Meanwhile... Back at the Ranch

Linda Stirling, Serial Queen

2011-12-19T11:04:00.004+01:00

A graduate of Ben Bard’s acting school (Bard was the widower of silent serial queen Ruth Roland), Linda Stirling (1921-1997) graced the covers of fashion magazines before auditioning for The Tiger Woman. The success of this debut made Linda Republic’s serial queen-bee and she went on to headline Zorro’s Black Whip (1944), Manhunt of Mystery Island (1945), The Purple Monster Strikes (1945), The Crimson Ghost (1946), and Jesse James Rides Again (1947). Under contract to Republic 4-11-1944 to 3-19-1947, Stirling later did some television. In retirement from performing, she earned herself a master’s degree in literature and taught English and drama at Glendale College. As Linda told the author Buck Rainey, her serial debut was quite an ordeal:

“I remember once [director] Spencer Bennet asked me if I could do a running insert. I said sure, although I had no idea what it was. To my dismay, I found out. My horse took it as a personal challenge to outrun the camera truck, and I went along for the ride, taking in the scenery from every possible angle as I was bounced around from side to side and end to end on that galloping beast. Horses and I never got on first-name basis or shared social lives."

The Tiger Woman (Republic Pictures, 1944)
Inter-Ocean Oil Company troubleshooter Allen Saunders (Allan Lane) travels to a South American jungle where an unscrupulous business rival (LeRoy Mason) is stirring up trouble for Jungle Woman (Linda Stirling), a tribal leader who may actually be Rita Arnold, a missing heiress to a fortune.

The Tiger Woman, even more than most Republic serials, is stunt driven and action oriented – to the point where the majority of the supporting roles are played by the finest stunt men in the business. Yet the serial remains something of a disappointment. Ostensibly harking back to the silent days of Pearl White and Ruth Roland, this western camouflaged as a jungle adventure actually comes with the standard heroine, Miss Linda Stirling, slightly more active than most, perhaps, but clearly deferential in action capability to hero Allan Lane. This is something of a comedown from the heady days of Kay Aldridge and Perils of Nyoka. Mostly thanks to the pioneering efforts of chapter play enthusiasts like Alan K. Barbour, author of such fondly remembered publications as "The Serials of Republic" (1965) and, especially, "Cliffhanger: Days of Thrills and Adventures" (1972) Stirling has come to epitomize serial heroine pluck, but although she – or rather a stuntman dressed as her – engages in a spectacular fight with George J. Lewis in chapter 5 and a bruising skirmish with Eddie Parker and the henchmen in chapters 10 and 12, Linda is surprisingly passive for the greater part of the serial. That said, however, Tiger Woman still has all the advantages of Golden Age Republic: a workmanlike plot, impressive sets, top-notch fights and stunts, good villainous performances by Lewis, LeRoy Mason and the often overlooked Crane Whitley, memorable alliterative titling of chapters, and classic cliffhangers. It also has more casualties among henchmen per chapter than perhaps any other serial, an unusually gory tally, in fact, for a genre presumably catering to the younger set.

About the production:
Tiger Woman is ostensibly set in a jungle but considering that the Iverson Movie Ranch and the Republic backlot hardly resemble the rainforest, the only clue to the locale of the serial must be found in a 1942-1943 advertisement listing "The Tiger Woman of the Amazon" as one of Republic's forthcoming attractions. This leads us to the most obvious question regarding The Tiger Woman:

What's in a name?
Why, pray tell, is a heroine known by all and sundry as The Tiger Woman garbed in a jaguar-like outfit and hat? Not even the otherwise so meticulous Jack Mathis of “Valley of the Cliffhangers” can offer a logical explanation, suggesting instead that the jaguar (or leopard, or whatever animal it was meant to be) was chosen because the tiger is an anachronism in South America. An explanation, of course, that completely fails to address the matter of a title that could easily have been changed to "The Jaguar (or Leopard) Woman." Some sources propose that Republic simply had the costume in stock, and who would care? And then there was RKO which had just released The Leopard Man (1943), one of those memorable Val Lewton thrillers. In any case, when re-released by Republic in 1951, The Tiger Woman had become Perils of the Darkest Jungle, which, considering the arid locations in Chatsworth, California, is just as misleading. To add to the confusion, Republic released a nightclub melodrama entitled The Tiger Woman in 1945, and whith the same associate producer listed on the credits, William J. O'Sullivan. Someone in power at Republic may simply have liked the title.

The Fungi of Fear
Chapter six culminates with the Tiger Woman and Jose (sidekick Duncan Renaldo) trapped by a river of burning oil on Republic's famous cave set, a feature used in countless serials and B-westerns. Linda Stirling's contemporary, Peggy Stewart, well remembers the Republic cave:

"The inside was moist, it was wettish," she told her biographers Bob Carman and Don Scapperotti. It smelled kind of musty all the time but everyone loved the cave. It wasn't that big but the camera angles made it look big and they had the little track for the coal car. It was actually on the Western set. There was a big red barn and you open those barn doors and it was the shell for the caves. When you went through the barn doors, you were in the cave. They had phony rocks and you could push those phony rocks aside and put hay there and it looked like you were coming out of the barn.”

One of Republic's most utilized standing sets, the cave figured prominently in all of the studio’s serials of the 1940s.

Greta Granstedt & The Devil Horse

2011-12-16T11:59:00.004+01:00

Greta Granstedt, the blond leading lady of the Mascot serial The Devil Horse, was a late substitute for Harry Carey’s usual costar, the difficult and demanding Edwina Booth. Purportedly from Malmoe, Sweden but in reality from Northern California, Granstedt (1907-1987) had made headlines when at 14 she shot and critically injured a wayward boyfriend in a jealous rage. The judge sentenced her to “leave Mountain View, CA, and never return,” after which she, naturally, drifted to Hollywood. Her subsequent screen career, however, never amounted to much, although she is quite good in a small role in Street Scene(1931) and later achieved some success on Broadway. The Devil Horse was the actress’ only chapter play.

The Devil Horse (Mascot, 1932)
A gang of bandits attempts to capture the Devil Horse, the leader of a herd of wild stallions who has once been a famous racehorse. Reared, Tarzan like, by the Devil Horse after his father’s murder, young Frankie Darro comes to the aid of Norton Roberts (Harry Carey), whose brother, a forest ranger, has been killed by the very same outlaws.

The Devil Horse opens with one of the more disturbing scenes in serialdom, the killing of a man in front of his 5-year-old son. The kid grows up in the wild to become Frankie Darro who swings through the trees like a pint-sized Tarzan. The comparison stops right there, though; this "jungle boy" is not raised by apes but by a former racehorse, and his skills as a boy rider include a spectacular jump on horseback into a river or lake.

Although it comes with the famous "William Tell Overture," Devil Horse is no Lone Ranger, however, but a clumsily told and acted story of a boy, a wild horse, and Harry Carey. The latter, unlike nearly everybody else in the cast, adds a bit of acting punch to the otherwise dull proceedings, which Mascot would recycle in its final chapter play, the far better Adventures of Rex and Rinty (1935). Frankie Darro, the studio's resident enfant terrible, mainly grunts and groans, and the brother-sister act of Barrie O'Daniels (a future Broadway director) and Greta Granstedt provides eminent proof of why they never amounted to much in Hollywood. Maybe the chief faults lie with Otto Brower, not one of the more enterprising of Hollywood helmsmen, but the writers equally failed to come up with anything of much interest. Everybody rides around endlessly chasing each other and the murky photography (and this is not just a matter of the condition of existing prints) doesn't help decipher what is actually going on. All in all, one of Mascot's weakest efforts, perhaps even the weakest.

About the production
According to his autobiography, stuntman extraordinaire Yakima Canutt headed a skeleton crew that did not include leading man Harry Carey (who wanted too much money) on a location trip to Arizona. Which is where Canutt himself devised one of the more spectacular stunts in serial history where Carey's character attempts to mount the bucking Apache (chapter 1) "This stunt was rough," Canutt would write,

“I rigged a strong strap around the horse's neck so that I could hang on to either ear. Then, with three cameras set and ready to shoot, we put a blindfold over [Apache's] eyes …. The horse stood for a second or two, then, as he started to rear, I swung my body under his neck and hooked my spurs over the top of his withers. He reared high and spun around trying to strike me with his front hoofs, but, because of the position I was in, he could only hit me with the forward part of his front legs.”

Despite his precautions, Canutt was knocked unconscious as the animal was thrown off balance and ended up in the hospital. As a result, many stunts in The Devil Horse fell instead to Richard Talmadge, another legendary Hollywood daredevil who would later star in his own chapter play, Universal's Pirate Treasure (1934; see an earlier post). This serial was originally intended for Rex, the original "wild" stallion of HalRoach's 1926 The Devil Horse (title is the only connection), but when his owner's monetary demands proved too high, Levine obtained Apache from stunt-rider Tracy Layne.

Filming locations:
Newhall, Beale’s Cut, Kernville, Phoenix, Arizona.

Beulah Hutton, serial hench-woman

2011-12-11T10:18:00.001+01:00

I included Beulah Hutton as one of my “Vixens, Floozies and Molls” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999 & 2004), my ode to early sound femme fatales, just because I liked her woman-handling poor Lucille Lund in Pirate Treasure (1934 see illustration). Not that I knew anything about Miss Hutton, other than her credits and the fact that she became Claire Trevor's stand-in, and I earned some ribbing for the inclusion. “How's Beulah today?” folks would ask, but happily before anyone had yet to invent that damnable LOL!

The true reason for Beulah's inclusion in my book was that she performed that extremely rare duty of being a serial hench-woman, a character she more or less had to herself. No other actress played a serial gang moll with the frequency of Beulah Hutton:

Heroes of the Flames (Universal, 1931) not available at this time
Danger Island (Universal, 1931) not available at this time
Battling with Buffalo Bill (Universal, 1931)
Perils of Pauline (Universal, 1933)
Pirate Treasure (Universal, 1934)
The Vanishing Shadow (Universal, 1934)
Tailspin Tommy (1934)

Since my book was first published back in 1999, I have learned that Beulah Hutton was actually a Canadian, born in Kingston, Ontario, in 1909. She was in Hollywood already by 1929 when she became one of eight starlets chosen to grace the Fox-Mary Astor vehicle The Woman from Hell.

Then in late June of 1936, Beulah Hutton suffered lacerations and bruised knees in a three car pileup near Universal City at Lankershim Blvd. and Valley Spring Lane Drive in North Hollywood. Hutton, whose age was given as 25 and who resided at 2034 North Argyle St. (a landmark Hollywood apartment building today known as “De Mille Manor,” was apparently the driver of a vehicle traveling north on Lankershim when colliding head on with an automobile driven by a Mrs. Delia Cordell, who escaped with minor abrasions. Worse off was Maybelle Hill, 42 and also of 2034 Argyle, who suffered compound fractures on both legs when the Hutton car skidded into a vehicle operated by Mr. A.L. Masters. In all, eight persons were treated for their injuries at the North Hollywood Carter Hospital.

According to someone at the Internet Movie Database, Beulah Maybelle Hutton took out US naturalization papers on June 25, 1943 under the name of Tempest Hutton. Also according to the Imdb, she was in the 1949 Columbia Academy Award-winner All the King's Men, which suggests that she had joined the ranks of Hollywood extras years before. Also according to Imdb, she died in Los Angeles October 19, 1995. I have not been able to verify this last claim, however.

Marguerite Chapman & Spy Smasher

2011-12-09T13:21:00.000+01:00

According to her official studio biographies, Marguerite Chapman (1918-1999), of Chatham, NY, was working as a switchboard operator when discovered by the John Powers modeling agency. Hollywood came calling soon after in the form of a contract with 20th Century-Fox, but Chapman's breakthrough assignment was the lead female role in Republic's Spy Smasher. Her career lasted well into the television era and she is best remembered today for playing Tom Ewell's supposedly lovesick secretary in the Marilyn Monroe comedy hit The Seven Year Itch (1955). Her final film was the Edgar Ulmer quickie The Transparent Man (1958), but she was evidently briefly in the running to play Old Rose in Titanic (1997). Sadly, she was not well enough to assume the part which, famously, instead went to Gloria Stuart.

Spy Smasher (Republic, 1942)

American secret agent Spy Smasher (Kane Richmond), alias Alan Armstrong, teams up with his identical twin brother, Jack (also Kane Richmond), to unravel a gang of fifth columnists headed by a Nazi known only as The Mask.

The submarine in chapters 3, 4 and 12 may look like what it is, a bathtub toy; the motivation for the Nazi villain The Mask to be wearing a mask in the first place remains obscure, and, looking for all the world like a handkerchief with holes, the garment appears downright ridiculous. And then there is the whole idea of a superhero wearing motorcycle helmet, goggles and a cape … well, you get the drift. But despite the silliness there is no denying that Spy Smasher holds your attention like few other serials, what with non-stop action and cliffhangers turning up with frequency in the middle of chapters as well!

Just take the scene in chapter 3 where Spy Smasher and sidekick Pierre (who is Franco Corsaro but may as well have been Republic serial regular Duncan Renaldo) seek help from the French governor only to realize too late that he is Vichy and not Free when the floor suddenly opens beneath them. Or how about the episode in chapter 10 where Spy Smasher narrowly escapes a stonecrusher while battling henchman Walker (John Buckley)? Not to mention the penultimate chapter whose title, “Hero’s Death,” and cliffhanger solution give new meaning to truth in advertising. Just three of the many thrills in store in this, Republic's finest wartime serial and arguably William Witney's shining hour as a solo director.

Everything is done to absolute perfection, from casting (even Marguerite Chapman, on loan from Columbia, seems classier than usual) to the legendary Republic company going full throttle in every chapter to Howard Lydecker's special effects. The comic strip original may never have enjoyed the success of, say, "Captain Marvel," or even “Bulletman” (who Republic at one point also considered), but the opening credits' dahdah- dah-dum from Beethoven's Fifth, done in Morse code accompanied by strobe lights forming the "V" for Victory, would be remembered decades later by then-young moviegoers looking for something uplifting instead of the increasingly dire reports out of real-life Europe and the Pacific.

Origins:
Created by the same team that brought the world “Captain Marvel,” artist C. C. Beck and writer Bill Parker, Fawcett Comics’ “Spy Smasher” debuted in the very same edition of Whizz Comics as Marvel, #2, in February of 1940. The character underwent a post war name change to “Crime Smasher,” but Fawcett ceased publication (along with all the company’s other super-heroes) in 1953. DC Comics, the copyrights holders of “Superman,” who had sued the creators of the similar Captain Marvel, purchased the rights in 1972 and "Spy Smasher" began appearing irregularly. In a case of cross-over story-telling, the character of Alan Armstrong famously recounts his Cold War exploits in Power of Shazam! #24 to Captain Marvel’s Billy and Mary Batson.

About the production
Although Spy Smasher Alan Armstrong and twin brother Jack appear together throughout the serial only the opening chapter used expensive split screen effects. For the remainder of the serial actor James Dale/stuntman stood in for one twin or the other in dialogue sequences (his presence easily detected in a car scene in chapter 8), while earning a surprisingly potent $650 for his troubles. David Sharpe and Carey Loftin performed stunt duties for Alan in his Spy Smasher disguise while Bud Wolfe, John Daheim and Sharpe doubled the civilian clothed Jack. At no point in the serial, incidentally, was Jack Armstrong referred to by his full name, Republic thus avoiding a potential copyright infringement suit from the "Jack Armstrong—The All-American Boy" radio program.

… and their fellas: Kane Richmond
Despite the customary granite-jaw looks and better-than-average acting ability, Kane Richmond (1906-1973) never could escape B-Movies. But those he did made him a favorite of the action set, including three Shadow features produced by Monogram in 1946 and, of course, his starring serials, Spy Smasher, Adventures of Rex and Rinty (1935), the execrable The Lost City (1935), Haunted Harbor (1944), Brenda Starr, Reporter (1945), Jungle Raiders (1945), and Brick Bradford (1948). Richmond left the screen shortly after the latter and went into the haberdashery business.

Censorship:
Although physical production of Spy Smasher commenced on December 22, 1941, fifteen days after Pearl Harbor, the screenplay had been developed while America was still at peace and a storyline threatening to reveal that America employed secret agents, an act of aggression, was retained despite the censors. In contrast, the arbiters of public morality demanded the elimination of the designation "Germany" for the warring foreign power mentioned in chapter 10. Also eliminated, but for an altogether different reason, was a scene in chapter 2 where a soldier was accidentally hanged when the floor of a gallows sprang open beneath him and his head just happened to slip into the noose during a fight scene. Considered too grim, the sequence was modified by having the poor sod merely fall through the trap door.

Nazi ingenuity?
Why would a German plane, a futuristic Bat Plane at that, bear instrument labels in English such as "Gyro Stabilizer"? Well, considering that the plane in question is actually the Flying Wing from Dick Tracy the wily Nazis may simply have been in contact with The Spider before his untimely demise six years earlier. Just a theory.

In-house advertising, Republic style
Pursued by the Armstrongs, fifth columnist gangsters Crane and Hayes disappear through a false billboard hawking Ralph Byrd in Dick Tracy Vs. Crime, Inc., which just happened to be the studio’s previous serial. (Chapter 9.)

