Royal Rodeo, The (1939)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
Silly and rather predictable Western/Musical from Warner has a young King (Scotty Beckett) looking up to cowboy star Bill Stevens (John Payne). The King eventually gets to meet his hero when the traveling rodeo comes to town and sure enough, the King is going to need to be saved from a bad assistant. This film has a few nice things going for it but not the items you might expect. Payne, before becoming a star, manages to be pretty good here even if his line reading is a tad bit hollow. The rodeo stuff is rather bland as we've seen the stunts done various times before and there's really nothing new added to them here. Where the film does succeed is with the music, which includes tracks such as 'Yankee Doodle', 'Oh! Susanna', 'The Good Old American Way' and a couple others. Another plus is the Technicolor, which really looks nice even if the print on Turner Classic Movies is somewhat faded in certain scenes.