Man of the Frontier

They must sing "Red River Valley" (the original title of this flick) a half dozen times, including an incredible sequence where Autry beats up one of the bad guys and forces him to sing this song in front of the whole saloon. There's also a jug band that plays throughout the flick that includes, among other wacky gimmicks, a rubber clarinet ... they play a damn coffee pot in one scene.

A singing cowboy movie with one of the most popular of the genre, Gene Autry. And here he and Smiley Burnette got to clear up the trouble with sabotage and missing wages at a dam construction site. Plenty of breaks in the story for their musical numbers, but once the action was on it was quite good. Republic Pictures knows how to make the basic westerns watchable, something most of the smaller companies certainly couldn't in this era, even if westerns was their bread and butter.