Ramsay Ames & G-Men Never Forget

2011-12-06T14:22:00.000+01:00

Sultry, Brooklyn-born Ramsay Ames (Nee Phillips, 1919-1998) had begun her career singing with a rumba orchestra before an injury to her back sidelined her burgeoning career. She left New York for Sunny Cal and nabbed contracts with first Columbia, then Universal where she briefly gave Maria Montez a run for her money. Today, she is best remembered for playing the imperiled girl in one of Universal's monster franchises, The Mummy's Ghost (1944). She was actually a late replacement for the studio's pedestrian Ape Girl, Acquanetta, whose thespian skills was apparently not up to the “demanding” role. Married to playwright Dale Wasserman (“Man of La Mancha”), Ramsay Ames later relocated to Spain, where she would appear in her final film, a supporting role in Carol Reed's The Running Man (1963). Ames other serial work: Ralph Byrd's leading lady in The Vigilante (Columbia, 1947) and a cameo in Republic's The Black Widow (1947).

G-Men Never Forgets (Republic, 1948)

Sprung from jail, master criminal Victor Murkland (Roy Barcroft) has Police Commissioner Cameron (also Roy Barcroft) kidnapped and, after a bit of plastic surgery, takes the commissioner's place and is free to pursue his criminal objective: a ruthless insurance protection racket that even includes sabotaging a GI Bill housing project.

Veteran Republic connoisseurs will once again marvel at how brilliantly the company manages to near-seamlessly combine old with new in G-Men Never Forget. Here is Roy Barcroft in the opening chapter putting pressure on poor old Edmund Cobb to pay up or else. The "or else" is the destruction of the channel island tunnel and we are treated to a cliffhanger lifted straight from the 12-year-old Dick Tracy. G-Men never forget, indeed! Where footage like this would show up as rather grainy and instantly recognizable stock at, say, Columbia and the late and often unlamented Universal, Republic made sure that no one was any the wiser – or at least no one with a short-term memory. That the studio chose stock footage from the old Dick Tracy serials to meet the necessary budget restraints is no coincidence: without exotic trappings such as monsters from Mars or weird despots teleported from who knows where, G-Men is really Dick Tracy redux, with Clayton Moore and company reactivating the old franchise without having to pay compensation, literally and figuratively, to Chester Gould.

And it almost works; Moore makes a fine G-Man, tight-lipped and no nonsense, and the beauteous Ramsay Ames is actually an improvement over Tracy's usual nondescript colleagues, even if studio hairdressers did give her a rather unbecoming but business-like short hairstyle. (In the opening chapter, Ames impersonates a gun moll and looks much more her usual glamorous self.) Roy Barcroft is, as always, a formidable foe and even gets to stretch his acting muscles by playing a good guy for a change, if ever so briefly. So when all is said and done, and like so many other Republic serials of the immediate post-war era, G-Men is much better than its reputation and perhaps even better than it needed to have been considering the competition.

… and their fellas: Drew Allen

With the possible exception of the 1946 Cisco Kid western The Gay Cavalier, also with Ramsay Ames, in which he played Helen Gerald's love interest (see an earlier entry), G-Men Never Forget marked the best opportunity for Drew Allen, a former Golden Glove boxing champ of Iowa and Minnesota. Allen, who was really Virgil Frye and hailed from Estherville, IA, plays Roy Barcroft's chief henchman, Duke Graham, and it is his hospitalization that gives agents Clayton Moore and Ramsay Ames their opportunity to infiltrate the gang. Allen later became known as Gil Frye and in August of 1963 he joined Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, director Billy Wilder, Charlton Heston (!), and other Hollywood progressives in a civil right march on Washington, D.C.

About the production
Like Republic's most recent releases, G-Men was originally intended as a 13-chapter serial. However, hasty rewrites eliminated chapter 10 and subsequent chapters were re-titled. Also eliminated was a confrontation in the opening chapter between Duke Graham (Drew Allen) and R.J. Cook's (Edmund Cobb) secretary, Miss Stewart (Dian Fauntelle), who was left with a single line in chapter 3. In contrast, the character of Frances Blake, played by Ramsay Ames, was expanded and she would figure prominently in several climactic shootouts. Clayton Moore provided his own wardrobe in this serial, purchased at McIntosh on Hollywood Blvd. “If you watch G-Men Never Forget, you’ll see exactly what the well-dressed man of 1947 was wearing,” Moore later wrote.

Location department
The sanitarium where Commissioner Cameron is kept hidden is actually the Duchess Ranch, complete with windmill, a set built in 1944 on the northeastern part of the Republic back lot for the Red Ryder Bwestern series starring William Elliott. The ranch house and barn turn up in scores of Republic feature films as well, instantly recognizable even when dressed to look like "modern" suburbia.

Lucille Lund & Pirate Treasure

2011-12-03T10:18:00.002+01:00

Although onscreen for mere minutes in The Black Cat, Universal's arguably most perverse thriller, starlet Lucille Lund, a sexy Rapunzel with long blonde tresses and a feline gait, managed to make an indelible impression as not only Boris Karloff's bride-to-be but also his stepdaughte. It was really a dual role; Lund also portrayed the girl's beautifully preserved dead mother (and Bela Lugosi's wife), vertically entombed in a glass casket. The role, short as it was, brought Lund a well-earned 1934 WAMPAS Baby Star nod, the last year this honor was bestowed upon various starlets. Despite the award, however, the actress' career with Universal failed to blossom. According to Lund, she had refused the amorous advances of production head Carl Laemmle Jr. and her Universal contract was not renewed.

The winner of Universal's "most beautiful and talented woman student on the American campus" contest while she was attending Northwestern, Lund made her screen debut in Saturday's Millions (1933), a football comedy. Unfortunately, Lund had to rebuff Laemmle's advances from the outset, which didn't sit well with the studio front office, and she soon found herself battling Walter Miller, Al Ferguson, and various wildlife fauna in Pirate Treasure (1934), a typical back-lot action serial. Lund's subsequent film, The Black Cat, must have felt like adding insult to injury. Director Edgar G. Ulmer proved a tyrant and a sadist, and once left Lund hanging in her glass casket while the company went off to lunch. After that debacle, leaving Universal probably came as a relief. The remainder of Lucille Lund's less-than-rewarding screen career was spent supporting lower-echelon cowboy stars such as Reb Russell and the slap-happy comedy team of the Three Stooges. Aside from The Black Cat, she is best known for her work with the Stooges in such two-reel comedies as 3 Dumb Clucks (1937) and Healthy, Wealthy, and Dumb (1938). Widowed by radio producer Kenneth Higgins and long out of public view, the actress returned to the limelight in the early '90s when she graced various film festivals with her reflections on both The Black Cat and the Stooges. (A version of this essay was published under my byline by the All-Movie Guide.)

Pirate Treasure (Universal, 1934)
Searching for his inheritance, an ancient treasure map, Dick Moreland (Richard Talmadge) is opposed by unscrupulous Staley Brassett (Walter Miller) and his gang of modern day pirates and cutthroats.

There are too many easy conjectures in film history and "truths" are repeated ad nausea with hardly anyone apparently willing to take the trouble of verifying their veracity. Such is the case of poor Richard Talmadge, the European-born silent screen daredevil whose rapid decline in talkies is usually explained by A: his problems with a foreign accent. Or B: a squeaky voice unsuited for heroics. One otherwise highly regarded serial historian, who is no longer with us and shall remain nameless, opined: "With the coming of sound, Talmadge's heavy German accent became a liability." Even a cursory look at Pirate Treasure completely fails to support such a statement, however, and Talmadge certainly wasn't dubbed. Yes, his voice was not exactly a manly basso but it was no girlish squeak, either. If Talmadge spoke with a hint of an accent, the origins may be located somewhere nearer to Flatbush Ave. than his native Switzerland.

It has also been stated that Pirate Treasure is strangely devoid of eye-catching stunt work, another "truism" wholly debunked already in an opening chapter that has the hero (and/or his real life stunt-double brothers Otto and Victor Metzetti) spending the final five minutes or so in one seamless series of stunts that include leaping from a cliff to a speeding car, battling three bad guys in said careening vehicle, and finally taking a terrific dive, automobile and all, off the pier at San Pedro. The following chapter is nearly wall-to-wall acrobatic action culminating with Talmadge being shoved off the roof of a six story building, his descent slowed down only by a succession of canopies. Treasure never lets up from there and in fact tends to become almost too stunt driven. There are of course the wild, camera undercranking donnybrooks typical of the early sound era with everyone flailing wildly with little or no discernible result, but that is just par for the course. Talmadge is attacked by a horde of henchmen in virtually every chapter and you're hard pressed to tell friend from foe among the flapping arms and legs. None of it is at all realistic, and the fights, as strange as it may sound, sometimes become complete action stoppers. But for all its faults, devoid of stunt work Pirate Treasure is not!

About the production:
Né Metzetti and from a Swiss-German family of acrobats, Richard Talmadge (1892-1981) had been Douglas Fairbanks’ stunt-double before embarking on a screen career as an action star in his own right. He continued his low-budget film career into the sound era -- and here is the rub for the so-called historians: Talmadge's sound films didn't differ one iota in concept or budgets from his silents -- before drifting into stunt coordinating, working well into the 1960s. Although no relation to silent stars Norma and Constance Talmadge, Richard Talmadge never actively dissuaded the notion.

Playing a true starring role in Pirate Treasure, the Lottie Carson was a real ship of that name anchored in 1933 at San Pedro, California. The vessel, according to an undated source, had a long and dramatic history before becoming a popular movie location.

“The little three-masted [sic] schooner Lottie Carson of 295 tons, built by Hall Bros. in 1881, also entered another phase of a long and checkered career. She had passed to Mexican owners during the First World War, being operated as the Lenora by F. Jebsen, the notorious German agent. After the war she was sold at auction in Victoria for $3,650 to W. H. Drewitt, who installed a gasoline auxiliary engine and entered her in the [bootleg] service as Coal Harbor. In February, 1925 she was captured bythe U. S. Coast Guard in southern California waters as a suspected rum runner, was towed to San Francisco and sold at auction to Los Angeles owners, who restored her original name, but found no use for her. After several years in lay-up she was given a peculiar bark rig and appeared in several motion pictures, including Slave Ship, Souls at Sea and South of Pago Pago.”

Cliffhanger cheat ("Annie Wilkes Hall of Shame" nominee)
With an obvious rag doll substituting, Dick Moreland is flung off a steep cliff in chapter 9. In chapter 10, alas, our hero simply dusts himself off and continues his quest apparently no worse for wear.

It's a Small World After All
Our intrepid heroes get a break when the uncharted island containing the treasure proves to be inhabited by Polynesian-looking "wild savages" speaking Spanish!

An Introduction to Sound Serials Part III:

2011-12-02T14:08:00.003+01:00

Is has often been claimed that chapter plays caught performers on their way up or down. The latter is most certainly true and nearly every silent era performer still working seems to have traipsed through a serial or two in the 1930s, some, like Jack Mulhall, Robert Frazer, and Reed Howes, even in starring roles. But when discussing serial performers who actually graduated to major mainstream stardom, most historians and/or buffs can only come up with John Wayne, George Brent, and Jennifer Jones, who, credited as Phyllis Isley (her real name), earned $75 a week to play Ralph Byrd’s leading lady in Dick Tracy’s G-Men in 1939. But most young serial performers became pigeonholed from the experience. “I truly enjoyed working in serials, but I couldn’t help wonder if they were a sort of dead end,” Clayton Moore wrote in his fine autobiography “I Was
That Masked Man” (Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing Company, 1996).

Like a close relative, the 2-reel comedy short, serials were a world apart from feature films and often deemed unworthy even by Hollywood hopefuls with supposedly nothing to lose. In a typical move, when signing with Republic in 1941 Bill Elliott, whose initial fame had been made in the genre (see the previous post, A Bill Elliott serial double bill), stipulated that he should no longer be forced to appear in chapter plays. Robert Livingston, star of Republic's first Western cliffhanger, The Vigilantes Are Coming (1936), similarly earned the contractual right to henceforth refuse serials. The studio, of course, turned right around and cast him in The Lone Ranger Rides Again (1939). Livingston later told his biographer, Merrill McCord:

"I fought that thing when they came and told me that I was going to do it. I said, 'Oh, no. It's in my contract. I don't have to do any serials.'"

But studio head Herbert J. Yates convinced him to play the legendary masked avenger by guaranteeing a series of feature films about the character plus plenty of publicity. In the end Republic reneged on everything (in fact, an agreement between the studio and “Lone Ranger” copyright holder George W. Trendle prohibited Livingston from appearing publicly as the character) and like so many of his peers, Livingston long regretted having accepted serial work.

Republic players Dorothy Patrick and Robert Rockwell had apparently anticipated trouble and their contracts prevented their casting in either Westerns or serials. Songstress Ruth Terry’s contract only precluded serials. Featured actors were warned against chapter plays as well, and even The Black Widow herself, Carol Forman, who is remembered solely for those she did accept, claimed to have turned down three serials in a single week, her agent warning her that they would hurt her career. "Serials were the 'street urchins' of the business," Forman admitted to film historian Buck Rainey. Another newcomer, Penny Edwards, opted out altogether. As the former Republic starlet told an audience at the 1994 Knoxville Western Film Festival:

"I loved the studio, but when they wanted to put me in [Zombies of the Stratosphere] I asked for a release. I didn't want to do it, so I went to 20th Century- Fox." (She was replaced in Zombies by the much more pliable Aline Towne. See an earlier post.)

Nan Grey, who had starred opposite Deanna Durbin in Three Smart Girls (1936) and appeared in several quasi horror films, flatly refused to do Universal's "Million Dollar Super Serial," Riders of Death Valley (1941), and was promptly suspended. Her screen career never recovered. (Jeanne Kelly, later known as Jean Brooks, replaced her.) In contrast, Peggy Stewart agreed to star in two Republic serials, The Phantom Rider (1946) and Son of Zorro (1947), before demanding a release from her contract. Ironically, the first thing she did after leaving Republic was Columbia's Tex Granger (1948), another chapter play.

For celebrated British stage and screen actor Lionel Atwill, cliffhangers became in essence a last resort after a highly publicized perjury conviction in a case that included possession of pornography and other salacious charges. Republic and Universal recognized Atwill's still very potent marquee value and assigned him top villainous roles in Captain America (1944), Raiders of Ghost City (1944) and Lost City of the Jungle (1945), in one case actually paying him a higher salary than the serial’s hero. Atwill died while filming Lost City and had to be replaced by body and voice doubles. Serials didn't kill him (bronchial cancer did), but the lack of prestige could not have helped. Hoping to resurrect a waning career, B-western star Jack Randall was fatally injured filming so-called running inserts on the location for Universal's The Royal Mounted Rides Again (1945), Randall having accepted the serial against the advice of his brother, former chapter play star Robert Livingston.

A virtual cinematic Siberia, in other words, cliffhangers tended to either create their own stars – Ralph Byrd, Larry "Buster" Crabbe, Kane Richmond, competent enough performers but perhaps just missing that extra spark that could turn them into major box-office champions – or rely on older genre perennials like Bela Lugosi, Tom Mix, or Ken Maynard, once celebrated in their various fields but somewhat limited either by thespian talent or their own publicity. Significantly, many actors preferred not to list their serial work in the annual casting directories.

The exception to all this doom and gloom seems to have been the non-professionals, stars from other media corralled by enterprising serial producers to perform in a chapter play or two. Football hero Harold "Red" Grange, who had some screen acting experience in the silent days, was persuaded to star in a signature serial from Mascot, The Galloping Ghost (1931), earning $4500 for three weeks work, a considerable sum at the height of the Depression. When reached by interviewers late in life, another former gridiron star, "Slingin' Sammy" Baugh, had only good things to say about his experiences of playing Republic's King of the Texas Rangers (1941), Baugh's
only stab at acting. Also generally pleased with their serial work were several of the better character actors specializing in the action field. Roy Barcroft, Republic's ace B-western villain of the mid to late-1940s, told the writer Ken Jones that he enjoyed playing serial Heavies, the viler the better, adding that he even relished wearing elaborate costumes "such as The Purple Monster Strikes and my own favorite Manhunt of Mystery Island [both 1945]."

But to many performers, serials were akin to cruel and unusual punishment. For one thing, wages were comparatively small (Kane Richmond, one of the highest paid performers, was awarded $450 weekly to play Republic’s Spy Smasher and Clayton Moore recalled getting paid $200 a week to co-star in Perils of Nyoka) and actual filming was tough and often dirty work for both cast and crew. George J. Lewis, star of Mascot's The Wolf Dog and Republic's Zorro's Black Whip, admitted to the writer Alan G. Barbour that "I never worked harder in my life," and the most famous serial hero of them all, Buster Crabbe, concurred. "They started shooting Flash Gordon in October of 1935," the former champion swimmer told author Roy Kinnard,

"and to bring it in on the six-week schedule we had to average 85 set-ups a day. That means moving and rearranging the heavy equipment we had, the arc lights and everything, 85 times a day… It wasn't fun, it was a lot of work."

