Charles and I eventually watched a short movie: the first episode in the 13-chapter Universal serial Gang Busters from 1942, which I’d downloaded from archive.org (most serials were in 10, 12 or 15 episodes, and it seems that Universal was the only company making serials that did 13-episode ones despite 13’s reputation as an unlucky number), which was an attempt 13 years before the 1955 Gang Busters movie to exploit the terrific popularity of the radio show of the same title. The radio project originally emerged as part of the mid-1930’s campaign to glorify the police in general and the FBI in particular as our lines of defense against the menace of gangsterism, and judging from the titles of the 1950’s Gang Busters TV episodes also available on archive.org, a number of them actually did deal with real-life criminals. (Among the famous criminal names appearing on the episode titles were John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, and Homer Van Meter.) Indeed, the person who entered the information for the 1955 Gang Busters movie onto imdb.com seemed to think it was a documentary, since the words “archive footage” appear after the name of every character listed! The 1942 Gang Busters was an attempt to continue the campaign that had begun in the mid-1930’s to enlist public support for law enforcement and end the (presumed) glorification of criminals of the gangster films of the early sound era like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, etc. (though since the leads of those films met ignominious deaths at the end, it’s hard to see how any reasonable person could read them as glorifying the life of crime!).
The attitude behind the movie is exemplified by the opening narration, which apparently preceded all the episodes: “Calling the police, calling the G-men, calling all America to war on the underworld. Gang Busters, with cooperation of law enforcement officers of the United States, presents a picture of the endless war of the police on the underworld, illustrating the clever operation of the law enforcement officers in the work of our citizens — the All-American crusade against crime!” According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the real Gang Busters radio show took actual unsolved crimes of the period and dramatized them in hopes that people in the listening audience would call in if they had information that could help police apprehend the real criminals — sort of the America’s Most Wanted concept decades earlier — but the plot of Universal’s Gang Busters (unlike that of the 1955 movie, which was about a fictional but mostly believable criminal) drew heavily on Universal’s expertise in horror and science-fiction. The principal villain is a man calling himself “Professor Mortis” (Ralph Morgan, brother of the Wizard of Oz — or at least of Frank Morgan, who played the title role in the 1939 film — Ralph often got cast as murderers, but usually in realistic whodunits), who leads a criminal organization called the “League of Murdered Men.” Ostensibly these are people who were executed for their crimes but whom Prof. Mortis (also identified as Dr. Clayton Maxon in the imdb.com cast list) has been able to bring back to life, though it’s unclear (at least from the first episode) whether Mortis really has the scientific capability to raise the dead or was just giving these people a drug or hypnotic treatment so they would appear dead and be declared dead when they were “executed.” Anyway, during the course of this first episode Mortis tells a new recruit to his gang that in order to have the job he must first kill himself so Mortis can revive him — and the would-be henchman is understandably miffed at this and not altogether concerned that every man in Mortis’s operation who has “died” has been brought back to life — “so far,” Mortis adds, ominously and unreassuringly.
