End of the Trail (Columbia, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had screened a movie I’d been curious about since I saw a clip of it on a retrospective in the early 1970’s: End of the Trail, an extraordinary 1932 production that was probably the first period Western in American history that presented Native Americans sympathetically. (The only predecessor I can think of is The Vanishing American, a silent made at MGM in 1925 and starring Richard Dix — and based, like End of the Trail, on a story by Zane Grey — and The Vanishing American was a contemporary story rather than a period Western like End of the Trail.) The star was Tim McCoy, a Hollywood cowboy whose films had been bread-and-butter releases for MGM in the late silent era; he was working his way down the Hollywood food chain and by 1932 had settled in at Columbia, where he made a long string of “B” Westerns like Two-Fisted Law (with John Wayne in a supporting role!) and this bizarre outlier, set in the same heady time and place — the Great Plains in the 1870’s — PBS covered in their recent documentary on General George Armstrong Custer.

McCoy plays Army cavalry captain Tim Travers (it was quite common for McCoy and other Western stars to play characters with the same first name as their own), who as the movie opens is being thrown out of his regiment and the Army itself for having sold modern guns to the Arapahoe Indians that live in the area of the outpost where he’s stationed. Travers denies the charge but makes it clear, in the first of a number of surprisingly forthright (if rather didactic) speeches in Stuart Anthony’s script that make it clear just what the whites did to the Indians in settling the West, and in particular how they made treaties with the tribes and then routinely violated them, that he sympathizes with the Indians and shares their resentment that the latest treaty, which guaranteed them a reservation in the northern Dakota territory in perpetuity, has already been broken by American gold miners who are flocking to the Black Hills and crossing through the reservation while the Army is protecting the miners instead of the Indians.

His epaulets are torn off the sleeves of his uniform (a weird sort of symbolic castration reused in the 1960’s TV series Branded, which starred Chuck Connors as an officer thrown out of the Army for allegedly having shown cowardice in battle) and then the uniform jacket is taken away, and Travers leaves the post with his young son (Wally Albright) and Sergeant O’Brien (Wade Boteler), who though he hasn’t been thrown out of the Army under false pretenses accompanies Travers nonetheless. A raiding party of U.S. cavalrymen — Travers’ former colleagues — attacks him and O’Brien, and a stray bullet kills Travers’ son. (Today we’d casually and cruelly call that “collateral damage.”) With nowhere else to go, Travers and O’Brien seek sanctuary among the Arapahoes, who take them in and make Travers part of their war council. Travers pleads with them to make peace with the white man or face inundation by more white settlers than they can either fight off or live with, but the whites provoke a confrontation, the Indians storm the fort, and Travers reports to his old commanding officer, Col. John Burke (Lafe McKee) and offers himself as the only person who can talk the Indians out of annihilating the fort with their far superior numbers. Travers duly emerges from the fort carrying a white flag, the troopers cease firing and so do the Indians — and then one shot rings out from the fort, from the mortally wounded Major Jenkins (Wheeler Oakman), who it turns out was the man who had actually been selling guns to the Indians and had set up Travers for the fall.

Travers is wounded but fortunately the Indians don’t take the bait and resume the attack; instead there’s a tag scene in which the Indians agree to return to the reservation and Col. Burke announces that he will be the new Indian agent to administer the territory. End of the Trail also features an attraction between Travers and Luana (Luana Walters, who later had some far less illustrious credits like the anti-marijuana movie Assassin of Youth and the wretched 1942 Bela Lugosi vehicle The Corpse Vanishes), though even in a movie this nervy writer Anthony and director D. Ross Lederman didn’t dare an interracial romance — but that (and an annoyingly racist reference to the Indians as “half-children”) only slightly mar a remarkable film that deserves its reputation as essentially the 1932 “B” version of Dances with Wolves. (Charles pointed out a remarkably similar bit of dialogue in both films, as the white army man living with the Indians pleads with them for peace because if they attack, the whites will flood the territory with new settlers and take away what little land they have left.) According to one message board contributor on imdb.com, McCoy personally participated in the oral history project in the 1920’s in which survivors of the battle of the Little Big Horn — on the Indian side, the side that had survivors — were interviewed for the only first-hand accounts we have of it.

 End of the Trail is a film that was pretty obviously influenced by those researches, and though the script gets a bit preachy at times the case it makes against the American whites for their treatment of the Native population is one that’s only become familiar since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s via the revisionist histories of people like Dee Brown, Vine DeLoria, Jr. and Howard Zinn. It’s also a quite well-made movie, far above the standards of a typical “B” Western; Lederman is a director I’ve made fun of in the past (in reference to one of his series crime “B”’s from the 1940’s I joked that you should never trust a director whose name looked like it should have “D.D.S.” after it) but he’s superb here, keeping the pace slow and the tone elegiac — and McCoy’s performance is also far ahead of the work he turned in on most of his projects. When he points out the abuses the whites in general and the Army in particular have wreaked on the Indians, his tone is anguished and breathtakingly sincere, and when he’s living among the Indians he portrays — at least as ably as Kevin Costner did 48 years later — a man really at home on neither side, burdened not only by grief at the loss of his son at the hands of his fellow whites but concern that the Indians he genuinely loves and cares about will be swamped by the white settlers and they’ll either be killed en masse (there’s a quite remarkable speech in the movie by one of the officers that actually seems to advocate genocide!) or forced to give up the only way of life they’ve known. Even McCoy’s age — he was 41, and though he was in good shape for his age the years are visible on his face — adds to the careworn demeanor he projects through most of the film.