Lucille Lund, blond leading lady of Universal's Pirate Treasure (1934; German poster, right)), remembered how she ended up being "pummeled royally all the time" by the stuntmen. "They were always very sorry afterward, they were very kind," she told Michael G. Fitzgerald in “Westerns Women.” Lorna Gray emerged black and blue from her many encounters with good friend Kay Aldridge on Perils of Nyoka (1942), Columbia starlet Shirley Patterson got sick for real from Dr. Daka's zombie fumes in Batman (1943), and Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) heroine Louise Currie balked at performing an underwater stunt. "Well, I decided that wasn't part of my talent and I said I didn't think I could do it," Currie told Serial World Magazine.

"The station wagon was supposed to go completely into the water and I could just visualize myself drowning until they finally rescued me. So I became a little stubborn at that moment and told [associate producer] Hiram Brown that I wouldn't do it. Finally, we agreed."

Linda Stirling, perhaps the best remembered sound-era serial actress of them all, vividly recalled the rigors of filming exteriors. "We shot most of the outdoor stuff at Iverson's Ranch, and I can still remember every physical aspect of it – the rocks, the trails, the bushes, everything," she told Buck Rainey in “Those Fabulous Serial Heroines.” "I had no skill whatsoever with horses," Stirling added, "and more than once the crew would find me sprawled in the dust or crumpled in the bushes after my horse had run away with me." In contrast, Peggy Stewart, a contemporary of Linda's at Republic, mostly found serial-making tedious. "Serials got so boring," the former starlet complained to biographers Bob Carman and Dan Scapperotti.

"You're jumping around from chapter ten to chapter one or whatever, because you're trying to film all the scenes that take place on a set at the same time … You were three or four weeks' time on those serials and you got the same darn hairdo or the same dress or costume all the time."

Although an icon of the genre, Kay Aldridge admitted to her biographer Merrill McCord that she had never seen a single chapter of any of her serials until 1978. “I didn’t understand the concept,” she said. “I didn’t know what a serial was when I made [them].” Due, she went on to explain, to the way chapter plays were filmed: out of sequence and on a fast schedule with no rehearsals and no retakes … “unless the horses went to the bathroom on camera.” Lorna Gray (AKA Adrian Booth) told an audience at the 2006 SerialFest that she was required to learn not only the lines of the next day's filming but, in case of inclement weather prohibiting location shooting, dialogue from several interiors scenes as well. "The girls in serials and their hairdressers reported to the studio as early as four o'clock in the morning in order to get ready," Gray remembered, adding that a full day could easily run into early evening. To have a life, some of Republic's serial queens stayed at a motel across from the studio on Ventura Boulevard.

To be continued …

Lead henchman Anthony Warde considered Universal the best of the serial factories. Not because the chapter plays there were necessarily superior but Universal paid more. Columbia in general and cheapskate producer Sam Katzman in particular ranked the lowest in both pay and esteem, with Republic, according to Warde, landing somewhere in between. "Oh, we had fun in those days wherever we were," he nevertheless told writer Gregory Jackson, Jr. "We all kind of laughed at this whole [serial] thing." Serial star John Hart concurred: “"I had big parts in lousy movies and lousy parts in big movies. I never made a lot of money, but it sure was fun.” Victor Jory had a lot of fun as well playing The Shadow (Columbia 1940) but, as he told an audience at a serial fair in Charlotte, North Carolina in the 1980s, “we weren’t so lucky with The Green Archer [Columbia 1940]; it didn’t make much sense.”

“As hard as we worked on The Perils of Nyoka [Republic 1942], I don’t remember feeling as though we were under unbearable pressure. I was a hard job, but an enjoyable one,” Clayton Moore later wrote about his serial starring debut. The busiest supporting player of them all, Tom London, explained to serial historian William C. Cline why he never minded being typecast as a reprobate in chapter plays and B-Westerns. “It kept the groceries on the table for a long time,” London said. “I worked steady for fifty-nine years.”

Chapter plays were especially taxing for the stunt performers. Unlike most cast and crew-members, stuntmen, and sometimes women, were paid handsomely for their efforts, often more than the lead actors who at times were picked solely for their physical resemblance to potential doubles. “I always took my leading roles with a grain of salt,” said Clayton Moore. “It seemed to me that the only requirements for getting a lead in a Republic serial were that you read dialogue, be in strong physical condition, and closely resemble at least one of the stuntmen.” Typically, David Sharpe, who doubled all the leads in Perils of Nyoka, earned the highest salary of any performer in that classic serial, $350 a week, followed closely, at $300, by Emil Van Horn, the stuntman wearing the chapter play's menacing gorilla suit. The only stuntman ever to be awarded an actual term-contract with action oriented Republic, Tom Steele earned $150 weekly for feature film work but as a testament to the strenuous nature of serials $350 a week for chapter plays. In contrast, Linda Stirling’s stunt double, Nellie Walker, would typically take home $60 a week, around the same amount awarded the average supporting player. (Roy Barcroft claimed to have earned $66 a week for his first Republic serial, S O S Coast Guard, but his was a bit role and probably never lasted a full week). The list of Republic stunt people reads like a roll call of founding fathers (and mothers) of the Stuntmen's Association: Yakima Canutt, Richard Talmadge, Earl Bunn (who had a wooden leg), Fred Graham (Roy Barcroft’s regular double), Tom Steele, Dale Van Sickel, Jimmy Fawcett, Dave Sharpe, Helen Thurston, Thelma "Babe" DeFreest, Nellie Walker, brothers Joe and Bill Yrigoyen, Post Parks (stage-driving specialist) and on and on. As a performer in serials, you had to get along with these sturdy men and women; sissies, prima donnas, and general hams needed not apply. And if they did, like Zorro Rides Again's vainglorious John Carroll, they rarely earned a second call.

"[The stuntmen] taught me a lot about timing. They made me look good in those fights even when I wasn't being doubled," said character actor and busy serial performer George J. Lewis, who even starred in one, Republic's Zorro's Black Whip (1944).

Chapter plays were not very rewarding for the serious thespian. As noted above, salaries were generally far from generous and dialogue, the actor’s chief tool, was usually purely utilitarian in nature with the sole purpose of explaining what was going on and setting up the next situation. “We’ll use our disintegrating guns,” as a couple of 25th century space cadets helpfully say in Buck Rogers (Universal 1939), a statement that in real life would be redundant. Serial characters also did not discuss important issues of the day and seemed incapable of harboring any feelings other than goodhearted camaraderie or diabolical hatred, or, at the other extreme, slavish obedience. One who felt trapped was perennial henchman Anthony Warde, who was never completely at ease playing villains. "I always felt a little self-conscious," he told Gregory Jackson. Similarly, George J. Lewis found the stilted dialogue difficult to make believable. Clayton Moore knew he was in trouble when perusing the script for the first day of filming Republic’s Jungle Drums of Africa. Breaking out a bottle of bubbly, Moore toasted his leading lady, Phyllis Coates, with: “Welcome to the bottom of the barrel.”

In contrast, John Wayne, who starred in three Mascot serials early in his career, chose in later years to stress the positive aspects for young actors: "It was a great experience," he said in an interview long after becoming a legend. “It was helpful, and it made me realize how wonderful it is to work in an 'A' picture where you're given the chance to walk into a situation and react rather than tell the audience what's going to happen and tell them where you're going to go and then telling them that you're there and then telling them what you're going to do.”

Wayne, of course, was one of the fortunate few who would eventually escape both the stilted dialogue and the furious pace of serial-making that would reach an incredible 114 setups on one very long day on the set of Shadow of the Eagle (1932). At the time, though, he was just glad to be working at all. The same could be said for George Brent, a handsome Broadway actor who despite a fine, theatrically trained voice had failed to interest any of the major studios. The enterprising Brent then presented himself to Mascot’s Nat Levine and was hired to play the male lead opposite Rin Tin Tin in The Lightning Warrior (1931). The newcomer was typically stiff in the role but Warner Bros. saw something in him and placed him under contract. The rest, as they say, is history. Rinty, incidentally, received $5000 for his performance in The Lightning Warrior, his final film, George Brent considerably less than his canine co-star. (Seventeen years later Mascot’s successor, Republic, would pay Brent a whopping $100,000 for starring in Angel on the Amazon.)

Frank Coghlan, Jr., who played Billy Batson in Republic's Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), always assumed that he landed the role solely because of age and availability. But casting even in serials could occasionally be with motives other than purely economic or simple availability. Running into director William Witney many years later, Coghlan finally learned exactly why he had been picked. "You were hired for the part because you were a damn good actor and we knew you could play the part the way we wanted it played” Witney told him. Another youngster, well, another actor playing a youngster, Batman and Robin’s Johnny Duncan stepped into the role when no one else seemed suitable. “Bob Kane was with Sam Katzman at Columbia Studio there,” Duncan told San Jose radio host Peter Canavese.

“They wanted a boy sixteen years old, and Sam knew me and thought of me for the part when Kane first came up … about the project. But Kane wanted a kid sixteen years old, and at that time I was twenty-six years old. So he said, 'Oh, no, I don’t want a guy twenty-six years old, you know, that’s as old as Batman.' So, anyway, why they looked at, gosh, kids and kids and kids and kids, and finally they couldn’t find anybody – Kane didn’t like ‘em, so Sam called me and he says, “hey, John, wear some jeans or somethin’ and a sweater and look as young as you can, for God sakes, don’t comb your hair or nothin’, you know, just come on over.” So I did. And so when I walked in the door, before I was even introduced, Kane says, 'Hey, that’s Robin.' So that’s how I got the part.

Everybody’s favorite 1930s serial queen, Flash Gordon's Jean Rogers, credited chapter plays for boosting her career. "In retrospect, it was a training ground that paved the way for my growth as an actress and enabled me to play feature roles in major films while under long-term contracts to Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer and Twentieth Century-Fox," she told Buck Rainey. Kay Aldridge, who starred in three serials for Republic, found the experience “a comedown in one way for a [former] featured player at Fox, but a come up in another way because I was the lead.” “I tried my best,” she added, “but it was very hard to learn to be an actress in [serials].”

Some actors were literally left to fend for themselves. As the star of Flying Disc Man from Mars, Walter Reed, recalled for B-Movie historian Tom Weaver: “The director would say, ‘Okay, now drive down the street in this car …’ I’d drive away, drive quite a ways away, then turn around and come back – and they’d be gone! That’s how fast they were shooting.” For a lucky few, however, serial-filming was easy, like playing a game. According to Bill Witney, Adventures of Red Ryder's Little Beaver, child actor Tommy Cook, quickly learned to ride and would always be ready to "chase down the bandits." Another boy rider, Sammy McKim, was so natural in The Painted Stallion (1937) and The Lone Ranger (1939) that Republic considered starring him in a Western series of his own; sadly, contract negotiations ran into conflict over finances, and the proposed series never materialized. And then there was House Peters, Jr. who, at age 19, bluffed his way into The Adventures of Frank Merriwell (Universal 1935), an aviation serial cast mainly with sons of silent stars: Jean Hersholt, Jr., Wallace Reid, Jr., Bryant Washburn, Jr. According to serial historian Bill Cline, House climbed the fence to Universal and when asked if he was one of the “juniors,” the son of the late matinee idol House Peters could truthfully reply, “Sure I am!”

What actors today disparagingly perceive as typecasting was in Classic Hollywood seen as necessary narrative shortcuts. Whether cast in B-Westerns and serials or major feature films, character players performed immediately recognizable functions that made everything so much easier for the writers. You instantly knew that although pretending to be a trustworthy businessman, rotund Arthur Loft was up to absolutely no good, no need for much elaboration. From major studio character stars such as Frank Morgan, Eugene Pallette, or Edward Arnold, each fulfilling a specific and recognizable function in the play, to serial performers like Lafe McKee, Joseph Crehan, Noah Beery, Harry Cording, Ernie Adams and Tristram Coffin – fatherly kindness, governmental efficiency, jocular villainy, brutish menace, sniveling cowardice and oily malice respectively – supporting players made lengthy explanations unnecessary, a useful proposition in B-Movies of all sorts but particularly in serials where exposition of any kind would simply take time away from the action. Veterancharacter actors with long careers in theater may not necessarily have enjoyed working in serials but their professionalism, and even more importantly, familiarity made them irreplaceable. I. Stanford Jolley is a case in point. A fine character actor who would turn up in scores of B-Westerns and serials, Jolley instantly connected with an audience who always knew that he was less than trustworthy whether playing a henchman or a “brains heavy.” No need for much exposition. Moviegoers not attracted to action films, however, only recognized him as a bit player, e.g. the station master in the yuletide perennial White Christmas (1954), but Saturday marquee fans had his number. Incidentally, B-movie work was never all that lucrative for character people like Jolley who, his widow claimed, never made more than $100 on any given assignment no matter how long the duration. Which, if true, would include director William Witney’s final chapter play, The Crimson Ghost (1946), where Jolley, who played the title role when masked as well as a bit part, was billed fourth right behind lead henchman Clayton Moore. Taking for granted by both audience and the industry, supporting players such as Stan Jolley, George Chesebro, Charlie King, Al Ferguson, Bud Osborne, and Jack Ingram were, according to actress Nell O’Day, who worked with all of them, “the real professionals of the Westerns and serials.”

To be continued ...

A Bill Elliott serial double bill

2011-12-01T19:17:00.004+01:00

The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (Columbia, 1938)
Famed lawman Wild Bill Hickok is assigned a U.S. Marshal post to bring peace to the town of Abilene, Kansas, to ensure that the railroad construction is free of sabotage, and to safeguard the Chisholm Trail in general and the first Texas to Abilene cattle drive in particular from cattle rustlers – much to the chagrin of Morell (Robert Fiske) and his Phantom Raiders who aim to prevent both the railroad and the Camerons (Monte Blue and Carole Wayne) from ever reaching Abilene.

Overland with Kit Carson (Columbia, 1939)
The government sends out famous scout Kit Carson to quell a series of terrorist attacks, all committed by the Black Raiders against homesteaders. Behind the crimes, it turns out, is a mystery man apparently lacking one appendage and thus known as Pegleg, who wishes to control the entire area.

Carole Wayne, a girl singer at the Brown Derby before her brief starlet career with Columbia Pictures,later toured in the musical show “Girls a Poppin'” and the drama “The Edge of Darkness.” She was married 1933-1942 to Bobby Webb, a Republic Pictures casting director.

(photo of Carole Wayne courtesy of Les Adams)

Formerly seen as lounge lizard types in melodramas, Gordon Elliott (né Nance) changed his first name to the more masculine Bill and became Columbia’s resident Western serial star with The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok and Overland with Kit Carson, both budgeted at around $200,000 each. A not too surprising tally considering that Columbia threw everything and the kitchen sink into both chapter plays, the studio's very first sagebrush serials, including location filming in the faraway Utah desert. Every genre cliché seems present: stampedes (both wild horse and cattle), saloon brawls, shootouts in the streets of Abilene, Indian attacks on stockades, fake Indian attacks on wagon trains, the crossing of rapid rivers, and on and on. Even a variation of "head him off at the pass" is heard at one point in chapter 2 of Wild Bill. Kit Carson adds a none-too easily detected mystery villain and is perhaps the better scripted of the two, but few serials had the epic sweep of Wild Bill Hickok.

The directors, Mack Wright, Norman Deming and Sam Nelson have not exactly gone down in Hollywood history as innovative, or even particularly accomplished, but they certainly knew how to achieve plenty of movement, and horses, dust, and people fill the screen at all moments, sometimes literally obfuscating the desert sun. Stagecoaches crash into rivers, prairie schooners burn, arrows whistle, and explosions light up the screen. This is B-Western filming at its sprawling best, serial or otherwise, and it is not hard to imagine that youngsters everywhere would eagerly return for a grand total of 30 weeks to learn what happened. Or that Bill Elliott, who claimed to have based his cowboy hero personality on silent screen icon William S. Hart, would emerge a major genre star, retaining his "peaceable man" motto and the gun handles facing forward for the remainder of his long career in Westerns. Both Wild Bill Hickok and Kit Carson remain thrilling chapter plays and belong to any Western serial top 10 list. Bill Elliott did a third Columbia serial, The Valley of Vanishing Men (1943), before defecting to Republic complete with a non-chapter play clause in his contract.(Elliott would later use the more grown-up designation of William Elliott when starring in Republic "A" Westerns, but never William "Wild Bill" Elliott as is often claimed.)

About the productions
Carole Wayne, Bill Elliott’s first serial leading lady, apparently only made that film but his second, Iris Meredith (1915-1980), was a former Goldwyn Girl who went on to appear in 31 B-Westerns, 20 of them opposite Columbia’s top sagebrush star, Charles Starrett. She later toiled for poverty row company PRC before leaving films to marry director Abby Berlin. Even more brave than her screen heroines, a cancer-stricken and horribly disfigured Meredith accepted an award at the 1976 Nashville Western Film Festival, her final public appearance. Appropriately, the former actress received a standing ovation.

Locations
Kanab, “Utah’s Own Little Hollywood,” St. George and Zion National Park, Utah, and Red Rock Canyon.