Mortis steals a police car and broadcasts a warning on the police band announcing that he’s responsible for the crime wave gripping the city (the city itself is carefully unspecified in the script by the usual committee — Morgan Cox, Al Martin, Vic McLeod and George H. Plympton — but it contains an elaborate subway system, and neither Charles nor I could think of a U.S. city with subways in 1942 besides New York and Boston), which includes not only sensible crimes (like robberies of genuinely valuable property) but senseless ones (like people gunned down on the street for no apparent reason except to spread fear and terror). It’s not all that clear just what Mortis is after, and quite frankly Ralph Morgan is too weak an actor to be playing a mad scientist (oh, how one wishes for Lionel Atwill’s authority in a similar part in Republic’s Captain America serial!), but the film itself is fast-moving — the directors are Noel Smith, a veteran of the Warners’ factory; and Ray Taylor, whose serial credits include the marvelous The Return of Chandu; the final Universal Flash Gordon serial, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe; and the engaging if rather silly The Adventures of Smilin’ Jack — and it looks more like a major-budget gangster film than a serial (though part of that is due to the scads of stock footage from major-budget gangster films it contains!). Gang Busters the movie was probably a disappointment to fans of the radio show (as no doubt Dick Tracy and Captain America were to people who’d got to know those characters from the comics), but on its own it’s quite a production (even though the good guys are, at least so far, even more colorless than usual) and I’m looking forward to the subsequent episodes. — 12/18/12
•••••
I ran Charles episodes two and three of the 1942 Universal
serial Gang Busters (notice the two-word
spelling of the title, which is also correct for the radio and TV shows
producer Phillips H. Lord created); the serial was more or less based on the
radio program — I say “more or less” because though the radio show had documentary
pretensions (at least one description of Gang Busters on radio indicated it was the America’s
Most Wanted of its time, broadcasting
dramatizations of real-life crimes for which the police had a solid suspect but
hadn’t actually caught him, in hopes an audience member would provide the
information that would lead police to the person they were seeking so they
could be apprehended, tried and given justice), the serial is a fantastical
plot in which the mysterious crime wave sweeping its city (unnamed in the
dialogue but quite obviously New York, especially since there’s a subway
running through it and the criminals hide in its tunnels, and often have to
cross the tracks very quickly to get to the secret door of the hideout before a
train bears down on them and runs them over) is headed by a mysterious
“Professor Mortis” (in the first episode a helpful bit of dialogue pointed out
that his name is Latin for “death”) and consists of his minions, the “League of
Murdered Men.” Apparently Mortis is in the habit of recruiting his gang from
recently arrested prisoners and slipping them a drug which, when they take it,
results either in them actually dying in their cells or slipping into a coma
indistinguishable from death. (The writing committee — Morgan Cox, Victor
McLeod, Al Martin and George H. Plympton — still, as of the end of episode three, hasn’t made it
clear which.)
Gang Busters is an
interesting serial in a number of ways, but the oddest of them is that the
story is a weird mix of gangster drama and horror film — Mortis is a character
straight out of the horror wing of Universal (indeed, the “subway tunnels”
which conceal his hideouts seem to me to have been recycled from the sets of
the Paris sewers built for the 1925 Lon Chaney, Sr. version of The
Phantom of the Opera) and the macabre
gimmick behind his gang is that they have to follow his orders because the only way they can stay alive after
he’s either brought them back from the dead or reversed the effects of the
coma-inducing drug he smuggled them in prison is with another drug Mortis has concocted, and for which only he
knows the formula. The best aspect of the episodes so far has been the
character of Mike Taboni (William Haade), who’s “killed himself” in jail so
Mortis can revive him and turn him into one of the League of Murdered Men;
Haade’s acting, even within the bounds of movie-gangster cliché, actually does
a good job of delineating his uncertainty about his new role as one of the
living-dead members of Mortis’s mob and the control Mortis has over him because
