Touches You

A Masterpiece!

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

PRC must have mortgaged the studio to give this film color. Could it have been a birthday present to their cowboy hero star Eddie Dean? We can only speculate.Eddie and sidekick Roscoe Ates are drafted into helping Judge Forrest Taylor bring and law and order to their town of Rawhide. There's a corrupt saloon and mine owner played by Warner Richmond who with his son Dennis Moore has the illegal activities pretty well organized. Taylor is going to be a kind of Judge Seabury and Dean and Ates are on the commission.What is revealed by the film is a prior relationship with Taylor, Richmond and Moore that is the key to the whole film. In the end corruption is driven from Rawhide.Dean has a couple of nice songs to sing including the public domain Home On The Range which every singing cowboy did a version of. Colorado Serenade is a pleasant enough film, quite a revelation for a PRC release to be done in color.

Eddie Dean and his sidekick Soapy Jones (any relation to Fuzzy Jones?) foil an assassination attempt against a circuit judge being sent to clean up the outlaws' dirty town, leading to Eddie's recruitment into the judge's team of crime fighters.This time around, Producers Releasing Corporation seems to have spent all it's budget on making the picture in color and not enough on the script or director, as this is too talky with not enough action.The only thing in this slow moving film that works is the handful of musical interludes featuring Eddie singing, as he was a pretty bland action star and this movie is instantly forgettable.

Singing cowboy Eddie Dean and his sidekick 'Soapy'(Roscoe Ates)team up with an undercover agent going by the name of Nevada(David Sharpe)to catch a gang of stagecoach robbers. 'Duke' Dillon(Dennis Moore)and his rough riding cronies are stealing gold from stagecoaches. The gold is later melted down by 'Dad' Dillon(Warner Richmond). Character development is par for mid 40's westerns. Rounding out the cast: Mary Kenyon, Forrest Taylor, Lee Bennett and Abigail Adams. Not only does Eddie Deen help crack the case; he gets to croon some cowboy tunes featuring "Home On The Range", "Western Lullaby" and "Riding on Top of the Mountain".

"Colorado Serenade" opens and closes with Eddie Dean on horseback singing "Home on the Range", though he trades partner Roscoe Ates for love interest Sherry Lynn (Mary Kenyon) by the end of the film. In between, Eddie and Soapy (Ates) help a trouble shooting circuit judge find a long lost son and bring justice to Rawhide City.When you see them both together, it's remarkable how much Dean and Ates look alike, with Roscoe being an older version. The Soapy character was actually Dean's second screen comedic sidekick, Emmett "Pappy" Lynn worked with Eddie in earlier films.In the story, a cowpoke named Nevada (David Sharpe) goes undercover to infiltrate a gang that may be robbing gold shipments. At first, Eddie is unaware of Nevada's role, and they really bang it out in a wild saloon fight that's one of the more realistic ones you'll see in a 'B' Western. Later, it's revealed that the mastermind behind the gold robberies is the same villain who Judge Hilton (Forrest Taylor) put in jail thirty years earlier. "Dad" Dillon (Warner Richmond) kidnapped the judge's son when he broke out and raised him as his own. "Duke" Dillon is now the town boss of Rawhide City, who'll learn his true origin just before he eats dust at the hands of "Dad".Eddie Dean began his film career in the mid 1930's, appearing in back up roles to Hopalong Cassidy. Prior to that, he made his mark as part of a singing trio on Gene Autry's Melody Ranch Radio Program. Dean has his backers that will claim he was the best of the singing cowboys, and that's probably not far from the truth. "Colorado Serenade" showcases his talent quite well with a host of songs, and he finishes one up with a low key yodel.While many movie cowboys were synonymous with their horses, Dean chose to appear with four different steeds in his films, on the assumption that he wouldn't be upstaged by any of them. His mount in this picture is a palomino named White Cloud. Actually, Dean had a reputation for being fairly generous with his fellow actors, allowing them center stage when the story called for it.A final bit of trivia - though other Westerns were made before in color, Eddie Dean was the first to do a series of films in color, with five films for PRC in the 1940's. On that account, he managed to beat Roy and Gene to the draw.