The most baffling things about End of the Trail are how on earth Tim McCoy and his producer, Irving Briskin, got it greenlighted, and what audiences who showed up at Saturday matinees expecting a normal, generic Tim McCoy Western made of it. The print we were watching (a commercial DVD release from VCI Entertainment) was missing the original opening and end titles — instead there was a rather crude 1950’s drawing that proclaimed the film as a production of something called “Gail Pictures” (and denied us the chance to see that marvelously cheesy Statue of Liberty logo Columbia used in the early days) — but it was in excellent shape otherwise, and it was a marvelous opportunity to see a movie so obscure it isn’t listed in the American Film Institute Catalog at all (their only listing for End of the Trail in their 1931-1940 catalog is of a 1936 production, also a Columbia Western, but starring Jack Holt and having a totally different plotline from this one) and deserves to be considerably better known.

Lightning Carson Rides Again (Victory Pictures, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Lightning Carson Rides Again, a film made by Tim McCoy as was working his way well down the Hollywood food chain. As a silent-era Western star he had been under contract to MGM — where David O. Selznick had cut his teeth as a producer by taking McCoy’s unit out to the conventional Western locations and shooting two films at once, thereby giving the MGM distribution arm two McCoy films for little more than it usually cost to make one — and in the talkie era he’d been through Warners (where one of his sidekicks was a then little-known actor named John Wayne), Columbia (where he made his masterpiece, the 1932 pro-Indian Western End of the Trail) and by 1938, he was down to working at Victory Pictures, an all-Western operation headed by producer Sam Katzman. The director was Sam Newfield, whom I once referred to as “the Stephen King of directors, who seemed more interested in how fast he could make them than in how good they were.” The story was standard-issue Western stuff, though set in the 1938 present — automobiles and telephones appear in the story (though most of the characters still move themselves about on horseback!) — and the American Film Institute Catalog indicates it as part of a “Lightning Bill” series and a sequel to a Tim McCoy Western called Lightnin’ Bill (note the apostrophe instead of the final “g” in the first word of the name) produced under different auspices — Excelsior and Puritan Pictures — and with Sam Newfield directing but his brother Sigmund Neufeld co-producing with someone called Leslie Simmonds.

The original Lightnin’ Bill is set in Texas, but in the interval between the two films Lightning Bill Carson (Tim McCoy) has settled in San Francisco where he’s become a federal agent for the Department of Justice. Only he gets a call to come back to Jerome, a Western town near Los Angeles, where his sister Katherine Smith (Jane Keckley) has summoned him to get her son Paul (Bob Terry) out of a jam. It seems that bandits ambushed the car being driven by Paul with $10,000 of the Jerome National Bank’s money he was supposed to transfer to a larger bank in the city. The idea was to shoot both Paul and the other man in the car, Gilroy (Wally West, a silent Western star whose career descended faster than McCoy’s did, though he occasionally got character parts under his real name, Hal Taliaferro), and steal the money, but when Paul escaped — albeit without his gun — the baddies stole Paul’s gun with the intent of using it to frame him for Gilroy’s murder. Carson arrives in Jerome and hits on a plan to infiltrate the gang by posing as Mexican bandido José Fernandez — and his “Mexican” makeup is relatively convincing though his voice isn’t (and it is a bit disappointing that the man who showed such extraordinary sensitivity to Native Americans in End of the Trail is basically playing Mexican Stereotype #101 here) — which he does by hanging out at the combination saloon and casino run by Hagen (Slim Whitaker), beating the pants off of Hagen’s henchmen at poker (don’t these guys know how to rig a game to take the sucker from out-of-town?), and ultimately winning their trust enough that they give him the $10,000 they stole from the bank so Fernandez can take it across the border and launder it. Carson is interested in proving Paul innocent — when he caught Paul he sent him to L.A. and told Tom Reynolds (James Flavin), his colleague from the San Francisco office, to catch Paul at the general delivery window of the L.A. post office and hold him until Carson could complete the job of rehabilitating his reputation — but he also wants to find out who’s the big boss of the bank robbers, who in something we’ve known all along since we’ve seen him planning the robberies turns out to be bank cashier George Gray (Karl Hackett). But before Our Hero can find that out, Chuck (Ted Adams), one of the members of the gang, traces him to the barn behind the Smith home in which Carson makes his changes of identity, and when the gang meets to steal $50,000 in payroll money from the bank, Chuck shows up with the Carson clothes ready to “out” José as Carson, and there’s a final shoot-out in which Carson uses his ability to do super-quick draws to subdue the rest of the gang until the local sheriff (Frank LaRue) arrives with a posse to take the baddies into custody.

