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.

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Fates Worse Than Death: Batman (1943)

Industrialist Martin Warren, after serving his sentence for an unnamed crime, is about to be released from prison; his niece, Linda Page, asks (her boyfriend? fiancée?) playboy Bruce Wayne to accompany her to pick him up. Although Wayne’s life of leisure doesn’t allow him to get out very early in the morning, he promises to accompany her. But before they arrive, Warren is picked up by some other old acquaintances, who coerce him to meet their boss, Dr. Daka. Daka is a Japanese spy striking at the United States from within, and if Warren doesn’t join Daka’s ring of “dishonored” engineers, bankers, and other professionals and agree to serve his “League of the New Order,” he’ll be turned into a mindless zombie by one of Daka’s inventions. In the mean time, the costumed crimefighter known only as the Batman, with his sidekick Robin, leave a pair of crooks (complete with the “mark of the Bat” on their foreheads) for the police to pick up. Who are Batman and Robin, and what do they have to do with Bruce Wayne and his young ward, Dick Grayson?

There can be hardly anyone reading this who isn’t aware that Bruce Wayne and the Batman are one and the same, of course, and the 1943 Batman serial wastes no time in letting the audience in on that information. In making the leap from the comics to the screen, only the core trio of Bruce/Batman, Dick/Robin, and Alfred the butler were retained (Batman’s police contact is Captain Arnold, not Commissioner Gordon), but their characters and identities are recognizable to readers of the comic book (for the most part: Alfred is relegated to comic relief, skittish and easily flustered, but he still comes through when his services are needed). None of Batman’s usual enemies like the Joker or Penguin are present (many of the most familiar villains weren’t created until later anyway); Batman was made during wartime, and the enemy he faces in Dr. Daka is a nationalistic one.

Even allowing for its wartime origin, it saddens me to report that Batman is incredibly racist. As a cringe-inducing caricature of the effete, treacherous Oriental, Daka is grossly offensive, but if the serial stopped there Daka would fit in with the pseudo-exotic threats I’ve mentioned before (and he is, after all, supposed to be a villain). But that isn’t enough: Daka’s lair is located on a street in “Little Tokyo,” which according to the enthusiastic narrator has been nearly empty “since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs.” That’s in the first chapter and it doesn’t get any better: even Daka’s own henchmen despise him and throw around racial slurs behind his back. “I’m not afraid of him or any other squint-eye,” says one named Forrester before rebelling. Forcing Daka to surrender, Forrester tells him “That’s the kind of answer that fits the color of your skin,” when he (briefly) has the advantage over him. Subtle it is not. (Unsurprisingly, Daka was played by a heavily made-up white actor, J. Carrol Naish, a common practice in 1940’s Hollywood.)

The wartime angle is also apparent in constant references to America’s fighting spirit and the important work being done by the armed forces and munitions manufacturers. In a twist from the comics, Batman and Robin undertake secret missions for the U. S. government, receiving coded messages from contacts about threats to America’s intelligence and infrastructure. (According to Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut in The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound and Fury, rigid censorship ensured that serial heroes were never shown taking the law into their own hands. Since being a vigilante is central to Batman’s identity, in the serial he remains independent from the police, taunting an exasperated Captain Arnold who nonetheless depends on the cases his “best agent” wraps up for him, but ultimately Batman gets his orders from Uncle Sam.)

After the generic “spy ring” of Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island, Batman has a refreshing specificity: Daka plots to steal radium (both to fuel a superpowered “radium gun” and to build an even larger one), blow up a supply train, steal an experimental plane, jump a claim on a radium mine (truly a magical element that allowed screen writers to add a contemporary touch to the hoariest plots), and more. The political context may have brought out some ugly, jingoistic racism, but there is also never a question of the time and place and what the stakes of the conflict are.

The oddest aspect of this propagandistic impulse is in the setup of Daka’s Little Tokyo hideout: the League of the New Order has its headquarters hidden in a “Japanese Cave of Horrors,” a wax museum primarily containing tableaux of Japanese war atrocities. Every time the front of the business is shown, a carnival barker is pitching its importance to the war effort: “See the life-size models of the victims of our savage enemies! . . . See how they treat their prisoners. It’ll make your blood turn cold!” It almost seems as if the filmmakers intend the barker’s words to represent the serial itself: “Come on in here and spend a dime, my friends, and wise yourself up. It’s not a circus, it’s not a carnival—this is a serious proposition!” Yet the carnival barker is in league with Daka, sending his henchmen to the secret entrance and selecting victims to be brainwashed. It’s either brilliantly self-referential, a commentary on the bottomless duplicity of the enemy, or just goofy. Daka believes in hiding in plain sight, apparently.

The seriousness of Japan’s Imperial ambition isn’t necessarily foreign to either the serial format or Batman as a character—both have featured their share of would-be world conquerors—but it is an odd fit with the tone of the 1943 production, which is frequently light, even whimsical. Lewis Wilson as Batman and Douglas Croft as Robin appear to be having a ball whether in costume or out: this isn’t the grim, tortured Batman of Christian Bale, or even the reclusive weirdo Michael Keaton portrayed. Even Naish as Daka gets to rub his hands gleefully and display a few moments of humor, like when he feeds raw meat to his pet alligators and briefly considers throwing a zombie to them as “something special.” The actors and narrator embrace even the most absurd contrivances with gusto, and I’m not convinced this is entirely a case of straight-faced material only appearing funny in hindsight: comic relief was an essential component of the serial, and I daresay the funny parts are fresher and more entertaining than the repetitive fistfights and formulaic cliffhangers. (It became very easy to predict what the cliffhanger would be in each episode, as the same beats were employed to set the stage each time. When, as in Chapter Six, a thug says, “Let’s get out of here before that chemical reaches those wires!” you know exactly what’s going to happen next.)

The 1943 Batman serial is likely to be of interest primarily to Batman completists, but I doubt it will satisfy any fan who would describe themselves as such. It was rereleased to theaters in the 1960s as a camp film, where it influenced the next wave of Batman adaptations. Fans of the 1966 Adam West Batman TV show will recognize many elements: the deadpan acceptance of ridiculous situations, enthusiastic narrator, and even the two-part episodes with cliffhangers very much in the serial style.

