TV REVIEWS : Home Movies on the Range

“Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys” (at 6 and 10 tonight on cable’s American Movie Classics) might better be called “Roy Rogers, King of the Home Movies.”

Rogers, 81, is certainly an apt subject for a TV retrospective. Born in modest circumstances in Cincinnati, he became one of Hollywood’s leading movie stars, one of TV’s first series stars and a restaurant mogul. This successful life, marked by four cruel tragedies, is the stuff of filmland legend.

Unfortunately for “Roy Rogers: King of the Cowboys,” the narrator is Rogers himself and the hourlong show is made up mostly of his extensive home movies and still pictures, with only a sampling of footage from his many Westerns.

A high school dropout, Rogers began singing on radio talent shows in the early ‘30s and was in several bands before forming the Sons of the Pioneers in 1933. He struggled with his singing career until one day when he walked into a laundry in the San Fernando Valley and met an enthusiastic friend who told him that Republic Pictures was looking for a singing cowboy. The next day, Rogers went to the studio for an audition and the rest is B-movie history.

While Rogers seems to be a prince of a family man, there is little here that tells us how he became King of the Cowboys. There is little discussion of his early days at Republic and no mention of Gene Autry, his longtime box-office rival. Rogers got his start in Autry Westerns (under the name Dick Weston) and was elevated to leading player only when Autry was having contract difficulties with Republic in 1938.

That elevation led to one of the most amazing streaks in Hollywood history. Beginning in 1943, Rogers was the No. 1 cowboy box-office attraction 12 years in a row. There is no evidence here of what that streak meant to Rogers (except we see that he lived well), or what it meant financially to Republic.