Revisiting Sky Captain at The Solute

It’s always nice when circumstances converge to provide an opportunity for me to write about things I wanted to write about anyway. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow opened ten years ago today, so I wrote a remembrance of it for The Solute. As with Shanghai Surprise, I was interested in revisiting it in light of my recent exploration of serials from the 1930s and ’40s, one of the major sources of Sky Captain‘s plot and visual style. My article for The Solute focuses on the film’s then-groundbreaking combination of live action and CGI backgrounds, but regular readers will recognize many of my usual preoccupations with pastiche and stock character types.

Today I took a look at the 1986 Madonna/Sean Penn vehicle Shanghai Surprise over at The Solute. It’s an auxiliary to Julius Kassendorf’s series examining all of Madonna’s film roles, but readers of my recent Fates Worse Than Death series will find many connections made with both the serials of the 1930s and the post-Raiders of the Lost Ark imitators that flooded theaters in the 1980s. Upon its release, Shanghai Surprise was an enormous flop and the passage of time has done little to rehabilitate it; however, I found some things to enjoy in it, which you can read about right here.

0 Comments Leave a comment

Fates Worse Than Death: Gang Busters

Calling the police. Calling the G-men. Calling all Americans to war on the underworld. Gang Busters, with the cooperation of law enforcement officers of the Unites States, presents a picture of the endless war of the police on the underworld, illustrating the clever operation of law enforcement officers in the work of protecting our citizens: the all-American crusade against crime!

That announcement, combined with the sounds of sirens, gun shots, and tramping chain gangs, opens each chapter of the 1942 serial Gang Busters, based on the popular radio show of the same name.

For over twenty years, producer-director Phillips H. Lord dramatized stories of true crime with the close cooperation of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. (In addition to the serial, a television series and a comic book were spun out from the original property.) On the radio, Gang Busters had a similar opening montage of sound effects and voice-over and, while based on true cases, dramatized its stories with broadly drawn characters and zingy, hard-boiled dialogue (“That music sounds pretty. . . . Now let’s have the music of the cash register opening!”). The serial, while fictional, is similar in tone, using voice-overs and newspaper headlines to give each chapter the urgency and documentary quality of a newsreel, at the same time drawing situations and characterizations straight out of contemporary gangster films.

The action begins with a crime wave in progress: seemingly unrelated robberies and destruction are terrorizing the city. Detective Lieutenant Bill Bannister (Kent Taylor) suspects that a single gang is behind the coordinated attacks, but it isn’t until a strange message is broadcast that his suspicions are confirmed. “Hello, citizens. You are listening to the voice of Death,” begins a cool, even-toned voice over the radio (in one of many effective uses of mass media, this scene suggests the chill listeners might have gotten from programs like Suspense). The disembodied voice is that of “Professor Mortis” (Ralph Morgan), whose terroristic attacks are explicitly meant to turn the citizenry against their police and government, demanding their removal.

Professor Mortis (“probably an assumed name,” Bannister astutely notes) claims to represent “The League of Murdered Men,” all of whom have grudges against the legal system. He promises that the attacks will continue until Mayor Hansen, Police Chief O’Brien, and every other authority is deposed. Mortis’ claim that all the members of his League have died and been brought back to life is too ridiculous to be believed, of course—but how can Bannister explain the fact that fingerprints recovered from the crime scenes match criminals who committed suicide in prison months ago? And how is it that Mortis seems to know what the police are planning at every turn?

The police are about to get a break: Bannister’s brother, framed for a gangland murder he didn’t commit, is being released from prison, and he claims to have information about the gang and its methods. Two nosy reporters, Vicki Logan (Irene Hervey) and Happy Haskins, talk their way into accompanying Bannister (as they seem to be able to talk their way into the Chief’s office, the lab, and anywhere else they want to go). Speaking to Bannister in private, his brother says he was approached in prison and given a set of instructions for escaping; before he can finish, he is gunned down by a pair of window washers who just happened to be cleaning the windows of Police headquarters.

The thirteen chapters that follow are full of action and intrigue: car chases and firefights, kidnapping and fisticuffs, and even the explosive demolition of the still-under-construction City Hall—with Vicki and Bannister still inside! There are twists and turns aplenty as the League of Murdered Men attempts to either draft or eliminate Bannister, and Bannister (with Vicki’s help) attempts to unravel the mystery of Professor Mortis’ identity. (Although his story is not revealed in detail until nearly the end, it’s clear from the beginning that his is a tortured soul, living only to exact revenge on those who wronged him. In comparison to the thugs who do his bidding, Mortis is cultured and intelligent: he demonstrates great scientific expertise, bringing members of his League back from the “death” he chemically induces and performing plastic surgery to hide their identities.)

True to its subject matter (and in contrast to many serials where every character is exactly what they seem), Gang Busters sets its heroes adrift in a dangerous world where no one can be trusted. Bannister isn’t wrong: someone is leaking information from the police to the League. Is it the Mayor, suspiciously eager to get Bannister taken off the case? Is it Bannister’s assistant, Detective Tim Nolan? Even a humble newspaper seller is more deeply involved than anyone would expect.

Then there are those fascinating characters on the margin, such as Frenchy “the Duck” (Edward Emerson, uncredited), who runs a dockside club catering to criminal types. Frenchy wants nothing more than to avoid police entanglements, but sometimes the money, she is too much to resist, mais non? If Frenchy’s establishment happens to have a water trap installed by the bootlegger who used to own the place, so much the worse for any nosy cops who blunder into it, ne c’est pas? (Yes, he is that broad: imagine Lando Calrissian crossed with Pepé Le Pew.)

Gang Busters is also a reminder of how vital the newspapers once were as a source of up-to-the-minute information. Even more than the radio, the papers are used by both the League and the police to send messages to each other, through advertisements or headlines; they’re also a convenient way to convey exposition to the audience quickly. (MORTIS’ GANG ABDUCTS GIRL REPORTER is followed up by JOURNAL CAMERA GIRL ESCAPES FROM MURDER CAR; with all the special editions and updates, the printing presses at the Journal must never stop running.)

Almost every chapter begins with a blazing headline and a burst of action: instead of simply rewinding to a point before the cliffhanger, as most serials do, Gang Busters stages a vignette about yet another atrocity perpetrated by the League, tying it into the peril in which we last saw our heroes. It’s very effective at catching the audience up without being too repetitive when watching several chapters in one sitting.

Finally, Gang Busters is a very satisfying mix of down-to-earth police work and politics with a flamboyant criminal mastermind. The sciences of fingerprinting, ballistics, and radio signal triangulation are balanced with suspended animation, remote control bombs, and a gun hidden in a camera (switched with Vicki’s: the next time she takes a picture of Bannister in action—bang!). Professor Mortis himself is a great theatrical creation, a brilliantly twisted egotist with a personal vendetta against the forces of law and order; cloaked in expressionistic shadows in his lair under an active subway tunnel, performing illegal medical experiments and speaking to a terrified public over the radio “from beyond the grave,” Mortis embodies the “gangland gothic” aesthetic of the production. There’s a lot of Dick Tracy in Gang Busters, but Batman would fit right in, too.

What I Watched: Gang Busters (Universal, 1942)
Where I Watched It: A pair of Alpha Video DVDs, sold separately. Vol. 1 contained chapters 1-6, Vol. 2 contained chapters 7-13; seriously, who watches half a serial? (It can also be seen online.)
No. of Chapters: 13
Best Chapter Title: Murder by Proxy (Chapter Eight)
Best Cliffhanger: True to serial tradition, the chapter titles often point to the peril that awaits the hero at the end of that chapter. Chapter Two, “The Death Plunge,” is one of several cliffhangers in Gang Busters involving a moving vehicle crashing or falling off a bridge or cliff, but in this case a car chase in a parking garage leads to the hero’s car plummeting several floors down an elevator shaft.
Annie Wilkes Award for Blatant Cheat: Alas, when will the producers of serials learn that cheaters never prosper? Gang Busters is mostly guilty of the “hero jumps out of the car/plane just before it plunges over the bridge/canyon” cheat, although most of the cliffhanger resolutions play fair. The most obvious is the cliffhanger to Chapter Ten (“Mob Vengeance”), in which Bannister attempts to redirect a truck full of dynamite (intended to blow up Police headquarters) over a bridge. In the cliffhanger, he’s still hanging on to the side of the truck when it goes over, while the driver rolls out and runs off. In the resolution, not only does Bannister jump in time, the driver—who appeared to be running off—runs headlong into a pylon and kills himself. It’s kind of hard to describe: you really need to see it to believe it.

Sample Dialogue: “The nerve of that guy Mortis! He’ll try anything!” –Detective Tim Nolan, Chapter Seven (“The Water Trap”)
What Others Have Said: “Gang Busters has exciting cliffhangers and contains some unexpected twists. The plot takes more than a few extraordinary turns, and the ending is exceptional. This is one of Universal’s most complex serials, with many chases and thrilling scenes skillfully staged in outside locations.” –Matinee Classics

Epilogue: I sought out Gang Busters on the basis of its trailer. I haven’t discussed the trailers for serials much: suffice it to say that they are examples of the “hard sell,” emphasizing the thrills and excitement awaiting audiences. Given that Gang Busters affects a breathless “breaking news” tone, it’s not surprising that the trailer would be even more over-the-top than usual. If the sequence beginning at 2:00, teasing each of the cliffhangers in compressed form, doesn’t get you excited for this film, maybe serials just aren’t for you.

0 Comments Leave a comment

Fates Worse Than Death: The Could-Have-Beens

In watching and researching motion picture serials over the past few months, I’ve run across many based on characters from other media: comics, radio, and literature. Allowing for the vagaries of art and commerce, I’ve been struck by the absence of several characters who one might expect to be adapted as source material. What follows is necessarily speculative, but I’ve compiled a list of characters, popular at the time, who could have appeared in a serial but didn’t, for whatever reason.