So what works? For all the fistfights, Batman engages in quite a bit of detective work in this serial: not only does he find and analyze clues, he goes undercover (he disguises himself as a thug named “Chuck White,” and sends Alfred out in disguise a couple of times), gets information out of Daka’s henchmen through a variety of means, and even manages to turn their traps around on them, all while maintaining his secret identity. Batman also delegates responsibility to Robin and Alfred, who several times come to the rescue. The complexity of the puzzles is laughable and the level of thought isn’t that deep, but within the bounds established by the script, it’s easy to believe that Batman and Daka are waging a high-stakes chess game against each other, striking and counter-striking until the big confrontation.

I also liked Lewis Wilson as the title character more than I expected: to cover his real purposes, his Bruce Wayne is vapid and silly, and his excuses for not being around—he took Dick to a polo match or an amusement park; he doesn’t get moving until around noon—are amusingly flip. He expects Linda to believe him, because what red-blooded man would use such indolence as an excuse unless it were the truth? When one of Daka’s henchmen suggest that Wayne might be the costumed troublemaker, Daka sneers, “Don’t be absurd—that simpering idiot could never be the Batman!”

What I Watched: Batman (1943, Columbia)

Where I Saw It: I watched a Columbia Pictures DVD set, but it is on YouTube (in many parts) starting here.

No. of Chapters: 15

Best Chapter Title: Almost all the chapter titles are pretty great, with the kind of snappy immediacy and hint of exciting developments that all the best pulp titles have. If forced to choose, I’ll go with Chapter Four, “Slaves of the Rising Sun” (balanced out by the fifteenth and final chapter, “The Doom of the Rising Sun”).

Best Cliffhanger: Chapter Thirteen, “Eight Steps Down,” ends with a double cliffhanger: Batman, trying to sneak into Daka’s lair, is threatened by the classic spiked-walls-closing-in trap, while at the same time, Linda Page is about to be turned into a zombie by Daka’s mind control device. However will they escape?

Annie Wilkes Award for Most Blatant Cheat: Many of the escapes in Batman are of the kind that would infuriate Annie Wilkes: a train bears down on the hero, or an armored car plummets off a cliff and explodes, only to be revealed in the next chapter that Robin pushed Batman off the railroad trestle or Batman leapt from the armored car just in time, all shown from a different angle. If any of those are cheats, then they all are. However, I can’t say any of them explicitly undo the setup of the cliffhanger.

Actually, my favorite is the resolution to the cliffhanger of Chapter Fourteen (“The Executioner Strikes”), in which Batman, knocked out and placed in a coffin-sized wooden crate, is carried to Daka’s lair; the box, unopened, is dropped into Daka’s alligator pit. At the beginning of Chapter Fifteen, it’s revealed that Batman had escaped before the crate was even brought to Daka’s lair, and it was Daka’s henchman Wallace in the box. You can bet he didn’t get the benefit of a last-minute cheat.

Sample dialogue:

Bruce: “Well, we never got to the cave. It was so hot out, we laid down by the side of the road and took a nap.”

Linda: “Asleep! Just when I needed you both so much. If it hadn’t have been for the Batman I’d be dead in the cave!”

(Chapter Nine, “The Sign of the Sphinx”)

What Others Have Said: “Where could even a Japanese spy get enough ration stamps for all that meat?” Harmon and Glut, referring to the fodder for Daka’s pet alligators

What’s Next: Join me in two weeks as I vicariously travel the Western frontier through Fighting with Kit Carson.

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Fates Worse Than Death: Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island

The year is 1936. The leaders of Pacific Dirigible Airlines are monitoring the maiden voyage of the airship San Francisco between California and Australia. Just before the dirigible reaches the mid-point refueling station at Clipper Island, disaster strikes! The radio operator on Clipper Island, half dead, reports that something has destroyed the fuel tanks. The island is taboo to the native Komatoans; have they risen in revolt, or was it the vengeance of their volcano god, Pele? The three directors, Ellsworth, Canfield, and Jackson, don’t have time to worry about that: if the San Francisco is forced to turn back, the fledgling company will be ruined. Suddenly, the airship itself is on fire and doomed to crash before it ever reaches the island. Oh, the humanity!

Ellsworth and his board suspect sabotage, and a government agent, Mala, is called in to investigate. Posing as the new radio operator, Mala travels to Clipper Island, where he gets mixed up with Melani, the Komatoan princess, and the high priest Porotu, who schemes to take her throne. Working with Mala are Scottish Hank McGlaurie and English novelist Anthony Tupper, as well as the second-billed stars Rex and Buck, a horse and a dog respectively. (Both Rex the “Wonder Horse,” aka “King of the Wild Horses,” and Buck were already animal stars, and they assist by attacking and harrying the bad guys, protecting the princess, and even going for help when Mala is in trouble, as in “I think he’s trying to tell us something!”)

Unbeknownst to both Mala and Melani, Porotu is secretly in league with a spy ring called the “Black Chamber,” led by a mysterious person known only as “H. K.” (Whenever H. K. is shown on screen, his face is blocked by a lamp, and his voice is dubbed.) The spies have a base in an old stone fort atop the volcano on Clipper Island, a location convenient for them to tap into the Trans-Pacific Cable to intercept secret messages (the main part of the villains’ lair that we see is an elaborate code-breaking operation led by Draker, the head of the Clipper Island branch). Porotu and the Black Chamber are working together to keep unwelcome guests off the island.

Will Mala gain the trust of Princess Melani and her people? Will he discover the true identity of “H. K.” and smash the spy ring? Will the successful establishment of a dirigible route across the Pacific ensure that airship travel is the wave of the future? These questions and more are posed over the fourteen episodes of Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island.

Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island was only the fourth serial produced by Republic Pictures, but it already included many elements of the Republic formula: a capable (if bland) hero backed up by comic relief sidekicks, lots of fistfights and daring stunts (including vehicular mayhem and the destruction of a mountainside fort, accomplished with miniatures), and a nefarious criminal organization led by a shadowy figure whose identity would only be revealed in the last chapter. (Some of the fights feature noticeable “undercranking”: it was a common practice to roll the camera slightly more slowly than normal, so that when the film was projected at regular speed all the action would appear sped up, increasing the excitement.)

