What Dreams Were Made Of: Movie Stars of the 1940s

2. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers: The Light of Western Stars

33 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 2 Gene Autry and Roy Rogers The Light of Western Stars EDWARD BUSCOMBE Gene Autry portrait, c. 1942; Roy Rogers portrait, c. 1944. Both photos collection of the author. Friends have learned to tolerate my apparent obsession with the western movie (they don’t any longer call them “cowboy films” when I’m around). Even so, there were some sniggers when I said I was trying to write something about singing cowboys. “You mean Roy Rogers?” they’d say with a laugh, scarcely bothering to disguise their disdain. “Do you really like that stuff?” Such an apparently simple question raises a lot more questions in turn. First, there’s the assumption that in order to write about something you have to actively enjoy it. Perhaps only people who aren’t film studies academics (normal people, if you like) believe that. They think that film criticism or film history is a sort of cheerleading activity. You write about things to convey your enthusiasm and hopefully to convert others to your enthusiasm . There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and I’ve done it myself. But that’s not why I am writing this piece. I really don’t mind if not one reader is inspired to watch a Gene Autry film. I don’t want to turn anyone into a fan. I’m not really a fan myself. What I’d like to do is try to understand something that was once a considerable phenomenon in the cinema, something too big to be ignored, though mostly it has been. I was a fan once. When I was very young, I was passionate about Roy Rogers. In the small town in the west of England where I grew up, the local picture house—called, with a deplorable lack of ambition, The Cinema—ran double bills that changed twice a week, and as likely as not a singing cowboy western would make up one half of the bill. There must have been plenty of Gene Autry films on offer, but my memory is that whenever I pleaded with my mother to be allowed to go to the pictures for the second time in a week, it was always because there was a new Roy Rogers film I simply had to see. My brother and I preferred Roy because, first, his films also featured George “Gabby” Hayes, whom we much preferred to Gene’s regular partner, Smiley Burnette. I guess we just thought he was funnier, though actually I now think I prefer Smiley. Gabby is just, well, too gabby. Also, Gabby was relentlessly misogynistic, whereas Smiley was always mooning after girls, which we didn’t approve of. (I feel differently now.) Second, it was our feeling that there was more action in Roy’s films, more chases on horseback, more fistfights and gunfights. And the action (you could hardly call it violence ) was just a little more realistic in Roy’s films. Most important, Roy didn’t sing as much. At least that’s what we thought. In fact, further research shows that both Gene and Roy sang five or six songs each per film. For us that was five or six too many. We liked the films because they were westerns, not because they were musicals. But while I suspect most small boys at the time shared our views, the music that Roy and Gene made was immensely popular with older audiences, and it’s clear that both performers regarded themselves as singers who acted, not the other way round. In his autobiography, Back in the Saddle Again, Autry put it thus: “Music has been the better part of my career. Movies are wonderful fun, and they give you a famous face. But how the words and melody are joined, how they come together out of air and enter the mind, this is art. Songs are forever” (Autry 18). 34 EDWARD BUSCOMBE ★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩ The Careers: Stardust on the Sage Gene and Roy (it seems natural to refer to them in that friendly manner; they encouraged that kind of identification) had a lot in common; in many ways they were mirror images of each other. Both came from humble backgrounds. Gene Autry was born in rural Oklahoma in 1907 (originally named Orvon Grover Autry). His education was limited; at age seventeen he got a job working on the St. Louis–San Francisco Railroad. In his early twenties...