Austin Woman Seeks Director’s Films Shot in West Texas

BY ENRIQUE RANGEL
AMARILLO GLOBE-NEWS

AUSTIN — Caroline Frick is on a mission.

Frick has spent years learning about Melton Barker, an independent filmmaker who crisscrossed several states from the 1930s to the 1950s making low-budget movies in which the actors and actresses — mainly children — were local folks with little or no acting experience. Frick, founder and executive director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, wants to find an estimated, but unaccounted for, 60 films that Barker shot in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Many were filmed in West Texas.

Frick said she plans to travel the state and spend a lot of time in West Texas because she believes that a wealth of historical homemade movies, documentaries, commercials and other bits of film is gathering dust in garages or basements.

“Texas has an amazing history and legacy of filmmaking, and nobody knows it,” Frick said at her office at the University of Texas at Austin. “I think West Texas produced incredibly rich materials.”

Frick said she is convinced that Barker’s 20- to 25-minute black-and-white films depict life in rural Texas communities as no other movies of that era do. Barker worked under the banner of Melton Barker Juvenile Productions. Frick said she believes that he was born in West Texas but moved to Dallas as a child.

Barker and his small crew would arrive in towns and place an ad in the local newspaper informing parents that if they paid $10 per child, their children would be in the movie. That amount was more than a day’s wages for most people during the Great Depression, but many parents gladly paid. Barker arranged with local theaters to show the movies.

Children considered for leading roles had to audition. Others, sometimes as many as 125, would only have to pay the fee.

It appears that the only movie Barker filmed, over and over, was The Kidnappers’ Foil. The best-known version was shot in Childress, where it was filmed twice — with different casts — in 1937 and 1948.
Foil is the story of a little girl, Betty, kidnapped after her birthday party.

Her two kidnappers demand a ransom, and her distressed father, often played by Barker, offers a $1,000 reward for her safe return. The movie features a group of kids, led by a vivacious boy named Butch, who imagine what they would do with the money and answer the challenge. After several days of no luck, they rescue Betty while her kidnappers are napping. After the girl is safely home, her family invites all the children to a party, where some of them sing and dance.

With the help of Judy Johnson, a lifelong Childress resident, Frick found the two versions filmed in the town. Frick has copies of the same movie filmed in eight other towns but thinks that as many as 60, many filmed in West Texas, have not been found. The plot never changes, but the backgrounds do, and they are what Frick wants to see. The movies show how each town’s parks, buildings and roads appeared at the time.

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