Despite its trailer’s claim to be “based on a novel all youth loves,” Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island bears almost no resemblance to Defoe’s classic. In fact, despite the island setting, at no time is the hero ever truly a castaway—he doesn’t have to forage for sustenance or improvise his own shelter—and he hardly ever lacks for company. (The title comes from the nickname bestowed on Mala by Tupper, who notes the irony of a Native Crusoe assisted by a white Man Friday in the person of McGlaurie.)

The hero is played by Mala (aka Ray Mala, née Ray Wise), a half-Native Alaskan who had already come to fame as the star of Eskimo (aka Mala the Magnificent) and the Tahiti-set Last of the Pagans, and who would lend his lean, athletic presence to several more features (and two more serials) as both an actor and as a cameraman and cinematographer. Mala is celebrated as the first Native American movie star, and is a notable exception to the almost exclusively white serial heroes. The character he portrays is also named Mala, but as an apparently Polynesian g-man, it would be a stretch to say he appears as “himself,” even by the loose standards of Hollywood.

I previously mentioned the deliberately apolitical invaders and menaces in the serials, pulps and comics of the 1930s. Robinson Crusoe is more down to earth than Flash Gordon but no less circumspect: H. K. and the Black Chamber are not identified with any nation or cause. The Pacific setting implies a Japanese connection, but the Black Chamber is shown to have branches all over the world. Depending on one’s perspective, the spy ring could represent fascism, international communism, or even gangsters intercepting government secrets for their own financial gain. The filmmakers may have had their own politics, but vagueness was undoubtedly better for business.

Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island transposes many conventions of jungle adventure—primitive tribes, wild animals, and exotic locales—to its island setting. Like the “modern Western” and “Canadian mountie” genres that were also popular, it combines the picturesque setting and colorful native peoples of the frontier with such contemporary touches as automobiles, airplanes, and radio. Over the course of the serial, a fleet of vehicles are featured traveling by land, sea, and air: dirigibles, a submarine, seaplane and biplane, and more.

Also like some other serials, it features white evildoers manipulating presumably superstitious natives through modern technology: Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island includes a volcano that can be made to erupt at will, allowing the spies to pose as the Komatoans’ god and strengthening Porotu’s position. The high priest claims that “Pele is quick to destroy those who arouse the wrath of the gods!”, even threatening to sacrifice first Mala and later Melani in a pit of molten lava, but the technology that stokes the volcano predictably gets out of control and destroys both the spies’ fort and Porotu by the end.

The Komatoans themselves are a Hollywood version of Pacific Islanders, living in thatched huts among a mélange of tiki idols and masks (not to mention an Easter Island head inside the sacred Cave of the Winds). Both the Black Chamber and Pacific Dirigible Airlines require the cooperation of the Komatoans (to whom Clipper Island is taboo) to carry out their activities, so Mala’s interest in protecting and (later) restoring Melani spring from more than altruism. The fact that Melani (Mutiny on the Bounty‘s Mamo Clark) is beautiful and smart surely doesn’t hurt, either. (Robinson Crusoe doesn’t get bogged down in mushy stuff, however: even with a nudge from Rex, Mala only says “You have rewarded me with your friendship,” and the concluding chapter fades out before they can do so much as embrace. The love triangle of Flash Gordon is positively steamy by comparison.)

What I Watched: Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island (1936, Republic)

Where I Saw It: I watched a Hal Roach Studios DVD, but it is on YouTube starting here.

No. of Chapters: 14 (According to the DVD liner notes, this unusual number was a result of the production going over budget, requiring the addition of an inexpensive “economy chapter,” recapping earlier events and increasing the serial’s revenue by an additional week.)

Best Chapter Title: “Jaws of the Beast” (Chapter Eight)

Best Cliffhanger: “Trail’s End” (Chapter Seven): After rescuing Melani from Porotu’s attempt to sacrifice her to Pele, Mala tries to leap with her across a boulder-strewn gorge. The boulder they land on isn’t steady enough, and the two fall helplessly into the abyss. How are they going to get out of this?

Annie Wilkes Award for Most Blatant Cheat: Weeeell, as it happens “Trail’s End” doesn’t play quite fair. At the beginning of Chapter Eight, Mala and Melani grab a vine and pull themselves to safety in noticeably different footage. I wrote CHEAT!!! in my notes. “Trail’s End” is only the runner-up for this award, however, as Chapter Ten (“Wings of Fury”) features an even more blatant cheat. Mala, back in San Francisco, is chasing down a member of H. K.’s organization, a pilot. The pilot jumps in a biplane and takes off, with Mala clinging to the side of the cockpit. The pilot tries to shake him off, but when Mala gets him in a headlock the pilot loses control of the plane, and it crashes into the water of San Francisco Bay . . . until the beginning of Chapter Eleven, that is, when the biplane pulls up and avoids the water at the last minute. The cockadoodie plane crashed, I tell you! I saw it! CHEEEEEAAT!!!!!!

Sample dialogue: “As you leap into the fire pit, Princess Melani, remember the vengeance of the priest of Pele!” –Porotu, Chapter Six (“God of the Volcano”)

What Others Have Said: “While I have mentioned the better performances, there were a number of rather awful serial performances that do deserve some mention: the four leads [in The Masked Marvel] probably rate our booby prize for bad acting, while following close behind are Mala in Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island and Bill Kennedy in The Royal Mounted Rides Again.” –Alan G. Barbour, Cliffhanger: A Pictorial History of the Motion Picture Serial

What’s Next: In 1943, a costumed crime-fighter made the leap from the comics to the big screen, not for the last time. Join me in two weeks for a look at Batman.

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Fates Worse Than Death: “What an Amazing Escape!”

Introducing the Annie Wilkes Award for Most Blatant Cheat

Although the serials are nearly synonymous with cliffhangers—in which the tension builds to a high point before the episode ends, with a character in mortal danger or a major revelation left dangling—they didn’t invent them, and cliffhangers continue to be used on television, in comics, and even in film. In the nineteenth-century, all kinds of writers serialized their work in popular magazines, from the authors of penny dreadfuls to Charles Dickens, and later pulp writers were similarly aware of the cliffhanger’s power to hold the reader’s interest. Edgar Rice Burroughs not only used them between chapters, but also between books: he ended his second John Carter novel, The Gods of Mars, with Martian princess Dejah Thoris’ fate unknown, only to be revealed in the subsequent The Warlord of Mars. (There is, of course, a similar narrative connection between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and indeed it is now common practice for the second book or film of a trilogy to end on an uncertain note.) Any serialized medium—in which chunks of story are doled out in installments—will sooner or later take advantage of cliffhangers to keep readers or viewers hooked.

