Song of the Saddle (1936) Review - Guns, Guitars, and Dirt

If you have an hour to spare and love cheap old westerns where guys sing to their horses, Song of the Saddle is a fun little relic. But if you hate corny cowboy tunes or old black-and-white films that look like they were shot in someone's backyard, you should probably skip this one. 🤠

It is basically a revenge story, but with acoustic guitars.

We start with a kid whose dad gets murdered by a bad guy named Hook. The kid runs off, grows up, and comes back ten years later to get even with the gang.

Only, instead of just shooting the bad guys, he decides to become a singing cowboy. It is a very specific choice of career for a guy looking for blood.

Dick Foran plays the grown-up Frank, and he has this massive, overly bright grin. He looks like he just won a pie-eating contest even when he is talking about his dead dad.

"I'm gonna sing them into the ground!" (Okay, he doesn't actually say this, but he might as well have.)

There is a scene early on where a wagon gets ambushed, and the dust looks so thick you can barely see the actors. I am pretty sure half of the extras were actually choking on the dirt during filming.

And then we get the romance. Jen (played by Alma Lloyd) is there, and she was also on the wagon train ten years ago.

Their chemistry is... well, it exists. They mostly just stand near each other and look very polite.

If you have watched other dusty indies from this era, like the silent flick Lone Fighter, you will recognize the exact rocky hills they keep riding past. I swear they use the same three boulders for every single chase scene.

Some weird details I noticed:

• The bad guy's henchmen all look like they bought their hats from the exact same clearance rack.
• A horse that seems much smarter than any of the human characters in the film.
• The way the background music just starts playing out of nowhere, even though there is no band in the desert.

Charles Middleton is in this too, playing one of his classic grumpy roles. He has that face that just screams "I am going to foreclose on your ranch and laugh about it."

The music is the main draw, I guess. Foran sings with a lot of gusto, though sometimes it feels like the movie pauses just so he can do a musical number.

Like, he will be tracking killers, and then suddenly he is strumming a guitar. It is wild.

Some of the stunts are actually pretty neat, though. The horse falls look painful, and I hope the animals were okay.

It is not a masterpiece, obviously. But it is short, dumb, and has a weird charm that modern movies just cannot copy.

Just do not expect anything deep. It is just a guy singing his way through a blood feud. 🎸