Perhaps arbitrarily, I’ve excluded characters who appeared in feature films or cartoons during the “Golden Age” of the serials: Sherlock Holmes and Dracula may not have appeared in serials, but they are well-represented on film. I’m more interested in characters whose film appearances are either limited to the modern era or who haven’t appeared on film at all (yet).

John Carter of Mars

From one perspective, it isn’t surprising that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ interplanetary hero didn’t make the leap to the big screen until 2012’s poorly-received adaptation. Although John Carter set the pattern for the early space heroes, appearing in print in 1912, both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were featured in serial adaptations during the Golden Age of science fiction (in 1936 and 1939 respectively). It was Gordon and Rogers who cemented the conventions and story beats of space opera for film audiences and became household names in the process. Later, Star Wars and other science fantasy epics would borrow elements of Carter’s adventures (what is Tatooine but Burroughs’ dying Mars?), further stealing the series’ thunder.

On the other hand, clearly there was a market for science fiction adventure, and Burroughs was aware of the power of licensing his creations: his other famous character, Tarzan, was featured in numerous film adaptations in the 1930s and ‘40s (continuing to this day), including one produced by Burroughs himself.

Perhaps it was the extravagant native fauna of Barsoom (the locals’ name for Mars) that made it prohibitive to film: in his adventures, Carter faces the four-armed giant Tharks (Green Martians), rides eight-legged thoats, and encounters other multi-limbed creatures that would have been compromised by the special effects of the 1930s, to say the least. (Flash Gordon tries manfully to create convincing space monsters, and is only intermittently successful.) In a similar vein, the fliers and radium guns of Burroughs’ novels might have seemed like a daunting proposition to film, but other science fiction serials and features found ways to create such effects or work around them.

Intriguingly, there was at least one attempt to produce a John Carter film during the Golden Age: in 1935, Warner Brothers animator Bob Clampett approached Burroughs with a proposal to put together an animated John Carter series that, had it been made, would have beaten both Snow White (the first animated feature) and the Flash Gordon serial to theaters. Clampett and Burroughs put together a deal with MGM, but ultimately the project was deemed too weird for audiences. Only a few minutes of test footage remain to show what might have been.

(Thanks to fellow fan Bruce Ross for alerting me to this aborted project, and check out Bruce’s blog to see his impressive custom action figures, including a certain Warlord of Mars.)

Jules de Grandin

The most popular author to appear in Weird Tales magazine wasn’t Robert E. Howard or H. P. Lovecraft: it was Seabury Quinn, a lawyer with a specialty in mortuary law and the funeral business. Quinn’s most popular creation was the feisty French physician Jules de Grandin, a prime example of the “occult detective” character type. With his sidekick/narrator Dr. Trowbridge (clearly modeled after the sturdy Holmes/Watson dynamic), de Grandin defended Harrisonville, New Jersey against supernatural, scientific, and just plain criminal threats in nearly a hundred stories.

Although less well-remembered now, the de Grandin stories contain plenty of ideas that could have made for excellent serials—killer animals, vampires, cults, mad scientists, and more—and were formulaic and action-packed enough to provide what audiences of the time expected. De Grandin, with his cod-French exclamations (not only the time-honored “Sacre bleu!”—de Grandin would frequently vary his patter with insertions of “Parbleu!”, “Mordieu!”, “Zut!”, and odd turns of phrase like “Horns of a little blue devil!”, “Name of a gun,” etc.), was likewise a character whose exaggerated national character would be right at home at Republic or Columbia. (His catch-phrases are no sillier than the “inscrutable” Orientalisms of Charlie Chan or the “By Jove!” English of Anthony Tupper in Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island.) More importantly, like all serial heroes, de Grandin favored the direct approach, and was as likely to defeat the forces of evil with a sword or automatic as with an incantation or clever trap.

Conan the Cimmerian, et al

Speaking of Robert E. Howard, it’s unlikely that a serial based on his famous creation Conan would have been anything like the 1982 feature Conan the Barbarian, influenced as it was by the success of special effects blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and the contributions of later authors (not to mention the Frazetta-esque physique of star Arnold Schwarzenegger). However, the ancient past had been represented in epics like Ben-Hur, and fantastical “lost worlds” were featured in serials such as The Undersea Kingdom and The Phantom Empire, so it wouldn’t have been out of the question. A Conan serial would have probably resembled those starring Tarzan or “jungle girl” Nyoka, with an emphasis on action and the lead’s physicality, toning down Howard’s often pessimistic philosophical digressions.

It’s worth noting, however, that Howard created several series characters, in a variety of genres, that could have headlined serials (and to this day, not all of them have been adapted for film). “Last king of the Picts” Bran Mak Morn and medieval Irishman Turlogh Dubh O’Brien represent Howard’s interest in the history and people of the British Isles; King Kull of Atlantis and swordswoman Red Sonja represent a strain of sword-and-sorcery similar to the Conan stories. Of all of Howard’s series characters, probably the closest in spirit to the serials is Steve Costigan, a modern-day merchant sailor and boxer whose stories combined action and wry humor. Although Conan remains Howard’s best-known creation, the author left behind a wealth of material yet to be mined for adaptation.

The Spirit

Cartoonist Will Eisner created the Spirit (the supposedly dead criminologist Denny Colt, going forth from his cemetery hideout to fight crime) in 1940 as the lead character in a series of comic books he produced for inclusion in newspapers owned by the Register and Tribune Syndicate. Ownership of his own character, with little editorial interference, gave Eisner the freedom to explore a variety of story-telling techniques, and due to his innovative approach to composition he is often compared to cinematic masters such as Hitchcock and Welles. (In Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the title characters are inspired by Citizen Kane to invigorate their own comic book stories with devices such as achronological narratives, alternating points of view, and dynamic, cinematic compositions applied not just to the panel but to the entire page. Although fictional, this is likely a reference to the leaps forward that Eisner made with The Spirit.)

Sometimes the title character was barely featured in stories, making cameo appearances in the stories of a range of urban characters both poignant and humorous; this approach would have fit perfectly with the serials, which often introduced audiences to original characters who had equal screen time with the licensed characters in the title (such as Linda Page and her uncle in the 1943 Batman serial). Quoted in A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, Eisner explained,

I began to realize who I was writing for”—that is, an audience dominated by adults, rather than children—and “I suddenly found an opportunity to do what I had really always wanted to do, which was to write ‘seriously’ or write good material, and at the same time stay within the medium I knew and had developed skills for.

Ironically, as Eisner drew from film to develop his sophisticated visual language, the serials were increasingly geared toward children, dropping the nuances of the 1930s serials in favor of formula and non-stop action. Without Eisner’s ambitious style, the Spirit wasn’t superficially different from other masked pulp heroes like the Spider or the Green Hornet, and it is unlikely a Spirit serial would have been very distinguished. (However, many commentators have pointed out that the title character of the 1943 serial The Masked Marvel bears a strong resemblance to the Spirit; in that serial the central mystery of the story was the true identity of the hero, with four possible candidates.)

Tom Steele as the Masked Marvel

Wonder Woman

Seriously, what gives? Despite the news that DC’s premier superheroine—the female superhero in the mind of the public—will appear in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Wonder Woman is severely underrepresented on film. She has yet to headline her own theatrical feature film, and has only a single direct-to-video animated feature to her name. Considering that Wonder Woman spent World War II fighting Nazis alongside Captain Steve Trevor, a serial would seem to be a no-brainer. But it was not to be.

Created in 1941 by psychologist William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman reflected his desire to create a strong but loving role model for girls, an Amazon princess fighting for equality in “Man’s World;” in his words, she would be “a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.” Marston modeled his creation on both his wife Elizabeth and a woman named Olive Byrne who lived with the couple in a polyamorous relationship. Although Marston’s unconventional views on the sexes and Wonder Woman’s fetishistic overtones (including the “lasso of truth” and the notion of loving domination) raised eyebrows in later years, they don’t seem to have been considered problematic during the 1940s. (Certainly the serials had their share of questionable material, and anything objectionable would likely have been removed or changed anyway: some of the changes studios made to comic book characters could be quite drastic.)

Consider the screen presence of Wonder Woman’s fellow heroes: Columbia produced serials starring Batman (in 1943 and 1949) and Superman (1948); Republic brought Captain Marvel (1941) and Captain America (1944) to the screen, and there were numerous less-remembered costumed heroes in serials as well. (That’s not even mentioning the animated Superman shorts from Fleischer or the later Superman and Batman TV programs; as of this writing, Lynda Carter’s portrayal of Wonder Woman is still the only prominent, long-running live-action version of the character.)

Female-led serials weren’t unheard of: I’ve reviewed two this summer, The Perils of Pauline and Zorro’s Black Whip. The star of the latter, Linda Stirling, was actively groomed to be the next Pearl White, appearing in several jungle, Western, thriller, and science fiction serials for Republic. (In fact, it was reading about Stirling’s career that brought Wonder Woman to mind and inspired this article.)

(Interestingly, an issue of DC: Realworlds, an out-of-continuity series in which DC’s heroes are expressly fictional but inspire ordinary people to take heroic action, features a hypothetical Wonder Woman serial. The story centers on an actress who finds the courage to stand up to a Red-baiting politician who combines features of Joseph McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. Perhaps in an alternate universe, audiences are thrilling to Wonder Woman vs. the Nazi Baroness or Wonder Woman vs. the Red Menace.)

What’s Next: In one week, I’ll conclude Fates Worse Than Death (for this summer, at least) with a look at Gang Busters. See you then!