Uncredited appearances
As we stated before, Columbia spared no expense (well almost) making Wild Bill Hickok and Kit Carson and the generously large casts include a host of familiar faces: Silver Tip Baker, Chuck Baldra, Ed Brady, Al Bridge, Budd Buster, George Chesebro, Edmund Cobb, Iron Eyes Cody, Richard Cramer, Lester Dorr, Kenne Duncan, Earl Dwire, Frank Ellis, Eddie Foster, Martin Garralaga, William Gould, Edward Hearn, Earle Hodgins, Frank Lackteen, Ethan Laidlaw, Ed LeSaint, Tom London, Lew Meehan, Walter Miller, Jack Montgomery, Tex Palmer, Bill Patton, Jack Perrin, Pascale Perry, Carl Sepulveda,Tom Steele, Blackjack Ward, Bill Wilkerson, Charles "Slim" Whitaker, and Bob Woodward. One question remains, though: What did Bud Osborne do to not be in these serials?

A Johnny Mack Brown serial double-bill

2011-12-01T16:02:00.001+01:00

Flaming Frontiers (Universal, 1938)
Indian scout Tex Houston (Johnny Mack Brown) helps Mary Grant (Eleanor Hansen) locate her brother Tom (Ralph Bowman and later known as John Archer), who has been kidnapped by a gang of outlaws desiring his rich mining property. Their leader, Bart Eaton (James Blaine), plans to force Mary into marrying him to get control over her inheritance, but another faction lead by Ace Daggett (Chas. Middleton) also wants the mine.

The Oregon Trail (Universal, 1939)
Famous scout Jeff Scott (Johnny Mack Brown) is assigned by Colonel Custer (yep, that Custer!) to safeguard an Oregon-bound wagon train that has become the target of a certain Eastern syndicate. Headed by Sam Morgan (James Blaine), the latter is determined to keep outsiders away from lucrative but illegal fur trade with the Indians.

Eleanor Hansen
Under contract to first RKO and then (due to her marriage; see below) 20th Century-Fox, Eleanor Hansen did her only work of any importance in Flaming Frontiers. Yet she did become part of Hollywood Royalty by extension. In early 1939, gossip maven Walter Winchell revealed that Eleanor Hansen was dating 20th Century-Fox musical star Alice Faye's brother and manager Bill. Or in Walter's inimitable way: “Alice Faye's brother Bill and Eleanor Hansen, a west coast tidbit, are impersonating the equator.” By April of 1939 there were marriage rumors and on May 10, the rumors were confirmed: Eleanor had become Mrs. Bill Faye at Tijuana, Mexico a month or so earlier. The couple apparently spent the honeymoon at Alice Faye and husband Tony Martin's Beverly Hills mansion, Alice and Tony being away on a personal appearance tour. Eleanor ended her screen career in 1942.

The wagon trains in both Flaming Frontiers and The Oregon Trail are attacked by silent era stock footage Indians – the very same Indians striking out from a picturesque settlement in Red Rock Canyon that had imperiled wagon trains in a host of Universal and other studio Westerns since Hoot Gibson’s The Flaming Frontier (1926). But what may be a bit disconcerting to a modern viewer was par for the course in the 1930s; the very obvious stock footage in Columbia’s Lost Horizon (1937), as film restoration expert Robert Gitt notes, never deterred anyone from calling that film a near-masterpiece, and moviegoers at the time, especially in rural areas, became immune to grainy and sometimes splotchy copies of even current releases. It was really less a matter of ignorance than simple convention.

With that said, however, it does take away a bit of the excitement when stock footage of a huge wagon train, cattle and all, fleeing from a blazing prairie fire suddenly turns into a few covered wagons and Johnny Mack Brown, or when a large band of “Redskins” swoops down on a Western town that looks nothing like Trail’s main backlot street. It is difficult to date most of the stock, but Ken Maynard is clearly seen on his famous horse Tarzan in both serials and pernicious Universal didn’t even bother matching Johnny Mack Brown’s shirt with Maynard’s in Trail. In operation at the same place since 1914 and churning out scores of Westerns every year, Universal owned a large amount of spectacular footage to choose from. Not that the studio stinted on the budget for extras or that the new stuff isn’t thrilling enough, what with Johnny Mack Brown duking it out with every renegade in sight, saving damsels in distress and surviving the sharing of scenes with both a pooch (Frontiers) and a tow-headed boy actor (Trail).

Flaming Frontiers, which opens with more story than action, remains perhaps the better of the two serials, but it is a close call. The attention to story content should not be all that surprising considering that the chapter play was one of the few Western serials "suggested" by a literary work, in this case pulp favorite Peter B. Kyne's "The Tie That Binds." Not that the subsequent chapters were all that "literary"; once the conflict has been established it is more or less down to business as usual.

But what surprising business it sometimes is, what with an Indian attack on a deserted shack during a windstorm interrupted only by the arrival of a cyclone. Said cyclone constitutes chapter 2's cliffhanger, a rare occasion where the second chapter is more exiting and better composed than the opener. Later, in chapters 9-10, the entire town is flooded when a damn breaks in yet another prairie storm, with hero Johnny Mack Brown seemingly trapped in a shack after a terrific fight with henchmen Charlie King and Charles Stevens.

Yet despite Peter B. Kyne, and good performances by the Universal stock company, including Roy Barcroft as Custer, of all people, in Trail, both serials come with the same problems that plagued several Universal and Columbia Western chapter plays of the 1930s: too much familiar footage, under-cranked fights that reminds a viewer of silent film comedies, and stories that simply cannot sustain 15 chapters.

Louise Stanley
A brunette starlet and B-Western heroine, Louise Stanley (1915-1982)married two of her leading men: Dennis O'Keefe and Jack Randall (aka Addison Randall). Born Louisa Todd Keys, Stanley began her screen career under contract to Paramount and later to Warner Bros., both of whom mainly farmed her out to independent companies. She subsequently went on to work for most of the B-Western producers, including Universal, Republic, and Monogram, starring opposite everyone from Johnny Mack Brown to Tex Ritter to Jack Randall, who became the second of her three husbands. Stanley appeared in a total of 15 B-Westerns before leaving films for good in 1944. She later married a navy pilot and resettled in Florida. (This essay appeared originally under my byline on the All-Movie Guide.)

About the productions
Although very similar in concept and execution Flaming Frontiers and The Oregon Trail (1939) were not actually filmed simultaneously (the latter went into production in early 1939 while Frontiers were still doing the rounds), but to Mack Brown they tended to blend together: "I'd do a scene for one,” he would remember in a late interview, “then get on my horse and ride over a hill and do a scene for the other. Back and forth I went every day until one or the other was finished. And I never once changed hats."

Next to Mack Brown, the most memorable player in both serials is Charles Stevens (1893-1964), reportedly a grandson of Geronimo and a prominent supporting player in the silent epics of Douglas Fairbanks. Reduced to smaller roles in sound films, usually as “half-breeds,” Stevens earned his best chances to shine in these two serials, promptly stealing every scene he is in with performances much more modern in tone than you have come to expect.

Locations:
Universal City and Kernville.

Publicity:
According to an uncredited news item planted by the Universal publicity department, Johnny Mack Brown rescued his Flaming Frontiers leading lady Eleanor Hansen for real during filming:

“The film star, former all-American'football player Johnny Mack Brown, and Miss Hansen were riding horses through a crowd of movie Indians on an outdoor set of the picture Flaming Frontier.

“An Indian chief's war bonnet frightened the actress' horse and it bolted for a rocky ravine. Brown galloped his horse after her and pulled Miss Hansen from the saddle before her mount plunged into the ravine.”

Uncredited appearances:
Scores of familiar faces turn up without credit in both serials, including Hank Bell, Dick Botiller, Ed Brady, Budd Buster, Horace B. Carpenter, Lane Chandler, Jim Corey, Frank Ellis, Helen Gibson, Herman Hack, Kenneth Harlan, Frank LaRue, Tom London, Cactus Mack, Bud McClure, J. P. McGowan, Lafe McKee, Artie Ortego, Warner P. Richmond (as General Sherman, no less), Harry Tenbrook, Blackjack Ward, and Charles “Slim” Whitaker.

An Introduction to Sound Serials Part II:

2011-11-29T16:50:00.003+01:00

From my unpublished "Next Week at This Theater"

Writer Jon Tuska has observed that the filming of the West was effected by a comparatively small group of people, around 200 in all. The same could be said of the sound serial. You spot the same names again and again in chapter play credits – approximately twenty writers seem to have penned all of them, flitting from one studio to the next – and more so than any other genre chapter plays depended on a specific type of director who knew how to translate the often telephone-book thick "treatments" into practical film blocking, be able to guide both action and more intimate scenes and keep everything on or preferably under budget. It quickly became clear that one man could not possibly do all that without sacrificing something important and team work became more or less standard operation.

The best of the directorial duos was undoubtedly Republic's William Witney & John English, who reportedly divvied up the chores with Witney taking care of the action and English concentrating more on the performance. (Surviving serial star Adrian Booth remembers no difference between them, however.) Other teams would work on alternate days, the down time usually spent blocking the following day's scenes. As a sad comment on the changing times and economics, most post-WWII serials were again directed by single directors, with Fred C. Brannon or Franklyn Adreon helming all of Republic's final chapter plays. According to actor Walter Reed, Brannon “was fast. He used to be a prop man and … he couldn’t direct. He was a nice guy, but very macho you know. He thought he was a tough guy.”

What Brannon and the others had in common, however, was an ability to edit in camera, making everything so much easier and less time-consuming in post-production, and an overall capacity to work fast. No one was faster than Spencer Gordon Bennet, who directed more serials, silent and sound, than anybody else. As Bennet told the writer Francis M. Nevins:

“When I went over to Republic [they] used to shoot their master scenes right through. They'd wreck the set. Then they'd have to set it up and do it over. I didn't do it that way. I would take it in four segments. I would say, 'From here to here I want a certain routine.' I'd let [the stunt men] work it out because they knew what they had to work with, they'd see what was there on the set. So they'd go ahead and work out the routine from there to there… then I'd match in the principals in the second
segment. Then the doubles would match the way they went out. That's why it was easy to shoot those fights that way, because I had capable men who knew how to do it.”

Another prolific director, Ford I. Beebe, who spent most of his serial career with Universal, always maintained that his ability to get things done on time and under budget prevented him from obtaining work in more mainstream fare. Starlet Kay Aldridge, who worked with both Witney & English and Bennet, later told her biographer, Merrill T. McCord, that they

"were real men. I had a feeling that they were really more like the old-time directors must have been. They really had to work hard. They knew how to handle crowds."

Much overlooked in the annals of film history, the serial directors were a hearty lot that often managed to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

An Introduction to Sound Serials Part I:

2011-11-28T13:18:00.003+01:00

From my unpublished "Next Week at This Theater"

"Most of us actors wanted to do our own stunts … and most of the stuntmen wanted to be actors” … actor Pierce Lyden

"There were times when I would have to pretend to shoot a man off a balcony. Then, when the scene was over, I would change wardrobe and go up on the balcony and fall off" … stunt man Tom Steele

Thanks to Jack Mathis and his life's work, the four volume "Valley of the Cliffhangers," "Valley of the Cliffhangers Supplement," and "Republic Confidential Volumes 1 and 2," we have an accurate accounting of how the leading chapter play producer, Republic Pictures, created their 66 serials, and although minutiae probably varied (costs certainly did), both Universal and Columbia most likely employed similar methods. Republic, as we shall see, inherited much of their serial-making expertise from Nat Levine's Mascot Pictures, which had been incorporated into the new Republic Pictures in 1935.

By 1936, with the tremendous success of Universal’s Flash Gordon and with Republic’s purchase of the screen rights to Chester Gould's popular comic strip Dick Tracy, serials were once again becoming a force to be reckoned with, a fact that brought Columbia Pictures into the fold the following year. It may be useful to quote Jack Mathis at some length here:

“Although the snobbish class distinction between features and serials remained a lasting stigma, chapter play profits helped make possible many a highfalutin production. As the Golden Age of the sound serials approached mid-life in 1940, major studios gazed enviously at the 100% to 300% grosses above their negative costs being regularly accrued by the cliffhangers. So astonishing were the percentages that [Republic studio head] Herbert J. Yates defied any feature produced on an equal investment to match these figures, a challenge echoed by his competitors Harry Cohn at Columbia and Nate Blumberg at Universal."

An amazing result, really, for a product sold on the free-for-all States Rights market for as low an amount as $10 an episode (in its hey-day Mascot charged as little as $5, and even lower than that if competition from Universal proved especially tough).

During the first decade of its existence, Republic's annual release usually consisted of two "streamline" 12-chapter serials and two "super" 15-chapter serials to satisfy the need of theaters for a full season of weekly entertainment. (Columbia stuck with 15 chapters whether or not the story demanded it, which it truly never did.) Running times for the opening chapter was set at 30 minutes in the first decade of operations (20 thereafter), with each subsequent installment running 15-18 minutes until the mid-1940s when chapter-lengths were standardized to an exact 13:20. Like no other Hollywood producer, Republic anticipated television and 13:20 plus commercial breaks would come to exactly 15 minutes, the standard length of syndicated television programs in the early 1950s.

Titles were a management decision but likes and dislikes of exhibitors and audience reaction mattered greatly. With the exception of literary adaptations, titles adhered more to exploitation possibilities than anything else (a harbinger of things to come in the teen-market craze of the 1950s) and the writers then had three months to come up with a proper story and screenplay to fit title and concept.

Filming at Republic and on location took three to eight weeks according to the length of the serial, with editing accomplished at one week per chapter. Scoring, dubbing, printing and other post-production tasks were then added before a release date was set. This strict sausage factory method of serial-making meant that first-run serials actually began playing in theaters before post-production of the entire serial had been completed. In many instances, the opening chapter of a new serial followed right after the resolution of the current presentation, ensuring that kids everywhere would be profitably hooked for another 12 to 15 weeks.

to be continued...

Helen Christian & Zorro Rides Again

2011-11-25T11:31:00.007+01:00

A Washingtonian debutante and the daughter of a socially prominent politician from Helena, Montana, Helen Christian, nee Fitzgerald-Collins, abandoned show business in favor of marrying Robert Bishop, a Pennsylvania newspaper magnate and aide to Illinois Governor Henry Horner. The nuptials took place in May of 1939 while the bride was appearing on Broadway in “I Must Love Someone,” a play that also featured another former serial lead, Scott Kolk/Scott Colton of Secret Agent X-9 (1937).

Zorro Rides Again (Republic, 1937)

James Vega (John Carroll) returns to his hacienda after the murder of his uncle, Don Manuel Vega (Nigel de Brulier), by El Lobo (Richard Alexander), henchman of railroad tycoon J.A. Marsden (Noah Beery). Battling Marsden and his thugs, James manages to keep his alter-ego a secret and is considered a fop by all, including railroad owners Joyce (Helen Christian) and Philip Andrews (Reed Howes).

Five minutes into Zorro Rides Again brutish El Lobo and his thugs blow up a train and depot then brutally murder peons Pedro (Chris-Pin Martin) and Jose (George Mari), the latter just a young boy.(It should come as a great relief to any susceptible viewer that the child playing the part of Jose returns very much alive playing another Mexican boy in chapter 8.) All in an effort to force the California-Yucatan railroad out of business. How is that for a dramatic – not to mention violent – serial opener? And we have yet to meet either the title hero and the boss heavy!

It should come as no surprise that this was the debut of the best directorial team in serial history, William Witney and John English, both of whom came from the editing rooms, and despite their shared dislike for leading man John Carroll, who was forced on the production and thought he was too good for serials, Rides Again remains one of the team's best efforts, a rollicking adventure yarn set in modern times with enough thrills, chills and spills to satisfy even the most discriminate palate. Whether it ranks above the team's 1939 follow-up, Zorro's Fighting Legion, a more traditional recounting of Johnston McCulley's legendary hero, is purely a matter of taste; technically and in narrative complexity both rank near the top of the serial heap and the difference may come down to whether you prefer the dynamic Carroll or the silvery-tongued Reed Hadley. Or, indeed, if a classic retelling is more your cup of tea than a modern update with a hero leaping tall buildings and traveling commercial airlines.

If the story is vaguely familiar to non-Zorro fans, the reason should be obvious: Superman is, of course, nothing but a space age Zorro rip-off, complete with a foppish alter-ego and a less than startling disguise that nevertheless manages to fool all and sundry. In addition to the action – which is fast and plentiful – Republic added a touch of pop music to the mix and had John Carroll serenading Helen Christian (sort of) in chapter 8 by warbling Walter Hirsch and Lou Handman's "A Beautiful Shade of Blue" and Alberto Colombo and Eddie Cherkose's rousing title song, "Riding Along." This just about makes Rides Again the most tuneful serial this side of Gene Autry’s Phantom Empire (1935) … and that in a season that also gave moviegoers a crooning flyboy in Universal’s Ace Drummond.

In contrast to the furious action and lively music, lead villain Noah Beery spends most of his screen time stuck behind a desk in a big city skyscraper office. The veteran blackguard, who seems to have filmed his entire part in a day, gives his customary solid performance and is ably assisted by the always dastardly Robert Kortman and Richard Alexander, the latter best remembered as an underling to Bela Lugosi in Republic's previous serial entry S O S Coast Guard.

