Who payed the critics

Brilliant and touching

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The last film and only sound movie directed by writer, Tom Gibson, who continued his writing career up to "Lost City of the Jungle" (1946). Singer and star, Fred Scott, is unlikely to win any converts with this entry. He plainly lacks both presence and charisma and has so little self-confidence that he allows the gloriously up-spoken, super-beautiful, pocket-sized blonde, Victoria Vinton, and most of the rest of the cast to walk all over him. In fact, the only person who doesn't put Scott in the shade and the only person, aside from Vinton of course, that we would have liked to be super-assertive, namely Howard Hill, is virtually a colorless nonentity. He doesn't assert himself at all. Bah! My main reason for buying this movie was to catch Howard Hill in action and I ran the movie right through and didn't even notice him! Normally, the director would have been a wake-up to the strategies employed by most of the players to take the audiences' attention away from Scott and concentrate it on themselves, but this was Gibson's only sound movie and he was feeling his way too. Available, coupled with another Fred Scott feature, "The Roaming Cowboy", on a very good Alpha DVD.

A very short lived outfit called Spectrum Pictures gave The Singing Buckaroo to the movie-going public in 1937. This was an attempt to make concert singer Fred Scott into a movie cowboy. The results you'll judge if you see this film.The plot is a pip. Victoria Vinton and her father William Favesham are fugitives with Favesham wanted for embezzlement and Vinton as his accomplice. But they did't do it really, no what he did was take the money so that villain Charles Kaley couldn't do it. Scott who owns a ranch takes Vinton in and foils the dastardly plot that Kaley has to get the money and run.Needless to say Scott does not come off a good singing cowboy hero. Other studios even the poverty row ones got their singing cowboys from the ranks of country music. But Spectrum got their's from the San Francisco Opera company where Scott was a leading baritone. The results are ludicrous.