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Give a man a horse he can ride, a gun he can shoot, a part he can remember. Then watch the money roll in!
by NORTON HUGHES JONATHAN
THE saddest days ever to fall upon Republic Pictures, a Hollywood studio which specialises in filming what are known to the movie trade as horse operas, were brought about by an incident which had never hap' pened in a Western thriller before.
Roy Rogers was kissed. Not by a horse, but by a real, live girl. She was even pretty. And Roy kissed her back — right on her Max Factored lips. All this was done not too fervently, but, nevertheless, Roy and his leading lady in a sagebrush epic called San Fernando VaWey definitely kissed in the fadc'out scene.
This stirred up a commotion that frightened the chaps off the Hollywood cowboys. Outraged devotees of Mr. Rogers — a mild young man, who, it seemed, had not realized what he was doing — protested by the thousands, by wire, by letter, by telephone, in person. Young and old alike, male and female, were up in arms because Roy Rogers had engaged in a clinch.
Some fans even proposed to come to Hollywood for the purpose of forming a posse to hunt down the erring producer of San Fernando V alley. One frightened studio executive was reported to have hidden behind the bar
in Giro's for two days. Horse opera fans will stand for no change in their beloved art form. In a Western picture men are men who can't want a woman unless the picture costs more than $500,000 to produce. Only the heroes of the big super-westerns like The Flainsman and Duel in the Sun are allowed to express a hankering for the heroine.
This is true because the big outdoor spectacles must appeal to a majority of movie fans. Minor-league Westerns are custom-made to please a much smaller segment of the moviegoing public, and it is this audience which will countenance no alteration in the traditional format of the horse opera.
All heroes must be virile, brave, honest and absolutely temperate. All villains must be dirty skunks and mean enough to rob a baby's piggy bank. All the characters in a typical Western must be uncomplicated. The audience must be able to recognize good or evil instantly.
The final scene usually shows the hero's horse coming between the poor guy and the girl. Fanatical Western fans seem to like an ending of this kind because it implies that the here ine won't succeed in getting the honest, upstanding cowboy in her clutches. Even when some kind of love story is unreeled, there can't be any show of passion stronger than the hero tipping his Stetson after