Red Time For Bonzo - Episode 7A: Cowboy From Brooklyn (1938)

Sep 16, 2018

If Wyoming Steve Gibson didn't exist, those darned culture industry stupidity profiteers would've had to invent him. What's that? He doesn't exist? Hot damn! The Gipper takes a back saddle to Dick Powell once again in 1938's COWBOY FROM BROOKLYN, a film that (as contemporaries were quick to observe) did absolutely nothing for any of the talented people involved in its creation. 

 

An elaboration of the (white) cultural appropriation narrative popularized by earlier Powell vehicles like BROADWAY GONDOLIER, this lower-drawer Lloyd Bacon musical comedy does derive a bit of satiric energy from Warner Brothers' obvious contempt for all things rural and countrified, but the film's central conceit (that people will put up with - and possibly even laugh at - 90 minutes' worth of Dick Powell running screaming from squirrels and barnyard fowl) is so catastrophically misguided that most viewers will have fallen off this irritating bull long before its Gender Panic Rodeo finale. 

 

Can a movie with Priscilla Lane, Ann Sheridan, James Stephenson, Pat O'Brien, Granville Bates, Hobart Cavanaugh, Elisabeth Risdon, Dick Foran, Dick Powell, and Ronald Reagan be all bad? 12-year old Dave would never have believed it, but...  Try watching this one under hypnosis and see if that helps.  

 

Now is a time for choosing. Choose RED TIME FOR BONZO!

 

Outro Music:

"Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride" performed by Dick Powell & Priscilla Lane, music by Richard A. Whiting & lyrics by Johnny Mercer

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Intro Theme:

"Driving Reagan" by Gareth Hedges