he’s the only one with the antidote that keeps him alive. Gang
Busters has its flaws, though; for one
thing, Robert Armstrong is billed fourth (and is playing one of the cops rather
than one of the gangsters, thank goodness) but he’s ill-used and doesn’t get
enough screen time. For another thing, directors Ray Taylor (an old serial hand
who in 1934 had directed one of the best — and most unusual — serials ever
made, The Return of Chandu) and
Noel Smith decided to put an arty dissolve effect at the end of every episode,
so you don’t get that clear an
idea of what the cliffhanger is because no sooner have you registered it than
it dissolves into the montage of prisoners walking up and down the halls of a
prison that was cribbed from stock footage and used in the opening as well —
which rather takes the edge off the whole concept of the cliffhanger. It’s a
fun serial and, unlike a lot of them, actually moves fast even between the
action highlights, but there were better serials than this (notably The
Return of Chandu and the 1943 Columbia Batman) and, as with Universal’s other “modern” serial The
Green Hornet, there are surprisingly few
fisticuffs — most of the action scenes are car chases (the cliffhanger at the
end of episode one is a runaway plane which the villains attempt to hijack,
killing the pilot, only the lead cop, Kent Taylor as Lt. Bill Bannister,
overpowers the bad guy in the plane and, despite having no previous flying
experience whatsoever, has to land the plane — and has to do it with one
landing-gear wheel off because he clipped the top of a building with it
earlier). — 12/22/12
•••••
I ran Charles episode four of Gang Busters, the 1942 Universal serial that remains an odd
mixture of gangster and sci-fi/horror tropes. The Gang Busters property began as a radio series that depending on
what source I’ve read (I’ve never actually heard a radio episode) was either a
re-enactment of famous crimes of the past or an America’s Most Wanted precursor that re-enacted current crimes in which a suspect had been identified but
not caught. Universal bought the rights from producer Phillips H. Lord to do a
serial based on it, but instead of having the leads — police detective
lieutenant Bill Bannister (Kent Taylor, bringing the same authority to the role
he did as Boston Blackie on TV a decade later) and reporters Tim Dolan (an
ill-used Robert Armstrong — but then again, aside from Howard Hawks’ marvelous
silent A Girl in Every Port and
the classic King Kong and its
sequel, Son of Kong, it’s hard to
think of a time when Armstrong was well used in film) and Vicki Logan (Irene Hervey, admirably spunky — one of
my aesthetic tests for a serial is how well the women are drawn: are they just
screaming damsels in distress or active participants in the action? Needless to
say, I much prefer the latter!) — fight either genuine gangsters or fictional
characters based on them, they decided to have the super-villain be Professor
Mortis (Ralph Morgan, the Wizard of Oz’s brother), who’s invented a way of
either raising the dead or giving convicts a coma-inducing drug that makes them
appear dead, then reviving them
with his own antidote — but one which has to be taken regularly or the person
will die permanently. Naturally, Mortis keeps control of all his revivified
sidekicks — whom he calls the “League of Murdered Men” (!) — because only he
has the antidote and the formula to make it, and in episode four (called
“Hangman’s Noose” for some reason even though no noose actually appears in the
film) he hits on the idea of turning Bannister to his will by kidnapping him,
giving him the “death” drug, then reviving him but making his continued
existence dependent on the antidote only Mortis has. I still find it annoying that the same self-consciously
“arty” montage scene is used at the beginning and ending of every episode — it’s especially bothersome when
the cliffhanger dissolves into it, leaving us uncertain as to just what deadly peril is affecting which character at the end
of each episode — but Gang Busters,
though hardly at the level of the all-time best serials (which I would say were
the 1934 The Return of Chandu and
the 1943 Batman), is still a lot
of fun to watch despite (or perhaps because of) its dorky genre-bending. And episode four does contain a quite well-staged fistfight, belying my
continuing complaints that too many of Universal’s serials relied on car chases
for the action highlights; this time, at least, their collection of stunt
people acquitted themselves in hand-to-hand combat at least as well as Republic’s.