Lightning Carson Rides Again is a pretty generic “B” Western for the period — a lot of these films were set in contemporary times and one critic ridiculed them as being set in a “never-never time in which horses, automobiles and airplanes are equally important means of transportation” (though this one doesn’t contain planes, at least) — and though McCoy is 47 he’s still a believable action figure and, perhaps because Sam Katzman’s budget didn’t extend to a lot of stunt doubles and breakaway furniture, the action scenes are unspectacular but at least realistic. As Charles said, it’s odd to see a bar fight in a Western that stays confined to the two people who start it and doesn’t “go viral” and sweep up everybody in the bar (or, in the case of The Spoilers, outside the bar and onto the streets); and only the final sequence, in which Carson ambushes one of the baddies single-handedly with the old trick of suspending his hat against a rock so he can sneak around to the bad guy while the baddie still thinks McCoy is where his hat is, strains credibility. Though hardly at the level of End of the Trail (an amazing movie that was the first period-set Western to treat Native Americans sympathetically and makes the case that the U.S. government systematically broke its treaties with the Indians that otherwise wasn’t part of American discourse until Dee Brown, Vine DeLoria, Jr. and Howard Zinn published their revisionist histories in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s), Lightning Carson Rides Again is a competent, workmanlike Western featuring a lot of behind-the-scenes people who would later go on to work for PRC (director Sam Newfield  and set designer Fred Preble) or Monogram (cinematographer Marcel le Picard).

Captain America (Republic, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I showed the first two episodes of the 1944 Republic serial Captain America, which I recently downloaded from archive.org (the downloads crashed so often I ended up having to do each episode one at a time, and though episode one ran normally episode two had an annoying gap of about a second or so between picture and sound, a glitch we’ve encountered in at least two other recent archive.org downloads), and which turned out to be a fun superhero romp even though it had its drawbacks: the special effects seem laughable by current standards (though the disintegration of a model skyscraper at the end of episode one still packs a punch) and Dick Purcell, playing Captain America’s secret identity — crusading district attorney Grant Gardner — looks considerably beefier, shall we say, than the stunt person actually wearing the Captain America suit.

Anyone familiar with the Captain America mythos as originally created by Marvel Comics (or whatever it was called pre-1950) in the World War II years will immediately note that this Captain America is not the comic-book Captain America; just as Republic’s writers changed Dick Tracy from a Chicago Police Department detective to an FBI agent, they junked the original backstory of Captain America and invented their own. In the comics, Captain America was Steve Rogers, whose general puniness rendered him 4-F in the World War II-era draft but who was subject to an experiment that filled out his frame and gave him artificially induced strength. The inventor of this process intended to create entire armies of artificially strengthened men but was killed before he could expose anyone but Steve to the process — and of course, this being a comic book, the secret of how he did it died with him.

Republic rejected all that and took away Captain America’s artificially enhanced strength (so in this reading he’s a Batman-style hero, an ordinary human who has willed himself to superhero status) along with his cape and the shield that was his principal weapon in the comics (I still remember the lyrics from the theme song to the 1960’s cartoon adaptation: “When Captain America throws his mighty shield/All those who chose to oppose his shield must yield”), and changed the basic color of his costume from white to black — so instead of being red, white and blue he’s red, black and blue in the film. But the serial is still a lot of fun, partly due to the casting of spunky Lorna Gray as Grant Gardner’s secretary, assistant and (it’s hinted) love interest — Republic’s serials always featured stronger, more feminist women than other studios’ — and especially Lionel Atwill as the villain of the piece, Dr. Cyrus Maldor (“from Mordor,” I mentally joked).

The first lines of the serial are Atwill’s voice, hypnotically inducing someone to commit suicide by driving his car off a cliff — which he promptly does — he’s taken on the nom de crime of “The Scarab” and has extracted a chemical from a rare orchid that allows him to take over the mind of anyone he can expose to it, to the point where they obediently divulge their secret information and then kill themselves when he tells them to. It’s nice for once to be watching a serial that lets us know who the villain is from the get-go instead of doing the hackneyed “who-is-it?” suspense number and withholding his (or her) identity until the last episode (and sometimes, given how cavalier the usual relationship of serial writers to the concept of continuity was, the character revealed as the villain in the final episode was often someone who’d been shown in the same frame as the villain earlier on!) — and Atwill, who had played virtually the same character as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon two years earlier, is in utterly superb form even though, after his marvelous turn as the criminologist hero of Lady in the Death House, it’s a bit disappointing to see him relegated to villainy in this serial and the PRC film Crime, Inc. the following year.

