Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (George Pal Productions, Warner Bros., 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 25) I watched another installment in the series Turner Classic Movies was doing based on films drawn from pulp fiction. This time it was a 1975 would-be superhero epic called Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, based on the Doc Savage pulp novels credited to “Kenneth Robeson” (a pseudonym owned by the company that published them, Street and Smith) but mostly written by Lester Dent. In later years Dent looked back on his career as a pulp writer with thinly disguised disdain. He’d been able to sell two stories to the legendary Black Mask magazine, both noir tales built around a Florida-based detective named Sail, in the mid-1930’s and had enjoyed working with its editor, Joseph Shaw. Unfortunately, in 1936 Shaw was fired as Black Mask’s editor after having launched the careers of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and was replaced by a woman named Fanny Ellsworth who came to the job from a pulp called Range Romances. Chandler jumped ship and did the rest of his pulp work for a competitor, while Dent lamented the loss of Shaw and went back to writing what he himself dismissed as “reams of saleable crap” and mourned the loss of “the little bit of power Shaw had awakened in me.” Doc Savage (former Tarzan Ron Ely in the movie) was a company creation of Dent, Henry W. Ralston, and John L. Nanovic. His real name was Clark Savage, Jr. and he was a young heir trained by his father, explorer Clark Savage, Sr., to be both an ultra-fit physical specimen and a brilliant scientist in various disciplines. Though he was Earth-born instead of from another planet, the creators of Superman borrowed a lot from the Doc Savage pulps, including a similar metallic sobriquet (Doc Savage was the “Man of Bronze,” Superman was the “Man of Steel”), the use of “Clark” as his non-hero first name (apparently both drawn from the popularity of real-life Hollywood star Clark Gable), and even their identically named redoubts in the Arctic, the “Fortress of Solitude.” When Doc Savage isn’t hiding out in the Fortress he has a redoubt on the 86th floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan (never specified but obviously the Empire State Building) with his five sidekicks (called “The Fabulous Five” in later novels about the character and in this film): chemist “Monk” Mayfair (Michael Miller), general-turned-attorney “Ham” Brooks (Darrell Zwerling), electrical engineer “Long Tom” Roberts (Paul Gleason), archaeologist and geologist “Johnny” Littlejohn (Eldon Quick), and the brawn of the group, construction engineer “Renny” Renwick (Bill Lucking).

The film was produced by George Pal, who’d had an interesting career; as a European refugee during World War II, he got a job at Paramount producing so-called “Puppetoons,” animated shorts featuring stop-motion puppets. In 1950 Pal acquired the rights to two books by Robert A. Heinlein on humans going to and landing on the moon, and he offered them to Paramount for his first feature. Paramount said no, so Pal offered the project to Eagle-Lion Pictures, who filmed it as Destination Moon. As luck would have it, the theatre where Destination Moon was first shown in New York was just down the street from the office building where Paramount had its headquarters, so for weeks the “suits” at Paramount had to pass the queues of customers literally lined up for blocks to see the movie they’d turned down. The Paramount executives got the message and immediately signed Pal to make a series of science-fiction films: When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Conquest of Space (1955). Pal then branched out to work for other studios on films like Tom Thumb (1958) and Atlantis: The Lost Continent (1961). Pal got interested in Doc Savage as a film property when he noticed huge stacks of Bantam Books’ reprints of the original pulp stories (which they’d began printing in 1964 in the wake of the success of James Bond both on paper and film), only the stacks gradually got smaller every time Pal went in the store. After elaborate negotiations with various claimants to the rights, Pal licensed all 181 original Doc Savage stories and started developing this film in 1969, though it took him six years to bring it to the screen. Pal hired Ron Ely to star as Doc Savage because Ely had become a star playing Tarzan in a TV series that Mad Magazine devastatingly lampooned. The aspect of the Tarzan show Mad chose to ridicule was that, though the show supposedly took place in Africa, it was really shot in Mexico. The original Tarzan show ran its credits over a map of Africa; the Mad parody started with a map of Mexico, with the name “Mexico” erased and “Africa” crudely written in. Also the natives looked Latino instead of Black, and they spoke Spanish. Ely apparently resented the way playing Tarzan on TV had stereotyped him, and he’d moved to Europe to find work there when Pal contacted him and invited him back to the U.S. to play Doc Savage.

