Like most of the 90-odd other movies Gene Autry made during his multi-media showbiz career, Heart of the Rio Grande, which will be presented Friday in a special free-admission screening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, holds relatively few surprises for dedicated fans.

It’s an irresistibly enjoyable 1942 trifle that features Autry as a dude ranch foreman coping with a spoiled heiress and a disgruntled ex-employee. But the plot isn’t really all that important – it’s just an excuse to include all the elements that audiences of the time expected in films showcasing the singing cowboy superstar.

Karla Buhlman of Gene Autry Entertainment — the outfit dedicated to the preservation, restoration and promotion of the late multihyphenate’s films, music and television programs – explains the formula thusly:

Even as early as 1942, however, the reliable formula occasionally was expanded to allow Gene Autry to be topical in his entertainment.

“Heart of the Rio Grande is just a real fun Gene Autry movie,” Buhlman says. “And it’s a typical Gene Autry movie, because it has music” — including Autry’s distinctive rendition of “Deep in the Heart of Texas” — “because it has comedy, and because it has really great action.

“But there’s also something in the film that’s what I call a real time-and-place moment. There’s a scene in there where Gene is talking with his ranch hands. And they’ve just got their paychecks, and they’re talking about what they’re going to do with their money. And Gene starts talking to them about buying war bonds. In fact, I think there’s actually a shot of Gene and [comic sidekick] Smiley Burnette and a war bond poster.

“So here we are in 1942, America is at war, and Gene Autry is entertaining people with one of his films – but because he’s in this time and place, he’s also reminding the audience: ‘Here’s something you can do for the war effort – just like I’m doing.’ And you know, not so long after this, he actually enlisted in the Army Air Corps.”

Heart of the Rio Grande will be shown Friday at MFAH on a double bill with Rainbow Over Texas, a 1946 musical Western featuring another notable singing cowboy, Roy Rogers, alongside Dale Evans, George “Gabby” Hayes and Trigger (a.k.a. The Smartest Horse in the Movies). The 7 p.m. program – which, by the way, we did mention was free and open to the public, right? – will kick off the museum’s three-weekend UCLA Festival of Preservation, a series of restored films and TV programs from the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Other highlights of the ambitiously eclectic series include Cry Danger (1 p.m. Saturday), a brisk and brutal 1951 film noir starring Dick Powell and directed by Robert Parrish; On the Vitaphone, 1927-30 (7 p.m. June 1), a wide-ranging collection of shorts dating from the dawn of talking pictures; and The Crusades (7 p.m. June 9), a lavishly produced historical epic directed by the master of the genre, Cecil B. DeMille.

Including Heart of the Rio Grande in this lineup is all the more appropriate when you remember that, as Gene Autry Entertainment president Karla Buhlman admiringly notes, Autry was into film preservation before film preservation was cool.

“Because he was such a brilliant businessman,” Buhlman says, “he was able to acquire the rights to all of his films – which is why we are the ones overseeing them, and not Republic Pictures or Columbia Pictures. Because in the early 1970s, he was savvy enough to know that these films would continue to be of interest.

“In fact, we have some correspondence from that period in which he’s telling someone that could see the time when people would be able to watch these films in their homes any time they wanted. So it’s like he was thinking about VHS and DVD before there was VHS or DVD.”

But wait, there’s more: While restoring many of Autry’s films for theatrical and home-video release, Buhlman has repeatedly relied on the late singing cowboy’s personal collection to replace damaged or missing elements in old nitrate prints, or to fill gaps that were left when original negatives were cut so Autry’s movies could fit into commercial TV time slots in the 1950s and ‘60s.

“Back then,” Buhlman notes with equal measures of amusement and amazement, “they might figure that the best way to make these movies fit into an hour-long timeslot – with commercials – would be to cut the songs. Because, of course, who cared about those old cowboy songs, right?”

Fortunately for all parties concerned, “Gene Autry was a pack rat. And even though he had two major fires in his lifetime, the source material that we had was fantastic.

“You see, he kept a 16mm print of each of his movies to show at home. Because, remember, in, say, 1948, if you wanted to see a film that was made in the ‘30s, there wasn’t a DVD or a VHS to grab. You actually needed to have a print. And you weren’t going to have a 35mm projector at your home. But you would have a 16 mm projector. So Gene had full-length prints of everything.”

And that’s why you can still see movies like Heart of the Rio Grande the way God intended you to. And Gene Autry really wanted you to.

“It’s always great to watch a movie in its natural environment – which is a movie theater,” says Buhlman. “That’s what people are discovering right now when they go to see something like The Avengers. There is something about sitting in a theater, and having this group response, this group reaction — whether it’s to a comical moment, or to a gasp moment – that’s unique to seeing it in a movie theater.

“Sure, you can see it at home with your friends on an amazing home theater system. But it’s not the same emotional experience you have when you’re watching a film in a theater.”

All the more reason, then, to get back in the saddle again – or behind the wheel of your multi-horsepower vehicle of choice — and mosey on over to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston this Friday.