The serial is full of high-tech gimmicks and well-done action scenes (though Republic doesn’t seem to have been able to get the top tier of stunt people this time; the fight scenes feature some of the most obvious punch-pulling I’ve ever seen in a movie), including one of the most outrageous cliffhangers in serial history — the bad guys (minions of the Scarab) decide to destroy the good guys en masse by heading for the building where a disintegrator ray is being demonstrated, forcing the good guys into a vault, then ramping up the power on the disintegrator until the entire building collapses and takes all the good guys out with it. It also has several unintentionally funny lines, including an interview with one scientist who announces that he’s invented a vibrating machine that can destroy matter and the person talking to him says, “Tell me about your vibrator … ” — 6/24/11

•••••

Relishing the comparison between a new superhero movie and an old one, I ran chapters three and four of the Republic serial Captain America, which is a perfectly acceptable actioner and is about as arbitrarily plotted as any superhero action movie today (contrary to David Thomson, there have always been genres of cinema where spectacle has been more important than narrative coherence) — we got these as a download from archive.org and they were afflicted with the same annoying synchronization problems as episode two (the sound is about a second ahead of the picture — Charles’ player has a setting to make minor adjustments in synch, but this couldn’t adjust it enough to fix the problem). The Captain America serial is typical Republic product, with well-staged fight scenes (if you can accept the obvious punch-pulling by the participants), relentless action, a surprisingly feminist take (in one scene the female lead, Lorna Gray, actually gets to shoot down one of the bad guys — in other studios’ serials the women were just there to be damsels in distress, but in Republic serials they frequently got to participate in the action and help good triumph over evil), and an especially compelling villain performance by Lionel Atwill.

I read his biography page on imdb.com and was startled that his career had been derailed by a scandal in 1944 — he was caught hosting a party at his home at which pornographic films were being shown and, according to some reports, orgies and even rapes were taking place; he refused to testify before the grand jury to shield his friends from exposure; he served six months and then was released when the prosecutors decided there was nothing to prosecute, but this killed his employability at the major studios and only Republic and PRC would still give him work (and in fact he died in the middle of shooting a serial, Lost City of the Jungle, in 1946 and the company just hired someone else to finish the role — a major studio producing a feature would handle the death of a supporting actor by recasting and reshooting the entire role, but that’s now how things got done on Poverty Row). He’s as good as ever, playing a part called Dr. Maldor (“of Mordor,” I couldn’t help but joke) — imdb.com’s page on the serial gives the character’s first name as “Cyrus” but I don’t recall him or anyone else actually using that name for him in the film itself. — 6/26/11

•••••

I ran chapter five of the Captain America serial, which was pretty much more of the same — the setting for the big action set-piece this time was a cardboard box company and the villain, Lionel Atwill as The Scarab a.k.a. “Professor Maldor,” and his minions threatened to decapitate heroine Gail Richards (Lorna Gray) with a guillotine-like machine for cutting large numbers of cardboard pieces at once. Captain America has all the virtues of Republic serials — acceptable acting (except for Atwill, who’s quite a bit better than “acceptable”: he’s as chillingly effective as ever in a role that quite obviously owes a lot to his portrayal of Professor Moriarty opposite Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon two years earlier), a proto-feminist heroine who can take care of herself in the action sequences, well staged action scenes and a relentless pace from co-directors Elmer Clifton and John English that makes the exposition sequences between the action highlights far less dull than usual.

Unfortunately it has all the flaws of a Republic serial: glitchy plotting, bizarre contrivances (in the opening scene Atwill as the Scarab is keeping track of his robot-controlled explosive truck from a camera located behind it — impossible because the shot we see could only have come from a camera in another vehicle following the truck, and the only vehicle following the truck belongs to the good guys … the sequence would be believable if it had been established that the good guys were following in a video-equipped truck and Atwill had hacked into their signal, but that’s probably not something a 1944 screenwriter would have thought of), an overall air of sloppiness, a lack of imagination (in their quite different ways, the 1934 Return of Chandu and 1943 Columbia Batman showed it was possible for a serial to be very imaginative indeed and still deliver the thrills its audience would expect), a sameness in the perils our hero and heroine are put through, and a rewrite of the basic source material to take out the compelling central premise of the original (Captain America as the product of a wartime experiment in taking a 90-pound weakling and artificially turning him into a superman through scientific means) and substitute something pretty flat and ordinary (Captain America as a D.A. who, like Batman and the Green Hornet, is a normal human being who fights crime in a provocative costume — and whose stunt double is quite obviously slimmer and hunkier than Dick Purcell, who plays him in D.A. drag). — 6/30/11

•••••

Charles and I watched episode six of the Captain America serial, “Vault of Vengeance” (I suspect someone on the writing committee had fun with these titles; they seem to have ramped up the usual unwitting campiness of these things to something that seemed deliberate), and it was O.K. even though the cliffhanger by which Captain America’s secretary/girlfriend Gail Richards (Lorna Gray) was saved from having her head chopped off by the guillotine-like cardboard box cutter was a bit of a cheat. — 7/2/11

•••••

I ran episodes seven and eight of the Captain America serial, both of which benefited from quite spectacular cliffhangers — the one at the end of episode six placed Captain America at the bottom of a mineshaft with a huge bucket of slag plummeting down at him (though slowly enough that he was able to roll away from it in time), and the one at the end of episode seven, “Wholesale Destruction,” featured an entire oil refinery blowing up because its owner, J. C. Henley (Tom Chatterton), had resisted the extortion demands of the Scarab (Lionel Atwill), first refusing to pay him and then paying him off but marking the bill numbers first and actually publishing them in the newspapers (which seemed dumb to me: why not mark the bills but not tell anybody you’re doing that, so whenever one of the marked bills shows up in a transaction it can be traced?), though once again Captain America simply rolled himself out of danger before the building (clearly a model, but a quite effective and convincing one by Republic’s special-effects maestros, brothers Howard and Theodore Lydecker) exploded.

