ABSTRACT
Billy the Kid Returns, a “B” film starring Roy Rogers, is generally remembered – if at all – as one example among perhaps thousands of “singing cowboy” films that were made in the 1930s and 1940s. Produced by Republic Pictures, a low-budget, independent, “Poverty Row” film company on the fringes of Hollywood, the film represents a form of production that responded to market needs unfulfilled by the main studios of the era. Popular particularly with juvenile viewers and in rural and neighborhood movie houses, Billy the Kid Returns appealed to an alternative viewership whose tastes were often distinct from those of Hollywood’s imagined mass audience. This chapter considers the film in relation to these overlapping contexts, all of which impinge on our understanding of the film as “independent.”