Doc Savage: Man of Bronze remains the only film ever made about this character, partly because it was a major box-office flop that destroyed Pal’s career (he had planned a sequel and it was promised in a post-credits tag scene, but it never materialized and the subsequent attempts to bring Doc Savage to the screen fizzled, though among the actors considered for the role were Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Chris Hemsworth, at least partly because the rights have become so dispersed that negotiating for them would be a nightmare) and partly because audiences didn’t like the relentlessly campy approach. Pal not only produced the film but also co-wrote the script with Joe Morheim, though instead of directing the film himself he hired Michael Anderson to do it. Anderson is best known for directing Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which many critics rank alongside Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1953) as the least deserving winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, though there are some compelling films on his résumé, including the first (1956) film version of George Orwell’s 1984 and The Naked Edge, Gary Cooper’s last film (1961), as well as the quite good papal melodrama The Shoes of the Fisherman (1969). Alas, Doc Savage isn’t one of them. It’s basically a series of bizarre action scenes with bits of plot exposition thrown in to connect them. Most of it takes place in the Latin American country of “Hidalgo” (fictitious, but obviously meant to be Mexico because Miguel Hidalgo was the priest and guerrilla leader who declared Mexico’s independence from Spain on September 16, 1810) and it’s about a mysterious tribe called the “Quetzamal” who lost a civil war and were supposedly annihilated. Only a few remnants of the Quetzamal found refuge on the bottom of a canyon referred to by the locals as “The Edge of the World,” where they’ve been discovered and enslaved by the film’s principal villain, Captain Seas (Paul Wexler, in a role that should have been played by Vincent Price), who has enlisted the natives to work for him extracting gold from a pool of molten metal at the base of their canyon.

Captain Seas kicked off the plot by assassinating Doc Savage’s father, who was exploring Hidalgo and had made a deal with the natives to take over the pool of molten gold and use it for their benefit. He’d recorded a land deed to that effect, but the deed was stolen and destroyed by one of Seas’s henchmen, little-person Don Rubio Gorro (Bob Corso). Don Rubio sleeps in a giant-sized crib that rocks, which couldn’t help but remind me of the “adult baby” story I once did as a cover article for Zenger’s Newsmagazine. Another clerk in the land recorder’s office, though she’s on the side of good, is Mona Flores (Pamela Hensley, who got an “Introducing” credit), a refugee Quetzamal who offers to lead Doc Savage and his Fabulous Five to the secret treasure. There’s also a mysterious weapon the Quetzamal have called “The Green Death,” which variously appears as a flying luminescent creature and an all-too-obvious full-sized snake, as well as being tattooed across the chest of a Native American assassin who’s flown to New York to make an attempt on Doc Savage’s life in the opening sequence. Quetzamal Chief Chaac (Victor Millan) is discontented with the way Captain Seas has turned his people into slaves, but his lieutenant Kulkan (Carlos Rivas, whose best-known credit is as the Burmese Lun Tha in The King and I) was the one who cut the deal and he has the power to enforce it. My husband Charles got home from work in time to join me for the last 20 minutes or so of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and he immediately asked me, “Was all of it as silly as this?” “Yes,” I said.

The pulp version of Doc Savage beat the character of Superman to print by five years, and the film Doc Savage: Man of Bronze beat the Salkind Brothers/Richard Donner film of Superman by three years – but Doc Savage failed where the first Superman feature with Christopher Reeve succeeded in striking a balance between heroism, comedy, and the sheer preposterousness of a comic-book superhero story. It also doesn’t help that Ron Ely, though possessing a gorgeous body, couldn’t act for beans (Christopher Reeve was considerably more personable). Before it was released, a film buyer saw it and called it “unsellable, horrible – supposedly a camp movie about this character called Doc Savage, Man of Bronze. Just terrible. Ron Ely is in it, and he doesn't even take off his clothes.” Doc Savage: Man of Bronze ran into a lot of bad luck, including a change of management at Warner Bros. just as the film started shooting (the old studio head had green-lighted the project; the new one hated it), major cutbacks in budget (among other things, Pal lost the money to commission a new musical score; instead music director Frank De Vol had to piece together one from the public-domain works of John Philip Sousa, with “The Thunderer” – the march Sousa composed for the 1888 Presidential campaign of the terminally dull and un-thundering Benjamin Harrison – becoming Doc Savage’s theme), and coming out on the same day as Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws. The film is a total mess with little or nothing to redeem it other than the technology; Lester Dent prided himself on keeping abreast of the latest in science, and though the story takes place in 1936 it includes SCUBA gear, a form-fitting bulletproof vest, and glass-globe fire extinguishers as well as a secret operation that transforms Captain Seas from a supervillain into (literally!) a Salvation Army street volunteer. (That was a gimmick cribbed from a genuine 1936 movie, The Man Who Lived Twice, in which it was unsurprisingly handled far better.)