Charles pointed out that the writers of this serial seemed quite unconcerned about the amount of collateral damage the villains were causing — as long as the principals escaped unscathed, it was O.K. if hundreds of other people died or millions of dollars’ worth of property were destroyed — though bear in mind that this serial was made in 1944, in the middle of World War II, when bombing raids targeting civilians were commonplace and being indulged in by both sides. The episode eight cliffhanger also looks like a lulu: called “Cremation in the Skies,” it features Captain America’s a.k.a. Grant Gardner’s secretary/assistant/girlfriend, Gail Richards (Lorna Gray), taking off in a small plane to visit the grandson of one of the now-deceased members of the Mayan expedition (still annoyingly pronounced “MAY-an” instead of the correct “MY-un”) to see if he can give a clue as to the provenance of the blow gun used in an attempted murder of Henley after his factory was blown up — and the villains, using a shoe-shine boy as their spy (the kid overhears Gardner and Gray talking about their plans), target the plane because if the grandson remembers where his now-dead granddad got the gun, it will “out” respected Dr. Maldor (Lionel Atwill) as the villainous Scarab.

We’re still having synch problems with the episodes in this serial — seven seemed as much as five to 10 seconds off and eight was closer but still annoyingly unsynchronized — but one of the most entertaining parts of it is the sheer visual presence of Lionel Atwill: he’s so good being bad, even though his part here is so derivative of his role as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon two years earlier, he tries to kill Henley with an air gun, albeit a considerably lower-tech weapon than the one in the Sherlock Holmes stories! — 7/15/11

•••••

I ran chapters nine and 10 of the 1944 Captain America serial for Republic on the eve of the premiere of the new big-budget movie of the real Captain America (preserving the origin story in Marvel Comics that the Republic people, probably for budgetary reasons, removed: as the serial stands, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why a tough district attorney on the trail of a serial killer should don a suit with a motif based on the U.S. flag, call himself “Captain America” and appear inside the suit as a considerably thinner, trimmer and more buff stunt double). This one had some real lulus in the cliffhangers: episode eight, “Cremation in the Clouds” (even for a serial this has some quite dire chapter titles), ends with a plane presumably being flown by Captain America’s assistant, Gail Richards (Lorna Gray), blowing up in the sky, courtesy of a time bomb planted there by the baddies — only in the opening scenes of episode nine we find out that Captain America got away from the baddies who were going after him long enough to radio Gail and tell her to bail out of the plane, and of course she just happened to be wearing a parachute — at least that’s what we assume was in the clunky backpack she had on — only the crash utterly destroyed the Mayan blow-gun Gail was supposed to be flying to the grandson of the professor who originally discovered it on the ill-fated expedition whose members are being knocked off, one by one, by Professor Maldor (Lionel Atwill), a.k.a. The Scarab.

Undaunted, the good guys make up a fake blow gun and put out the word that it’s from a plaster casting of the original — the guy who constructed it jokes that the Scarab’s men will have a lot of fun trying to decipher the fake Mayan hieroglyphics with which he adorned it (I joked that it would turn out to be the Mayan for, “There was an old man from Nantucket … ”) — which the Scarab’s men go after, and the end of chapter nine, “Triple Tragedy,” is as bonkers as the end of chapter eight: Gail traces the baddies to their lair but just happens to be standing over a trap door, whose lever the bad guys pull so she disappears into a hole under the floor of their hideout, which turns out to be an old barn full of powder (we see large black canisters helpfully labeled “POWDER”) which the baddies blow up, hoping to take out Captain America and Dale — they survive, of course, but the barn blows up and with it more potential evidence identifying the Scarab (who, somewhat off the norm for a serial, we’ve known from the get-go is really Maldor but none of the characters — at least the good ones — have).

Captain America is a pretty mediocre superhero serial, with well-staged action scenes by directors John English and Elmer Clifton (the latter a former star for D. W. Griffith: he was Phil Stoneman in The Birth of a Nation and the “Rhapsode” in Intolerance) but a singularly unimaginative script from the writing committee and Republic’s typically slapdash and “cheating” chapter endings: the sort of Republic serial that led me to joke that anyone who’d seen one of these movies could have figured out how to do a sequel to Thelma and Louise: just before the car went over the cliff, they jumped out of it … — 7/21/11

•••••

I ran chapters 11 and 12 of the 1944 Captain America serial with the idea that we’ll finish the piece and then go out to see the newly released Marvel/Disney version, also set in the 1940’s, directed by Joe Johnston (a promising sign giving his success with the lovely, pastoral October Sky) with Chris Evans (who’s already appeared in the Marvel Universe as the Human Torch in the two Fantastic Four movies — which rank among my favorite recent superhero films because they are blessedly free of the forced seriousness Christopher Nolan and Sam Raimi brought to the Batman and Spider-Man franchises, respectively — and while Raimi’s presence and Andrew Garfield’s casting in the next Spider-Man promise a great deal, the fact that Nolan is helming the next Superman movie makes me disinclined to see it even though Christopher Meloni has supposedly signed up for a major role, though what major role I don’t know: are they going to have him shave his head and play Luthor?).

