Back to Oklahoma Again
Tex Lawton (Tex Ritter) and his buddy Slim Hunkapillar (Slim Andrews) arrives in town to help out an old friend whose stage coach business is being targeted by Storm (Karl Hackett) and his outlaws. But Tex isn't the only new person in the area as Storm has hired Mule Bates (Olin Francis) to kill anyone who gets in his way of destroying the stage coach business. But Tex and Bates are old friends and together they come up with a plan to fool Storm and stop him from succeeding.
Maybe it is just me but as I looked through the cast list for "Take Me Back to Oklahoma" I felt like I could already work out how the movie would play without watching. Firstly you have Tex Ritter delivering some good guy heroics where in typical fashion he will defeat the bad guy in the big climax before walking off with the girl. Then in the cast there is Slim Andrews which means we will have some simple comedy sidekick stuff going on with him repeating his lines whilst holding on to his waistcoat. Then there is Bob Willis and further down the cast list the playboys which means musical scenes including an amusing one of them riding on a stage, sitting on the roof having a good old sing a long. In fact the amount of musical scenes in "Take Me Back to Oklahoma" is not huge but feels more than you normally get.
The thing is that "Take Me Back to Oklahoma" has a storyline and an okay one in context of old westerns but it is completely regular from the scheming businessman behind the outlaws terrorizing the stage business to Tex knowing the killer who has been hired to finish the job. It makes it the sort of old western which offers little which is new to western fans but might amuse and bemuse those who stumble across it by accident.
What this all boils down to is that "Take Me Back to Oklahoma" is a text book old Tex Ritter western with nothing in it you won't have seen at least once before. It means that it ends up a forgettable western as there is nothing which makes it stand out from other early westerns.
