The Cisco Kid rides (yet) again
The other day I was blathering on about
Cisco Kid movies. I thought I might move on from Cesar Romero and review a Duncan
Renaldo one. The Gay Amigo, Renaldo’s
fifth, will do as well as any. Of course in the 1940s the word gay had not yet acquired its meaning of
homosexual in common parlance. In fact if anything it was used to refer to a
man who seduced many women, as in ‘he’s a gay dog’. And Cisco is a renowned
romancer of the dames.
Joe Sawyer, the villain in an earlier, Romero, Cisco movie, Lucky Cisco Kid, has now become the dumb Army sergeant (the part taken by Dana Andrews in his first Western in the previous one), outwitted at every turn by the pardners. In this one he gets cross and there are fisticuffs but Cisco easily wins.
The local military is commanded by Captain Kenneth MacDonald and his second-in-command is Lt. Clayton Moore. Moore had actually appeared in 14 feature Westerns before becoming the Lone Ranger in September 1949. The Gay Amigo was released in May so he hadn’t yet donned the mask and was still rather a minor player. In fact he is soon written out, Sgt. Sawyer taking over as the captain’s right hand man.
Mind, there’s some extremely fake bronco-busting with Sawyer and Renaldo trying vainly to convince the audience that the mechanical contraption they are ‘riding’ in the studio is a real bronc. Renaldo is particularly bad at this.
There’s a gal, naturally, Rosita (Armida, a vaudeville star who, however, doesn’t sing and dance in this picture apart from one short song). I must say Cisco didn’t woo her all that much. The sergeant fancies here, though, just as Dana did Lola in that earlier movie. These films all had pretty well the same plot.
The mononymic Armida
Sadly, they don’t finish with the “Oh, Pancho!”/”Oh, Cisco!” ending we know and love. You have to wait for the TV series to start in 1950 for that. In The Gay Amigo they just ride off for another adventure.
No one will pretend that this is a classy A-Western but it provides an hour of harmless black & white fun.