The conceit in this one is that Dr. Clinton Lyman (Robert Frazer) has invented a machine that can restore a dead person to life — provided that the dead person in question hasn’t been dead very long — only the writing committee does precious little with that provocative premise: they have the villain, Dr. Maldor a.k.a. The Scarab (Lionel Atwill), kidnap Dr. Lyman right after Maldor’s henchman Bart Matson (George J. Lewis) dies in a gun battle with the good guys (the good guys hope to keep him alive to pump him for information, including the Scarab’s true identity, but he croaks before that can happen), and the thing is powered by something that looks like an open door to the inferno but which I think was supposed to be a nuclear reactor (it’s hard to think of anything else that could generate a million volts and yet be located inside an ordinary-sized office in an ordinary-sized office building) and Captain America and Matson get into a fight in front of the open door to the inferno as one of the chapter cliffhangers, and guess which one comes out alive (though actually I think they both do).

The episode titles were “The Dead Man Returns” (episode 10 had been called “The Avenging Corpse,” though when Matson is actually revived it doesn’t seem like he’s after vengeance; it’s more like he just wants to get back to work at his job as the Scarab’s assistant and a minor little detail like he was killed and then brought back to life in a science-fictional machine that is the one element in this serial that isn’t physically possible simply doesn’t interest or bother him in the slightest) and “Horror on the Highway,” and of course the titular horror on the highway is a car tipping over in the middle of a chase sequence … though no doubt the writing committee will figure out some cop-out way that Our Hero and Our Heroine (one good thing about this movie is that, like in a lot of Republic serials, the heroine is as spunky, brave and intimately involved in the action as the hero; though she doesn’t get to don a cool costume, Lorna Gray as Captain America’s girlfriend/assistant/secretary Gail Richards is quite feisty and butch in the best tradition of Republic’s serial heroines) will get out of danger! — 7/23/11

•••••

Charles and I decided to finish the 1944 Republic serial Captain America, largely to “clear the decks” before we see the new version that was released last Thursday for one special screening here in downtown San Diego and then generally last Friday. The serial had a larger than usual writing committee — Royal K. Cole, Harry L. Fraser, and Joseph F. Poland, script, plus additional credits to Ronald Davidson, Basil Dickey, Jesse Duffy and Grant Nelson — and overall, while it isn’t a bad movie and certainly “delivers the goods” to the serial audience — a lot of well-staged if not especially creative action scenes, and decent if not truly exciting cliffhangers (the one at the end of episode 12 showed Captain America’s car going off the side of the road and down a cliff, and the beginning of episode 13 revealed that he used the all-time favorite Republic escape mechanism: just before the car went over the cliff, he opened the door and jumped out of it — Republic used this one so often that when Charles and I watched Zombies of the Stratosphere, during the later episodes as the cliffhanger scene unreeled, we’d both call out to the screen, “Jump! Jump!”), just as the audience for the modern-day Captain America will no doubt be waiting for the big action scenes, 3-D effects and spectacular computer-generated imagery.

The focus of the last three episodes was the so-called Temple of the Emeralds, a jewel-encrusted (or possibly completely constructed of precious gems) building the Mayans (the “MAY-ans,” as they’ve been referred to all serial) supposedly left behind when they … well, when whatever happened to them happened. They left an engraved bronze map in two parts, concealed inside two stone tablets, and as it turned out the ill-fated MAY-an expedition on which Dr. Maldor (Lionel Atwill) was a participant, and whose other members he has been systematically knocking off in his guise as the arch-villain The Scarab, recovered both of them: Maldor had one and Professor Hillman (John Hamilton) had the other, and Hamilton discovered it when his clay tablet accidentally broke and revealed the flat sheet of bronze beneath it.

Thanks to his network of spies in and around the offices of district attorney Grant Gardner (Dick Purcell), who’s also at least nominally Captain America (a few close-ups show Purcell in Captain America drag but virtually all the long shots of Cap are of a shorter, lighter and considerably more agile stunt double) — and also to an electromagnetic wire recorder, an esoteric enough gadget in 1944 that the serial stopped for exposition to explain to the audience just what it was (and the electronics technician who made it for the Scarab is played by Kenne “Horsecock” Duncan, later a semi-regular in Ed Wood’s movies) — the Scarab, a.k.a. Professor Maldor, learns that the other half of the bronze treasure map has been concealed in the clay tablet he had all along, and so he sends his gang to break into Hamilton’s home (his men have no particular trouble evading the police guard Gardner posted there, who for sheer incompetence make the Keystone Kops look like Dirty Harry by comparison), steal the tablet and also kidnap Hillman because he knows how to read MAY-an and Maldor doesn’t.