2 Comments Leave a comment

Fates Worse Than Death: Zorro’s Black Whip

AKA “Zorro minus Zorro”

Although movie studios adapted many popular characters from the comics, radio, and literature for serials, they eventually grew tired of paying license fees and squabbling over creative control and came up with thinly-disguised copies of licensed characters, changing (for example) the Phantom to “Captain Africa” or Zorro to “Don Daredevil.” This allowed filmmakers to reuse footage from earlier productions without paying to license the characters again. Studios also created a few original characters, such as Rocket Man/Commando Cody.

Zorro’s Black Whip, however, is an unusual case, a seemingly superfluous license: aside from the title, the lead character, the “Black Whip,” is never referred to as Zorro at all, and only superficially resembles Johnston McCulley’s masked avenger. Zorro’s Black Whip doesn’t even take place in Mexico or the Southwest: the story is set in the Idaho Territory in 1889, just before elections to determine Idaho’s statehood. However, the use of Zorro’s name in the title undoubtedly sold tickets, and the film’s reputation for being “the female Zorro” has given it a sort of immortality.

So Zorro’s Black Whip, despite its title, is a fairly straightforward Western with a masked hero. It begins with a title card describing rampant lawlessness on the eve of statehood elections:

Law-abiding citizens called for a vote to bring their territory into the Union. But sinister forces, opposed to the coming of law and order, instigated a reign of terror against the lives and property of all who favored statehood.

After a montage of masked horsemen attacking wagon trains, burning settlements, and robbing a bank, the scene changes to a meeting of the “citizens’ committee,” including pro-statehood newspaper editor Randolph Meredith, at the offices of stagecoach operator Dan Hammond. A federal commissioner is arriving in the territory in response to the bank robbery, driven by Meredith’s sister Barbara; he’ll take charge of law and order in the area until the elections.

After the meeting, Hammond confers with his henchmen, Baxter and Harris: it is Hammond who is behind the outlaws’ depredations, and he’ll stop at nothing to prevent statehood from wrecking his plans to control the territory. (Yes, this is the same motive as Kraft’s in Fighting with Kit Carson.) Hammond sends his goons to eliminate the commissioner and capture Barbara in order to force her brother to stop pushing for statehood in his newspaper.

A chance meeting with Vic Gordon, a railroad surveyor, gives Barbara and the commissioner a fighting chance, and when the Black Whip rides in to assist, Baxter and Harris are outmatched and retreat. It’s too late for the commissioner, however, and before he dies of his wounds he reveals that Gordon is an undercover agent working for him, deputizing Barbara to help Gordon “stamp out these evils [and] bring Idaho into the Union.”

The Black Whip, also injured, returns to his lair behind a waterfall; as he unmasks before dying, we see that it is Randolph Meredith, and the secret entrance connects to his and Barbara’s ranch house. When she returns home, looking for him, she finds his body and learns the truth. From then on, she wears the costume and takes on the responsibilities of the Black Whip, as well as the newspaper, with the aid of Vic Gordon.

There are quite a few complications before Hammond is eventually brought to justice: Gordon is briefly framed for stealing reward money he had collected, and is almost lynched by an angry mob; Barbara is captured with the intention of forcing her to reveal the Black Whip’s identity; Gordon learns the truth and puts on the Black Whip costume to avert suspicion that Barbara is the masked vigilante.

Throughout, Barbara uses the newspaper to pass information along and provide handy visual summaries for the audience: HERALD EDITOR MURDERED; $10,000 REWARD; BIG GOLD STRIKE AT HARPER’S CREEK, etc. At the same time, Hammond secretly uses his position as a businessman and member of the citizens’ committee to shape public opinion and stymie attempts to curb the outlaws. It’s a surprisingly urban approach to the Western, with gangsters using six-shooters instead of tommy guns and getting away on horseback instead of in black sedans.

Also contributing to the contemporary feel, I was struck by the fact that everyone has a telephone. At first this seemed anachronistic to me, but reliable sources inform me that the first commercial telephone service in Idaho was established in 1883, so I can now claim the entire four hours of Zorro’s Black Whip as “educational viewing.” In other ways it is a typical Hollywood production: there are no Native Americans or people of color at all, sparing us the usual problematic racial depictions but also whitewashing away any real history. (I know, expecting “real history” was probably too much, but the telephone thing got my hopes up.) In fact, probably the most jarring element from a modern perspective is typesetter “Ten Point” Jackson’s addiction to patent medicines (like a “jitters tonic” helpfully labeled “90% alcohol”), played as comic relief.

(note telephone in background)

The performances are uniformly excellent and, in combination with the writing (credited to four people: Basil Dickey, Jesse Duffy, Grant Nelson, and Joseph Poland), give the characters a lived-in quality. As Vic Gordon, George J. Lewis is the first billed, but Linda Stirling as Barbara/the Black Whip should really be considered the star. (As in most serials, no one person is responsible for moving the entire plot forward, but come on, she’s the title character and was the focus in promotional materials.) Lewis comes off as somewhat glib, flashing a movie-star smile at the end of most of his scenes, whether appropriate to the moment or not.

Who knows—maybe he really had the hots for Stirling, and who could blame him? Beautiful and self-possessed, Stirling is considered one of the “serial queens” of the era, having previously appeared in The Tiger Woman, a jungle adventure; she here shows both an ability to act and carry a stunt-heavy action picture, riding, shooting, and dispatching bad guys with the long whip from which her alter ego takes its name. (Unlike Pearl White, however, she didn’t do all her own stunts.) On the villains’ side, Francis McDonald gives a wiry intensity to Hammond, and Hal Taliaferro is physically imposing and laconic in the manner of John Wayne as Hammond’s chief henchman Baxter.

From a technical standpoint, this is one of the most tightly assembled serials I’ve watched so far. Directors Spencer Gordon Bennet and Wallace A. Grissell frame the action clearly and keep the pace up, aided by the cast’s game performances. Famed Western stunt coordinator Yakima Canutt serves as second unit director, contributing his expertise to the numerous horseback gunfights, chases and careening wagons that fill the running time. Also present are Tom Steele and Dale Van Sickel, who would typically play a few henchmen or other bit parts while coordinating fistfights and other stunts behind the scenes. Finally, Theodore Lydecker is in charge of special effects, and his miniature work is recognizable in several shots, such as a cabin being flattened by a rockslide (according to imdb, Theodore’s brother Howard did uncredited work as well, which would make sense: they usually worked as a team). Zorro’s Black Whip is a showcase for some of Republic’s production talent at a high point of quality.

The fight scenes are especially prominent and well executed, and Republic must have spent half its budget for this picture on breakaway furniture. Several locations are demolished by fights (including the newspaper office, the stagecoach office, an abandoned mine tunnel, and several barns and shacks), the fighters throwing each other over and through objects, and the furniture and any loose items being turned into impromptu clubs or missiles. When a fight breaks out in Barbara’s sitting room, with its flimsy knick-knack shelves and parlor furniture, it’s as thoroughly trashed as in any juvenile delinquent movie of the 1950s. In another fight scene, everything in the room, up to and including a cast-iron stove, comes crashing down during the brawl. It’s a credit to the choreography that these fights never become dull or repetitive.

In The Great Movie Serials, Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut highlight the contradictions inherent in the serial heroine: do audiences want to see an avenging she-devil whipping her male oppressors, or a bound victim awaiting rescue? It’s the same question posed by The Perils of Pauline in an updated package.

Harmon and Glut even go so far as to draw a connection between Stirling’s tight costume and “man-abusing actions” and “certain forms of underground erotica” (the book was written in 1972). I wonder, however, if through hindsight they were overstating the film’s effect on their younger selves. It’s possible to read the Black Whip as a predecessor of Russ Meyer’s “supervixens”—there’s definitely a lot of whipping in this film, and one can imagine it charging the imagination of some young Russ Meyers in the audience—but Linda Stirling is no Tura Satana, and Zorro’s Black Whip, while entertaining in its own right, will never be mistaken for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

In the interest of equal time, Vic Gordon is also captured and tied up.

What I Watched: Zorro’s Black Whip (Republic, 1944)
Where I Watched It: A Roan Group Archival Entertainment DVD; it’s also available to watch on YouTube.
No. of Chapters: 12
Best Chapter Title: “Take Off That Mask!” (Chapter Five)

Best Cliffhanger: Fittingly for a serial that places such a premium on action, there are many excellent cliffhangers in Zorro’s Black Whip. There are several falls off of cliffs, of course, in and out of speeding wagons; there are explosions, including a burning barrel of coal oil in a dead-end mine tunnel. There’s quite a bit of violence which is grisly in its implication, if not very graphic in its depiction (and lest you think that whip is just for show, the Black Whip totally whips a guy backwards off the edge of a cliff at one point). I think my favorite cliffhanger is in Chapter Ten, “Fangs of Doom,” the title of which leads me to expect a rattlesnake (or maybe . . . a vampire?). As it happens, during a fight in a barn, in which a variety of riding tack and farm implements are thrown around, the Black Whip is knocked out, and Baxter attempts to finish her off with a pitchfork(!), thrusting it downward with a sickening crunch.
Annie Wilkes Award for Blatant Cheat: But wait! At the last minute, Gordon throws a saddle over the Black Whip’s torso, so the sickening crunch is the sound of the pitchfork driving into the hard leather. Okay, it’s not a cheat, but come on . . . a saddle?

Sample Dialogue: “The Black Whip’s got to be a man! He’s out-shot us, out-rode us, and out-fought us, stopped us at every turn!” –Baxter to Hammond, Chapter Nine (“Avalanche”)
What Others Have Said: “What still remains a mystery to viewers of Zorro’s Black Whip is that those crooks could wrestle around the barn so many times with the avenger without somehow discovering the true sex of the ‘masked man.’” –Harmon and Glut, The Great Movie Serials
What’s Next: Next week I plan to publish a special serial-related article, and then in two weeks I’ll be back with my impression of Gang Busters, the final installment of Fates Worse Than Death until next summer. See you then!

