Roy Rogers looks so immaculately pristine as to have come straight from an high school barn dance - luckily for all, though, Gabby Hayes injects a bit of realism and grit into a really procedural tale of the expansionist Gringo's, determined to upset the established order of the Spanish Don's as they arrive en mass in California. It's got loads of action, a dastardly, murderous, plot with plenty of back-stabbing shenanigans and oddly enough (for me, at any rate) the songs are not nearly so annoying, or frequent, as they might have been. Rogers as an hero, though, is just too goody-goody; epitomising what Americans would have liked their trailblazing forebears to have been, rather the reflect what they actually were and I found it all rather sugary.

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