As crude a narrative device as they are, however, cliffhangers are popular because they work: already in the short time since I began this project, I’ve sat down more than once with the intention of watching one or two chapters of a serial, only to be drawn forward by curiosity and suspense, and I’ve ended up watching several more than I planned. I can only imagine what it was like to wait a whole week to find out whether the hero would live or die (and make no mistake, in a very few cases the hero actually did die, only to be resurrected later, or for it to be revealed that someone else had taken his place). If you were the right age or particularly attached to the characters, it was probably as intense as the wait for a new Harry Potter novel or episode of Breaking Bad in recent years. For casual viewers, I imagine it was more like my experience of reading daily comic strips or watching soap operas: easy to forget and not think about after the fact, but when reading or watching the next installment it all comes back to me.

Serial chapters always rewound the story to a point before the cliffhanger, both providing context (for anyone who might have missed the previous chapter) and renewing the tension (for new viewers and regulars alike). Like reading daily comics collected in book form or watching an entire season of television in one sitting, binge-watching a serial makes for an experience with built-in redundancy. Seeing the cliffhanger and its resolution back-to-back also makes it more obvious when the filmmakers cheat (more on this in a bit).

In Paul Malmont’s The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown, a fictional mystery starring several real-life science fiction and pulp authors set in 1943, there’s an amusing scene in which L. Ron Hubbard is trapped in a forgotten, gaslit aqueduct beneath the Empire State Building with a group that also includes Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Walter Gibson (author of the Shadow novels). A self-styled man of action, Hubbard plans their escape:

Hubbard jerked a thumb back to the bigger hall. “Why don’t we douse the flame, let the gas fill up, then ignite it with the lighter and blow the lid up there clean off?”

“Are you nuts?” the kid [Asimov] asked. “Don’t you understand the formula for gas density? . . . It means we’d suffocate before we ever built up enough gas to do anything.”

“And even if we could survive that,” de Camp added, “a basic energy equation shows that the shock wave would kill us even before the roof collapsed on our heads.”

“Well, let’s dam up the stream and just float up and let the water pressure pop the top off!”

“Are you kidding? . . . The hypothermia would kill us.”

“Before we drowned under the ceiling.

The joke isn’t just that Hubbard (then a self-aggrandizing young writer, not yet the father of Scientology) is an ignoramus; rather, he is thinking like the kind of pulp hero he is accustomed to writing about. Serial heroes, like their magazine counterparts, often relied on the same kind of likely-sounding but scientifically impossible solutions to get them out of jams. In addition, well-aimed shots, conveniently dangling ropes or vines, and explosions from which the heroes were miraculously thrown clear tended to balance out the contrived death traps that threatened them.

That’s not the kind of cheat that infuriated serial audiences however; as long as the solution played fair and didn’t significantly change the cliffhanger’s setup, it didn’t matter whether it was likely or even possible. After all, Flash Gordon, the Lone Ranger, and Gene Autry were heroes precisely because they could do things ordinary people couldn’t, and if their array of talents included one-in-a-million strokes of luck, well, that’s what audiences expected from them.

The difference between realistic and fair is explicated as clearly as possible by Annie Wilkes, author Paul Sheldon’s “number one fan” in Stephen King’s Misery. Wilkes (played by Kathy Bates in the 1990 film adaptation) demands that Sheldon, her captive patient, write a novel resurrecting his beloved character Misery Chastain after he had killed her off. She won’t accept any rewriting cheats to do so, and she uses an example from the serials to explain:

This was a no-brakes chapter. The bad guys put Rocket Man—only it was Rocket Man in his secret identity—into a car that didn’t have any brakes, and then they welded all the doors shut, and then they started the car rolling down this twisty-turny mountain road. . . .

“And here came the car, with Rocket Man still trying to put on the brakes or bash the door open, and then . . . over it went! It flew out into space, and then it went down. It hit the side of the cliff about halfway down and burst into flames, and then it went into the ocean, and then this ending message came up on the screen that said NEXT WEEK CHAPTER 11, THE DRAGON FLIES. . . .

“The new episode always started with the ending of the last one. They showed him going down the hill, they showed the cliff, they showed him banging on the car door, trying to open it. Then, just before the car got to the edge, the door banged open and out he flew onto the road! The car went over the cliff, and all the kids in the theater were cheering because Rocket Man got out, but I wasn’t cheering, Paul. I was mad! I started yelling, ‘That isn’t what happened last week! . . . Are you all too stupid to remember? Did you all get amnesia?’ . . .

“He didn’t get out of the cockadoodie car! It went over the edge and he was still inside! Do you understand that?

Even allowing for the small number of serials I’ve watched so far, I’ve known that feeling: the hero didn’t get out of the cockadoodie car before it went over the cliff, or out of the building before the cockadoodie bomb went off, or didn’t switch the cockadoodie train to another set of rails before it crashed. Some cheats were more obvious than others, and some studios were more prone to pull a fast one than others. Cheats also became more common later in the serial era, when dumbed-down serials were aimed at supposedly gullible kids. But there’s an Annie Wilkes in every audience, and they’re watching closely. So I’m proposing the Annie Wilkes Award for Most Blatant Cheat, to be awarded (when deserved) to those moments where the film’s producers don’t quite play fair with the audience, rescuing the hero at the expense of the suspension of disbelief. I believe I’ll have plenty of candidates.

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When Stock Footage Roamed the Earth

“Why, if I had half the chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage!” exclaims Johnny Depp as the title character in the 1994 film Ed Wood as he examines film clips of explosions, military maneuvers, and stampeding buffalo. Although Wood never went quite that far, later filmmakers would take up that challenge, and the scene illustrates just how much movies in the black-and-white era depended on footage of stunts, special effects, and locations culled from other sources in the studios’ extensive libraries to cut costs. (Even into the 1970s and ‘80s it wasn’t uncommon for low-budget directors to build films and TV episodes around footage of car crashes and stunts, matching the actors’ clothes to the pre-existing clips.) As a kid in the 1980s, I was indirectly exposed to a great deal of older movies and television by the flood of repurposed stock footage on TV at that time.