— 12/27/12
•••••
I ran Charles two more episodes, the sixth and seventh, of
the Gang Busters serial. This has been
an interesting one to watch because most serials were either superhero stories,
action tales or Westerns — the tropes of a gangster movie fit rather oddly with
those of a serial, particularly since the principal villain is Professor Mortis
(Ralph Morgan), not your standard-issue movie gangster but a mad scientist
who’s figured out a way either to induce actual death in people or give them a
drug that makes them look dead,
enough to fool prison medical authorities so when he gives the drug to a
convict, said convict is declared to have committed suicide in their cell and
Mortis then has someone claim the body so he can revive it with an antidote
drug only he knows about. The fourth-episode cliffhanger — Mortis sends two
minions out to kill the serial’s good-guy lead, detective lieutenant Bill
Bannister of the police (Kent Taylor, who a decade later would play Boston
Blackie on TV with the same authority) — was resolved rather disappointingly
when he escaped the trap with absurd ease at the beginning of episode five, but
the later cliffhangers were much more spectacular, including Bannister and the
female lead, reporter Vicki Logan (Irene Hervey). being caught at the end of
episode six inside the new, and uncompleted, City Hall which Mortis has set
incendiary bombs to burn down (obviously Universal had stock footage of a half-finished building burning and
the writing committee wrote this story line into the script to use it); and a
“water trap” at the end of episode seven — though Charles was wondering how the
villains could possibly set the water trap for the heroes when they were in
different parts of the building in which it was located. What’s more, the
cliffhanger at the end of episode five — a nicely shadowy shot of Bannister
taking a header out of the window of a multi-story building — got resolved really disappointingly when we were supposed to believe
that he landed on an awning and it broke his fall so well that within a second
or so he was able to get up and give chase to the baddies! — 12/29/12
•••••
Charles and I ran episodes eight
and nine of the 1942 Universal serial Gang Busters last night — and, praise be, this is one of those serials
that’s actually getting better as it
goes along instead of just running its situations into the ground. It’s true
that some of the cliffhangers are the usual cheats, but the good parts of this serial include unusually atmospheric
direction by Ray Taylor (the remarkable talent behind The Return of Chandu) and Noel Smith (who started in the Warners’ “B” salt
mines and should have had the talent to rise above them the way Vincent Sherman
and Gordon Douglas did), and a personable and quite dynamic cast headed by Kent
Taylor as Detective Lieutenant Bill Bannister, the leader of the gangbusters’
force of the city police department (the city is pretty obviously New York — as
Charles pointed out, the crooks have their hideout inside the city’s subway system
and New York and Boston are the only
U.S. cities with such extensive subways — though in the usual practice of the
time the city’s identity is kept secret and the police cars simply say “Police
Department” on them); Irene Hervey as an appropriately spunky heroine, reporter
Vicki Logan; Robert Armstrong as Tim Nolan (though in some of the episodes he
seems to be affiliated with the police as Bannister’s partner and in others he
seems to be Vicki Logan’s co-worker at the paper!); Ralph Morgan as a surprisingly
personable and subtly played villain, “Professor Mortis”; and oddball
characters like newsboy Mr. Grub (John Berkes, later one of the crooks Bela
Lugosi recruits for his gang in Bowery at Midnight) and Frenchie Ludoc (Edward Emerson) — whoever was painting
the prop sign for his waterfront restaurant had only the dimmest idea how to
spell a French name! — whose character is surprisingly morally ambiguous for a
serial, willing to let crooks use his place as a hideout and keep their stolen
money and goods there but not O.K. with
having his place used as a murder scene. The script for this one is by the
usual committee (Morgan Cox, Al Martin, Victor McLeod and George H. Plympton,
who’d later work on DC Comics-based serials for Columbia) but it’s facile, and
one should give them credit for some quite inventive gimmicks — like one
cliffhanger in which Vicki is about to take Bannister’s picture with a camera
that, unbeknownst to her, has a gun inside that will shoot Bannister when the
shutter button is pressed, and directors Taylor and Smith get a nice suspense
thing going since we know the camera is
booby-trapped but the on-screen characters (at least the good ones) don’t—
though the resolution is something of a cop-out (Vicki hits the shutter button
and the camera fires, but Bannister escapes harm because he just happened to trip and fall moments earlier). One wonders if the
writers got this gimmick from the Marx Brothers’ film The Big Store, made just a year earlier! — 12/30/12
•••••
I ran Charles episodes 10 and 11 of the 1942 Universal
serial Gang Busters — a quite
interesting production, despite some of the usual serial problems (like weird
glitches in continuity between episodes — interestingly, instead of a formal
recap of the preceding episode’s contents, each new chapter begins with a
prologue containing new footage of the previous episode’s events as well as
recut scenes from the earlier one, and there’s a device at the beginning with a
newspaper headline giving the details of the latest crime committed by sinister
Professor Mortis and his gang, the League of Murdered Men). Not only is the