2 Comments Leave a comment

August 15, 2014

Guy Vollen

I’m excited to announce that I am contributing to a brand-new website for discussion of film and related topics, The Solute. The Solute is, in the words of founder Julius Kassendorf, “a brainchild collective emerging from the commentariat of The Dissolve,” the same website on which I posted my reassessment of Addicted to Love last spring. Right now, I’m only represented on the site as part of a roundtable discussion on the state of theatergoing in 2014, but I’ll be posting reviews and longer articles as it moves forward. I’ll have a longer post soon that addresses how that will affect Medleyana, and I’ll post links here whenever I publish an article at The Solute. In the mean time, I invite you to check it out and explore the diverse range of writers who will be sharing their thoughts; if it’s anything like the conversations at The Dissolve, I expect it to be fresh, varied, and entertaining.

0 Comments Leave a comment

Fates Worse Than Death: Radar Men from the Moon

A string of mysterious explosions and attacks is crippling America’s defense network. Scientific analysis indicates that atomic weapons caused the destruction, but what power on earth could focus atomic energy into the kind of ray being used? Only one man is equipped to investigate: Commando Cody, inventor and explorer, whose jetpack allows him to soar through the air (and who is also a crack shot with a pistol).

Liberating the atomic ray from the two gangsters wielding it, Cody takes the futuristic weapon back to his lab to analyze it. The two gangsters, Daly and Graber, report to their superior, Krog, who (as Cody will discover) is the leader of an invading force from the moon! Krog orders them to recover the ray and sends his human minions on several criminal assignments to raise funds for his terroristic activities.

Eventually, Cody and his team determine the source of the trouble and launch Cody’s latest invention, an interplanetary rocket ship, to the moon itself. The lunar civilization is dying, as its leader Retik explains, the air too thin and dry to grow food; already the lunarians must wear helmets outside of their pressurized cities in order to breathe. (Needless to say, no more attention is paid to real scientific knowledge of the moon than in the space fantasies of Edgar Rice Burroughs from decades before.) After softening up earth’s defenses, the lunarians plan to invade earth in Radar Men from the Moon.

In 1949, Republic Pictures, weary of licensing superheroes from the comics and radio, introduced an original character, Rocket Man, in King of the Rocket Men. Three years later, Radar Men from the Moon featured Commando Cody, a repackaging of the Rocket Man concept (essentially a superhero with a jetpack). By all accounts, Radar Men relies heavily on footage of Rocket Man from the earlier serial, as well as reusing props, costumes, and special effects from Republic’s extensive library. (Two sequels followed: Zombies of the Stratosphere and a television series, Sky Marshall of the Universe; Rocket Man/Commando Cody’s influence is also readily seen in Dave Stevens’ comic book hero the Rocketeer, adapted into a 1991 film directed by Joe Johnston.)

Radar Men from the Moon is very much what you would expect from a science fiction adventure from the early 1950s, as much Captain Video as Flash Gordon. With the fishbowl-style space helmets, finned rocket ships, and sweet moon tanks (not to mention Cody’s bullet-headed flying costume), it is, to use a modern term, “toyetic” (although the kind of mass merchandising we’ve come to expect since Star Wars wasn’t in place then, so there don’t seem to be a large number of actual toys based on these designs). On the other hand, the Greco-Roman architecture of the lunar city and the futuristic laboratory of Retik show that styles hadn’t changed that much since the space operas of the ‘30s (and a lot of the running time is spent on earth with perfectly mundane cops-and-robbers business).

Normally, I’ve tried to look at examples of a given concept or character in chronological order (covering Flash Gordon instead of one of its sequels, for example), but I had a copy of Radar Men on hand, and since Commando Cody is technically a new character, free of any earlier continuity, I don’t feel too much conflict about covering it before getting to the original Rocket Men. Besides, reused footage and props were a cost-saving feature of the serials almost since the beginning, so Radar Men is exceptional only for its late position in the format’s history and the slickness of its incorporation of previous material.

For what it’s worth, it wasn’t obvious to this viewer when it cut to older footage, and establishing shots weren’t drawn out as excessively as I’ve observed in the Universal serials I’ve watched. From a technical standpoint, the production of serials was clearly at a high point, and everything moves quickly and looks sharp. However, the same professional application of an established formula that makes everything look polished also drains any spontaneity out of this production: the characters are thinly drawn and their dialogue functions almost exclusively to move the plot forward. There is little room for the weird digressions or surprises that mark the serials of the 1930s.

Star George Wallace leads a cast that includes “heavy” Roy Barcroft as Retik and future Lone Ranger Clayton Moore as the gangster Graber; the performances are fine, but the real stars are special effects wizards Howard “Babe” Lydecker and Theodore Lydecker, brothers whose detailed miniatures of earthly and lunar structures and vehicles are extensively featured. There are also plenty of well-executed fight scenes, courtesy of Tom Steele and Dale Van Sickel, longtime stuntmen and fight coordinators.

So why isn’t Radar Men from the Moon more exciting? There’s a business-as-usual quality to the proceedings: no one seems that surprised that America is under attack by atomic weapons, or that the culprits might be from the moon. What’s that, we need to take our rocket ship to the moon? Sure thing. Oh, we need to go back? No problem. I’ll remember to take my jetpack in case I need to hijack a space tank. The material calls for hyperbole à la Stan Lee, but the execution is more like Dragnet.

That’s not to say that I’d be happier if Radar Men from the Moon stopped in its tracks to marvel at the insanity of its own plot: in general, pulp narratives don’t spend a lot of time questioning their believability. The characters accept that what is happening is real—they don’t have a choice—and the audience follows suit. There is usually, however, a moment or two that acknowledges the overturning of established science (I think of this as the “more in heaven and earth” speech, often delivered by a scientist who admits that there are still mysteries in the universe) or asks the audience to consider what it would really mean for humanity to encounter, say, an invading army of moon men. (Robert E. Howard, to cite one example, often salted his tales of brawny barbarian warriors with thematically-appropriate musings on destiny and masculinity.)

No such philosophical problems trouble Commando Cody or his team. If I had seen Radar Men from the Moon when I was twelve, I expect I would have loved it, but as an adult the prospect of an adventure that is all plot and very little character is less appealing. Rather than revisit it, I’ll probably just rewatch The Rocketeer.

What I Watched: Radar Men from the Moon (Republic, 1952)
Where I Watched It: A Hal Roach Studios DVD; it’s also available to watch on YouTube.
No. of Chapters: 12
Best Chapter Title: “Molten Terror” (Chapter Two)
Best Cliffhanger: At the end of “Molten Terror,” Cody and Ted are trapped in a mountainside cave on the moon. Lunar soldiers aim the atomic ray at the mountain, softening the rock (using the same melting effect seen at the end of The Phantom Empire) and filling the cave with molten lava.

Annie Wilkes Award for Most Blatant Cheat: Several times Cody is in a vehicle that crashes: planes at the end of Chapter Four (“Flight to Destruction”) and Chapter Seven (“Camouflaged Destruction”), a car in Chapter Five (“Murder Car”). In the next week’s episode, intercut footage reveals Cody and his passenger bailing out at the last minute, exactly the kind of cheat Annie Wilkes was complaining about.
Sample Dialogue: “For some time our astronomers have noticed an unusual amount of atomic activity on the moon. Atomic activity on the moon, atomic blasts on the earth: the two known facts fit together.” –Henderson (Don Walters), Cody’s government contact

What Others Have Said: “It was my own personal homage to Commando Cody and all the other serial heroes of that era. I’d always been a huge fan of the serials. I loved all those edge-of-your-seat, cliff-hanging chapter plays. . . . I’d always loved the idea of a guy flying like a bird, with just a combustible contraption strapped to his back. The image really appealed to me. But I didn’t want to be stuck doing an exact replication of the serials, with Martians, death-rays, etc. That wasn’t quite the approach I wanted to take. I wanted to do a real period aviation strip, but with one small element of science-fiction added: The rocket-pack!” –Dave Stevens, creator of the Rocketeer, interview with Jon B. Cooke in The Comic Book Artist
What’s Next: I’ll take a look at Zorro’s Black Whip, starring Linda Stirling. Join me in two weeks!

1 Comment Leave a comment

Fates Worse Than Death: The Phantom Empire

Radio Ranch is a busy place: Frankie and Betsy Baxter’s father Tom co-owns the ranch with “Radio’s Singing Cowboy” Gene Autry, whose daily broadcasts have brought visitors from all over. The Baxter kids also run the “Junior Thunder Riders,” a combination fan club and service organization (after some debate, they settle on “To the rescue!” as their motto) inspired by a mysterious group of riders they once witnessed in nearby Thunder Valley. In addition, Frankie is a tinkerer (with an enviable workshop in the barn loft), assembling electrical gadgets using instructions from Popular Science (and occasionally borrowing parts from the ranch’s radio engineer!).

The action begins with the arrival of Professor Beetson and his crew, secretly in search of a radium deposit Beetson believes to be in the area. At the same time, one of Frankie’s devices, a radio signal “direction finder,” indicates that some scrambled signals he’s been tracking for weeks are coming from straight down, somewhere in the depths of the earth.

Before the first chapter is over, it is revealed that the mysterious riders, the radium deposit, and the unknown radio signals are all connected to “The Scientific City of Murania” 25,000 feet below the surface, a realm of futuristic marvels ruled by the haughty Queen Tika and whose entrance in Thunder Valley is protected by her royal guard (the “Thunder Riders” the Baxters witnessed, wearing gas mask-like breathing apparatuses while at surface level). It isn’t long before the surface and subterranean worlds collide and the fates of Autry and Tika are entwined!