Certainly it was more common to find old movies, shorts, and black-and-white shows on television as part of cheap daytime syndication packages (I watched Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, and The Little Rascals after school—can you imagine that today?) and the “late late show.” Sunday afternoon was reserved for the “Creature Feature,” a phrase that in my naiveté I thought the local station managers had come up with themselves. Creative editing into new formats such as music videos, commercials, and interstitials was just the next step for this material, much of which, before the explosion of cable channels and the revival of TV shows on DVD, was considered nearly worthless.

An appetite for old film clips excerpted from their context began to develop in the 1970s with the emergence of full-length “docutainment.” The pioneer of the nostalgic clip movie was That’s Entertainment!, a celebratory look at movie musicals made in 1974 to commemorate Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s fiftieth anniversary. In addition to editing together highlights from both classic and obscure MGM musicals, That’s Entertainment! brought together a large number of the stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age to talk about their experiences filming such classics as Singin’ in the Rain and reminisce about the good old days. (A recurring theme of both the film and its marketing was that this would be the last time so many stars would be gathered in one place—although there would be two sequels—and even the trailer emphasizes its escapist quality in the Watergate era, ending its ballyhoo with a hilariously downbeat “That’s Entertainment! Boy! Do we need it now.” Ah, the 1970s.)

That’s Entertainment! is a film that I’ve returned to several times over the years, but 1982’s It Came from Hollywood was more my speed at the time: comics Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Gilda Radner, and Cheech and Chong introduced clips from dozens of science fiction, horror, and cult movies, ranging from cheap B movies and serials to the monster classics of the 1950s and focusing on such niche categories as drug panic, juvenile delinquency, and even musicals. In addition to the skits setting up each category (which also included “Monsters,” “Gorillas,” “The Brain,” and “Aliens,” among others), they offered a running commentary, often razzing the cheapness or tastelessness of the films in a manner that echoed the audience participation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the mockery of The Golden Turkey Awards (in fact, Golden Turkey winner Edward D. Wood, Jr. is the subject of his own segment in It Came from Hollywood, the only filmmaker so “honored”) and anticipated the format of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

It Came from Hollywood is doubly nostalgic for me now, hearkening back both to an era of drive-in double features and Saturday matinees I only experienced second-hand, and to the early 1980s heyday of the hip comedians (younger at the time of filming than I am now, and two of them sadly since passed away: seriously, did anyone in 1982 think that of all these comedians, Cheech Marin would have the strongest career in 2014?) I considered the height of cool back then. Unlike That’s Entertainment!, It Came from Hollywood didn’t bother to name most of the films it excerpted (except in a long list during the end credits), lending a dissociative, dream-like quality to the proceedings (and often leaving me unable to place a particular image for years, until the internet made it easier to find such information, not to mention the films themselves).

Another film that must have had a considerable influence on me was 1977’s Gizmo!, produced and directed by Howard Smith, which, unlike my two previous examples, drew most of its footage from films that purported to be true (or were at least staged for publicity: mostly Depression-era newsreels, from the look of it). Many of the clips are of gadgets and contraptions made to solve the petty problems of life—a dog-powered washing machine, a self-rocking cradle, and a spaghetti fork mounted on a hand-held drill so as to twirl automatically—in the truest Rube Goldberg spirit. Gizmo! casts a wide net, however, including many examples of “self-invention” as well, people with strange talents or driven by obsession: human flies and high wire walkers, a “human camel” drinking gallons of water and washing it down with kerosene, feats of strength and endurance.

Obsession and invention come together in the numerous doomed-to-fail flying machines, each presentation inevitably preceded by the delusional inventor’s proclamation that “what we are about to see will change the world.” The succession of disastrous ornithopters, “triphibians,” rocket planes, and bat-winged flying costumes fizzling, burning out, or simply tumbling off the ends of their take-off ramps was probably the inspiration for a similar passage in Airplane! (1980) in which former pilot Ted Striker suffers the most pathetically hilarious flashback in all of film.

In fact, the Airplane! sequence is just one of many examples of footage that was insinuated into public consciousness through its reuse: while it may not have been the first film to revive them, Gizmo! contains many images that have become iconic, such as performer Frank “Cannonball” Richards being shot in the belly point blank by a cannon. If they didn’t see Gizmo!, viewers in the 1980s might have seen this image in numerous other contexts such as commercials or music videos; it was ubiquitous enough that when The Simpsons parodied it in “Homerpalooza” they could assume that the majority of their audience would get the reference.

As it happens, I did see Gizmo! several times: in addition to appearing on HBO (like both of the other films I’ve mentioned), it was a favorite of my middle school shop teacher, good old Mr. Lundquist (who would often joke that he couldn’t use a typewriter because he had lost his “typing finger” in a bandsaw accident—he was truly a shop teacher of the old school). Whenever we had an inactive day (for whatever reason), Mr. Lundquist would pop Gizmo! into the VCR for us to watch, on the pretense that we might glean some insight into mechanical engineering from it: I must have seen the damned thing at least half a dozen times in school.

Although now mostly forgotten, Gizmo! (along with other docutainments) led to such programs as That’s Incredible! and Real People with their mix of weird talents, record-breaking attempts, and magazine-like pieces on strange subjects, kicking off a brief “reality TV” craze twenty years before Survivor. In a more serious vein, the obsessed oddballs of Gizmo! are the forefathers of Errol Morris’ subjects in the similarly anthology-like Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.

It was on basic cable that stock footage became almost a medium in itself, continually reshaped and recombined by editors, filling in the cracks in programming and propping up commercial messages like the media equivalent of duct tape. Rick Prelinger, collector and curator of countless educational and industrial films, was one source, financing his more serious preservation projects by supplying film clips to cable channels and other buyers. Nickelodeon and the Comedy Channel frequently ran old shorts in the late 1980s when their own programming was thin on the ground. And it’s a cliché by now to complain that MTV no longer runs music videos, but what I really miss are the incredible variety of cult films and the kind of sponsored films that Prelinger specialized in: safety, hygiene, and civil defense films from the 1950s and ‘60s, presented uncut but ironically juxtaposed with the rest of the channel’s programming.

