- Baseball player Dan Walker being benched doesn't bother him as it allows him to make the easy decision to be a full time Texas rancher - his goal to own his own ranch - and be at home with his wife and daughter, Susan and Mary. The one thing Dan will miss about not being a ball player is the casual friendship he has with a bunch of disadvantaged boys at his team's ballpark. Without knowing their full stories, Dan could always manage to get a few of them into the ballpark to watch games for free. When Dan learns that two of them, Skippy and Hank, will be sent to reform school, with the probable outcome being they growing up to be adult criminals due to that experience, Dan feels he has no choice but to take the two with him to Texas to try to get them jobs on ranches. Dan learns both that city boys being thrown into the deep end in ranching duties doesn't sit well with the locals, and that there are just as many disadvantaged boys in the country as there are in the city, they who just want three square meals they can call their own. Dan is able to convince his initially reluctant fellow ranchers to donate property and seed funds for a pilot project for a boys' ranch where they can raise their own food, have a roof over their heads, have some proper, caring adult guidance, and get a decent education in the process, the ranchers who only agree on the condition that Dan manage the ranch. With the ranch up, running and thriving, Susan worries most about a younger boy named Butch Taylor who doesn't seem to have ever learned how to be a real boy, while Dan has to worry about Skippy, who doesn't respond to authority, who just wants to live on his own rules, and who only understands what money can do in whatever manner he can get it. As such, Skippy may threaten the pilot moving into a permanent situation, one where all the other boys are responding in this supportive environment.—Huggo
- Based on the real "Boys' Ranch" located in Oldham County, Texas northwest of Amarillo, Texas. The ranch was started in 1939 by ex-wrestler Cal Farley of Amarillo as a home for underprivileged boys after rancher Julian Bivins donated the old Tascosa courthouse and 120 acres of land for Farley's project. It started with Farley and his wife and nine boys, and currently has over 400 boys and fifty buildings on 4000 acres of farm/ranch land and its own post office and school. Now known as Cal Farley's Boy's Ranch. This film is a semi-western version of MGM's earlier "Boy's Town" plot-wise in which a snarling little petty thief and liar (played by, who else, Skip Homeier in a repeat of his Nazi brat in "Tomorrow, the World!") who comes to the ranch and immediately makes problems. His comeuppance and redemption is a foregone conclusion, although many viewing the film were rooting for him to end up in Tascosa's old Boot Hill. James Craig and Dorothy Patrick play the characters of Cal Farley and his wife under fictional names.—Les Adams <longhorn1939@suddenlink.net>
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