As the story develops, Beetson’s greed (for both radium and scientific acclaim) and the Baxters’ curiosity endanger Murania’s secret. Beetson hopes to get Autry out of the way—if Autry misses a broadcast, he’ll lose his radio contract and the ranch—so that he won’t have any interference in his digging (or have to share any of his finds with the property owners and government). Beetson even goes so far as to kill Tom Baxter and frame Autry for the crime! Queen Tika wants both Autry and Beetson gone for similar reasons: too many visitors to Radio Ranch means risking the discovery of Murania, and their serene kingdom must never be desecrated by the presence of surface people!

Little does Tika know, however, that there is division in her own kingdom: her Chancellor, Argo, schemes to overthrow her with a band of rebels, men he has saved from death in the “Lightning Chamber.” Will she succeed in keeping her throne? Will Frankie and Betsy discover the secret of the underground city? Will Beetson succeed in keeping Gene Autry away from Radio Ranch, or will Autry make it back to broadcast a performance at two o’clock each day?

Thus begins the epic twelve-chapter Mascot serial The Phantom Empire, Gene Autry’s debut as a leading man (following his attention-getting appearance in In Old Santa Fe) and one of the strangest examples of the form. This is one I had actually seen before: The Phantom Empire was my introduction to the serials several years ago, and revisiting it in light of my recent exploration has not lessened its curiosity factor.

As even this brief summary indicates, there are numerous characters with competing interests to be accommodated by the story, and while some of them fit the profile of stock serial characters—the juveniles, the imperious monarch, the scientist-explorer—both the energy of the performances and the unusual situations in which they find themselves make them stand out as individuals. Even the comic relief, provided by Autry’s sidemen Oscar and Pete (longtime sidekick Lester “Smiley” Burnett and Peter Potter, credited as “William Moore,” respectively), is more idiosyncratic than the typical examples (for one thing, they actually help advance the plot).

Gene Autry is the star, of course, playing the fictionalized version of himself that would carry him through dozens of features and television episodes, bland but likeable, a good guy and friend to all except for heels like Beetson (even Queen Tika eventually comes to see him as an ally). (Incidentally, there is a perception, given his persona, that Autry sings in every chapter, but this is not so: fewer than half the chapters include musical numbers, and in some cases the film cuts to other action, the song continuing in the background.)

Most pulp heroes are intentionally somewhat blank, more active than reflective, the better for audiences to project themselves onto their characters. In this case, however, the audience identification characters are clearly Frankie and Betsy (played by frequent juvenile leads Frankie Darro and Betsy King Ross, whom we saw in Fighting with Kit Carson): their leadership of the Junior Thunder Riders (whom they address as part of Autry’s radio broadcast) and Frankie’s do-it-yourself projects are clear appeals to the kinds of young viewers who might throw themselves into fandom, who in the following generations might become Futurians, or members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, or Trekkies, or Whovians. Were they around today, the Junior Thunder Riders would undoubtedly be attending Comic-Con.

Obviously, the most notable element of The Phantom Empire is its mingling of genres, drawing on the “modern” Western (in which contemporary inventions such as radio, automobiles, and airplanes coexist with horses and six-guns) and space opera (albeit of the inner rather than outer variety). Very little of Murania, with its gleaming art deco spires (reminiscent of both Metropolis and the Emerald City of Oz) and fantastic machinery, including robots and disintegration rays, would be out of place the following year in Flash Gordon. Like the royalty of planet Mongo, the citizens of Murania dress with stagey, pseudo-medieval flair and favor both swords and ray guns for defense. With their flowing cloaks and ornate headgear, it’s no wonder Frankie and Betsy took the Queen’s royal guard as their models for the Junior Thunder Riders.

The genre mash-up (which, even at this late date, is still unusual in film*) gives it a quaint appeal. Much of Murania’s technology was on the cusp of becoming real in 1935, but must have seemed as fantastic as the automobile would have been in the Old West: radium is treated as a source of almost magical power, not only powering the weapons and machines of Murania but even bringing people—including Gene Autry—back from the brink of death in a “radium reviving chamber.” The disintegrating ray that (inevitably) dooms Murania must have seemed fanciful indeed until real-life atomic bombs cast all such science fiction premises in a new light ten years later. Television is a particular object of fascination, treated here as a magic mirror, able to direct its user’s view almost anywhere with godlike omniscience. (Queen Tika’s viewer, which gets much use, even takes the form of a spiraling horizontal disc, like an oracle’s scrying pool.)

There had been fictional treatments of a hollow earth, or at least of subterranean realms, before, by such authors as Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and underground kingdoms continued to be popular in the science fiction and fantasy pulps. The Muranians are identified as descendants of ancient Mu who went underground one hundred thousand years earlier, fleeing the advancing glaciers of the Ice Age. Separate from the “mad world” above, they cultivated an advanced science based on the abundant radium they found.

Even in the 1930s, such beliefs were the territory of fringe science and occultism: I’m sure no one involved thought they were making a documentary, but the backstory indicates that at least one of the writers had been paying close attention to such ideas. In Chapter One, after Frankie’s direction finder has detected the radio signals from underground, Betsy asks Autry, “Say, do you suppose there’s anything to any of those books that Frankie’s been reading, about a world underground, with people and cities and everything?” Without hesitating, Autry replies, “Well, of course there’s something to them,” like a regular reader of Amazing Stories.

Speaking of that esteemed publication, The Phantom Empire anticipates by several years the so-called “Shaver Mystery” that appeared in its pages. Beginning in 1943, Amazing Stories’ editor Ray Palmer began printing letters and stories from Richard S. Shaver, who claimed he could hear voices from reincarnated spirits from the past and decode markings left in stone by the long-ago inhabitants of Atlantis and Lemuria. An important part of Shaver’s increasingly complex cosmology was the present-day survival of the original Lemurians’ descendants, who, subject to harmful rays from our sun, had degenerated into “detrimental robots” or “deros.” The deros continued to live in vast cave and tunnel systems beneath the earth, and, through their mastery of the ray technology left behind by the ancients, wreaked all manner of havoc on the surface. Eventually, Shaver came to believe that all illness, mental distress, war, and other problems of the individual and society were caused by the machinations of the malevolent deros. As his stories became wilder and his memories of the ancient world became more vivid (with extensive rewriting by Palmer), letters poured in from readers claiming they had encountered the deros too, having unknowingly crossed into their realm via caves or mines, or that they were being persecuted by the deros and their surface allies. **

I am not aware of any claim that The Phantom Empire influenced the form of Shaver’s later revelations, but they both share a paranoid, hallucinatory quality that (in the case of The Phantom Empire) goes beyond the novelty value of merging two such disparate genres. I would venture so far as to say that The Phantom Empire is in many places truly surreal, not just in the colloquial sense of “weird” but in the sense of invoking a dream-like acceptance of seemingly unrelated events, making the strange seem normal and vice versa. Through the alchemy of film, obvious artifice becomes more vividly real than reality.

As an example, Autry’s easygoing music, for which he was presumably chosen to headline the production, is often juxtaposed with scenes of mystery or danger, giving it an eerie edge: in Chapter Eight (“Jaws of Jeopardy”) he sings “I’m Getting a Moon’s Eye View of the World” on an airplane while Frankie holds a gun on the unwilling pilot; in Chapter One, his then best-known song “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine” is broken up and heard from a distance while Frankie and Betsy use the direction finder in their secret workshop. The moment when they realize the signals are coming from beneath the earth achieves something often reached for but not always grasped in the serials: a sense of wonder, and in that scene The Phantom Empire anticipates the inquisitive child protagonists of Steven Spielberg and other filmmakers of the 1980s.

There is a reflexive quality to much of The Phantom Empire, and the borders between narrative elements are permeable: Autry’s daily broadcasts (at least before he is framed) include full live performances of stagecoach robberies and other dramas, supposedly staged for the live audience at the ranch rather than those listening to the radio show, but in ways that play with audience expectation and blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Frankie and Betsy address “Junior Thunder Riders” in the radio audience as a way of speaking directly to the film audience.

The Queen’s royal guard, nicknamed the “Thunder Riders” by Frankie and Betsy, and taken as the basis of their club, are at first referred to only as the “royal guard;” later as the “thunder guard;” and finally as the “Thunder Riders,” the same as the name given to them by the children. The robots of Murania have what appear to be built-in cowboy hats as part of their design (the logical explanation is that someone in the prop department heard the phrase “science fiction Western” and took it to heart, but I’m more interested in effect than intent); ultimately, two of the robots’ metal bodies are inhabited by Oscar and Pete, real cowboys in disguise.

The constant reuse of key sets above and below ground, made possible in part by Queen Tika’s remote viewing from her control room, gives events a sense of circularity: Flash Gordon moves from one fantastic place to another in sequence, but The Phantom Empire moves up and down as capriciously as the city’s sole elevator, always returning to the same locations.

Queen Tika’s television viewer contributes to this same dream-like scramble of images: several times she views a succession of unconnected scenes from the surface (stock footage of traffic, boxing matches, and car crashes) in order to express her disapproval: “Fools! Surface people are always in a hurry—their world today is a madhouse. We in Murania are indeed fortunate. Death . . . suffering . . . speed . . . accidents. . . .” Almost everything Tika (played by Dorothy Christy) says is delivered in a tone of high dudgeon: “Do I have to witness this insane material because you are unable to find the Garden of Life?” she demands of her assistant, sounding exactly like an annoyed spouse whose husband continues to flip through channels at random.

In one odd scene, Tika takes Autry on a virtual tour of Murania using the viewer, and then contrasts the achievements of her kingdom with a penniless beggar: “Feast your eyes,” she says. “He is from your world; we have none of that here.” Changing the view to Frankie and Betsy, she says, “There are friends of yours. They may become beggars.” In 1935, the depths of the Depression, such a concern was far from academic.