Nominal second-leads Helen Christian and Reed Howes are adequate and pleasant enough to look at, and Duncan Renaldo, made up to look far older than he was, does well in the standard loyal factotum role. But like all the Witney-English serials to come, Zorro Rides Again belongs mostly to the stunt performers, notably Yakima Canutt, who doubles for John Carroll when in disguise and has more actual screen time than the star.

(left to right: Jack Ingram, Robert Kortman, Reed Howes, Richard Alexander and Helen Christian in Zorro Rides Again)

About the production
Zorro's handsome pinto (Pair O'Dice) was a stud owned by actor-director Ralph McCutcheon who earned $350 and a $5000 insurance policy for 22 days of filming Zorro Rides Again. The railroad scenes were filmed at the Southern Pacific Railroad Espee Branch near the Iverson Ranch location. Other locations: Red Rock Canyon, Pacoima Dam and the Cascade Coffee Shop in San Fernando.

The Republic Pictures songbook
John Carroll, a trained baritone, twice warbles Colombo and Cherkose’s title song:

Zorro rides again, into the night, riding along, singing a song
Zorro lives, he takes, then he gives, happy and gay, singing away
I laugh at life, through storm and strife, with mighty grip, I crack my whip
With courage bold, like knights of old, rollicking on, into the dawn
Hear ye men, for Zorro rides again, riding along, singing a song.

Serial Origins: The Silent Era

2011-11-24T13:59:00.005+01:00

From my unpublished "Next Week at This Theater":

Most historians agree that the classic serial format emerged from What Happened to Mary?, a 1912 Edison Company series detailing the life and love of a plucky heroine (Mary Fuller, pictured left), each chapter a self-contained story. Short films featuring popular actors portraying the same roles had of course been made even earlier than that, mostly comedies. But Mary, with its prominent Chicago newspaper tie-in, became a turning point of sorts, and within a couple of years the holdover excitement of cliffhanging perils had become a regular part of the movie-going diet and the chapter play the domain of Pearl White, Ruth Roland, Marie Walcamp (pictured below right), Helen Holmes and all the other classic serial heroines frantically clinging to the rims of Ithacan gorges, wayward balloons and box cars, speeding automobiles, and boats adrift in the rapids.

That serials should be focusing on the plight of girls was no coincidence; women were most welcome behind the camera in the early silent era and downright dominant in front. It could even be argued that prior to the emergence of the dangerously exotic Latin Lovers in the 1920s leading men were little more than glorified props, essential for the thrust of melodrama but never very exciting. A notable exception, of course, was the cowboy and action stars: Broncho Billy Anderson, J. Warren Kerrigan, Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, and all their imitators. But early serials, although many technically set in the West, were Victorian melodramas at heart, and although they had barely yet earned the right to vote, women were front and center.

It has often been stated that in contrast to sound serials deemed suitable mainly for children and the uneducated, silent chapter plays were considered mainstream entertainment. That, however, is only partially true. Up until World War I, with short films the staple of the film industry and movie theaters often little more than mere storefront nickelodeons, serials did indeed appeal to general audiences, mostly women and recent immigrants, the predominant moviegoers at the time. To the point where even celebrated

Broadway personalities such as Mrs. Florenz Ziegfeld, Billie Burke, and Ziegfeld's much-ballyhooed mistress, Lillian Lorraine (pictured left), would partake in the fun, if only once. Irene Castle, of the celebrated ballroom dance duo of Vernon & Irene Castle, headlined in Patria (1917), by all accounts a muddled affair in 15 chapters depicting a nefarious union between Mexico and Japan that threatened pacifist America. Conservative newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst was behind this effort to change America's growing mood to join the Allied war effort in Europe but the serial tanked at the box-office and it was the last time the genre attempted to do much more than simply earn a healthy return. Both the New York-based Thanhouser Company and the American Film Company of Santa Barbara, California, produced "Million Dollar" super serials prior to WWI, The Million Dollar Mystery (1914), 23 episodes featuring ill-fated daredevil Florence LaBadie (Florence, pictured below right, who reportedly never met a speeding conveyance she wasn't willing to try at least once, perished in a car accident in 1917) and the 30 chapters The Diamond from the Sky (1915), ostensibly first offered to Mary Pickford but eventually starring her less talented sister, Lottie. Both made money but chiefly because of expensive exploitation efforts.

The great escape artist Harry Houdini turned to the serial screen in the independent The Master Mystery (1920), but although he initially drew crossover crowds, they quickly thinned out when each of the 15 chapters demonstrated all too well that what worked on the legitimate stage, such as spectacular escapes from handcuffs, sealed bank vaults or blocks of cement, did not necessarily translate to the more prosaic movie screen where these stunts came across as just so much special effect trickery. With adult audiences turning thumbs down, The Master Mystery lost money.

These serials and many others were often promoted as "high class attractions" that could stand on their own, but with the emergence of both the feature film and the movie palace in the latter part of the decade, chapter plays were increasingly relegated to a supporting role on the bill. The "grown up" reputation of such rare surviving serials as The Woman in Grey and Lightning Bryce, both released in 1919 by small independents, is due mainly to the overly complicated plots that modern historians feel few children could possibly have followed. Today's viewer is ill equipped to appreciate the often serpentine approach of pre-WWI pulp fiction. Moviegoers in 1919, especially in the hinterlands where theatrical barnstorming was still a commonplace phenomenon, most likely experienced little or no difficulty following the outlandish, long-winded plots. Oddly, modern critics routinely disparage the 1936 sound version of The Amazing Adventures of the Clutching Hand, a true silent-era serial at heart if judging by the few surviving examples of the real thing (and with a large cast of former silent stars to remind you), while at the same time heaping praise on the original Pearl White and Ruth Roland chapter plays seen by few, if any, still with us today.

Most of the serial producing companies of the 1910s were gone by the 1920s, victims of a stubborn decision to champion short films (Vitagraph, which did follow the feature film trend, lasted the longest), and serial production became almost wholly dominated by two distinctive firms: the strangely governed Pathé, a company run by committee much to its eventual ruin (but, ironically, operating a lot like today’s Hollywood conglomerates), and Carl Laemmle's sprawling if somewhat unfocused Universal. Pathé had the team of Walter Miller and Allene Ray (pictured left) in their corner, the main reason, it could be argued, for the company's longevity, while the Big U, the company that had launched the serial duo in the first place by teaming actor-director Francis Ford and actress-writer Grace Cunard, now heavily promoted the Western serials of first Art Acord then William Desmond. Other chapter play stars of the period were Elmo Lincoln (the original movie Tarzan),

Juanita Hansen (pictured right, who was advertized as the next Pearl White and paid a staggering $1,500 a week by Pathé until felled by a cocaine addiction), daredevils Eddie Polo and Charles Hutchison, actor-producer-director-writer Ben Wilson, and physical culture maven Joe Bonomo.

But with the possible exception of Pathé's fearless Hansen and Ray, and, to a lesser extent, Universal cowgirl Eileen Sedgwick, the era of the serial queen had come to an end. Suffering from failing eyesight and an old back injury sustained on the set of her signature opus, The Perils of Pauline, Pearl White made Plunder (1923) her cinematic swan song, but although heavily promoted by Pathé the highly anticipated comeback laid an egg at the box-office. Tarzan, meanwhile, now portrayed by athlete Frank Merrill, actually spoke, or rather yelled, in Universal's Tarzan the Tiger (1929), one of those hybrid part-talkies that jarred the senses before the emergence of The Indians are Coming (1930), the first true talkie serial.

Pearl White in her final serial, Plunder (1923)

Ella Neal & Mysterious Dr Satan

2011-11-23T16:58:00.005+01:00

From my unpublished “Next Time at This Theater”:

Ella Neal earned quite a bit of publicity for being “the only actress born in the Canal Zone,” i.e. Panama. She had lost her father at the age of five and went to live with her grandparents in Jamaica before resettling with her mother in Los Angeles. Graduating from Fairfax High, Ella earned a scholarship with UCLA but chose instead to sign a contract with Paramount, a fortune teller having predicted she would become a star. Or so studio publicity claimed.

A “dark brunette,” she was one of 11 starlets under contract to Paramount in 1941. The others were: Martha O'Driscoll, and Veronica Lake (blondes), Catherine Craig, Susan Hayward, Margaret Hayes, and Jean Phillips (redheads), Lillian Cornell and Esther Fernandez (dark brunettes), and Frances Gifford and Eleanor Stewart (“brownettes”). Of this coterie of lovelies, Veronica Lake and Susan Hayward became major stars, Frances Gifford played the Jungle Girl for Republic, and Catherine Craig married Robert Preston.

It was actually hard work to be a Paramount starlet, as syndicated columnist Virginia Vale could report in May of 1941:

“Ella Neal established something of a record recently when she appeared in three pictures in threedays. On Wednesday she was Jon Hall's handmaiden in Aloma of the South Seas; Thursday morning, for "Buy Me That Town" [released as New York Town] she was a mother at her baby's christening; Friday, she played a Mexican bride in Hold Back the Dawn—for that one she had to say something in Spanish, which she doesn't understand; she's still wondering what it meant.

Like Gifford, Ella was lent to Republic Pictures for a serial, in her case the fine Mysterious Dr Satan, but she was foisted upon the production and unlike Frances Gifford, did not add much to the serial according to co-director William Witney in his fine memoirs “In a Door, into a Fight, Out a Door, into a Chase: Moviemaking Remembered by the Guy at the Door” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004).

Despite predictions, Ella Neal never did become a star. In fact, while her fellow starlets were sent out on dates with Hollywood's elite, Ella was seen at also-ran nightspot Chez Boheme with Ukrainian bit player Leon Belasco. Her contract having run its course, she did a Lone Rider western with George Houston, The Lone Rider in Cheyenne (1942), and left films for good.

Mysterious Dr Satan (Republic, 1940)

To enable him to conquer the world, criminal mastermind Dr. Satan (Eduardo Ciannelli) has crafted a mechanical man. But to finish his fiendish project, the good doctor needs a remote control device invented by Professor Scott (C. Montague Shaw). Opposing Dr. Satan is Bob Wayne (Robert Wilcox), who dons the disguise of the Copperhead, an identity once used by his father to battle evil forces in the Old West. Wayne/The Copperhead is aided – and sometimes hindered – by Professor Scott's reporter daughter Lois (Ella Neal) and fellow newshound Speed Martin (William Newell).

Although Republic in early 1940 proudly announced a serial version of Superman, to be titled "The Adventures of Superman," negotiations with Superman, Inc. broke down and the writers were given less than six weeks to retool the script into Mysterious Doctor Satan. The result, however, still bears a few Superman trademarks, including a leading lady named Lois who works as a cub reporter and a chapter containing the famous designation "Man of Steel." That the term now refers to Dr. Satan's robot (or "robbot," as Eduardo Ciannelli insists on pronouncing it) is another matter entirely. (The chapter title could also refer to the Robot's alter ego, ace stuntman Tom Steele, in that case very much an inside joke.) It is not clear if Robert Wilcox was originally pegged to play Clark Kent but he is Bob Wayne here and unlike Superman has no extraordinary powers other than the usual serial bravery. That young Wayne decides to wear a full-face metallic hood when combating Dr. Satan's evil plans for world dominance remains a typical serial contrivance to better hide the identity of the stunt double. There is really no other reason for the disguise and no one seems to give his true identity much thought.

Dr Satan is a good Republic serial falling just short of being great due to miscasting in the title role. Eduardo Ciannelli could be a very effective villain, as he demonstrated in the classic Gunga Din (1939), but his performance here is perhaps a bit too guarded and restrained for an action serial. Republic did what they could to make him more satanic, down to an ever present chin light and a general chiaroscuro mood befitting an early noir serial; but you miss the kind of gleeful over-the-top performance of, say, a Charles Middleton or Bela Lugosi, or even a J. Carrol Naish. The latter played a similar role in Columbia's Batman (1943) and visibly relished his on-screen wickedness, whereas Ciannelli seems to be holding back.

The same could easily be said for leading man Robert Wilcox as well, who, while undeniably handsome, appears almost too bland and laid back for such rigorous heroics. But apart from the casting of the lead roles, Dr Satan remains top-notch serial action, Republic style, short on logic – we are never told what exactly the good doctor is out to gain other than some generalities about world dominance – but strong on production values, stunt work, and general mayhem. The Lydecker brothers add their special wizardry as well, and although ingenues Ella Neal and Dorothy Herbert (pictured left) lack somewhat in the glamour department – the latter’s presence must have been downright puzzling to moviegoers – the supporting cast is above average even for Republic.

Who? Why? What the f...?

Republic studio president Herbert Yates, who went on to marry Czech figure skater Vera Hruba Ralston, apparently had a yen for athletic if rather homely blondes and he forced Kentucky-born equestrienne Dorothy Herbert on associate producer Hiram Brown. Turning a deaf ear to the suggestion that a Western serial might prove more accommodating to Miss Herbert’s undeniable riding skills, Yates blithely demanded additional rewrites to an already burdensome production. In the end, Herbert, whose Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey specialty was jumping blindfolded through flames, did not seriously harm Dr Satan, but the writers had obvious difficulties capitalizing on her special talents in a modern dress serial and she is absent from several chapters in a row, including the final.

… and their fellas: Robert Wilcox

Having been spotted in a summer stock production of The Petrified Forest, Robert Wilcox (1910-1955) went on to a modest B-Movie career that was ultimately derailed by latent alcoholism. Wilcox’s first wife was Florence Rice, the starlet daughter of sportscaster Grantland Rice, and his second Diana Barrymore, who survived him and whose autobiography, “Too Much, Too Soon,” would be dedicated to him.

Crazy Credits:
Eduardo Ciannelli demanded to be billed “Edward Ciannelli.”

How best to use a circus bareback rider in a non-Western serial:
Let her play the scientist's secretary and escape unexplained imprisonment on horseback with both hands tied behind her back and the reins in her mouth. (Chapter 1.)

Frances Gifford & Jungle Girl

2011-11-22T17:24:00.001+01:00

From my unpublished "Next Week at This Theater")

A Paramount contract player from Long Beach, California, recently divorced from alcoholic actor James Dunn, Frances Gifford (1920-1994) never actively pursued a career in serials but was lent to Republic by Paramount along with Ella Neal, who would appear, to much less effect, in Mysterious Dr. Satan (1940). Despite starring in such notable MGM pictures as Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), Little Mister Jim (1946) and The Arnelo Affair (1948), Gifford is remembered only for her two jungle dramas, Jungle Girl and the 1943 RKO Johnny Weissmuller vehicle Tarzan Triumphs.

In 1948, en route to Lake Arrowhead with Metro executive Benny Thau, she was badly injured in a two-car accident and her personality reportedly changed overnight. MGM let her go and although she struggled along for another five years, the damage was done and in 1958 she was admitted to Camarillo State Hospital. She reemerged, healthy, in 1983 and reportedly collaborated on Ohio-based filmmaker Richard Myers’ tribute to Jungle Girl, also entitled Jungle Girl, according to Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times “a gentle dream/memory work of haunting visual beauty.” In her final years, Frances Gifford performed charity work and was a volunteer with the Pasadena Public Library.

Jungle Girl co-director William Witney remembers Frances Gifford with fondness in his autobiography, “In a Door, into a Fight, Out a Door, into a Chase: Moviemaking Remembered by the Guy at the Door” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004):

“When we heard the front office had borrowed a girl from Paramount we all groaned, but for once we had to admit that after all the mistakes they had made, the law of averages finally prevailed. They had hit the jackpot. She was a beauty.”

(Among Republic's previous "mistakes," Witney mentions the other starlet borrowed from Paramount, Ella Neal.)

Jungle Girl (Republic 1941)

Desiring the famed Diamonds of Nakros, guarded by a tribe of Lion Men, gangster Bradley Meredith (Trevor Bardette) kills his identical twin brother John (also Trevor Bardette) and takes his place as the local doctor. Not even John’s daughter, Nyoka (Frances Gifford), detects the difference, at least not at first, but before long she, along with pilot Jack Stanton (Tom Neal) and his sidekick Curly Rogers (Eddie Acuff), is fighting tooth and nails not only to rid the jungle domain of Bradley and his gangster pal Slick Latimer (Gerald Mohr) but also the traitorous witch doctor, Shamba (everybody's favorite accented serial villain Frank Lackteen).

Having decided to return to an earlier age and resurrect the serial queen, Republic did very well indeed by borrowing Frances Gifford from Paramount. A pretty starlet who could also act, Gifford became perhaps the quintessential sound serial heroine, and although she later earned a contract from lofty MGM and co-starred in several grade-A productions, Jungle Girl remains her most memorable role. The serial was lost in copyright limbo for decades and when it finally surfaced in the 1990s, few fans were disappointed. Not since Pearl White clung to the gorges of Ithaca has a serial heroine endured as much as Miss Gifford’s Nyoka, who survives every peril known to woman, including almost perishing in an abyss, being burned at the stake, boiled in oil, and mauled by the obligatory man-sized gorilla. Gifford comes through it all with every hair in place, helped immeasurably by not only leading man Tom Neal (who shortly after having a bullet removed from his shoulder is able to hang on to the wheels of a plane in mid air!), but also stunt doubles Dave Sharpe (who performs the wine-swinging) and Helen Thurston. It is all very excitingly directed by the team of Witney and English, and acted by a superlative supporting cast; even the comic relief, Eddie Acuff, is tolerable, as is Tommy Cook, formerly Little Beaver in Adventures of Red Ryder (Republic 1940). Little Kimbu, in fact, is simply Little Beaver with a different fright wig. Although they certainly did not shy away from using his famous name in all advertising, Republic cleverly left Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original alone and even invented a new name for his heroine, Nyoka. This proved fortunate when a sequel was suggested less than a year later.