Black-and-white footage was especially felicitous for film collage: just as the low-budget filmmakers of the time had reused stunts to cut costs, counting on the consistency of the film stock to hide discrepancies, modern editors could draw on a vast body of film to assemble an original world from spare parts: in It Came from Hollywood, the invaders of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers could share the screen with the alien masterminds of Mars Needs Women and the ape-like Robot Monster could trade places with the gorilla from The Perils of Nyoka, making the visuals as archetypal and interchangeable as the storylines. Later filmmakers could, and would, go much farther in assembling collages (the work of Craig Baldwin, for example, deserves a write-up of its own, to follow at a later time); the uniformity of black-and-white film bears comparison to the Victorian engravings that Max Ernst turned into the surreal graphic novel La Femme 100 Têtes, the consistency of the illustration style allowing for a greater suspension of disbelief than more typically disjunct visual collage.*

In fact, my memory of the 1980s is so colored by the reuse of kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley routines, death-defying stunts, and proto-steampunk flying machines set to new soundtracks, that they largely run together in my mind. For example, I had completely forgotten that Gizmo! has a voiceover, yet the announcer talks over the clips almost continuously. I wonder, too, how much effect this had on other members of my generation: I was beguiled by these hints of an older world, touched by both history and fantasy, and I eventually had the opportunity to dig deeper, to watch complete films. But the emphasis on dippy inventions and quaint habits of the past might have equally fueled the perception that old movies (and even the world they represented) were uniformly corny, boring, and dumb—an attitude that can be hard to overcome.

Similarly, the use of editing to present only the highlights—a pattern that is already evident in That’s Entertainment!, but which would accelerate with each passing year—both artificially juices the excitement level and misrepresents the more leisurely pacing that was the norm in old films. (That’s not to say that editors of the 1930s and ‘40s never used quick cutting—they did—but over the length of a feature intense and exciting passages were generally balanced with slower sequences.) From a modern perspective, one of the most interesting sequences in That’s Entertainment! edits together the numerous examples of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in the so-called “Backyard Musicals” series, saying “Let’s put on a show!” (or a dance band, or a rodeo) in rapid succession, a predecessor of the supercuts that now thrive on YouTube.

Perhaps like any fad, the use of stock footage on television began to fade; by 1994, Turner Classic Movies was on the air, providing a more respectable home for both feature films and ephemeral short features that could be presented original and uncut. Likewise, many of the original sources from which features like Gizmo! drew are available online now and can be easily seen; it isn’t as necessary for them to be edited together for general viewers. What is needed is context, and curators like TCM or Criterion are able to provide that. With the availability of this footage has come easy-to-use editing software, so that anyone can create the kind of collage that was once trendy on television. As for the low-budget producers, they are now more likely to lean on the crutch of CGI for their features, which may not be any more believable than stock car crashes or explosions, but can be quickly produced and can be tailored to their specific needs. And MTV? Well, everyone knows they don’t show videos any more, anyway.

* In this connection, the most intriguing example of this from the 1980s is Tom Schiller’s 1984 film Nothing Lasts Forever, a black-and-white homage to Golden Age Hollywood that uses stock footage to lend authenticity to the trippy journey of a young would-be artist. More popular was Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), a film noir parody in which Steve Martin played the detective, interacting with characters from classic movies through the magic of intercutting.

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Stop! In the Name of Motion

Speaking of stop motion animation, my son, who is three and a half years old, has recently discovered the stop motion masterpieces of the late Ray Harryhausen: Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans. I had purchased a tribute issue of Famous Monsters with some of Harryhausen’s iconic creations on the cover, and my son started asking about them. I explained the technique of stop motion animation—taking hundreds, sometimes thousands of successive pictures of slightly adjusted models, creating the illusion of motion when projected in sequence—always being clear that they were models, like toys, not real. As fascinated as he is by monsters—he’s a boy, after all, and before Harryhausen he was curious about the Godzilla movies I had lying around, and of course we have lots of discussions about dinosaurs—I wanted to make sure he could draw a distinction between creatures of fantasy like the Kraken and real but extinct animals like Tyrannosaurus rex. Overprotective? Perhaps, but I remember being kept awake at night by fears of the giant ants from Them!, and at an older age than my son is now. If I give him nightmares, I’ll hear about it from his mother.

Famous Monsters cover by Terry Wolfinger

From my explanation it was a short leap to hunting for clips on YouTube and the excellent documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan on Netflix, which explained Harryhausen’s methods better than I could and held my son’s attention for a good twenty to thirty minutes at a stretch (the documentary is feature-length: we watched it in installments). For a few weeks after, my son would ask about the “model movies” and we would watch a scene or two from Clash of the Titans, the only Harryhausen movie I have on disc.

Harryhausen is nostalgic to me for a few reasons. I remember seeing Clash of the Titans when it was new in 1981, at the downtown movie palace that would close a few years later, replaced by the four-screen “multiplex” at the mall. The mythological references went over my head, but I’ll never forget the terrifying and fascinating Medusa and its gruesome death scene. Even more than that memory, I associate Harryhausen with holidays: most of his movies I saw on television during Thanksgiving or Christmas breaks, probably counterprogrammed against football games in those days when cable TV meant having a few dozen channels instead of hundreds.

I’ve previously indicated my obsession with animation and effects as a kid. Any time there was a behind-the-scenes show about movie special effects, I was there. The best parts of these shows were often clips of other projects the filmmakers had a hand in, the kind of thing that was unlikely to show up on TV by itself. For example, I knew who Phil Tippett was because of his involvement with Star Wars and the big special effects movies that followed in the 1980s, but I was never able to get more than a glimpse of personal projects like Prehistoric Beast, from 1984. Unless they were part of a film festival showing or I was lucky enough to catch them on Night Flight or MTV, there wasn’t much I could do to track them down in those days.

A number of speakers in the Special Effects Titan documentary comment on stop motion’s “dreamlike” quality. That’s a polite way of saying it doesn’t look real, but realism wasn’t exactly the point. To my knowledge, Harryhausen never proposed replacing human actors with stop motion likenesses in the same way computer graphics have been put forward as a “fix” for aging actors or a replacement for the long-dead. There is something mysterious about the sometimes-jerky movements of stop motion; even when done by a master like Harryhausen, it has a certain distinctive “look.” Along with other film tricks like rear projection and altered film speed, the ratcheted movements of stop motion are burned into my mind as a filmic style that isn’t “real” but is aesthetically gripping. As a less obvious example, Dragonslayer’s composite landscapes, with their fast-rushing clouds, heightened lighting, and blend of full-size and miniature models, are just as artificial as the computer-assembled Middle Earth of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations, but I still cherish them. Perhaps it’s simply the density of elements that are brought together that grabs me.

