Roy Rogers and Lynne Roberts in Billy the Kid Returns

ALAN writes:

In a brief essay titled “What We Have Lost,” Lawrence Auster wrote in 2006 that “there is an endless supply of cinematic treasures from the Hollywood Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s….” for people who want to enjoy worthwhile movies.  What has been lost, he said, is the moral framework, masculine authority, and benevolent sense of life reflected in such movies.

I agree. One category of movies fitting that description but that he probably did not have in mind is the B-Westerns. In this connection, may I offer the following thoughts about a man who gained prominence through those Westerns and was certainly an American traditionalist:

ROY ROGERS: A REMEMBRANCE AND APPRECIATION

I first became aware of Roy Rogers when I was a boy in the 1950s.  On some Saturday mornings in the cold weather months, my father and I would watch Roy’s half-hour television program. Or he would listen as I read aloud portions of Roy Rogers adventures in the Little Golden Books my mother bought for me.  And like other American boys, I wore cowboy hats and shirts and shot cap guns in make-believe cowboy games with my friends, classmates, cousins, or in the rich terrain of boyhood imagination. The pillow on my bed took a terrific beating as I helped Roy by punching the daylights out of western outlaws, an achievement my mother seemed strangely unable to appreciate. Then many years went by. I grew up and forgot about my boyhood western heroes like Roy, Gene, Hoppy, Sky King, and The Lone Ranger.

But one night in the late 1980s, it all began to come back to me when I happened for the first time to watch the 1938 B-Western “Under Western Stars.” It was the first movie in which Roy was featured as the star and hero and in which he sang the memorable song “Dust,” which was nominated for an Academy Award that year.

My father and I talked about Roy and that song during a walk we took one evening shortly afterward. Only years later did I understand what that simple, spontaneous conversation must have meant to him, recalling as it did layer upon layer of his memories going back half a century, ranging from Roy’s early days as a founding member of the Pioneer Trio in the 1930s, to the B-Westerns he must have enjoyed seeing at neighborhood movie houses in the 1940s, to the memory of those Saturday mornings in the 1950s when he sat there with me as we heard Roy and Dale singing “Happy Trails” at the end of each episode of their television show.

It was an unexpected pleasure to rediscover how enjoyable and satisfying those B-Westerns had been. I understood 30 years later—far better than I could at age eight or ten—why they were so rewarding:  Partly because of the writing, direction, and characterization, but mostly because of the proper code of ethics followed by Roy and those other silver screen cowboys—which made them heroes—which meant that viewers were uplifted by those movies—which is why they left the movie theaters feeling better than when they walked in.

Motion picture technology was not highly advanced in those years. But B-Westerns reflected a bedrock-solid code of morality that was never open to negotiation or compromise.

Today the reverse is true: Motion picture technology is very sophisticated. But motion pictures now reflect more ugliness, decadence, and contempt for moral standards than Americans in 1940 could have imagined possible in their nation. The culture of restraint in the 1940s—when Roy was at the peak of his popularity—has been thrown out the window by people who hate restraint and responsibility.

There were no anti-heroes, profanity, feminism, or moral relativism in Roy Rogers westerns. There were no shades of gray.  Evil was always evil and was never depicted as anything less.  Criminals were not “victims” of psychiatric “diseases” that “caused” them to steal horses and rob trains.  Criminals were bad men.  That is how scriptwriters depicted them and how audiences regarded them.  What they had in common was a moral code that all Americans understood and most tried to enforce.  That moral code was proof that Americans in those years had a much better understanding of life than they have today.  They had enough sense not to imagine that science could take the place of moral judgment and enough courage to express those judgments in plain words whose meaning was clear to all.  Today they have neither that sense nor courage.

When Shirley Temple is kidnapped and held captive by a jewel thief in “Baby Take A Bow” (1934), she does not say to him, “I feel sorry for you, mister, because you are a sick man suffering from the dreaded psychiatric disorder Psychobunkumitis.”  Instead, she says to him, “You’re a bad man.”    

There is all the difference in the world between the two. And there is more wisdom in Shirley Temple’s remark than in all the psycho-prefixed psychiatric pomposities in all the world.  Americans in 1934 understood her remark and never doubted its truth, but would have laughed if she had spoken the other words—because Americans in 1934 could tell sense from nonsense. Americans today would dismiss her actual words and believe the psycho-disorder claptrap—because Americans today are suckers for scientific-sounding nonsense.

The code of moral standards depicted in Shirley Temple’s movies was common in B-Westerns and most other movies in that Golden Age of American popular entertainment. That moral code is one reason why it was golden.