Due to the locations at Sherwood Forest and the leafy Corriganville, Jungle Girl actually looks more “jungle” than most tropical serials, but the supposedly Native extras, who wear black Harpo Marx-style wigs, somewhat detract from the overall impression. Why Republic didn’t hire African Americans to play the natives, as they would a decade later for Jungle Drums of Africa (1953), is one of those questions better left unasked. In any case, the natives, such as they are, pudgy white guys with body paint, remain the chapter play’s greatest detriment. Like Westerns, jungle serials are somewhat limited in ways to endanger people and Jungle Girl uses every cliché in the book. But you cannot deny that after a while the spectacle of spear-carrying natives running to and fro wears off and you must rely on the featured villains. Trevor Bardette, despite his dual-role, is somewhat underused, mainly sulking in his hut and leaving it up to Gerald Mohr and the henchmen to chase down the heroic quartet. Mohr, however, is well cast, and Frank Lackteen, as the witch doctor, positively shines in a getup that probably kept children awake long into the night in 1941. Lackteen’s hatred toward Nyoka is never properly explained but you cannot deny his effectiveness. The print viewed is from a British release and Shamba’s demise, along with a sequence involving the gorilla, is slightly censored for gruesomeness (the British and, strangely, the Finns, were more squeamish than almost anybody else). The cliffhangers, however, all survive intact and this is where Jungle Girl meets all expectations as perhaps the best jungle serial of them all.

About the production:

Republic purchased the rights to Rice Burroughs’ 1932 novel, which was set in Cambodia, for $5000 with the stipulation that only one serial, and only a serial, would be produced and that the rights would revert to Burroughs’ after seven years. Republic, of course, solely used the title and Burroughs’ marquee-ready name, and Jungle Girl was created whole cloth by the studio writers. Although split-screen technique was used in certain sequences, Al Taylor, who also played a henchman, doubled for one or the other of the Meredith twins in over-the-shoulder shots.

… and their fellas: Tom Neal

Tom Neal (1914-1974), who according to Witney showed up on set of Jungle Girl complete with a valet, was at one point promoted by MGM as another Clark Gable but his most memorable performance came in the dirt cheap PRC noir Detour (1946). Neal made headlines publicly battling for the affections of buxom starlet Barbara Payton, who later became a call-girl. Then in November of 1965 he received a verdict of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of his second wife and was sentenced to a 15-year prison term. He was paroled in December of 1973 but died of a heart attack eight months later. Neal also starred as the would-be Dick Tracy character of Bruce Gentry (Columbia 1949).

(right: Tom in an iconic pose with the fantastic Ann Savage in Detour)

Serials: An Introduction

2011-11-22T12:25:00.001+01:00

From my unpublished "Next Week at This Theater":

"Generalities about any enterprise – and in particular, the movies – are very, very dangerous"
… silent era serial writer Frank Leon Smith

According to conventional wisdom, the American motion picture serial enjoyed a prominent beginning, a lowbrow but profitable middle, and a sorry end. But is that quite true? Did the chapter serial slink meekly into the night after the release in 1956 of Columbia's Blazing the Overland Trail? As a specific genre, certainly, but the thrill-a-minute action-oriented fare never left us. If what cineastes routinely dismiss as B-Movies were more or less ignored in the oh, so intellectual 1960s and 1970s with their auteurs and art houses, they certainly came back with a vengeance in the following decades. For what is today's summer blockbuster release if not a multi-million dollar serial spectacular? Long on concept and special effects, just like serials used to be, and short on characterization and motivation. Again, exactly like the classic cliffhanger. The only ingredients missing, and, granted, they are important ones, are the cliffhangers and holdover suspense.

The comic book hero, once the exclusive domain of serial producers, is back as well, and if the Spider- Super- and Batmen – not to mention even more recent incarnations of The Green Hornet and Captain America – of today benefit from modern technology – most importantly digital – the FX Lydecker brothers of Republic Pictures provided just as eye-popping wizardry for their audiences. In fact, sometimes more so, and if the Lydeckers' miniatures looked like what they were, miniatures, today's CGI looks exactly like what it is, CGI.

No the chapter play didn't disappear after 1956; it merely took on different shapes. To stretch the premise to its very extreme, movies of today owe more to Nat Levine, Spencer Bennet, Yakima Canutt, William Witney and the Lydeckers, than to Cecil B. DeMille, George Cukor, Jean-Luc Goddard or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. All this, of course, is nothing new to true serial fans, and ever since Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Los Ark (1981) serial historians have compared the chapter play genre with the summer blockbuster. But there is actually an even more direct link: nighttime television dramas.

The debut of the CBS drama Dallas in 1978 changed television forever, a revolution felt even more so today than in the immediate aftermath. Always meant to be serialized, according to creator David Jacobs, even if the pilot five episodes were developed as a series, Dallas eventually brought back the grand cliffhanger – the solution to the “Who shot J.R?” question that opened season 3 became the most watched television episode in history up to that time – although viewers had to wait a whole summer and well into the fall to learn the outcome rather than a mere week.

Up until Dallas, and the 1960s soaper Peyton Place notwithstanding, television companies deemed serialized drama a dangerous proposition, refusing to believe that people would commit to weekly viewing. Miss an episode, and you would miss much of the plot, a sharp contrast to episodic cop and medical shows that did not depend on sequential viewing. But as Jacobs opines in his foreword to the definitive book on Dallas, Barbara Curran’s Dallas: The Complete Story of the World’s Favorite Prime-Time Show,

“[W]hen you think about it, it now seems obvious that continuing drama is television’s natural form .. no other medium but television can tell you stories that keep going, unrolling like ribbons, revealing new aspects, new twists and turns, showing you not only the stories but the consequences of stories.”

Yet, the nighttime television “serial” has always been more beholden to daytime soap operas, where dialogue and character development are generally more important than physical action, than to the classic cliffhanger. But then, in 2001, the Fox Network premiered 24, where the serial-like action blockbuster finally merged with the television nighttime serial, complete with weekly cliffhangers. It was followed by such shows as Lost and Heroes and True Blood, to mention just a few of newer serialized television dramas. And who knows where this trend will eventually lead?

Meanwhile … Back at the Ranch – UK! Greta Gynt, the Queen of Quota Quickies

2011-11-21T12:17:00.003+01:00

Although she came to England with her parents as a four-year-old, Norwegian-born Margrethe Thoresen Waxholm (1916-2000) made her stage and screen debuts in Scandinavia, her native Norway and Sweden, respectively. But her ambitious mother thought that with her fine knowledge of English she could do better in London and, presumably once established, in Hollywood. In was 1935 and the Garbo craze had yet to subside so she shortened Margrethe to Greta and added that familiar name from Grieg, to become Greta Gynt.

Confusingly, around the same time another Norwegian starlet, the Brooklyn-born (!) Sigrid Gurie was attempting to launch a career in Hollywood and she, too, took the name Greta Gynt, added an extra “e” and billed herself Greta Gynte. As such she was listed in pre-publicity material for James Whale's The Road Back (1937). Unfortunately, Greta Gynte ended up on the cutting-room floor (if she was actually ever even in the film), signed instead a contract with Samuel Goldwyn and reverted to her real name. (Today, she is remembered, if remembered at all, as yet another of Goldwyn's dead-on-arrival attempts to create a new international star a la his great silent era discovery, Vilma Banky.)

The original Greta Gynt, meanwhile, had caught the eye of UK producer J. Arthur Rank, who saw in her a British version of Jean Harlow. She would never enjoy that kind of success, but did embark on a lengthy career in B movies, notably the so-called “quota quickies,” minor genre films bankrolled by American companies in order for them to be allowed UK distribution of their overly competitive Hollywood fare. Without hardly any accent at all, Greta Gynt became a fixture in the British film industry and was all set to take on Hollywood after hooking up with German-American producer-director Robert Siodmak in the post-war era. Nothing came of it, alas, and as far as I can determine, Greta Gynt never appeared in a true Hollywood movie. Her popularity in the UK waned in the 1950s and she retired from the screen in 1963.

Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938)

Quota Quickies, in my opinion, have gotten a bad rap. At least those that I have been fortunate enough to view. And we can all enjoy Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, produced by quota quickie expert George King (Quota Quickie King?), which is in public domain and available for free on the Internet. Greta Gynt plays Mademoiselle Julie and attempts a sophisticated accent while dallying with her two leading men, Sherlock Holmes wannabe Sexton Blake (George Curzon) and evil mastermind Michael Larron. The latter is played in typical over-the-top Victorian style by the delightfully-named Tod Slaughter, a fixture in British film production since the days of silent films, days, indeed, that the redoubtable Mr. Slaughter seemingly never forgot. Sexton Blake was a long-lived British pulp-fiction detective who had the audacity to reside in Baker St. complete with a bumbling sidekick, Tinker (Tony Simpson), and an elderly landlady (Marie Wright), who was called Mrs. Bardell but was Mrs. Hudson by any other name. Many writers contributed to the Sexon Blake stories through the ages and even I remember reading Danish translations of the books as a young teenager. Here Mr. Blake, et al. get involved in various Oriental hokum and the whole hour or so reminds you of a Hollywood action serial, bizarre cliffhangers included. By no means a work of art, Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror is nevertheless recommended viewing for its period richness and as a prime example of a throwaway quota quickie production.

Aline Towne: The serial queen who gets no respect.

2011-11-20T15:25:00.011+01:00

Aline Towne co-starred in five serials but is not remembered for any of them. Or at least not as remembered as, say, Frances Gifford, who did only one; or Carol Forman who “only” played the villainess. Towne is even less memorable than Phyllis Coates, who starred in Republic's penultimate chapter play, Panther Girl of the Kongo (1955). But Phyllis was television's first Lois Lane and that trumps everything. Yet, if you take a second look, at least in her serial debut, The Invisible Monster, Aline actually is a much more hands-on heroine than most of her contemporaries, including Coates, playing a sob-sister who refuses to take a back seat to her leading man, the forgettable Richard Webb. Okay, she reverted to form in her other chapter plays, notably allowed onboard the very first manned space flight in Radar Men from the Moon solely, it appears, for the purpose of serving the male crew coffee. Oh, well, serial equality has a limit, I suppose.

Nee Fern Aline Eggen and from St. Paul, MN, Aline Towne (1919-1996) had won a Chicago Daily News personality contest and several beauty pageants in the Mid-West prior to signing with MGM in 1948. She performed the usual starlet duties there and later with 20th Century-Fox but earned leading roles only in B-Movies, serials and television shows. She appeared in quite a bit on the small tube, and like Phyllis Coates enjoyed a career that lasted much longer than you would have suspected, finally packing it in after an appearance on Airwolf in 1985. She was widowed in that year, but according to one of her two daughters, traveled extensively in retirement. Aline Towne died from a heart attack.

The Invisible Monster (Republic, 1950)

The Phantom Ruler has invented a formula that when sprayed on an object exposed to a powerful ray can render said object, including the Phantom Ruler himself, invisible. Aided by a group of American-speaking illegal aliens he has abducted and is now blackmailing to do his bidding, this particular crime boss is not out to gain control of the entire world but merely to rob a bank or two. Enter our heroes, a couple of insurance agents (Richard Webb and Aline Towne) who wear sensible shoes and hats. And you have a serial. Or do you?

Now here is the thing: If you could render yourself invisible would you use that fact to walk from one point to another unobserved? Or would you have some fun with your environment and scare everybody witless by appearing without a head? Like they did in the old Universal horrors? By the end of chapter one of The Invisible Monster you really is left beyond caring, the proceedings are that dull. The Phantom Ruler's invisibility trick is rather cumbersome when all is said and done and takes a couple of henchmen to set up, so why bother when you just wish to pick up a package left in a garbage can unobserved (chapter 3). Why not just have one of your boys whistle a happy tune, pick up the package and quickly skedaddle? No, Mr. Phantom Ruler has to have his huge truck back up to the garbage can, empower the powerful ray, and have a henchman pretend to weld something on a lamp post in order to explain the bright light. If anyone was actually looking, which the entirely empty neighborhood doesn't exactly suggest. To add insult to injury, after all this subterfuge, the Ruler is then is promptly revealed to be Stanley Price by our hero, Richard Ebb, who naturally has smelled a rat and clambered aboard the truck.

By 1950, only one writer, Ronald Davidson, was credited with writing an entire Republic chapter play and the seems were showing everywhere. I guess little children could still marvel at the invisibility effects but who by then hadn't seen plenty of inanimate objects suddenly move in thin air as if on wires? Oops, did we just give away the Lydecker brothers' secret. Well, you won't be fooled for a minute.

The result is that you have to rely on the acting prowess of the relatively (for serials) small cast and although I like Stanley Price as a henchman, or even as a law abiding member of society, he makes a drab master villain. Happily, Richard Webb is an engaging enough hero and Aline Towne visibly enjoys the goings-on which always helps. So The Invisible Monster is not a total loss as entertainment.

... and their fellas: Richard Webb

There really hasn't been all that many blond Hollywood leading men. Think about it. Who can you name from the classic era? Well, one actor stands out: Paramount contract player Alan Ladd, who made light hair appear not only butch but downright dangerous. (Dan Dureya is another blonde from that era, but he rarely played the hero and was really the forerunner of the even more sadistic Richard Widmark). Interestingly, Paramount also groomed another blond contract player, especially after the war, but Richard Webb (1915-1993) never really caught on and his only true star-billed role was in The Invisible Monster. He got very popular with the small fry as television's Captain Midnight but angered the creators by refusing to publicly endorse the show's sponsor, the icky chocolate drink Ovaltine. Webb ended his long screen and television career in 1977 appearing on the daytime drama Days of Our Lives. Although he published several books on the occult, this writer know for a fact that Webb actively sought a publisher for his memoirs. Failing to find a buyer, and suffering from terminal cancer, he committed suicide shortly thereafter.

Radar Men from the Moon (Republic, 1952)

Commando Cody and his colleagues investigate a serious of explosions that lead them to the moon where Retik and his army of lunar men plan to invade the planet Earth.

Republic's second "Rocketman" serial is eminently positioned to become a camp classic. Not that it lacks in technical facility – the Lydecker brothers, Howard & Theodore, were top-of-the-line sfx supervisors for the period and stock footage takes care of the rest – but there is something hilariously ludicrous about Roy Barcroft as an American-accented Man in the Moon dressed in a modified version of his arch villain outfit from The Purple Monster Strikes (1945) and commanding only a couple of standard henchmen to do his bidding. Then there is the space craft itself, surely America's first, which lifts off vertically and is launched without any ado whatsoever. Yes, sure, the launch is supposed to be very hush-hush, but the lack of interest from the scientific world at large is curious to say the least! Republic's chosen location for this inter-planetary take-off also seems ill-advised considering that the rocks of the Iverson Movie Ranch look suspiciously similar to the landscape found on the Moon once our heroes get there. A trip that took them about a couple of hours, give and take, according to the dialogue. No one on board seems the least bit awed by what they are about to accomplish – land on the moon in a spacecraft built (in his garage?) by Commando Cody himself – and Commando even has time and energy to discuss whether to bring along girl scientist Joan Gilbert to cook his inflight meals when a refreshing cup of tea should have sufficed on this bargain-basement space flight. And so it goes: fistfight after fistfight and shootout after shootout between Commando (George Wallace) and sidekick Ted Richards (William Bakewell) and their Earthly enemies, gangster-types Daly and Graber. The latter is played by Clayton Moore during his mysterious season-long absence from television's Lone Ranger program and must have been something of a comedown from a starring role.

With that said, Radar Men is entertaining enough on its own level, but it has all been seen before, including Commando stiffly flying through the air in his rocket suit from King of the Rocket Men (1949). George Wallace himself makes a standard Republic hero, appropriately tight-lipped and able to take it on the chin. Literally, it seems, and he reportedly never even missed a day of filming after Clayton Moore accidentally broke his nose in the brawl seen in chapter 6. But there is little evidence of the considerable acting talent known at the time only to Broadway audiences. In contrast, silent screen juvenile William Bakewell and Aline Towne are completely wasted in the thankless roles of sidekick/helper-girl scientist, respectively, while third-billed Roy Barcroft seems to have phoned in a performance that evidently only took one day to complete. Radar Men from the Moon, it is obvious, was made by a serial unit running on empty.

... and their fellas (II): George Wallace

Leading man George Wallace(1917-2005), an actor who broke into the business with help from the G.I. Bill, actually auditioned for Retik, the role eventually played by Roy Barcroft. Wallace later told of also having tested to play Graber but noticing a resemblance to stuntman Dale Van Sickel, the studio decided to cast him in the lead role instead. He later appeared on Broadway and in numerous television shows (and well into the new millennium), his only other serial work a supporting role in The Great Adventures of Captain Kidd (Columbia 1953).