One moment in the final chapter (“The End of Murania”) says a great deal about the production as a whole: the underground city is melting down under the beam of the rebels’ giant disintegrating ray, now out of control. Queen Tika, resigned to die with her kingdom, remains in her control room and throws the switch which will open the hidden door in Thunder Valley, allowing Autry and his surface friends to escape. Hitching up some of the Thunder Riders’ horses, Autry sees the remaining herd and suddenly says, “We can’t leave those horses here to die!” The group takes an extra moment to free all the horses, as if they knew that the young audience they hoped to grab would say, “Hey, Gene! What about those other horses!?” I admit that, seeing the herd of animals stream out of the hidden door, my heart swelled. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.

What I Watched: The Phantom Empire (Mascot, 1935)
Where I Watched It: Timeless Media Group’s 3-DVD set, endorsed by Gene Autry Entertainment and “sourced from Gene Autry’s personal film archive.” There are several versions on YouTube.
No. of Chapters: 12
Best Chapter Title: “Prisoners of the Ray” (Chapter Nine)
Best Cliffhanger: The bound or incapacitated victim on a conveyor belt, inexorably moving toward death in the form of a buzz saw or furnace, is one of the iconic images of the serials, but I haven’t seen it all that much in my admittedly limited viewing. Perhaps it was already a cliché by the 1930s heyday of the form, or perhaps I just haven’t watched the right examples yet. However, Chapter Ten of The Phantom Empire (“The Rebellion”) includes just such a cliffhanger: following Argo’s overthrow of Queen Tika, Autry attempts to fight his way out of Murania. During a fight in a foundry full of laboring robots, he is knocked unconscious and sprawled onto a warhead assembly line. At the end, a robot ceaselessly raises and lowers a welding torch—whether its white-hot fire touches a weld point or Autry’s all-too mortal flesh is of no concern to the mindless automaton.

Annie Wilkes Award for Most Blatant Cheat: After his experience in the “radium reviving chamber” in Chapter Seven (“From Death to Life”), Autry escapes into the underground city and gets into a sword fight with a group of guards. Overpowered by one of them, he falls over the railing of a suspended catwalk; at the beginning of the next chapter, he climbs over instead of being pushed, and grabs onto a rail underneath. As cheats go, it’s a small one, but there’s no question the footage is different.
Silliest Costume: The assistant who operates Tika’s television is essentially a glorified remote control, but he does serve the Queen directly so I can’t blame him for putting on airs. The bat wings on his helmet are a little much, though.

Sample Dialogue: “So, you are the sprouts from which surface people spring!” –Queen Tika, upon meeting Frankie and Betsy (Chapter Nine, “Prisoners of the Ray”)
What Others Have Said: “Although the stories written about such central ideas are often vastly entertaining, they remain completely fallacious. The Earth is not hollow. The atom is not a miniature solar system. Mars is very different from Earth and could not support Earth life.” –Isaac Asimov, “Social Science Fiction”
What’s Next: I’ll examine another science fiction adventure, Radar Men from the Moon. Will it be as good as The Phantom Empire? Check back in two weeks to find out!

* The Western with science fiction, supernatural, or “weird” elements has a long history in both the comics and prose, but only spotty success in the medium of film. (2011’s Cowboys & Aliens is only the latest attempt to fuse the two genres, but its rejection by audiences is probably due less to its hybrid nature than its relentlessly dour tone; these days, audiences are more willing to embrace sci-fi Western elements under the mantle of “steampunk.”)

** Although mostly a footnote now, the Shaver Mystery was a sensation in the 1940s. It was overtaken by fascination with UFOs, but as late as the 1960s a vocal minority of UFO researchers claimed that flying saucers came from inside the earth rather than outer space.

4 Comments Leave a comment

Fates Worse Than Death Double Feature: The Perils of Pauline (1914 and 1933)

This week I explored two female-led serials that share a title (and not much else). The Perils of Pauline wasn’t the first motion picture serial, but in 1914 it caught the public’s attention, making a star of its lead, Pearl White, and laying the groundwork for later serials’ success. Indeed, The Perils of Pauline was such a sensation that its name became synonymous with the serial of a certain type, inspiring both imitators (The Exploits of Elaine, The Hazards of Helen) and remakes (other than the 1933 version, two features borrowed the title: a 1947 biopic starring Betty Hutton as Pearl White, and a campy 1967 remake starring Pat Boone in the vein of The Great Race). The ambiguous status of its leading lady as both heroine and victim would also be a source of contention, still familiar in today’s debates over “strong female characters.”

Part I: 1914

The wealthy Mr. Marvin trusts his secretary Koerner with the safety of his ward, Pauline, but he doesn’t know about Koerner’s shady past, or his escape from prison. When one of Koerner’s old associates, Hicks, approaches him and demands money, Koerner begs him off. Marvin is ill and won’t live much longer: once he is gone, it will be a simple matter to get rid of Pauline and claim her inheritance. Koerner’s scheme is made easier by Pauline’s independent nature: although Marvin’s son Harry presses her to marry, she wants to experience her share of adventure and excitement before she settles down. It’s a simple matter for Koerner to suggest she take a ride in a hot-air balloon or motorboat in the hopes that Pauline will meet with an unfortunate “accident.” (And if those don’t work, there’s always the more direct approach of simply having her abducted and drowned or burned alive.)

Thus are set in motion The Perils of Pauline, from which Harry is sometimes on hand to rescue her, and from which she sometimes escapes on her own (and which in a few cases she avoids entirely unknowingly, as when she is delayed and doesn’t get on board a sabotaged airplane, which then crashes). Through all of her adventures, Koerner never reveals his sinister intentions (except to the audience) and Pauline continues to trust him. Harry, for his part, is only concerned that Pauline’s taste for risky adventure will get her killed, and tries to discourage her out of general worry (and sometimes he is caught up in the same danger). Even when Pauline is kidnapped and directly assaulted multiple times, they don’t connect the dots—it’s just a dangerous world. (Incidentally, none of the perils include the oft-parodied scenes of a damsel tied to a railroad track or menaced by a spinning buzz saw: those images came from other films.)

The silent serial The Perils of Pauline originally had twenty chapters, filmed in America by the French company Pathé Frères and distributed in America by the Eclectic Film Company. However, the only surviving version is from a French print edited into nine chapters, released in 1916. (In addition to the loss of scenes, this version changed the name of the villain from Owen to Koerner to sound German; since that’s the version I was able to watch I’ve stuck with calling him Koerner.) The shorter version is more than enough to get a sense of both the style and the story: the serial is entirely episodic, with each adventure introducing a different location and supporting cast, and there are no cliffhangers, each conflict being resolved before the end of the chapter. Other than the first and last chapters, they could be watched in any order, and missing some doesn’t damage the story in a meaningful way, neither of which could be said about later serials.

The staging and editing of The Perils of Pauline is often crude, and the English title cards are famously full of mistakes in spelling and grammar (a result of both the hurry with which the film was made and director Louis Gasnier’s poor grasp of English). Although there are humorous touches, the story is told in broad strokes: in “Goddess of the Far West,” Pauline travels to Montana and is promptly kidnapped by ruffians employed by Hicks; upon escaping from an underground burrow, she is witnessed by a local Indian who takes her for a goddess springing out of the earth. To prove herself she must race the “stone of death,” an enormous boulder, down the side of a mountain. “The Deadly Turn” involves an attempt to wreck Pauline’s car in an automobile race; “The Shattered Plane” refers to the airplane previously mentioned. By the time we see the title of Chapter Eight, “The Serpent in the Flowers,” we can be certain it isn’t a metaphor.

Hicks parleys with a group of Western ruffians

Despite its flaws, however, the serial is saved by its star, Pearl White. White’s early life is shrouded in misinformation, much of it spread by White herself, but she had already appeared in films before agreeing to star in The Perils of Pauline, and had earned enough to tour Europe in 1913. On screen, she is active and emotes strongly, desirable qualities in a silent film actress. She is also sturdy and athletic, a far cry from the fainting violets one thinks of as the heroines of melodrama.

In contrast to later decades, when a cadre of professional stuntmen doubled actors for almost any strenuous scene, silent actors generally did their own stunts, and White’s reputation partially rested on the very real dangers she put herself in. Kalton C. Lahue, in his Continued Next Week: A History of the Moving Picture Serial, relates several hair-raising incidents: the “runaway” balloon actually did come loose, coming down in a lot full of people, who promptly mobbed the star and nearly suffocated her in the gas that was escaping from the balloon. In another (apparently lost) chapter set in Chinatown, White was surprised by a group of Chinese actors who, seeking to make a good impression, beat her up with very real jujitsu. She was long troubled by an injury to her back sustained when she was accidentally dropped down the stairs while filming Pauline, and she retired in 1922 after a stuntman was killed filling in for her (in full view of a crowd, an awkward situation considering her producers still claimed she did all her own stunts as she had when she was younger).

Although later generations have primarily thought of her as the archetypal “damsel in distress,” contemporary audiences saw in Pauline an independent woman putting off marriage to explore her own interests, a cinematic counterpart to the idealized women drawn by Charles Dana Gibson. Even though much was made of Pearl White’s physical bravery, her beauty and femininity were still a selling point, and it should be noted that the wide range of settings of the Perils called for an equally large number of costumes for the leading lady to appear in: tennis outfits, boating, riding and driving costumes, and more, including the “Indian” costume she wore as the “Goddess of the Far West.” Like the Gibson Girls, Pauline was both capable and fashionable, a figure onto which many fantasies could be projected.

Although it is mostly not (intentionally) humorous, it’s probably fair to compare The Perils of Pauline to the action-packed silent comedies of the day rather than the lengthy dramas that are rightly considered the pinnacle of the silent era. Like the comedies, serial episodes were only two or three reels in length, and the injuries Pearl White sustained in making them are comparable to the gauntlet of abuse that Buster Keaton and (later) the Three Stooges put themselves through. Just like modern action movies, the serials delight with the swiftness of their plotting and their dazzling effects rather than their keen insight into human nature, and they’re most engaging when going a little haywire. Scenes like Harry buying a car on the spot so that he can ram it into the front door of a burning house, or Pauline trapped on a ship the navy is using for target practice, make for cracking entertainment, even if they are as unlikely as the comic exploits of Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

What I Watched: The Perils of Pauline (Pathé, 1914)

Where I Watched It: It’s on YouTube, starting here.

