DUDE COWBOY (1941)

U.S. Treasury engraver Frank Adams is on his way to Reno to visit his daughter when he's shanghaied at the train station by Gordon West and his henchmen who drag him off to a cave and force him to make counterfeit paper money plates for their forgery operation. Soon, however, the Feds are on alert, as they find that Adams has deliberately slipped errors and his initials onto the bills he's being forced to produce, and which are cropping up around Silver City, Nevada. Agent Terry McVey is sent there to investigate (with, unknown to him, Adams' daughter Barbara on his trail, using an alias). Terry enlists his medicine show buddies Smokey and Whopper to help him. The three get hired as entertainers at the local dude ranch and, with help from some supporting characters, eventually track down the bad guys and rescue Adams. This is not quite an hour long, and though it's not strictly speaking a musical, there are four songs performed, which leaves probably 45 minutes or so for the story to play out, which is plenty of time. Tim Holt makes a fairly charming lead, and one of his medicine show buddies is singer Ray Whitley (pictured), best known as the composer of Gene Autry's signature song, "Back in the Saddle Again." I'm not necessarily a fan of the singing cowboy movies, but I enjoyed Whitley's songs. The wooden Marjorie Reynolds leaves something to be desired as Barbara, but Louise Currie is a standout as the supporting gal Gail who sets her cap for Holt. Glenn Strange, who later played the Frankenstein monster in a couple of Universal monster movies, is a henchman. There is perhaps a bit more comic relief here than you might find in the typical B-western of the era, but it all goes by painlessly enough. [TCM]