gimmick of the criminal gang itself unusual for a serial outside the
sci-fi/horror genre — Professor
Mortis (played by reliable heavy Ralph Morgan in a surprisingly courtly
fashion, especially given the hammery of other serial master villains) has
either revivified dead criminals or given them a drug that simulates death,
then worked them to do his will by saying that they will die for real if he
doesn’t keep giving them an antidote to the original drug, which of course only
he has the formula for — but Mortis’s motives aren’t the usual ones of greed:
when one of his henchmen actually asks him why he isn’t in it for the money and
what he is in it for, he says,
“Revenge … and power!” Though so far we haven’t been given enough of Mortis’s
background to have a clue what he might want revenge for, or against whom, he has said throughout the serial that what he really wants
is to destroy the city government and put his own in power in its place. In
these two episodes, he hires a bomb builder to make a dynamite bomb and conceal
it in a truck — with which he plans to blow up police headquarters and kill
everyone inside — though the hero, police lieutenant Bill Bannister (Kent Taylor),
hijacks the truck and forces it off a bridge into a river, where its bomb
explodes harmlessly (clever editing turns this into a cliffhanger by making it
appear briefly as if Bannister has been blown up).
There’s also a great deal
made of the exposure of Happy Haskins (Richard Davies) as Mortis’s “mole” in
the police department, and the death of the very interesting character Mr. Grub
(Johnnie Berkes — he later played a crook recruited by Bela Lugosi to join his super-gang in the film Bowery at Midnight, though in that one he was merely “John Berkes”), a
newsboy who works as courier for the gang by slipping messages from one gang
member to another concealed in the newspapers he delivers. He’s run down by a
subway while on his way to the gang’s underground headquarters, which are
concealed behind a maintenance door in the subway tunnels — which means the
gang members are severely inconvenienced when they have to wait for the trains
to pass so they can get into their hideout (and Mortis himself never seems to
leave there — this is not one of
those serials where the villain’s identity is a secret and he’s hiding in plain
sight as an ostensibly respectable, law-abiding person — though the story might
have been more interesting if the writers had used that trope). Gang Busters is good by serial standards, and it’s one Universal
serial where the directors had access to enough good stunt doubles to stage
convincing fist fights (the way their confrères did at Republic) instead of having to rely on car
chases for the action (though there’ve been some good car chases here, too,
including one rather kinky one in which the crooks stole a cop car so the chase
was between two identical-looking vehicles, and it was a challenge to remember
which was the police car containing the crooks and which was the police car
containing the police); it’s also fast-moving and isn’t suffering from the longueurs a lot of serials showed off towards their later
episodes, and I’m looking forward to watching the last two episodes (this contained
13 chapters, an odd number I think only Universal used — 10, 12 and 15 were the
norms), probably tonight so we can close out this very interesting serial
before the year ends! — 12/31/12
•••••
I ran Charles and I the last two chapters of the 1942 serial
Gang Busters, and while the ending was a
bit disappointing — the big reveal of Professor Mortis’s identity was that he
was someone called Dr. Clayton Maxton, who (like the part Boris Karloff played
in his first mad-scientist movie for Columbia, The Man They Could Not
Hang) put a volunteer to death intending to
revive him — only the police came in at the wrong moment and arrested him for
murder without even giving him a chance to bring his “temporarily” killed
victim back to life. Dr. Maxton served a prison sentence and, when he got out,
he had decided to avenge himself on the mayor and police chief of the carefully
unnamed city where this takes place for the years he lost due to his conviction
— so he invented a drug that would give the appearance of death, had convicts
take it, then had his associates claim their bodies so he could revive them …
or actually just pretend to, since contrary to what he’s been telling his gang
members all movie, the drug’s antidote only needs to be taken once: you don’t need maintenance doses of the antidote
every week to keep yourself alive the way Mortis told his staff so they’d be
loyal to him as the only one who could provide the presumably necessary drugs
to maintain their revived existences. All through the previous episodes we had
been kept in suspense about whether Mortis was genuinely a scientific
necromancer giving life to dead gangsters to form his so-called “League of
Murdered Men” or the suicide drug he was giving them was simply a heavy-duty
soporific that put them under and made them look dead; these last two not only answered the question
but offered a rather lame cop-out that explained the serial’s hero, Detective
Lieutenant Bill Bannister (Kent Taylor, who in a plot twist anticipating Clint
Eastwood’s movie, accepts being fired from the police force on the ground that
as a private citizen he won’t be bound by legal and constitutional
technicalities and therefore will be that much more effective in prosecuting
the “war on crime” alluded to in the opening credits and spoken prologue),
being able to get injected with Mortis’s drug (the needle approaching his body
was actually the serial’s final cliffhanger!) without having to take
maintenance doses of the antidote for the rest of his life.