About the production

Republic Pictures must have been satisfied with Radar Men, which inspired a series of short subjects sold to both theaters and television under the umbrella title of Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe. Captain Video's Judd Holdren played the title role but Aline Towne was retained as Joan Gilbert. 12 episodes were produced by Radar Men's Franklyn Adreon, and Holdren and Towne also starred in Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952), the final entry in Republic's "Rocketmen" serial trilogy.

Most conspicuous bit of stock footage:

Establishing shots reveal the Moon to be the home to a city resembling Antique Athens, or, truth be told, the Grecian-inspired Atlantis in Republic's 1936 serial Undersea Kingdom.

The Wit and Wisdom of the World's First Space Travelers:

Cody, arriving at the desert location for the launch of the very first manned flight to the moon: "I still think this is no trip for a woman." Joan: "Now don't start that again. You'll be very glad to have someone along who can cook your meals." Ted: "I'll say we will. [To Cody] Don't give her any more arguments!" Cody: "Okay. I like to eat, too.”

Radar Men from the Moon is in public domain and may be downloaded for free from the Internet.

Jane Adams (Lost City of the Jungle & Batman and Robin)

2011-11-18T13:22:00.001+01:00

Pasadena Playhouse student and Harry Conover model Jane “Poni” Adams (she never knew why Conover nicknamed her “Poni,” incidentally) actually became one of Universal's “monsters” when she appeared as a lovely but doomed hunchback in House of Dracula (1945). It was only her second film after signing with the studio – she had lost the lead to Yvonne de Carlo as the awful Salome, Where She Danced (1945) and instead played one of her handmaidens – and she went on to “grace” the hideous The Brute Man (1946), a so-called “horror movie” so bad Universal sold it outright to bottom-feeder company PRC. While at Universal, she was Russell Hayden's nominal leading lady in the studio's penultimate serial, Lost City of the Jungle, but rather more importantly, the screen's very first Vicki Vale in Columbia's Batman and Robin. As we have seen in a previous post, the girl in the original 1943 Batman serial, played by Shirley Patterson, was the niece of a newspaperman and not good old Vicki. Jane Adams (born in San Antonio, TX in 1921) was much better served by the five Westerns she did opposite Kirby Grant (she later did three with Johnny Mack Brown and one with Jimmy Wakely, all at Monogram) but eventually packed it all in in favor of her marriage to Major-General Tom Turnage. The Turnages (she was widowed in 2000) resided for years in Rancho Mirage, CA.

Lost City of the Jungle (Universal, 1946)

British character actor Lionel Atwill, in his final performance, appears as a war-monger attempting to get rich from others' misfortune in this 13 chapter Universal serial. Sir Eric Hazarias (Atwill) is searching the mountains of the Himalayas for Metorium 245, the only known antidote to the Bomb, which he then plan to sell to the highest bidder. The infamous megalomaniac is opposed by United Peace Foundation investigator Rod Stanton (Russell Hayden); archeologist Dr. Elmore (John Eldredge and his daughter Marjorie (Jane Adams); and local guide, Tal Shen (Keye Luke). But to everyone's surprise it is suddenly revealed that "the power in back of Sir Eric" is none other than his secretary, the even more nefarious Malborn (John Mylong). The reason for this sudden change of direction was the tragic fact that Atwill was suffering from bronchial cancer (he died April 22, 1946). Bits of dialogue filmed earlier were inserted throughout the 13 chapters and actor George Sorel doubled Atwill in several scenes, the villain's trademark Panama hat pulled well down over his face. In yet another economy move, The Lost City of the Jungle used stock footage from Columbia's earlier Lost Horizon, the 1943 Maria Montez vehicle White Savage, and even Leni Riefenstahl's legendary White Hell of Pitz Palu.

Lost City of the Jungle, regrettably, is a holy mess and hardly the "avalanche of titanic thrills in the most dangerous spot on earth" that its advertising promised. Lionel Atwill's sudden death naturally handicapped Universal somewhat, but the cost-conscious studio was not about to forfeit already filmed scenes nor Atwill's pull at the box office. The results are mostly ludicrous and the repeated use of grainy stock shots of a tired and worried-looking Sir Eric downright sad. Although Atwill manages to deliver his usual solid performance under what must have been extremely difficult circumstances, his double, George Sorel, seems rather an ill choice. Slightly less corpulent and visibly much younger, Sorel's disguise won't fool anyone. Leading lady Jane Adams, the only Universal contract player in the cast, later professed to have had "a wonderful time" filming Lost City of the Jungle, but the serial bears the imprint of having been put together in great haste and under trying circumstances.

(This review of Lost City originally appeared with my byline on www.allmovie.com.)

Batman & Robin (Columbia, 1949)

It's been almost six years since Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson last fought the powers of evil in Gotham City and the latter, now played by curly-haired, zoot-suited Johnny Duncan, is no longer a young teenager but a 26-year-old who should perhaps not prance about in tights in broad daylight. Time has not been kind to Batman's costume, either, which now looks like something his mother made him for Halloween. And that darn cape just keeps getting in the way of an honest brawl, doesn't it? In other words, Batman and Robin has gone from Rudolph Flotow to Sam Katzman, and the only reason the serial doesn't look quite as cheap as it could have is the availability of standing sets at Columbia.

Is Batman and Robin as bad as its reputation, then? Well, frankly no. True, Johnny Duncan looks more like a juvenile delinquent than someone known as the Boy Wonder, and it doesn’t help that he is occasionally doubled by balding and middle-aged stuntman Wally West. True, this is the only serial in memory where a henchman takes time out from a getaway to stop and have a smoke (chapters 3 and 5; see Allan Ray below) And true, there is once again no Batmobile per se and the Mercury Coupe convertible Batman and Robin use instead is parked in plain sight in front of Bruce Wayne's mansion, ahem nice surburban home, from whence our two caped crusaders blithely emerge fully costumed in the middle of the day! And so on and so forth. But the characters retain their childlike charm, the writers took the title serious and gave Robin an equal opportunity to shine, the action is fast and furious (if a bit clumsy at times), and the solution contains a mildly surprising twist. So what if Robert Lowery’s Batman has something of a beer gut (Johnny Duncan claims to have helped put a girdle on his leading man every morning but at times said garment must have slipped), and that the fights hardly suggest athletic prowess? It is all in good fun.

Duncan once told a radio audience that filming the serial took three months. The actor is certainly mistaken, but it may have felt like three months. “There was fifteen chapters,” he told host Peter Canavese, “and we had three crews working—three units working – and we shot about, oh, fifty to fifty-five set ups a day. I know on the main crew we did. And the only stunt doubles I had was [sic] for long shots like a train. You know, I had a double on that, but the other stuff, why Bob and I usually did all of our own stuff.” Jane Adams, meanwhile, spoke of her leading man with authors Boyd Magers and Michael Fitzgerald: “Robert Lowery also went to the Pasadena Playhouse, so it was easy to work with him. He was one of my friends there. We really didn’t have time doing a serial to socialize.”

Locations

The now demolished George Lewis home(as the Wayne Mansion), Benedict Canyon Drive, Iverson Ranch, Bronson Canyon.

Cliffhanger cheat ("Annie Wilkes Hall of Shame" nominee)

Batman and Robin’s Chapter 2, “Tunnel of Terror,” concludes with Batman battling three henchmen on the top of a train speeding toward a tunnel. But the takeout in chapter 3 has The Wizard stopping the engine by remote control and a solitary Batman gets off to take up the battle with the same three henchmen on the ground. Not much Terror in this Tunnel!

… and their fellas: Allan Ray

Allan Ray is one of those “names” that pop up in literally hundreds of films and television episodes in the 1940s and 1950s, a fleeting presence as “dancer,” “radio operator,” “pilot,” “reporter,” “bellhop,” and “gas station attendant.” In fact, Allan Ray appeared in films and on television well into the 1970s. He finally fell victim to complete typecasting in Harlow (1965), the posh Carroll Baker version, where he is listed as “man at Central Casting.” Ray turns up in chapter 5 of Batman and Robin as Mac Lacey, one of about only two or three instances in his long career where his character actually comes complete with a full name. The redoubtable Mr. Lacey is one of arch villain The Wizard's boneheaded henchmen and has an occasion late in the chapter to deliver a punch straight to Batman's face. “That hurt,” replies a completely unperturbed Batman, after which the caped crusader pummels the poor sap right out of the show.

For more information about Jane Adams, I refer you to Boyd Magers & Michael Fitzgerald: “Westerns Women” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999) and Gregory William Mank: “Women in Horror Films, 1940s” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999).

Shirley Patterson/Shawn Smith (B-Movie and serial starlet)

2011-11-17T10:48:00.003+01:00

Shirley Patterson (1922-1995), from Winnipeg, Canada via the San Fernando Valley, enjoyed two distinct screen starlet careers: under contract to Columbia and then free-lancing, she was Shirley Patterson and appeared 1942-'48 opposite the likes of Charles Starrett, William Elliott, Russell Hayden, Johnny Mack Brown, and Eddie Dean; then, as Shawn Smith, she co-starred in several science fiction “classics” in the 1950s courtesy, loose lips insisted, of a boyfriend “high up at Universal.” Prior to that she had been a champion archer (!) and won the obligatory beauty pageants (although apparently not “Miss California” as her publicity insisted). The first part of her career ended with marriage to the socially prominent real estate developer Alfred Smith. Bel Air matron-hood didn't last long, alas, and she reinvented herself as Shawn Smith, looking a bit older, of course, but essentially playing the same kind of roles in genre films as she had as Shirley Patterson. A skiing accident in 1958 that resulted in multiple broken bones put the kibosh to the second part of her career and she retired for good. Divorced from Smith and remarried, the former Shirley Patterson enjoyed appearing at Western fairs in the 1980s before, sadly, falling victim to cancer. In her final years, she resided in Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Batman (Columbia, 1943)

Columbia's comic-page-to-serial version of Batman earned a surprising resurrection in 1965 when youthful audiences, most likely influenced by something more potent than milk duds, were treated to midnight showings of the entire serial in one sitting. The reaction to "An Evening with Batman and Robin," alas, was almost wholly derogatory. The camp-craze of the 1960s spawned the fondly remembered television series starring Adam West and we have since witnessed the emergence of a string of highly profitable Batman blockbuster movies. In contrast, the original chapter play version and its 1949 sequel, Batman and Robin, never earned the respect of, say, the Flash Gordons, among serial buffs. But if you can get beyond leading man Lewis Wilson's ill-fitting tights, Douglas "Robin" Croft's enormous head of hair or J. Carrol Naish's sometimes over-caricatured delivery, Batman is a rollicking good show with plenty of noir touches, a memorable arch villain, a typical tough-looking and talking Columbia stock company, and a great comic sidekick in the nervous butler, Alfred (William Austin). Add to that a credible performance by Wilson in the title role, especially when portraying Bruce Wayne's other alter-ego, gangster "Chuck White," complete with putty nose and a slouchy nonchalance. If you are so inclined, you may discover some (probably unintentionally) homoerotic undertones, mainly due to the fact that Douglas Croft is younger than anyone succeeding him in the role of Robin. Is Bruce Wayne in reality a child molester? Did the makers of the serial imply anything by having Robin devour a banana in one scene? Well, you be the judge.

The New York street at the Burbank Columbia ranch, today Warner Bros.

Batman is even more interesting in the official 2005 Columbia/Sony restoration, which bravely refurbishes the serial with its original WWII soundtrack and eliminates the politically correct dubbing by Gary Owens and Don Pardo heard since its release on home video in 1989. Not that I approve of calling anybody a "shifty-eyed Jap" or any such derogatory language but Batman was produced in 1943 partially as a propaganda piece and should be viewed in that light. Today, even a Japanese viewer will probably accept Naish's performance for what it is, a wonderfully over-the-top exaggeration belonging to a specific time in history with vastly different motives and sensibilities.

One of Columbia's very best chapter plays, Batman was produced during the Rudolph Flothow regime at the studio, a brief but prime period for the serial department sandwiched between the often bizarre era of James Horne and the penny-pinching years of Sam Katzman. Yes, Batman is cheaply made, too, but it is easy to see what kept young audiences coming back every Saturday for 15 weeks. Although this serial is often listed as "The Batman," the title credit is Batman and narrator Knox Manning refers to the character without the definitive article. In the serial itself, only the villain, Dr. Daka, addresses Bruce Wayne's alter-ego as "The Batman."

About the production

Actor Lewis Wilson (1920-2000) enjoyed very little success in his chosen profession, other than starring as the original movie Batman and a supporting role in the 1950s television series Craig Kennedy. His legacy, however, is somewhat more impressive. When Wilson’s first wife, Dana Natol, married Anglo-American film producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, his son, Michael Wilson, became the de facto heir to the James Bond franchise and is today the executive producer of the most recent installments starring Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig.

PC Score Card

Until Columbia/Sony released the unedited version of Batman on DVD in 2005, this wartime serial was shown without the overt anti-Japanese language that has kept it off television for more than 50years. For readers with access only to the censored VHS print, here is what you'll be missing: Narrator Knox Manning and a later substitute (from chapter 7) using the word "Jap" at the drop of a hat; Manning, explaining the empty storefronts of Little Tokyo: "Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs, it has become virtually a ghost street"; Martin Warren to Dr. Daka: "No amount of torture conceived by your twisted Oriental brain will make me change my mind." (Chapter 1.) Foster, warned of Daka's displeasure after failing to kill Batman and Robin: "I did my best. Anyway, I'm not afraid of him and any other squinteye." Foster, in the mistaken belief that he has Daka at a disadvantage: "That's the kind of answer that fits the color of your skin." (Chapter 3.) Linda, face to face with Daka at long last: "A Jap!!" Daka: "Please to say Nipponese. That is the courteous way of addressing one of the future rulers of the world." (Chapter 13.)

Cameo Appearance

The newsboy selling Bruce Wayne an extra edition featuring Batman's newest exploits in the opening chapter is Bob Kane, "Batman's" creator who in his autobiography had little good to say about either Lewis Wilson or his portrayal.

Serial verisimilitude

Although Batman is supposedly set in fictional Gotham City, a letter addressed to Bruce Wayne bears a Los Angeles address.

Kay Hughes (The Vigilantes are Coming, Dick Tracy, Gene Autry, etc.)

2011-11-16T10:12:00.006+01:00

Despite co-starring in two of the best remembered chapterplays of all time – The Vigilantes are Coming and Dick Tracy, Kay Hughes (1914-1998) gets no respect. While Jean Rogers, as Flash Gordon's Dale Arden and Linda Stirling, as the imperiled heroine du jour in the 1940s, have earned reams of print by once-overheated fan boys, Kay is just there in her serials, upstaged by two of the best serial heroes of all time, Robert Livingston and Ralph Byrd, and never allowed to be much more than decoration. Born Catherine Rhoads, Hughes began her show business career as a dancer and background extra. She was placed under contract to Republic Pictures for six months, June 1, 1936 to December 1, 1936, and while there also appeared in Three Mesqueteers and Gene Autry westerns. Universal's Radio Patrol (1937), where she replaced Jean Rogers, followed, after which her screen career petered out. She returned for three B-westerns in the following decade: Charles Starrett's Riders of the Badlands (1941), The Texas Rangers' Enemy of the Law, and the Buster Crabbe opus Fighting Bill Carson (both 1945). And that, as they say, was that. Kay Hughes married three times and lived most of the remainder of her life at Desert Hot Springs, CA.

The Vigilantes Are Coming (Republic, 1936)

I readily admit it: I once slammed The Vigilantes are Coming in my review on the Internet's All-Movie Guide. But a second viewing for this article has somewhat changed my mind. Yes, there are several unforgivable cliffhanger "cheats" in Vigilantes, the kind abhorred by both serial fans and Republic Pictures honcho Herbert Yates, who reportedly personally banned their use in future chapter plays. But such misdeeds are balanced at the very least by one of the most personable serial heroes of all times, Robert Livingston, and excellent portrayals by such silent screen stalwarts as blowhard dictator-in-training Fred Kohler and pug-ugly Robert Kortman, both as unremittingly evil as they would ever be. Even the ubiquitous sidekicks, Salvation and Whipsaw, described in the serial as "madcap mountain men," are more than tolerable and both Guinn Williams and Ray Hatton would enjoy lengthy A- and B-western tenures playing the type of roles they more or less tested here.

The most surprising aspect of Vigilante, however, is how cheaply it was apparently made. Despite being the longest of Republic's 66 serials, it was also the least expensive and enjoyed the second-shortest shooting schedule: a scant 21 calendar days. Granted, stock footage from both the Mascot library and Gene Autry and Three Mesqueteers Westerns helped stretch the budget but there is actually less of that stuff in Vigilantes than in many more expensive Western serials. Neither Mack Wright, a former actor, nor Ray Taylor, reputedly a hopeless drunk who would find himself replaced by William Witney on The Painted Stallion (1937), do much more than direct the general traffic, but at least they keep things moving and Livingston, et al. are good enough performers to take care of themselves. Fine location filming at Kernville, the Kern River, and the picturesque Mission San Luis Rey helps immeasurably, and you can easily forgive and forget the more than usual sloppy continuity, a restrained and at times downright irrelevant heroine, and the obvious doubling of Livingston by Yakima Canutt or Wally West. (Livingston would be much better served in the Mesqueteers films by Duke Taylor, who resembled him somewhat.) Ersatz Zorro, perhaps, Vigilantes is far from the perfect Western serial but good enough entertainment for all that.