I don’t hold that traditional stop motion is superior to computer graphic animation because of its difficult and time-consuming nature: that line of thinking is to my mind a moral rather than an aesthetic argument. The goal of either technique should be involvement in the story rather than calling attention to itself. If we accept the premise that film—all film, from The Great Train Robbery forward—contains shifts of viewpoint that were once associated with either dreams or godlike omniscience—the ability to jump from one point in space to another, to cut between views—then CG’s ability to create images purely from light and numbers represents the culmination of cinema’s potential: it is of a piece with all effects work that has come before. If cinema would continue to be vital, why cut off any avenue of development?

Of course CG is understandably used to save time and money, and sometimes by filmmakers who have more of both than they have imagination. If anything it’s the low barrier to entry that has given CG such a bad rap; nevertheless, a bad film is a bad film. I will say I prefer practical effects for their sense of heft and reality in space, and I appreciate the level of craftsmanship and dedication that handmade filmmaking shows off, but I wouldn’t deny that those can be qualities of CG. Perhaps the joy of practical effects work is in the ingenuity with which filmmakers solved problems; it could be the “personal touch,” sensing the involvement of an animator handling a model (like the marks left in King Kong’s fur by Willis O’Brien) or dragging a brush across a cel.

Ultimately the effectiveness of special effects lies not only in their execution but in how they are used—how effects shots are framed, how they are built up to and cut away from through editing, and their function within the story. Jurassic Park, still a landmark of CG effects after more than twenty years, looks better than many CG films made last year simply because of the care with which Steven Spielberg and his crew combined CG with models and other practical effects, edited seamlessly together to create an illusion of reality. Conversely, a carelessly executed effect will look crummy and take the viewer out of the film whether it’s CG or practical.

One reason traditional stop motion looks eerie compare to actual moving objects on film is the uncanny clarity of each frame: when live motion is filmed, there’s a slight blur as the actor or object is caught in motion while the shutter is open. Animators have ways of getting around that (even in hand-drawn animation), introducing more naturalistic blur after the effect (or even in-camera, through a process dubbed “go motion”). Nowadays, CG can be used to smooth out the inconsistencies and simulate the blur of motion even when models are still animated by hand (such films as Coraline and Paranorman are examples of this hybrid style).

As it happens, The Lego Movie, which I wrote about enthusiastically last time, is animated almost completely in CG rather than stop motion, but the constraints of animating a world made (almost) completely out of Lego bricks lead to some interesting results. In an interview with fxguide, CG Supervisor Aidan Sarsfield of Animal Logic (the studio that animated The Lego Movie) spoke of the filmmakers’ desire to “stay true to the medium” of Lego, treating it very much as if it were a stop motion film on a real Lego set (albeit one of huge scale and complexity). The CG bricks were treated as rigid: there was no stretching or distortion, and the only movement was at points of articulation. Even effects that are generally ephemeral or subject to fading (such as flames, laser beams, smoke, explosions, and moving water) were virtually “built” out of bricks or other Lego pieces, which were “binary”—either there or not there. Sarsfield describes the process by which colors or brick sizes could be cycled through to give the impression of fading clouds of smoke or moving waves; the effect is unlike anything I’ve seen, and more to the point most of it could by recreated in actual bricks and animated by hand (even though it would probably take forever).

Sarsfield also noted that very little motion blur was used, giving most of the action a staccato feel similar to old-school animation. For extreme fast motion, however, the animators devised a technique for what they called “brick blur:”

Brick blur was created by a little strip of bricks. The colors of the character matched the string of bricks but the silhouette was defined as if someone has structured the motion blur with bricks.

I previously mentioned how much I enjoy the abstraction of animation, especially stop motion. In this case, the squared-off forms of Lego bricks and minifigures are matched perfectly by the jumpy, ratcheted motion of the animation style. (It’s worth noting that the Lego characters’ faces are smoothly animated—there are limits to abstraction, after all.) Subtleties like “brick blur” and the audacity of (for example) an entire surging sea made of constantly shifting Lego bricks are great examples of filmmakers exploiting the unique aspects of their medium to create something truly novel; and the end result shows how computers can be used without losing the handmade qualities that made the project appealing in the first place. Aidan Sarsfield mentions that the animators knew they had been successful when the first trailers appeared and audiences couldn’t tell whether stop motion or CG had been used; I wouldn’t be surprised if The Lego Movie inspires another generation of animators and model makers.

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My 2013 in Film

As I mentioned last time, the end of the year offers a time to look back at the offerings—be they movies, music, or books—of the last twelve months and evaluate them. I’m always interested to see what critics hold up as the best of the year, although in most cases I’ll put titles on my mental “to see or read” list rather than compare my opinions directly to theirs. When it comes to movies, I’ve fallen behind; my wife and I used to be frequent moviegoers, but the arrival of children has an impact in more ways than one. (I see more animated films, for one thing, and fewer documentaries.) Not only does a night out at the movies entail getting a sitter, it means giving up precious time (of which I’m now more conscious of the scarcity). Movies as a whole aren’t trivial, but specific movies—G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I’m looking at you—are another story. Perhaps that’s why I tend to be more forgiving of movies I watch at home. Transformers exceeded my expectations as a cable TV offering, but I doubt I would have been as pleased if I’d trekked out to see it at the theater. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I probably won’t have a very complete picture of 2013 in film until 2016 or so, or possibly never. The films I saw in the theater this year don’t even add up to ten, so my top ten list would of necessity include some movies I didn’t even like that much, and I had to search my memory to come up with some of them.

A few years ago, I was discussing movies with a relative I didn’t see very often. He revealed that he keeps an ongoing log of every movie he sees, with a numerical rating system of his own device. Any movie that came up, he was able to tell me what he had rated it, and which movies were adjacent in rankings. I doubt I could do that: I’m not that compulsive or organized, for one thing. Asking around online, though, it seems that quite a few film buffs do track their reactions in that kind of detail.

