Watching 1930s movie stars play cowboy in Screen Snapshots

Is it worth your time?

If you're a fan of old Hollywood history, sure. It’s barely ten minutes long, so it won’t kill you. But if you’re looking for a plot or anything resembling actual cinema, you’re in the wrong place. This is for the people who want to see what Joel McCrea looked like when he wasn't reading lines.

Honestly, the whole thing feels like a very polite advertisement for owning a horse. Every few minutes, someone else pops up on a saddle, smiling like they’re having the time of their lives. It’s peak 1930s PR work.

The Cowboy Fetish

There is something genuinely funny about how obsessed these people were with looking like rugged frontiersmen. You’ve got Gene Raymond just chilling, trying his best to look like he spends all day wrangling cattle instead of being in sound stages. It feels a bit like watching My Stars, where the performance of 'normal life' is just as scripted as the movies themselves.

There is a segment with Charles Buck Jones and his horse, Silver. The horse is definitely the better actor here. It has more personality in its ears than most of the humans have in their entire range.

• The editing is abrupt. One second you're at a ranch, then suddenly you're somewhere else.
• The music is that classic, tinny, upbeat orchestral stuff that never stops.
• I really wonder if any of these actors actually liked horses, or if it was just a requirement to look cool in the 30s.

It’s not as chaotic as Stork Mad or as emotionally heavy as some of the other stuff from that decade. It’s just... quiet. It’s a very strange, sun-drenched, dusty little relic. Sometimes the camera lingers on a fence post for two seconds too long, and you start to wonder if the cameraman just forgot to yell cut.

It’s not a masterpiece. It’s not even really a movie. It’s more like a digital scrap-book that someone found in an attic and decided to digitize for us to squint at. If you like horses and black-and-white grain, give it a go. Otherwise, you aren't missing much.