Hollywood Hoofbeats. Audrey Pavia
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The black stallion Rex strikes a regal pose in his debut film, The King of the Wild Horses (1924). In his best penmanship, Rex has inscribed this photo to early cinematographer and special- effects man Ernie Crockett.
Since most actors refused to work with Rex, his double, a quiet gelding named Brownie, was used in close-up scenes. Only the fearless former rodeo star, actor, and topnotch stuntman Yakima Canutt would work “up close and personal” with the stallion. Canutt costarred with Rex in The Devil Horse and had a close encounter with his wild side. In one scene, Rex had to run to Canutt’s character during an Indian battle. He had performed the liberty work beautifully for several takes, but Canutt noticed he was getting mad. He warned the director, Fred Jackman, that the horse needed a break. Jackman pressed for one more take—and Rex snapped. He charged Canutt, baring his teeth. “I tried to duck,” Canutt remembered in his autobiography, “but his upper teeth hit my left jaw and his lower teeth got my neck. I was knocked to the ground, and he reared above me, striking down with his powerful front hooves.” Canutt managed to roll away and kicked Rex on the nose. Still the horse came after him even when Lindell tried to call him off. “I finally rolled over a bank and escaped,” wrote Canutt.
Rex’s frequent costar was a pinto stallion, Marky. Sometimes he was used as a shill, to incite Rex to fury with an off-screen whinny. Marky had some hair-raising on-screen tussles with Rex, carefully orchestrated by Lindell, who made sure neither stallion was injured no matter how vicious the fight appeared. Their hooves were shod in soft rubber shoes to soften kicks, and their teeth were wrapped in gauze to prevent serious bites. Fake blood added to the realism of the fight scenes, which were acted for keeps by both stallions.
Behind the back of an oblivious Native American chief, Rex’s nemesis, the pinto Marky, menaces his off-screen rival in The Devil Horse (1926).
In early 1927, Rex was sold to Universal Pictures. There he continued his career, appearing in several films with Jack Perrin, an appealing cowboy actor. One such film was Guardians of the Wild, released in 1928. Perrin plays Jerry, a forest ranger who talks to his gorgeous light gray mare, Starlight, the actor’s frequent costar. As bright as she is beautiful, Starlight, of course, understands every word. Playing a sympathetic character for a change, Rex is depicted as smarter than Jerry and expends a considerable amount of energy trying to communicate with him.
Critics loved Rex, as is obvious in this 1928 review of Guardians of the Wild from Photoplay magazine: “Rex, the ‘Wonder Horse,’ is the star; but you see little of him. He’s buried under a pile of screaming heroine, half-witted hero, wronged father, and leering villain. Too bad a horse can’t choose his own stories!”
In another of Rex’s films, Wild Beauty (1927), the stallion costars with a French Thoroughbred mare named Valerie. The film features Rex at his wildest, killing a mountain lion, battling cowhands who have roped him, tearing into a rival stallion with a vengeance, and galloping at breakneck speed to accomplish his varied goals in the film. His performance is truly stunning.
Rex never outgrew his wildness. In fact, during the filming of Smoky in 1933, he charged an actor and knocked him to the ground, as scripted. What followed was pure improvisation by Rex, who began tearing the man’s clothes off with his teeth. The director cut the frightening scene from the film.
Rex is credited in nineteen films, but he played anonymously in countless others as an incorrigible stallion. His career continued into the talkies era, and in 1935 at age twenty, he costarred with the German Shepherd Rin Tin Tin Jr. in a twelve-part Mascot serial, The Adventures of Rex and Rinty. Rex made his final film in the late 1930s. He eventually retired to the ranch of Lee Doyle in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he was turned out with a band of mares. Although Rex sired a number of foals, none became a movie star. Truly one of a kind, Rex passed away sometime in the early 1940s.
3. Horse Heroes and Singing Cowboys
“Back in the saddle again, back where a friend is a friend…”
—Gene Autry and Ray Whitley, “Back in the Saddle Again”
Pardner and friends are serenaded by Monte Hale.
The advent of sound opened up whole new vistas on the celluloid range. Actors could be heard delivering their lines at last, and sound effects provided extra realism. For Westerns, this meant that for the first time, smacking fists, gunfire, and thundering hooves rattled speakers in movie houses across America. It also meant the birth of a new kind of Western hero: the singing cowboy. Tough enough to roust out the vilest varmint, the singing cowboy was also clean living and honest to a fault, with a smile and a song always at the ready. More than one of these new heroes sang his way into the hearts of moviegoers. The two most famous were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Just as celebrated were their horses, Champion and Trigger.
Gene Autry and the original Champion, along with their costar Buck, grace a lobby card for their movie Melody Trail (1935).
The Horse Opera
Cowboy music was already extremely popular with radio audiences so it’s no wonder that the first sound Western, In Old Arizona (1929), was also a musical. Warner Baxter won an Academy Award for his performance as the Cisco Kid. Both he and his costar, Dorothy Burgess, sang as did members of the cavalry. A microphone strategically hidden in some sagebrush captured the exciting sounds of galloping horses for the first time in movie history. The immense success of this Best Picture-nominated venture convinced filmmakers that cowboys and music were a marriage made for box-office heaven, and the horse opera was born.
The singing cowboy’s boots are planted in practical tradition. Cowboys driving cattle from Texas to northern stockyards learned that nervous steers could be comforted by song. Yearning for amusement after dusty days on the trail, cowboys also sang to entertain one another. While no record of these early singing cowboys’ efforts exists, they sparked an enduring tradition. Even now, many country music stars dress as cowboys and cowgirls, embracing the imagery of the Old West that has come to symbolize all-American qualities of integrity and freedom.
Tom Mix hired live cowboy singers to entertain audiences between showings of his silent films but never attempted to warble himself. Western star Ken Maynard, however, had “long had a hankerin’” to sing, and in his first all-sound feature, Kettle Creek (1930), he not only performed some of his most spectacular stunts with Tarzan but also worked in some songs. He repeated the formula in a few more films for Universal. Although Maynard enjoyed a brief recording career with Columbia Gramophone, the cowboy star had a raspy, nasal singing voice that limited his appeal. Undaunted, he bought the film rights to a popular ballad about an incorrigible horse, “The Strawberry Roan,” and sang the title song in the 1933 movie of the same name. Maynard believed the singing cowboy was the next big thing, and Mascot Pictures chief Nat Levine agreed. In 1934, Levine produced In Old Santa Fe, which blended Wild West action and cowboy music on a modern dude ranch. Ken Maynard and Tarzan received top billing, but a young WLS radio star named Gene Autry, the “Cowboy Idol of the Air,” stole the singing thunder of his own long-time idol Maynard, whose poor singing had to be dubbed in the movie. Maynard and Tarzan were already fading into the sunset as Autry began his meteoric rise.
America’s Cowboy and the World’s Wonder Horse
“Back in the Saddle Again,” a catchy song about the pleasures of riding the range, became the first famous singing cowboy’s theme song. In Gene Autry’s case, the saddle was usually aboard