Mission San Luis Rey

Cliffhanger cheats ("Annie Wilkes Hall of Shame"
nominees)

Cheat #1: a hitherto unseen river suddenly appears in chapter 2's takeout to cushion the Eagle's fall from Burr's fortress tower. A river apparently running inside the compound!

# 2: Chapter 4 concludes with the Eagle screaming out in pain when caught in an ore crusher. But in the takeout in chapter 5, Salvation pulls him clear well before the hammer can do any damage at all.

# 3: After being chased – screaming again – off a cliff in chapter 5, the Eagle nonchalantly parks his horse, Starlight, and smartly jumps down to a hitherto unseen ledge in chapter 6's takeout.

# 4: At the conclusion of chapter 7, Petroff and four Cossacks have the Eagle pinned down on the floor ready to skewer him with their rapiers. But the takeout in chapter 8 simply substitutes a completely different take which has the Eagle remaining on his feet and eminently able to take care of himself. "Have you all got amnesia?" as Stephen King's
eponymous heroine would have complained.

# 5: Petroff and his Cossacks suffer not only from amnesia but instant blindness in chapter 10s cliffhanger solution when, after felling the Eagle, they fail to spot the prostrate figure on the ground and blithely continue their chase. But rather than being trampled to death, as the cliffhanger suggests, the takeout in chapter 11 reveals how Loring simply rolls well clear of the lead horse, mounts his own and is once again ahead of the enemy posse!

Grizzled sidekick pronunciation 101

Whipsaw to Clem Peters: "We're forming a vigilante to fight Jason Burr and his
'Roosians'!" Clem: "'Roosians?' What are they up to?" (Chapter 2.)

Although The Vigilantes are Coming is in public domain and available everywhere today, I recommend you spend a couple of $$ more and get the Serial Squadron restored version.

For anyone interested in serials in general and Robert Livingston in particular, I heartily recommend Merrill T. McCord's "Brothers of the West: The Lives and Films of Robert Livingston and Jack Randall" (Bethesda, MD: Alhambra Publishers, 2003), in my opinion perhaps the finest publication about B-Westerns and serials next to Jack Mathis' Republic Pictures books.

Virginia Belmont (Monogram westerns & Dangers of the Canadian Mounted)

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Nee Virginia Schupp and originally from Boston (born 1921), San Diego-raised Virginia Belmont was a cigarette girl at famed Hollywood nitery The Mocambo before signing a starlet contract with RKO. She did little actual acting for that studio but decorated their patented crime series and performed the usual legwork. The 1948 Republic serial Dangers of the Canadian Mounted was a breakthrough of sorts (she had earlier, very briefly, graced the 1944 Columbia chapterplay Black Arrow) but she was going nowhere fast – and "nowhere" included co-starring in no less than three Monogram Jimmy Wakely oaters: Oklahoma Bullets , The Rangers Ride, and Courtin' Trouble (all 1948), and one each opposite Johnny Mack Brown and post-Harry Sherman William Boyd – when deciding to relocate to Italy with a new husband in tow. Adding the necessary vowel to her name and becoming Virginia Belmonte, she went on to appear in several Italian films until at least 1957.

Dangers of the Canadian Mounted (Republic, 1948)

In the Canadian Journal of Communication (volume 23. no. 4. 1998), University of Alberta professor Christopher Giddings writes: "The manifest destiny or cultural imperialism of [serials] such as Dangers of the Canadian Mounted and The Royal Mounted Rides Again [see earlier post]is apparent in the hybridized American/Canadian territories in which the films are set, Alcana and Canaska respectively." Warming up to his subject, the good professor continues:

“This annexing reinvention of the Canadian landscape, whether intentional or just the product of sloppy thinking, has political implications. A redrawing of the map harmonizes Canada with the U.S. Yet there is in this cinematic transformation an odd paradox. These U.S. producers and directors obviously thought of Canada as "other"; they recognize a Canadian difference to America by making a conscious choice to set their plots in a foreign location, a location of otherness which they then proceed to fill with American landscapes and the people and values of America's dominant white culture …”

Leave it to an academic to politicize action serials! But no one at Republic or Universal obviously thought of Canada as “other” but simply chose the location to frame stories around the colorful Canadian Mounties, always a popular subject for pulp fiction. And what could be more topical in 1947 than the building of the Alaska-Canadian Highway, a project that soon led to Alaska becoming the 49th state of the union? If anything, in Dangers it is American gangsters who are "other" and not Jim Bannon's heroic Canadian Mountie. It really is amazing what you can achieve with an expensive education if only you apply yourself! Yes, Dangers does reflect "the people and values of America's dominant white culture" – as though that in itself is somewhat suspect and as opposed to exactly what? – but America’s “dominant white culture” really doesn't do all that well considering Anthony Warde’s ultimate lack of success.

Academic theory aside, Dangers remains one of Republic's better post-war serials with some very interesting ideas in the original script. Including the character of Skagway Kate, an American mind you, although exactly how interesting we shall never know due to a bit of censorship trouble (see below). Another unusual touch that did make it through to the finished serial is the very physical use of the border between the territory of Alaska and Canada. With no jurisdiction on the Alaskan side, forceful Sgt. Royal picks a fight with Warde’s Mort Fowler at Skagway Kate's, beating the blackguard straight across the border and right into his own bailiwick. (Chapter 8.) While we get the usual amount of stock footage, including cliffhangers, it is well incorporated and Jim Bannon heads a game cast that includes such veteran stuntmen as Eddie Parker and Bud Wolfe. Nothing to get too excited about, Dangers of the Canadian Mounted is pure escapist entertainment, 1948 Republic style. Nothing more, nothing less.

Censorship troubles

The character of Skagway Kate was conceived by the writers as running a gambling hall complete with dancing girls but the censors objected to what could be misinterpreted as a brothel and Kate became a rather more sedate operator of a boarding house. Veteran comedienne Dorothy Granger (1914-1995), who plays Skagway Kate with a Mae Westian swagger, also lost he opportunity to sing in a late rewrite. Today, Granger is best remembered for having worked with such Hal Roach comedians as Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase, not to mention co-starring in 2-reelers with Harry Langdon, The Three Stooges, W.C. Fields, and Edgar Kennedy. She eventually retired from the screen to run a Hollywood upholstery store with her husband.

All in the family:

In the opening chapter of Dangers of the Canadian Mounted little Dan Page surreptitiously listens to henchmen Dale and Scott plan their next move. The boy is played by young Bill Van Sickel, the son of stuntman Dale Van Sickel who, in this scene, portrays the villainous Scott. In chapter 4, the elder Van Sickel, now playing a henchman named Steele, actually knocks junior over in his attempt to flee the Mounties.

Uncredited appearance department I

In another example of cost-cutting, ubiquitous B-movie actor Marshall Reed (1917-1980) plays no less than four different Mounties: Dave (chapter 3), Douglas (5), Jim (7) and Williams (8). As handsome as the leading men he supported Reed later assumed the starring role in the 1954 Columbia serial, Riding with Buffalo Bill, but it was too little too late for an attempt at genre stardom. Off-screen, Reed ran into some trouble that no serial hero would encounter, including a December 1956 arrest for drunk driving. The actor was stopped on Pico Blvd. and Missouri St. in West Los Angeles but then refused to take a sobriety test. At the time of his arrest, Reed was appearing on the television crime show The Lineup.

Uncredited appearance department II

The voices of Don "Red" Barry and Roy Barcroft are heard in telephone conversations, in chapters 4 and 11 respectively. All in a day's work when under contract to a studio like Republic.

Adele Jergens & Black Arrow

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Leggy, bottle-blonde Adele Jergens (1917-2002) always looked as if she had been around the block a few times; in other words, she was the quintessential tough broad and not necessarily the one with a heart of gold. She claimed to have been in the "Follies" but she most certainly was voted "The Fairest of the Fair" during the 1939 New York World's Fair before joining the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. Columbia Pictures signed her to a contract in 1944, nicknamed her "The Eyeful" and launched her in their patented brand of lowbrow escapist fare. Surprisingly sedate in real life and not at all like the floozies she did so well on screen, Adele blithely accepted to play Marilyn Monroe's mother in Ladies of the Chorus (1948), despite the fact that she was Marilyn’s senior by only nine years. By then, of course, the bloom was already off the rose, and her role as "Cameo McQueen" in MGM's Technicolor remake of Show Boat was so severely cut that it ended up as a silent bit. Happily married since 1949 to fellow B-Movie actor Glenn Langan (The Amazing Colossal Man), she seemed not to have cared all that much about her career and continued instead to add her vibrant presence to lower-case potboilers such as The Miami Story (1954) and The Day the World Ended (1956). Modern movie fans may not remember Adele Jergens but her films pop up on cable stations on occasion and are often more watchable today than many a dreary classic.

Black Arrow (Columbia, 1944)

"Fifteen chapters of slip shod production and direction by Lew Landers, who could do better. It's as if he's saying, 'Let's get this crap in the can.'" The harsh judgment comes from Boyd Magers of Western Clippings, one of the most astute commentators on B-Westerns and serials, and Boyd is right on the money. Black Arrow is indeed slip shod, with paint-by-numbers cliffhangers and especially wooden leads that include the very contemporary Adele Jergens, who is clearly out of her element in the Great Outdoors.

Yet despite that, the serial does have a few compensations, and chief among them is Kenneth McDonald's suave villainy. McDonald, well cast as greedy carpetbagger Jake Jackson, is smooth as silk when surrounded by the good folks of Big Mesa, only to turn downright viperous when plotting with his henchmen. No one did this type of two-faced villainy better. Then there is Charles Middleton as a wise Indian agent, a surprise, no doubt, to everyone who has followed the redoubtable Mr. Middleton's long career in skullduggery. Even as far into the serial as chapter 3, you kind of expect Middleton to turn right around and side with McDonald, but the reformed reprobate remains on the side of righteousness for the duration and Middleton visibly delights in the transformation.

In addition to the good performances by the supporting cast, and despite the worst wigs this side of Republic's Jungle Girl (1941), the serial depicts the Dinee, i.e. Navajos, with certain respect and not as the usual "red devil Injuns." They live in hogans and not tents, for one thing, and the tradition of sand painting is briefly mentioned in the opening chapter. But as a whole, Black Arrow is one of those Columbia chapter plays that comes and goes, long on sound and fury – no one did more sound effects than the studio that also produced the Three Stooges – but very little substance.

About the production

Adhering to a longstanding tradition of casting unknowns as serial leads, customary for all three serial studios, male Columbia starlet Robert Scott (1921-2006) played the title role in Black Arrow. The Colorado native actually enjoyed a long career that included television, not as Robert Scott but under the moniker of Mark Roberts.

Uncredited appearances

Best known for portraying Mexican sidekick Pancho in the 1944-1946 Monogram Cisco Kid series, the same character name, as in Black Arrow, Martin Garralaga was in fact of Norwegian descent. He worked in films until 1969. Playing Ma Prescott in chapters 5-6, Marin Sais acted in films as early as 1910 and in the mid-1910s became the star of several popular series, including The Girl from Frisco (1915) and The American Girl (1917). Divorced from B-Western star Jack Hoxie, Sais portrayed mostly pioneer women in the sound era, notably The Duchess in the 1949 Red Ryder series with Jim Bannon.

King of the Forest Rangers (Republic, 1946)

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You certainly didn't need to be well versed in Shakespeare, Ibsen or Strindberg to star in an action serial. In fact, several rank amateurs did quite well as chapter play heroes, including gridiron and other sport stars, big game hunters, and aviators. Larry Thompson (see illustration at right), the hero in King of the Forest Rangers, is clearly not an experienced actor and almost certainly chosen solely for his resemblance to ace stuntman Dale Van Sickel. This is just fine. We don't demand much more from a serial protagonist that he, or she, can speak their lines with a modicum of conviction and refrain from bumping into the furniture when not specifically engaged in a brawl. But when it comes to the Boss Villain, we may reasonably demand more than what we get here.

Stuart Hamblen is just as amateurish as Thompson, if not even more so, and that is a big problem in a genre that usually employed the likes of Charles Middleton, Eduardo Ciannelli, Henry Brandon, Roy Barcroft and other natural scene-stealers to perform the dastardly deeds. Known as a country & western singer and songwriter (and a 1952 third party presidential candidate on a prohibition ticket), Hamblen is as wooden as they come and not even his chief lieutenant, the experienced Anthony Warde, can quite make up for such deficiency. Mr. Hamblen's presence as the lead villain is especially galling considering that a much more appropriate candidate, Republic veteran LeRoy Mason, is wasted in a nothing-part as a gambler.

Too bad; except for that single miscalculation in casting Forest Rangers is otherwise a perfectly adequate example of a latter-day Republic serial with generally unobtrusively inserted stock footage from earlier Northwoods melodramas and the customary fine work by the stuntmen. And it has that dreaded pulp shredder imperiling lovely Helen Talbot in chapter 9!

About the production

It had become the norm by 1946 for Republic stuntmen such as Tom Steele and Dale Van Sickel to play more than one henchman in each serial, sometimes up to four or five. King of the Forest Rangers took the practice to the extreme by also having one actor, Scott Elliott (aka Robert Neil), play no less than four different rangers. This way, the serial could live up to its title without the extra expenditure of hiring four actors to play the parts.

Helen Talbot

Blonde and voluptuous (“the most stacked of all the girls at Republic,” says Peggy Stewart), Kansas-born Helen Talbot (1924-2010) suffered quite a few indignities in her two serials, including nearly getting herself incinerated and placed before a whirling airplane propeller in Federal Operator 99 (1945). She was the girl on the pulp shredder conveyor belt in Forest Rangers and appeared in three Westerns with then-boyfriend Don “Red” Barry before packing it all in to marry someone else. Talbot, a discovery of choreographer Don Loper, began her screen life as a Goldwyn Girl and was under contract to Republic from September 10, 1943 to January 6, 1946.

Uncredited appearances department

Rex Lease, the star of such serials as Mystery Pilot (1926), The Sign of the Wolf (1931) and Custer's Last Stand (1936), plays a ranger and is awarded a couple of lines in Forest Rangers. Lease, whose stardom waned in the 1930s due to alcoholism, was a special favorite of Republic president Herbert Yates who secured him employment in all four of the studio’s 1946 serial releases.

Jacqueline Dalya & The Secret Code (Universal, 1942)

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A girl singer from New York City, and a former “Miss Greater New York,” Jacqueline Dalya (1918-1980) claimed to speak French, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Arabic. Perhaps. But she certainly did speak Spanish, fluently, and would even appear in a couple of Mexican films. By 1940 she had become Mrs. Bill Conselman – he was a prolific screenwriter – and was singing at Charlie Foy's in Hollywood. In fact, Jacqueline Dalya's private life was often much more interesting than her screen roles and her union with Conselman proved rocky with headline grabbing splits and reconciliations. They finally did divorce in 1943, Jacqueline testifying that Conselman “played gin rummy in the morning, played the horses in the afternoon, and spent the money we needed to pay bills.”

Attempting to get over the divorce, Dalya dallied with Mexican singer Carlos Ramirez and rising MGM star Van Johnson. The latter “engagement” was of longer durations but even the gossip columnists assumed she was merely a “beard.” Jacqueline, in fact, was described as “the only girl Johnson ever showed any interest in.” You think?

There were nightclub sightings with the very young Rory Calhoun and jockey Sammy Rennick but Jacqueline also took time out to smash her car into Fox producer Sol Wurtzel's Bel Air property in an attempt to avoid a vehicle traveling in the wrong lane. She was unhurt but Wurtzel was obliged to get a new fence.

There were more men: Swiss newcomer Kurt Kreuger, bad boy star Lawrence Tierney, director (and later Tonight Show producer) Fred de Cordova ( “there's a surprise for you!” opined columnist Harrison Carroll, whatever that meant) and handsome Tad Van Brunt, the latter described as a “new Paramount find.” Dorothy Kilgallen, meanwhile, observed that “The John Hart whom Jacqueline Dalya is introducing around Hollywood as her "cousin" is really her new heartthrob. He's the Columbia cowboy star.”

In between, Jacqueline also appeared in films and on television but in 1950, as an insurance against screen roles drying up she became sales manager for a California autoparts manufacturing company. By this time she was married to songwriter Bob Hilliard (“In the Wee Small Hour of the Morning,” etc.) Dalya was still working in the film business into the 1970s, one of her final appearances coming in the drive-in flick Blood Mania (1970).

… and their fellas: Tad Van Brunt.

A genuine war hero who served in both WWII and the Korean conflict, Frederick “Tad” Van Brunt (1921-1977) only dabbled in the movie business in between. Van Brunt was buried in Hawaii. A namesake son became a Hollywood prop man.

The Secret Code

… to be continued!