I wonder how much their rankings change over time, though. Some things I enjoyed the first time around wear thin after just one or two viewings (comedies are especially vulnerable to this). Others stick with me, even as I’d rather they didn’t: I’ve only seen A.I. Artificial Intelligence once, and I hated it. Really hated it; it was refreshing, in a way, because how often do we have such pure reactions to things? Yet, large chunks of it stuck with me: that must be worth something, right? And even the fact that I had such a strong reaction puts it on a somewhat higher level than the many movies that I’ve occasionally remembered and thought, “Oh yeah, I saw that, I think.” I’ve read passionate and intelligent defenses of A.I. that have given me different perspectives on it; I don’t think I’d enjoy it any more if I saw it again, but I might appreciate it more. How do I put a raw number on such an experience?

Professional critics, of course, do it all the time, and they, more than anyone, know the limitations of a star, number, or letter-grade system, boiling their nuanced and (hopefully) insightful consideration of a film down to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” And critics’ opinions change, as well, so even a listing of their favorite movies of the year won’t necessarily line up with the ratings they originally gave those films. That’s okay, and as long as we don’t pretend any given opinion is the final word, it’s part of the process of evaluation we all take part in.

In any case, it’s easier than ever for anyone to be a critic, or at least to publicize their opinions. Amazon and iTunes have featured customer reviews for years, some of them lengthy essays by prolific writers; now services like Letterboxd (“Your life in film”) allow users to keep track of their viewing and ratings, just like my relative (I wouldn’t be surprised if he were a Letterboxd early adopter), with the added benefit of making their reviews public and allowing them to compare them with others’ and cross-reference their film choices with influential lists such as the AFI 100 or the various critics associations’ year-end lists. Like many other elements of contemporary online life, Letterboxd takes activities that many people were already doing in isolation, and turns it into a social activity.

Another change in recent years is the increasingly narrow gap between the big and small screens. Many of the films that came out earlier this year are already available on DVD or Blu-ray, and the lead time between theatrical release and home video gets shorter every year. Streaming and video-on-demand services make it even easier to catch up on the year’s releases at home, something that is increasingly important for those smaller movies that don’t have wide theatrical distribution. I watched Escape From Tomorrow on Vudu at home; it didn’t make it to a theater near me, as far as I am aware. This year, Stephen Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, starring Michael Douglas as Liberace, was released in theaters in Europe but made its American debut on HBO. Although I would have liked to have seen both films on a bigger screen, TV time shifting made them much more accessible to me.

It goes the other way, too, although rarely: this year my wife traveled to Olathe to watch the Doctor Who fiftieth-anniversary special The Day of the Doctor in a movie theater, a rebroadcast of the international simulcast. While undoubtedly an unusual move designed to mark a significant occasion, special engagements like this will probably become more common as theaters look for ways to create communal “events” and spectacles (like IMAX and 3D) that will bring people to the theater. Simulcasting of live performances is even farther ahead: concerts and stage shows are available in local theaters. I can even see performances of the Metropolitan Opera here in Wichita.

So what did I think of the movies I did see? I’m glad you asked me that, Senator:

The Lone Ranger: No, it wasn’t quite as bad as its toxic reception indicated, but it wasn’t very good, either. I enjoy Westerns, I’m open to the reinterpretation of popular characters, especially of the pulp era, and I even liked Pirates of the Caribbean, at least the first one, so this should have been a slam dunk for me, but The Lone Ranger was mostly a giant mess. This might be another one that I enjoy more at home, where I can skip or tune out the boring or silly parts (of which there are many) and just focus on the bigger-than-life action sequences.

Oz the Great and Powerful: Another critical bomb that I thought was just okay, not flat-out terrible. In crafting a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, director Sam Raimi’s appropriation of the 1939 classic film’s art deco and Technicolor visuals was both a strength—I thought it looked fantastic—and a drawback, as it couldn’t help remind viewers of the superior original. Films like this are stuck in a bind: the audiences who would in theory be most interested in it are also going to scrutinize it more than average and hold it to a higher standard before accepting it. Properties with already-passionate fans are a double-edged sword, as NBC recently found out with The Sound of Music Live!

Escape From Tomorrow: I’ve already written about this one, so I’ll just add that this is one case where I’m glad I read some reviews before I saw it. If Escape had been as incredible as its trailer promised, it would probably be my pick of the year, if not the decade. Although I still enjoyed it and think it’s worth seeing, getting a sense of the buzz around it brought my expectations down to earth.

Speaking of trailers, another one that had me pumped this year was for Pacific Rim. Personally, I loved it, but I can understand audiences being underwhelmed, as it’s kind of a “fans only” prospect—if you already love giant monsters and robots, the one-dimensional characters are genre conventions, not flaws. I saw it twice, and took friends with me, both of whom are genre fans: one a fan of action and superheroes, the other a fan of Tolkien-style high fantasy. They enjoyed it well enough, but weren’t as enthralled as I was. Oh well, to each their own. The only plot point that struck me as insultingly dumb was the “Gipsy Danger is somehow ‘analog’ while the other jaegers are ‘digital,’ and that somehow protects it from the electromagnetic pulse” thing. And while it’s kind of a nitpicky complaint, I was very excited to hear GLaDOS (the AI in the Portal video game series, voiced by Ellen McLain) prominently featured in the trailer. McLain’s voice is heard in the finished film, but the resemblance to GLaDOS is toned down, as confirmed by director and Portal fan Guillermo del Toro for Ain’t It Cool News:

“I called Valve [the makers of Portal] and asked ‘Can you give us the filter?’ so we went full GLaDOS for the first commercial, but I thought it was too much. If you’re a gamer, it’s too distracting so we created our own GLaDOS 2.0 filter that’s a little less full on.”

I get his reasoning, and it’s probably the right call, but as someone who’s been interested in Portal almost completely because of GLaDOS’ lilting, half-mechanical voice, it was a letdown. Finally, although there’s been some criticism of the formulaic rivalry between hero Raleigh Brackett and cocky Chuck Hansen, after ten-plus years of Harry Potter and knock-offs thereof, it’s actually refreshing to have a story that knows the difference between a rival and a villain. Hansen is abrasive to the end, but ultimately he and Brackett are on the same side, and the two characters are able to set aside their personal differences and work together. It’s sad that something so simple has become novel.

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