In a performance by Atwill that owes so much to his role as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon two years earlier, it really puts the capstone on things that the final episodes of this serial even track Secret Weapon plotwise; in that film, you’ll recall, Holmes and Moriarty were racing each other over London for the four parts of a state secret, all of which had to be assembled for the message to be readable. Eventually Maldor realizes Captain America’s secret identity as Grant Gardner; Gardner and his assistant/secretary/girlfriend Gail Richards (Lorna Gray) realize Maldor’s secret identity as the Scarab; the police raid the Scarab’s headquarters at the Drummond antiquities museum — and there’s a real surprise that the villain of a serial is taken alive at the end, which hardly ever happened. There’s also a denouement that gave rise to a “Goofs” posting on imdb.com: the successful capture of the Scarab and the end of his “reign of terror” (though unless you had been accompanying him on that expedition to the MAY-an territory in Mexico, you seemed pretty safe) is hailed on the soundtrack by the tolling of bells and on screen by a shot of … Big Ben, in London, in a film that until that last shot (which quite frankly looked like the same shot that Alexander Korda used as the logo for his company, London Films) has taken place entirely within the United States.

In the power of the action scenes, the slovenliness of the exposition, the welcome spunkiness of the leading female character (for all Republic president Herbert Yates’ fabled conservatism, he put strong women on the screen as action heroines while the major studios generally used them in action films, if at all, only as helpless damsels in distress to be rescued by the butch male hero in the final reel!) and the overall spirit that overcomes the cheapness and the silliness, Captain America is a typical Republic serial even though it doesn’t do justice to the original conception of the character by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon (they developed him in 1942 as a war-themed superhero and he was the earliest hero in what’s become known as the Marvel Universe) and would no doubt have been a much better movie if it had — as it is, there’s no particular reason for a district attorney to don a flamboyant costume just to chase after the crooks he’s seeking to prosecute in his other identity! — 7/24/11

Pro-Indian 1932 Western Screens in Hillcrest this Saturday, January 26

As part of its continuing exploration of Native American rights and the continuing oppression and virtual genocide against Native people in the United States, Activist San Diego is showing a rare and unusual film from 1932 this Saturday, January 26, 7 p.m., at the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest, in the Uptown District mall on Vermont Street north of University between Panera and Aladdin Restaurants.

The film is “End of the Trail,” a 1932 Columbia Western that was the first U.S. film to depict the Indian Wars of the 1870’s from a pro-Native perspective. Strikingly similar in plot and theme to the 1980 Academy Award winner “Dances with Wolves,” “End of the Trail” tells the story of U.S. cavalry captain Tim Travers (Tim McCoy), who is unjustly thrown out of the U.S. Army for allegedly providing guns to the Arapahoe Indians. Then an attack by Travers’ former fellow officers results in the “collateral damage” death of Travers’ son. With nowhere else to go, Travers joins the Arapahoes and becomes part of their war council.

At a time when virtually all Westerns depicted Native people as mindless savages, “End of the Trail” — despite at least one wince-inducing line — shows them sympathetically and condemns the U.S. government’s systematic breaking of all treaties with the tribes. Tim McCoy’s unusual background helps explain why he made this film. In the 1920’s he was part of an oral history project that interviewed Native survivors of the battle of the Little Big Horn, thereby taking down the only firsthand accounts we have of it. The film’s script by Stuart Anthony anticipates the pro-Native readings of the Indian Wars by 1960’s and 1970’s historians like Native writers Dee Brown and Vine DeLoria, Jr. and whites like Howard Zinn.

The screening is free of charge, but donations to Activist San Diego’s community radio project, KNSJ 89.1 FM — an FCC-licensed broadcast station in East County scheduled to go on the air in April 2013, and an affiliated Internet radio site now operational at www.knsj.org — will be requested.

For more information about this event, please contact Mark Gabrish Conlan at (619) 688-1886.

For more information about the film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022856/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

For a review of the film by Mark Gabrish Conlan: http://moviemagg.blogspot.com/search?q=End+of+the+Trail

They Died With Their Boots On (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next item on TCM’s program of final films by famous movie duos was They Died With Their Boots On (1941), an ostensible biopic of George Armstrong Custer made at Warner Bros. with Errol Flynn as Custer, Olivia De Havilland as his long-suffering wife Elizabeth Bacon Custer, and Raoul Walsh directing from a script by Wally King and Aeneas MacKenzie that played fast and loose with American history in general and Custer’s life in particular. One gets the impression that the writers had a checklist of elements they needed to include to shoehorn Custer’s life into the traditional Hollywood formulae and get in the romance and comedy audiences would have expected a big movie – even a big movie whose main subject is war – to include. The film starts in 1857 when Custer arrives at West Point in a uniform of his own design with, as one cast member puts it, “more gold braid than a French admiral.” At first he’s mistaken for a senior officer instead of just another cadet, and during his four years at the school Custer racks up an imposing list of demerits and punishment details – including one that becomes the meet-cute between him and Libby (as she was nicknamed both in the film and in real life) as she’s there to visit her father and has got lost, but he’s not allowed to give her directions because part of his punishment is he’s not allowed to speak at all.