I’d been hoping that was how it would end — the police scientists would
have discovered Mortis’s antidote and figured out how to make it themselves,
but Bannister would have to stay on the drug for all his remaining days — but
that would have brought this film too close to the Production Code’s flat ban
on stories about drug addiction. Aside from that, though, the 1942 Gang
Busters is a quite interesting serial that
— unlike a lot of members of the breed — got more interesting, not less, as it continued; it was
helped by a fast, relentless pace (though the principal villain character
seemed to have wandered over from the part of the Universal lot where they made
their famous horror movies, the film did gain from the speedy action and staccato violence typical of the
gangster genre, especially in the
1930’s) and by highly competent acting from a cast that, while hardly from the
“A”-list of the time, was far better than the no-names that usually played in
serials: Kent Taylor, spunky Irene Hervey, villain Ralph Morgan (who usually played
a less exotic sort of bad guy — though he got one part, Condemned to
Live, in which his portrait of a decent man
cursed into becoming a monster would have been worthy of Boris Karloff, Lionel
Atwill or John Carradine in similar parts) and Robert Armstrong, albeit wasted
as Taylor’s sidekick. (One would have thought his parts in King Kong and the sequel, Son of Kong, would have “made” his career — but Armstrong was
probably too difficult to cast to achieve major stardom, too heroic to be
re-“typed” as a villain the way RKO did with his King Kong co-star, Bruce Cabot, and not good-looking enough
for conventional romantic leads.)
The writing, though done by the usual serial
committee (Morgan Cox, Al Martin, Vic McLeod and George H. Plympton), is also
quite inventive — especially in the climax, in which in order to spare reporter
Vicki Logan (Irene Hervey) and Detective Tim Nolan (Robert Armstrong) from
being drugged to death and then revived as members of the “League of Murdered
Men,” Bannister agrees to assassinate the mayor and police chief on Mortis’s
orders — and actually goes into the office where they’re meeting, closes the
door behind the reporters waiting outside, then two shots ring out and he
announces to all and sundry that he’s done the dirty deed. It’s an effective
scene and would have worked even better if directors Ray Taylor and Noel Smith
had actually staged it — if the mayor and chief had been shown getting hit,
bleeding and crumpling to the floor so that they looked dead when the reporters saw them — and we’d only
later found out that the shootings had been faked, with a blank-loaded gun and
blood packets that “exploded” on cue, the way they would be done in a movie.
Still, Gang Busters is a
better-than-average serial, and if it rejected the “ripped from the headlines”
pretensions of the original radio program and substituted a mad scientist and
rank serial melodrama in its place, it was at least good, well-done rank serial
melodrama, the sort of story that moves fast enough that we don’t pick out the
relatively obvious plot holes until well after the movie is over! — 1/2/13
