater in Century City. We were the third largest in the country and was a location where the members of the Academy saw Oscar nominated films for free with their members card.
One of my jobs was to stand outside the box office and answer questions about the films playing in the 13 theaters. I could give one line descriptions and do all 13 in one breath so people would ask me a lot about what was playing. One night a group of movie customers ask me about what was playing. I described NUNS ON THE RUN as “a stupid comedy about guys on the run dressed as nuns.” They reacted with delight. That is what we what, they said, a stupid comedy to rest our brains after their day at work.
Not everyone wants to be enlightened, to see art, to have their life changed, sometimes they just want to turn off their brains and laugh. The greatest danger I found as a TV/film student, film writer, and critic is to forget that the audience is there for different reasons.
Family and friends won’t watch network TV with me because I can rip those shows apart and notice every flaw. Too often I can tell them what will happen and when before the first act ends. Critics and academics watch TV and film differently than the masses and it shows in most reviews.
October 27th, 2017 at 4:31 pm
They just don’t make movies like ROUND-UP TIME IN TEXAS any more — or do they?
October 27th, 2017 at 5:33 pm
Michael, your comment deserves attention.
As for Why watch bad movies, or write about them, I think the final paragraph sums it up. I am certainly not a fan of all bad films, but some delight me.
And I watch good movies as well. In fact, I watch mostly good films, classics like THE WAGES OF FEAR, Olivier’s HAMLET, THE TALES OF HOFFMAN, STAGECOACH, VERTIGO, BEAUTY AND THE DEVIL…. I could go on, but you get the point.
I can not, however, be dazzled all the time. Sometimes I need to look at the less respectable stuff, and when I occasionally find something worthwhile therein, I like to point it out.
You may note that I seldom if ever write a negative review, and that’s because it’s more fun celebrating redeeming qualities than damning faults.
October 27th, 2017 at 6:56 pm
Dan, I always enjoy your reviews of movies in the weird & wonky category. Keep’em coming.
October 27th, 2017 at 8:56 pm
Hey, halloween is coming, The season of bad movies. I wish I could find a great bad dub of a Coffin Joe movie.
October 27th, 2017 at 9:37 pm
There is style of bad movie that is done just professionally enough, with just enough sheer insanity that it exists in an almost alternate reality.
Think of Tom Mix and Mickey Rooney in MY PAL THE KING (remade as a short in color with John Payne a singing cowboy) a Ruritanian Western, where else can you find a mix like that other than the pulps?
I have my limits with bad films, but some just resonate, and some actually succeed in there own way.
Gene Autry in Africa, Hopalong Cassidy on the Pampas, Tarzan in New York, football star Sammy Baugh battling Nazi Zeppelins in the scant clouds over Texas for 15 chapters … Some ideas are waiting to be filmed.
October 28th, 2017 at 5:32 pm
I’ve got a radical idea: How about watching good movies?
Hollywood made hundreds of them.
I have less and less patience with “good” Hollywood movies. From any era. Too many heavy-handed messages. Too much Hollywood self-satisfaction.
I’d much rather watch a trashy B-movie. Because cinema is basically trash culture. That’s why movies are fun (or should be fun). They’re disposable trash. They’re like candy. They’re not supposed to be nutritious. Watching “good” Hollywood movies is too much like having to eat your spinach. I don’t want to eat my spinach. I want ice cream.
October 28th, 2017 at 6:07 pm
These are very interesting comments.
I learned a lot about what other people think.
A list on my web site of outstanding Hollywood films.
This has a limit of one movie per director. It is just a sample of the riches of Hollywood:
http://mikegrost.com/zlist.htm
Gene Autry, who I love, is represented by “The Phantom Empire”.
Bob Baker is another singing cowboy favorite. But Baker/Joseph H. Lewis gems like “Border Wolves” and “The Last Stand” lost on this list to Joseph H. Lewis’ “The Big Combo”.
I love B-movies.
Especially if they’re made by Edgar Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, George Sherman or WIlliam Castle.
October 29th, 2017 at 11:53 am
My tastes wander all over the map. I keep a list of favorites that includes both THE WORM EATERS and Orson Welles’ THE TRIAL. Movies that slip into the absurd, as Dan mentions in his summation, are a special delight. There are moments of that in BEAST FROM THE HAUNTED SEA and R.O.T.O.R., which are also among my top picks.