Then Abraham Lincoln gets elected President, the Civil War breaks out, and there’s a surprisingly orderly scene in which the class that’s about to graduate from West Point breaks apart when they are asked to take a new oath swearing to fight for the United States rather than any particular state – and the Southern officers go to one side of the parade ground and are sent off while the Northern ones who stay loyal to the Union stay and are assigned to regiments. (I’m sure the real division of the U.S. Army and its officer corps on the outbreak of the Civil War was nowhere nearly this orderly.) Custer, as the most scapegrace officer in West Point history since Ulysses S. Grant (obviously this is the writers’ idea of irony), fails to land a regiment and has to take a train to Washington, D.C. (breaking a date with Libby to do so) and personally crash the office of the overall Civil War commander, General Winfield Scott (Sidney Greenstreet in his second film – his first was The Maltese Falcon – and he looks exactly like the extant photos of the real Winfield Scott), to get an assignment – which he has to steal a horse from a superior officer to get to. (One of the film’s biggest deviations from history is that Scott remains the supreme commander of the Army not only throughout the Civil War but even afterwards. In reality Scott was forced out of that position by the ambitious George B. McClellan even though he had already worked out an overall strategy that not only would have won the Civil War for the Union but actually did win the Civil War for the Union when Ulysses S. Grant thought it up independently three years later.) The first half of the film focuses on the Civil War and depicts Custer as nearly winning it single-handedly for the Union by constantly disobeying orders and being proved right.

Then Custer settles into an unhappy retirement from active service, living off his wife’s money (she inherited it from her father, Samuel Bacon, played by Gene Lockhart as an arrogant blowhard Custer tells off in a bar, then has to make up to when he wants to marry Bacon’s daughter) and drinking a lot (the old Hollywood cliché Douglas Sirk wanted to insert into Battle Hymn, only the real person that movie was about, Dean Hess, was there to tell Sirk, “I didn’t drink,” essentially saying to Sirk, “Don’t fall back on such a stupid cliché. Work harder as a director and make the audience believe in my story as it really happened”). He gets an offer from three speculators, Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy), his father William Sharp (Walter Hampden) and Fitzhugh Lee (Regis Toomehy), to become nominal president of a railroad they’re organizing to lobby for government contracts and sell stock to unsuspecting victims. (Richard White’s fascinating book Railroaded! documents how the original transcontinental railroads were built exactly this way: by speculators and grifters who weren’t interested in building railroads as much as they were in milking the government for subsidies, including free land for rights-of-way; so this portrayal is one of the few things about this movie that’s historically accurate. It’s also typical of the mild critiques of capitalism that often insinuated themselves into Warner Bros. movies before the line hardened at the end of World War II and Jack Warner became one of the most ferocious and committed defenders of the Hollywood blacklist.) Custer, whom we’re obviously supposed to believe has a sense of righteousness despite his scapegrace and egomaniac exterior, angrily turns down the offer and throws the grifters out of his home.

Then he gets a commission from the U.S. military to join the wars against Native Americans in the Montana Territory, which then included not only modern-day Montana but North and South Dakotas as well, and when he arrives at Fort Lincoln, Montana he learns that the troops he’s supposed to command are dissolute louts – courtesy of Ned Sharp, who’s wangled a government contract to operate it right next to the base and says that if the soldiers want to spend their pay in his establishment, that’s their business. (It’s not like there’s a lot of other things to spend it on in the middle of the Great Plains, and in those days before national banks and wire transfers they can’t easily send it home either.) The only friends Custer makes in this territory is a British cavalry officer who moved to the U.S. and fought with him in the Civil War, Lt. “Queen’s Own” Butler (G. P. Huntley, Jr., who appeared with Fred Astaire on stage in the 1931 musical Gay Divorce; when the show was filmed by RKO in 1934 as The Gay Divorcée, with Ginger Rogers replacing the stage lead, Claire Luce, Edward Everett Horton played Huntley’s part); and California Joe (Charley Grapewin, Uncle Henry from The Wizard of Oz), who advises Custer that if he wants to fight the “Indians” he will need to learn to fight the way they do. (That suggested an interesting road-not-taken for writers Kline and MacKenzie: Custer asks Joe to join the Army to advise him on tactics, but we never see him doing so – just some cute byplay about how Joe will only join if he doesn’t have to wear a uniform or salute.)

Custer literally wrecks Sharp’s saloon – it’s interesting how strongly an anti-alcohol attitude this film, made only eight years after the repeal of Prohibition, takes – and manages to discipline his troops into an effective fighting force, partly to keeping them off booze and partly by teaching them an old British cavalry song, “Garry Owen,” which Butler taught him. (Not surprisingly, this becomes a major Leitmotif in Max Steiner’s typically thundering music score – in many Warners films Steiner put a particularly loud, brassy chord under his own credit, and I’ve joked, “Music by Max Steiner – as if you couldn’t tell!”) Custer also catches Sharp and his equally slimy staff selling rifles to the Natives, thereby ensuring that they actually have better guns than the ones the U.S. has issued to his men – which reminded me of the magnificent pro-Native 1932 Western End of the Trail, produced by and starring Tim McCoy, who plays a U.S. officer cashiered for allegedly selling guns to the Natives. McCoy’s character denies the charge but protests that the Natives are getting a raw deal from the U.S. government, which has broken every treaty they have made with a tribe, and he lives with the Natives for a while – I once showed this astonishing film to a group of Native American activists and they were astonished that this history had actually been the subject of a Hollywood movie in 1932.

They Died With Their Boots On actually tries to remake Custer as a sympathizer to the Natives; when Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn) comes onto the grounds of Fort Lincoln to buy himself and his braves the guns Sharp’s operation is selling, