When Nelson Eddy sang Rudolf Friml songs to win the heart of Jeanette MacDonald in Rose Marie he forever got his signature role as the singing Mountie. In his nightclub act toward the end of his life Eddy would come out in tuxedo and Mountie hat.Grand National Pictures decided a singing Mountie series was apparently what they needed and they hired James Newill, a good operatic baritone, but a guy whose acting skills made Nelson look like Spencer Tracy. But he looked good in a Mountie uniform and sat the saddle well. In the first film of the series Renfrew Of The Royal Mounted, there are certain elements similar to Rose Marie. There's an American counterfeiting outfit operating in the Canadian woods and they have a really ingenious way of smuggling their bogus currency into the USA. Won't reveal it, but the title gives some clues.Anyway a Mountie is murdered and that makes it personal for the RCMP and Renfrew. Also an American engraver just released from prison is forced to work with the gang under threats of killing his daughter who is played by Carol Hughes.Newill and Hughes aren't exactly MacDonald and Eddy mainly because she sings not a note. And the songs Newill sings aren't top drawer material like the score from Rose Marie.But the series was shot on location at Big Bear Lake so that makes it a cut above most B studio series of the time. And the story isn't a bad one.

So you might be asking yourself what would possess a film company like Grand National to come out with a picture about a singing Mountie. Actually, Mountie films in the mid to late 1930's were quite popular, and the singing cowboy craze was pretty much in full swing with the likes of Gene Autry. James Newill himself performed as a big band singer, and even though a lot of his career remains unknown, he did appear in a series of these films which began with "Renfrew of the Royal Mounted".Quite honestly, you probably won't find another Western type genre film with a similar plot element. In this one, smugglers are moving hot money on ice, that is to say, a counterfeiting ring goes to the trouble of smuggling forged bills inside the body cavities of rainbow trout that are frozen in blocks of ice! Yes, you read that right. You'll have to see it to believe it, but once the story got going, I had to give the writers some credit for the ingenuity shown here. Of course, if this ever happened for real I don't know, but it seems to me that counterfeit money traveling inside fish would have been difficult to pass the smell test, let alone whether determining if the bills were real or not.It might not seem on the face of it that this story would be remotely entertaining, but James Newill does give a spirited rendition of the Barbecue Bill song in the early going. It seems that he's a top contender for the best barbecue sauce in Canada contest, and wouldn't you know it, his number one competitor is the mastermind of the counterfeiting ring, George Poulis (William Royle). It's better not to try to understand all this stuff, just go with the flow of the story.Renfrew winds up with a romantic interest in the picture, Virginia Bronson (Carol Hughes), who's father is one of the counterfeiters but is attempting to go straight. I find it interesting that Hughes was also the leading lady in Roy Rogers' first starring film the following year, in "Under Western Stars" for Republic Studios.Also on hand as a henchman for the bad guys is Chief Thundercloud, who's earliest claim to fame might have been as the original screen Tonto in the 1938 serial "The Lone Ranger". The Chief would team up with James Newill's Renfrew once more in 1940's "Murder on the Yukon". I haven't seen that one yet, but I can just imagine.

This is one of a series of Renfrew films. Renfrew is a Mountie -- actually, a Singing Mountie, so he's bound to burst into song during the course of the film. The story is not profound, and has a tad of the science-fictional invention in it. A gang of crooks has a member who's invented a kind of ray gun, carefully explained as a gun that sends out a tight beam of microwaves to short out the magnetos of an airplane. His invention works, but not well enough, so a university professor is tricked into helping them upgrade the device. The professor is led to believe that he's helping to perfect an antiaircraft device for national defense.The crooks have planted a bug in the offices of a gold mine, and thus can overhear the plans for gold shipments. However, these are relayed to them by a person who pretends to be an amateur radio operator, with the information buried in children's stories.Sgt. Renfrew is multitalented, being among other things, an airplane pilot. He and his sidekick, Constable Kelly, have been assigned to find out why the airplanes from the mine are mysteriously vanishing without a trace, so Renfrew goes airborne, with his sidekick either airsick or asleep.Naturally, the professor has a pretty young daughter, who comes up to Canada ti visit him, and who is intimidated by the crooks into keeping quiet for her father's safety.The Mounties finally figure out what's going on, and Renfrew goes aloft to pilot a gold shipment while Kelly goes to the crooks' lodge. The chief of the crooks, through the bug, determines that Renfrew would be flying an agglutinate route, and goes aloft himself to lure the Mountie into chasing him into the ray gun's range. The average viewer can figure out the end of this one.The film is full of light comedic moments and a lit of fistfights. And of course, Renfrew sings a few songs, one in the airplane he' s flying on the supposed gold shipment.You could do far worse, but it's not a film to take seriously.

Renfrew Of The Royal Mounted sure is a curious movie. I mean I'm not too sure who greenlighted the adventures of a singing Mountie, but here it is, and while it's entertaining, it sure makes some highly amusing factual errors. James Newill stars as Renfrew, the dashing figure in red, while not singing songs about Barbecue sauce (!!) he helps out a woman who gets inadvertently caught as bait while going to see her father, who unbeknownst to her, is being forced to work as a counterfeiter for them bad Amerikans. Got all that? Good. Actually, the plot is not too hard to follow, and builds up some suspense along the way, I wasn't really convinced with Renfrew as a gruff hero though.Watch for Renfrew casually littering in his home country at the end. lol