No. of Chapters: 9

Best Chapter Title: The title of the final chapter, “The Floating Coffin,” deserves this honor, as it was so good it was borrowed as a chapter title by several later serials.

Best Peril: As I said, the chapters don’t end on cliffhangers, but the title is well earned by the many dangers Pauline faces. In addition to the race against the “stone of death” in Chapter Two, Chapter Seven (“The Tragic Plunge”) sees Pauline trapped underwater aboard a sabotaged submarine, from which she escapes by being ejected through the torpedo tube and swimming to the surface to get help.

Sample Title Card: “The great chief commands that the white girl shall be subjected to the ordeal which should reveal her immoral [sic] strength.”

What Others Have Said: “All in all, it was much a case of the right actress in the right role at the right time. It is quite probable that even an actress of greater stature than Miss White could not have carried it off any better.” –Lahue, Continued Next Week

Part II: 1933

When I saw that Universal had made their own (sound) version of The Perils of Pauline, I naively thought that the producers might have kept the bare bones of the 1914 story, even as they embellished and rearranged the plot to bring it up to date. After all, the story of a corrupt guardian trying to claim his ward’s inheritance is a sturdy hook, ripe for adding the types of formulaic side characters the serials of the 1930s were known for. I didn’t expect extreme fidelity, of course: considering the changes that established characters went through in adaptation, or the fact that producers could brazenly claim something like Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island was based on Defoe’s novel, I knew that many liberties would be taken.

The 1914 serial had a lot of material to work with, though. In fact, several chapters of the original version could form the basis of their own serials: many Western serials were based on premises no less flimsy than “The Goddess of the Far West.” The episode I mentioned above with the sabotaged submarine had even more potential, as it introduced a spy ring and a female counter to Pauline in the person of Mlle. Yagow, whom Koerner immediately recognized as a kindred soul and potential partner in crime. In that episode, Harry and Pauline effectively guest starred in somebody else’s spy thriller, a story that could have easily been stretched to a dozen chapters.

But no: Universal’s 1933 production has nothing in common with the 1914 classic except the name of the heroine (and only the first name, at that), although it does give Charles W. Goddard, who wrote the scenario of the original, a story credit. That disappointment aside, the 1933 Pauline is quite entertaining in its own right, a globe-trotting pulp adventure that is an obvious source for the Indiana Jones films and a showcase for the kind of production that Universal did well.

The action begins in China, where Westerners are fleeing the oncoming Revolution. Professor Hargrave (or sometimes Hargraves: the credits, titling, and even the spoken dialogue are inconsistent on this point) is close to finding a sacred ivory disk whose secret has been entrusted to him by the Chinese monk Confu (a character never shown, but frequently referred to); even at the urging of his daughter Pauline (Evalyn Knapp) and his cowardly secretary Dodge, Hargrave refuses to leave the country until he has recovered the disk. Also searching for the disk is the “Eurasian” Dr. Bashan (John Davidson) and his scarred henchman Fang. The disk contains a secret formula for an invisible poison gas that destroyed an earlier civilization; Hargrave wants to give the secret of the gas to humanity (by way of the U. S. government, of course) to put an end to war, whereas Bashan wants to use it for himself to gain power.

When Pauline follows Hargrave and Dodge to the Temple of Tsai Tsin, where the disk is hidden, she is rescued from Bashan and his men by Robert Warde (Robert Allen, AKA Craig Reynolds), an American engineer whose work on a Chinese railroad is about to be put to an end by the Revolution. Warde quickly grasps the situation and joins Hargrave’s team. The disk turns out to be only half a disk, and stored with it are instructions for finding the other half. From this start, The Perils of Pauline turns into an international scavenger hunt as Hargrave and Bashan follow the clues to piece together the disk and attempt to out-maneuver each other. From China they travel to Borneo, Singapore, India, and New York, facing obstacles ranging from wild animals and booby-trapped temples to assassins and gangsters.

True to its title and inspiration, this version of The Perils of Pauline puts the professor’s daughter in danger in every cliffhanger, sometimes alone and sometimes with Warde or as part of the group, but the story is driven by the search for the sacred disk, not her own sense of adventure. Like the 1914 version, the 1933 version finds opportunities for its star to appear in a variety of costumes both rugged and glamorous (although to be fair, the male stars go through a number of wardrobe changes as well: like Indiana Jones or James Bond, Warde is the kind of rugged he-man who takes care of business whether in khakis and pith helmet or a tuxedo). In addition, Evalyn Knapp is competing for screen time with many more characters than Pearl White had to deal with: in the context of the serials, she is the star, but that doesn’t mean she is always the center of attention.

As Dr. Bashan, John Davidson (a frequent serial “heavy”) gives a magnetic performance. Bashan is a smooth operator, whose strategy is often to let Hargrave uncover the next clue, and then take it from him. In one sequence, Bashan and Fang end up on the same flight from India to New York as Hargrave and his party, an uneventful trip that is described in dialogue as having taken five days! Did they say anything to each other in all that time, or even cross paths on the way to the lavatory? Such details are as lost to time as the empires of the past.

Although Bashan and his assorted flunkies are described as “political renegades,” are they anti-colonial nationalists? Communists? Who knows? Contrary to the popular image, Bashan and other serial villains aren’t given to long-winded explanations of their political gripes; there are no trade disputes or committee hearings. They’re bad guys, and that’s all we really need to know. There is a close resemblance between Bashan’s rivalry with Hargrave and the later feud between René Belloq and Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark: they truly are two sides of the same coin, working for different goals by similar methods.

Davidson delivers many of his lines with a satisfied purr; when he is angry he doesn’t raise his voice, he deepens it. It was while watching Chapter Seven (“Trapped by the Enemy”), set at a Singapore hotel, that I realized who Bashan, disguised in a turban, reminded me of:

As a Universal production, The Perils of Pauline is relatively lavish, relying on the studio’s extensive collection of sets, props, and stock footage to support the world-spanning narrative, but there are times the seams show. The Chinese and Indian temples are full of Egyptian statues (excused by reference to the global civilization wiped out by the poison gas—this is a rare example where relying on a fantastic conceit like Atlantis would make the story more plausible). Every location is represented by stock footage that sometimes goes beyond scene-setting and smacks of padding. The jungles of Borneo are full of wild animals, but suspiciously few of them ever appear on screen at the same time as the characters. The same shot of a dead leopard appears twice in the same chapter, representing two different attacking animals. Finally, background music is only present in a handful of chapters, but its absence is made up for by a constant racket of city and jungle noise, a challenge to my perception that older movies were quieter than those made today.

Still, this is a fun, action-packed serial that would be of interest to anyone looking to go back farther than Indiana Jones. Even better, it is continually surprising and inventive, right down to the last scene in which Bashan and Fang discover what the invisible gas really does—I won’t spoil it, but I’ll admit that for such a predictable outcome, it managed to surprise me.

What I Watched: The Perils of Pauline (Universal, 1933)

Where I Watched It: I watched an Alpha Home Entertainment DVD; it doesn’t appear to be on YouTube, except for this clip of Pauline and her father from Chapter One.

No. of Chapters: 12

Best Chapter Title: “Confu’s Sacred Secret” (Chapter Twelve)

Best Cliffhanger: At the end of Chapter Nine (“The Mummy Walks”), Hargrave’s party has tracked the last fragment of the disk to a museum in New York, and find it hidden in an antique vase. A curse is inscribed on the outside, leading Hargrave to believe it may be packed with an explosive (!). Of course Pauline, running from Bashan’s henchmen, drops it down the stairs, where it explodes, appearing to knock her out. (Like many of the cliffhangers, the resolution is anticlimactic—Pauline stands up and brushes herself off—but doesn’t rely on a cheat, exactly.)

Sample Dialogue:

Sullivan, a friend of Warde’s: “How’d the fight turn out?” after a run in with natives in the jungle of Borneo

Warde: “Great—the whole village burned down!” (Chapter Six, “Pursued by Savages”)

Warde and his pilot friend Sullivan share a laugh after dropping hand grenades on the natives (and Bashan).

Silliest Character: I must give a little more attention to Willie Dodge (Sonny Ray), whose appearance and mannerisms bring to mind Stan Laurel, and who is the main source of comic relief throughout the serial. Cowardly to the extreme, Dodge is constantly put upon, by life and the other characters. A running joke has him in the middle of the jungle or other perilous situation offering his resignation to Hargrave, who solemnly replies, “Very well. Would you like to leave now?”

In a modern story, Dodge might be redeemed at the end by finding his courage for a single heroic act, or at least accidentally saving the day à la Jar Jar Binks, but this isn’t that kind of story and Dodge isn’t that kind of character. He’s consistently out of his depth, but I’ll admit I laughed at his antics several times, for example:

During a brawl on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, Dodge stands with the luggage, unsure whether to put it down or not:

In the museum at night, Dodge falls into a trough of plaster and is mistaken for a mummy, scaring off the bad guys:

When Bashan and his men break into a mansion and kidnap Pauline, Dodge runs out the front door wildly firing a pair of pistols in every direction:

After the Millennium Falcon engages a group of TIE fighters, Dodge is tangled in a bunch of wiring and shrieks, “I’m melting!”

. . . Well, it’s possible I’m thinking of someone else with that last one.

What’s Next: In two weeks, I revisit The Phantom Empire, the serial that made Gene Autry a star.

0 Comments Leave a comment

Fates Worse Than Death: Fighting with Kit Carson

Famed scout Kit Carson is tasked with accompanying a shipment of government gold across hostile Indian territory. Although it would be safer to wait and travel with the wagon train that will be arriving soon, Carson’s superiors insist that the gold shipment is urgent and that he hire some unfamiliar locals to ride with him. Unbeknownst to him, the riders are part of a gang secretly run by fur trader Cyrus Kraft, who plans to steal the gold and use it to cement his control of the Southwest. Sure enough, the party is attacked by Indians, and Carson is accused of betraying the riders by Reynolds, one of Kraft’s gang. Carson is locked up to await trial for treason.

Elsewhere, Kraft parleys with Cheyenne chief Dark Eagle in his trading post office. Kraft encourages Dark Eagle to make war against the settlers filling the territory, the better for Kraft to control it, but the Cheyenne have no quarrel with their white brothers and Dark Eagle refuses. (A memorable part of Kraft’s shtick is the knife which he toys with while in conversation; if Kraft hears something he doesn’t like, he drops the knife, seemingly by accident, a signal for his hidden confederate to kill whomever Kraft is talking with.) For his obstinance, the Cheyenne chief is murdered and his body is left in the path of the wagon train so that his tribe will blame the settlers. Dark Eagle’s son, Nakomas, at first takes the bait, but Carson suspects foul play and convinces the young chief to join forces so they can uncover the truth.

In the mean time, the gold is missing: Carson’s friend Matt Fargo, who also rode with him, suspected that something was up when the Indians attacked, and hid the gold before it could be stolen. Fargo’s little daughter Joan disguises herself as a boy and stows away on the westbound wagon train to find her father. Carson escapes from jail to find Fargo and the gold, and clear his name; when the wagon train is attacked by the enraged Cheyenne, Carson and “Johnny” Fargo end up on a runaway wagon, careening toward a stand of trees.

The 1933 serial Fighting with Kit Carson is the first serial I have watched based on a historical figure: Christopher “Kit” Carson (1809-1868) really was a famous tracker and scout, blazing trails across the Southwest, negotiating with (and ultimately warring against) the Indians. The subject of hagiographic dime novels even during his own lifetime, Carson has fallen out of public favor in recent decades as the history of the Indian Wars is no longer taught in such a one-sided fashion and the bloody conquest of Native peoples no longer seems so glamorous.

Needless to say, Fighting with Kit Carson is in the dime novel tradition, crafting a typical pulp narrative around a few familiar names and character traits. However, while the Carson of the serial is unambiguously good (and Kraft equally evil, even stooping so low as to shoot his own men to gain Matt Fargo’s trust), the conflict is not the simple “cowboys vs. Indians” one might expect from a 1930s Western. Part of Carson’s legend is that he was a friend to the Indians (they refer to him as “White Chief” in the serial), equally trusted by the Cheyenne, settlers, and the Army. The Cheyenne are presented as honorable, if volatile: Dark Eagle refuses to be manipulated into war by Kraft, and his son Nakomas, while quick to judgment, is an equal and ally of Carson. Of course, the surest way to introduce conflict is to call Carson’s trustworthiness into question, something that happens over and over again as Kraft works to undermine him in private while claiming to support him in public. (The “Mystery Riders,” a band of masked and cloaked vigilantes under the control of Kraft, are another clearly cinematic element, complete with their own song that they sing as they ride, and which doubles as the theme song for the serial.)

Fighting with Kit Carson stars Johnny Mack Brown, a college football star who got his start at MGM, as the title character. Brown would go on to specialize in Westerns, having first played Billy the Kid opposite Wallace Beery in 1930. Beery’s brother Noah plays Kraft, exactly the sort of sneering, scenery-chewing “heavy” that the serials were famous for, in a performance reminiscent of Edward G. Robinson. (With his imposing size and mixture of bonhomie and sudden violence, Kraft would be a great role for John Goodman today.) Noah’s son, Noah, Jr., plays Nakomas in braids and bronze makeup (a common practice then). Rounding out the main cast (and second billed, above Beery Sr. and Jr.), Joan Fargo is played by Betsy King Ross, a rodeo performer and child star whom Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut in The Great Movie Serials describe as Mascot’s answer to Shirley Temple.

Fighting with Kit Carson is much less linear in its storytelling than the serials I’ve watched so far: leaving aside some of the backtracking in resolving its cliffhangers, the serial cuts back and forth in time, revealing new information about settled events, and the use of flashbacks is more extensive than the simple recapping used in the typical “economy chapter.” (There are also some interesting graphic effects, like the use of double exposure to show the passage of time when Carson is tracking, and a dotted line representing the secret passageway between Kraft’s office and the barn that is the secret meeting place of his gang.) The end result, while introducing variety, is frequently disjointed and hard to follow.

There are exciting stunts aplenty, however, and as in all serials there is a premium on action. Many of the fight scenes are edited to within an inch of their lives: according to Harmon and Glut, the standards of the time required that

Bullets could not be shown striking a man’s body; the gun and the human target had to be separated by cuts from one camera angle to another. The same rule held true for a man being struck with a club; the swing of the gun butt or blackjack had to be shown from one angle, the victim falling from another.

Perhaps it is because the Western setting puts more emphasis on gunplay than on the fistfights of Batman, but this was very noticeable in Fighting with Kit Carson, and to the blackjacks and gun butts I would add tomahawks, which were also evidently subject to this rule.

The wagon and horse chases fare better: famed stuntman Yakima Canutt, while not credited, is recognizable for his hand in a scene where Carson leaps from horse to horse on an out-of-control wagon team and is then dragged underneath the wagon, a stunt Canutt pulled off in dozens of Westerns (and which was an inspiration for the similar scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indiana Jones is dragged underneath a speeding truck).

Fighting with Kit Carson is a bit of a mixed bag, less streamlined than the serials Mascot’s successor studio Republic would be making in just a few years, but with some memorable performances (in addition to the cast already mentioned, Edmund Breese as Matt Fargo is quite good) and some literally explosive action sequences (of which more momentarily).

What I Watched: Fighting with Kit Carson (1933, Mascot)

Where I Saw It: It is on YouTube, starting here. (This accounts for the lower quality screenshots—sorry about that.)

No. of Chapters: 12

Best Chapter Title: “The Secret of Iron Mountain” (Chapter Six)

Best Cliffhanger: For the first two thirds, the cliffhangers are pretty underwhelming: in my notes I’ve included “Carson and Nakomas fall down cliff,” “Carson shot?” (he fell down when the shot was fired to fake out his attacker, something that happens several times in this serial), “Carson and Nakomas fall down cliff again,” and “Joan Fargo falls off horse.” Things heat up considerably in the last few chapters, however, starting with the end of Chapter Eight (“Red Phantoms”), in which Carson appears to be shot just before his wagon plunges into a canyon. I say “appears,” as of course added footage in the next chapter shows that he not only wasn’t shot but actually jumped from the wagon before its fall. Even Carson’s enemies are suspicious, saying uncharacteristically sensible things like “How do you know he didn’t jump?” and “Funny we haven’t found any trace of Carson’s body.” This overturns a longstanding convention of the serials, in which henchmen are constantly assuring the villain that the hero is dead, only for him to keep coming back, over and over again.

The filmmakers were obviously saving their budget for Chapter Nine (“The Invisible Enemy”), because suddenly all hell breaks loose, with Carson DROPPING A BOULDER on the Mystery Riders and leading them on a merry chase up and down the cliffside through misdirection (at one point, Carson throws a cocked rifle off the cliff, counting on it to land on a rock and fire, which of course it does). The wagon was full of black powder (“Hey, be careful with that powder!”) which the Mystery Riders plan to use to blow up the settlers who are riding into the canyon. Carson rushes to get the powder keg out of the way, but IT EXPLODES AS SOON AS HE PICKS IT UP! HOLY DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENT, BATMAN!

At the beginning of Chapter Ten (“Midnight Magic”), we back up, and this time Carson picks up the powder keg and hurls it at a group of Mystery Riders, where it blows them up (I should point out that the keg was lit with a line of powder on the ground, not a fuse, so in order for it to explode after being picked up it’s necessary for Carson to throw the keg into a conveniently-placed campfire). I could only imagine the confusion and cries of “CHEAT!” that must have greeted this development in the movie theater in 1933.

I was boggled: how could this have happened? I went back and watched both the cliffhanger and the resolution closely, again and again, as if it were the Zapruder film. Ultimately, I decided there were only two explanations: either Kit Carson had the ability to warp time and space (“midnight magic,” indeed!), or those cockadoodie dirty-bird screenwriters counted on everyone in the audience to get amnesia. There is no question that both “Best Cliffhanger” and the Annie Wilkes Award for Most Blatant Cheat goes to Kit Carson, Master of Time and Space, getting blown up at the end of “The Invisible Enemy.” After this, Kraft’s comeuppance in Chapter Twelve, as explosive as it is in its own right, could only be anticlimactic.

Sample Dialogue: “If I can only live long enough to tell the gang about this!” –a Mystery Rider named Rawlins, after being shot in the back by Kraft, his own boss (Chapter Four, “The Silent Doom”)

What Others Have Said: “The old breed of cowboy star was a lot tougher and gutsier than today’s star is. Course, most of the old ones was real cowboys and circus stars at one time too, and this all helped them as film stars. But today’s cowboy star never has the chance or the rugged real-life experiences on the range the old stars had, so they naturally are softer when it comes to the he-man action stuff.” –Noah Beery, Jr., interview with Lee O. Miller in The Great Cowboy Stars of Movies & Television

What’s Next: Join me in two weeks as I acquaint myself with one of the most famous names in the serials. Can you guess?

0 Comments Leave a comment

	Guy Vollen on Fates Worse Than Death: Dick T…
	Guy Vollen on Fates Worse Than Death: Superm…
	Jeff on Fates Worse Than Death: Superm…
	Jeffrey F on Fates Worse Than Death: Dick T…
	MR N J TOOP on Cowboys & Aliens: A R…