Roy Rogers projected responsibility, self-discipline, self-restraint, courtesy, kindness, courage, good humor, loyalty, respect for women—and the immovable, adamantine determination never to compromise or surrender those things.  Audiences—children and grown-ups alike—loved him for it and made him one of the most admired and beloved Americans in the 1940s-‘50s.

The retired professor who writes at “Cambria Will Not Yield” had these things in mind when he wrote in 2007:

“The essential thing in the B-Western and in the good A-Western is that the hero supports the code…the code of chivalry.” By “the code”, he meant the traditional moral code of speech and conduct by which virtue is defended and evil opposed and punished—always opposed and punished.

“John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, Roy Rogers, Joel McCrea and countless other Western heroes represented a proud, long line of men who supported the code, the code of great knights, swashbucklers, and saints. That code is gone now. Not even our Protestant and Catholic leaders would recognize it, and if they did they would condemn it. But the code existed, and the American western is one of our reminders that it did once exist.”

The professor is right. And where today are the men who will defend and uphold that code?  Where are those who even understand why it must be restored and upheld?  In lieu of such men, today we get adolescent-witted buffoons, foul-mouthed boy-men and feminized girlie-men.  All of them are laughable compared to a Roy Rogers, William Boyd,  or Randolph Scott.

It was a reflection of his good judgment that Roy did not care for the diminishing restraint and increasing glorification of violence that became fashionable in motion picture Westerns beginning in the 1960s.

Keep your modernism, your advanced technology, your “special effects,” your camera tricks, your rock and rap “music,” and your hatred of restraint—and give me the moral code in Roy’s B-Westerns any day. Nothing in modern entertainment can match the simple beauty and elegance of Roy singing “The Lights of Old Santa Fe” or “Dreaming of You” or “Ole Faithful” or “That Pioneer Mother of Mine” or “Sonora Moon” or “Red River Valley” or “Dust”, or of Pauline Moore singing “Are You the One?” in “The Carson City Kid” (1940) or Sally Payne singing “Don’t Gamble With Romance” in “Sheriff of Tombstone” (1941), or of Roy and Bob Nolan and The Sons of the Pioneers singing “My Old Pal, Pal of Mine” or “Cowboy Jubilee” or “Happy Cowboy” or “Home in Oklahoma” or “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”.

To watch those B-Westerns today is to glimpse a world that was not so much lost as purposely abandoned.  It was abandoned so thoroughly and decisively that, compared with what is out there today, it may as well have existed a thousand years ago.  I weep for the loss of the talented, disciplined men and women who created those B-Westerns and wrote those wonderful songs about the joy or sadness to be found in simple things like moonlight, dreams, work, love, thirst, and home.

Roy Rogers was one of the last of the great and legitimate heroes in the realm of American popular entertainment.  There was no dirt dished against Roy Rogers because he was the same decent man in real life as he was on the silver screen.  “…Offscreen, Mr. Rogers minded his own business, which is a rare quality nowadays….  He endured personal tragedies with modesty and grace….”  [ “Roy Rogers: Happy Trails to You”, Editorial, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 8, 1998 ]

On a beautiful summer day in 1960, my mother and I visited Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.  We walked throughout the forecourt and saw the handprints and footprints of many motion picture actors and actresses.  At age 10, I stood there next to her and took a snapshot of the cement square containing the handprints, footprints, and signature of Roy Rogers.  At that moment, I was too young to be aware of my extreme good fortune:  Standing there with the most decent human being I would ever know and looking down at the signature of one of the best exemplars of decency Hollywood ever had.  Nor could I foresee that half a century later, I would look backward and upward from a nation deeply entrenched in moral rot toward the high ground that Roy and his fellow B-Western heroes defended by means of that iron moral code.

It was reported that grown men wept at the funeral service for Roy Rogers.  I could understand that.  It must have been a shining hour early in their lives—as it was in mine—when they discovered Roy Rogers and knew he could be depended upon to stand for everything decent and worthwhile.  How many people like that do we encounter in life?  And it must have seemed to them—as it did to me—that the moral code he defended was disintegrating rapidly in the same years when he, Dale, Gene, and Clayton “The Lone Ranger” Moore were riding off into that eternal western sunset.

“Hoppy, Gene, and me, we taught you how to shoot straight,” Roy sang decades after his B-Western days had ended and in a song addressed to those for whom Roy, Gene, and Hoppy had been childhood heroes.  Indeed you did, Roy.  And for that, you and they deserve our deepest gratitude.

— Comments —

Steve Kogan writes:

In a 1994 documentary on Gene Autry, the acclaimed country western, blues, folk, and gospel singer Johnny Cash makes a particular point about the moral code of the old westerns that stays with me still. Growing up as a farm boy in Arkansas during the Depression, Cash says that the wonderful thing about those films for him and neighboring children was the escape they provided from the daily hardships of their lives into a world where everything came out right.

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