Arizona Days (1937)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Excellent but underrated film

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Tex Ritter and sidekick Grass Hopper (!) take a job at a vaudeville show In the town of Tombstone, Arizona; some bad men react to being forced to pay for admission by destroying the show. Tex then becomes a county tax collector in order to make the men pay, or so I've heard as the print I watched appears to be missing a reel!This is better than it should be thanks to the boundless charisma and talents of Tex Ritter, though this is clearly not one of Tex's best.However, this is the first and only Saturday matinée western I've ever seen where the villains murder a young boy on screen! Then we're treated to a happy ending where the kid appears to have been forgotten amongst the singing and laughing and marital bliss!Some years later, bad guy Glenn Strange was cast as the last of Universal's Frankenstein monsters.

A second disappointing follow up to Tex's first film, 'Song of the Gringo' (1936). Tex and his side kick, 'Hopper' (Syd Saylor, as a not so annoying comic relief) join a minstrel show in Arizona. This is the best part of the film, as it shows Tex on stage singing and then dealing with the villain Harry Price (the great badman Forrest Taylor) and his henchmen who enter the theater without paying.Unfortunately, the only prints I've seen then cut out about the next ten minutes of the film, and suddenly Tex is a tax collector in a showdown with Price to get him to pay his taxes! There isn't much on display here. The prairie flower love interest is a cypher; we are also subjected to a too long ambush shoot out behind rocks. The only other 'high point' is a tense little bit of editing as the evil looking Price waits in the cantina to shoot Tex.Tex does sing three co-written songs, one of which 'Tombstone, Arizona' has a four bar melody section taken directly from his version of 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain.' But that's okay! He also admitted in later years to how he 'stole' Leadbelly's melody for 'Goodnight Irene' and wrote new words recording it as 'I've Done the Best I Could.' He also borrowed 'Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay' for another of his hits. But all is forgiven Tex, because you did so many great songs, sang 'High Noon,' gave us John Ritter, and made some fairly decent westerns! But 'Arizona Days' is not one of them. I give it a 3.

As a studio Grand National Pictures only lasted for a couple of years, it's best known films were two from James Cagney who worked there while quarreling with Warner Brothers. Seeing what success Republic had with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, they signed Tex Ritter from The Grand Old Opry as their singing cowboy.One thing that was original with Arizona Days, Tex took on the job of tax collector for the Tombstone Arizona area. That has to be unique in the annals of western films. Imagine outlaws who not only rob, and pillage and kill, but don't file their 1040s. It's the most unheard of thing I've ever heard of.Another thing unheard of in western films is the up front killing of a child, the kid brother of Eleanor Stewart who Tex is paying court to. Tommy Bupp is killed when the outlaws ambush Tex and Eleanor and miss Tex, but kill young Tommy. I'm not sure how that one got through the censors of 1937.The production values aren't good at all so I can't say this was a decent film for all its originality. Ritter sings a couple of nice songs and the taxes do get collected, after a western fashion for which you'll have to see the film if you care to.

"Arizona Days" opens with a snappy song on horseback by cowboy star Tex Ritter, but truthfully, that's about as entertaining as this film gets in it's fifty seven minute run. However the DVD print I viewed had a rather disjointed cut following a scene where Tex offers to help a minstrel show owner by paying off a thirty one dollar debt in exchange for a singing gig in the show. It quickly jumps to a ten pace gunfight between Tex and villain Harry Price (Forrest Taylor). Another review of the film states that Price was behind the burning of the minstrel show wagons, so with this scene missing, the movie's continuity suffers in the print I saw.Syd Saylor is Tex's sidekick, and provides a bit of comic relief with a running gag where he attempts to play a trombone to poor effect. Saylor's film history includes an astounding 360 movies in which he appeared, though uncredited in many of them. My first intro to Saylor's work was as John Wayne's sidekick Dink Hooley in "Born to the West", also known as "Helltown", where he gets a few laughs trying to sell lightning rods to unsuspecting victims.When you come right down to it, there's not much of a story here, as Tex manages to get the drop on Price's gang in an attempt to secure back taxes that they owe. Tex won the right to collect when he beat bad guy Price to the draw in the aforementioned gunfight.Poor production values and a consistently dark picture often interfered with this viewer's enjoyment of the film. On the plus side were three tunes by Ritter, including "High, Wide and Handsome", "Arizona Days", and opening and closing renditions of "Tombstone, Arizona". Pretty Eleanor Stewart winds up as Ritter's new bride in the closing scene, even though there was no romance to speak of during the movie, but the image you'll remember is Syd Saylor's character "Grass" Hopper wearing a "Just Married" sign around his neck as he rides the back of the buckboard heading out of town.