This isn't a great movie. I'll give it a 4 and many people would rate it lower, but it was a low budget film which seems to have been produced by the Hughes family to boost the acting career of young Billy Hughes Jr. In the movie he plays the role of Chris, an eleven-year-old who lives with his dad who travels around working in the Texas oil fields. Chris finds a white dog in need of medical attention and brings him home. His dad says 'you can help him get well but then we have to take him to the pound'. Moving around as they must in his line of work, it's not easy to find a place where they can keep a dog. Chris names the dog Rex.
Rex gets better and Chris decides that they'll run away rather than for him to let Rex go to the pound. After an afternoon's assorted adventures - with Rex somehow catching large fish in his mouth in a very small pond, eating lunch with a hobo, and stopping by a rancher working in his yard, Chris and Rex stumble into a field full of rattlesnakes. Chris trips and scrapes his leg which somehow keeps him from running away from the snakes. Rex attacks the field of snakes, grabbing and shaking to death each one of them. As Rex has finished killing nearly all the snakes, Chris's dad and some others ride up on horseback, having finally located him - but Rex has pretty much already saved the day. Having done so, good old Dad says 'there's no way we'll let Rex go. He's going to stay with us.' Okay, the plot here is very thin, no doubt, and some things aren't totally logical. (Why a sheriff drives a fancy new 4 door Buick hardtop without any markings or lights, for example, or how there could be so many whopper sized fish in a 1/4 acre pond, or how a missing 11 year old boy could be described to the sheriff as being four feet tall; Chris looks of totally average height for his age, which would have been more like 4 foot 8.) And I think they seriously must have killed not just a handful of fish (Rex dragged them out of the pond and left them on the ground) but better than a dozen rattlesnakes as well. I'm sure these days they would not let any animals or creatures be killed for the sake of making a movie but they sure racked up a total here.
But the important thing in this case isn't the movie but what it stood for. It was evidently a family-sponsored production to boost the acting career of Billy Hughes Jr. Who was about 11 years old when this movie was filmed. He was rightly seen as having some natural acting talent, and while he wasn't going to win any awards for this film, he developed into a respected kid-actor for a few years in the early 1960's. (His portrayal of Grid Maule Jr. In the Rifleman episode "Sidewinder" is one impressive performance from a then-13 year old boy.) I'd say he beats most of the current young crowd of actors - watch him in 'Sidewinder' and see. So this isn't a movie you'd want to sit down and watch for the sheer enjoyment of it, sorry to say, but it does represent something on a more human level for its young star, and probably helped serve the intended purpose at the time. To my knowledge this movie hasn't ever been released beyond the original films where it was shown in theaters and you aren't likely to see it shown on TV - even Turner doesn't have it listed in their database.
Ole Rex is not so much a movie as a small piece of history for its leading player, Billy Hughes Jr. Unfortunately he left Hollywood a few years into his career after developing a reputation for his acting skills. His parents divorced and he was sent to live with his grandmother who did not approve of his acting career (which he really enjoyed) and wanted him to live a 'normal' life. Scripts and movie offers came in the mail and she threw them away unopened. By the time he was old enough to return to Hollywood on his own, he had been forgotten and couldn't get much work and ended up with that normal life his grandmother wanted for him, working a succession of hum drum low pay dead end jobs. Sadly, he passed away in 2005 at the age of 57.
Rex gets better and Chris decides that they'll run away rather than for him to let Rex go to the pound. After an afternoon's assorted adventures - with Rex somehow catching large fish in his mouth in a very small pond, eating lunch with a hobo, and stopping by a rancher working in his yard, Chris and Rex stumble into a field full of rattlesnakes. Chris trips and scrapes his leg which somehow keeps him from running away from the snakes. Rex attacks the field of snakes, grabbing and shaking to death each one of them. As Rex has finished killing nearly all the snakes, Chris's dad and some others ride up on horseback, having finally located him - but Rex has pretty much already saved the day. Having done so, good old Dad says 'there's no way we'll let Rex go. He's going to stay with us.' Okay, the plot here is very thin, no doubt, and some things aren't totally logical. (Why a sheriff drives a fancy new 4 door Buick hardtop without any markings or lights, for example, or how there could be so many whopper sized fish in a 1/4 acre pond, or how a missing 11 year old boy could be described to the sheriff as being four feet tall; Chris looks of totally average height for his age, which would have been more like 4 foot 8.) And I think they seriously must have killed not just a handful of fish (Rex dragged them out of the pond and left them on the ground) but better than a dozen rattlesnakes as well. I'm sure these days they would not let any animals or creatures be killed for the sake of making a movie but they sure racked up a total here.
But the important thing in this case isn't the movie but what it stood for. It was evidently a family-sponsored production to boost the acting career of Billy Hughes Jr. Who was about 11 years old when this movie was filmed. He was rightly seen as having some natural acting talent, and while he wasn't going to win any awards for this film, he developed into a respected kid-actor for a few years in the early 1960's. (His portrayal of Grid Maule Jr. In the Rifleman episode "Sidewinder" is one impressive performance from a then-13 year old boy.) I'd say he beats most of the current young crowd of actors - watch him in 'Sidewinder' and see. So this isn't a movie you'd want to sit down and watch for the sheer enjoyment of it, sorry to say, but it does represent something on a more human level for its young star, and probably helped serve the intended purpose at the time. To my knowledge this movie hasn't ever been released beyond the original films where it was shown in theaters and you aren't likely to see it shown on TV - even Turner doesn't have it listed in their database.
Ole Rex is not so much a movie as a small piece of history for its leading player, Billy Hughes Jr. Unfortunately he left Hollywood a few years into his career after developing a reputation for his acting skills. His parents divorced and he was sent to live with his grandmother who did not approve of his acting career (which he really enjoyed) and wanted him to live a 'normal' life. Scripts and movie offers came in the mail and she threw them away unopened. By the time he was old enough to return to Hollywood on his own, he had been forgotten and couldn't get much work and ended up with that normal life his grandmother wanted for him, working a succession of hum drum low pay dead end jobs. Sadly, he passed away in 2005 at the age of 57.
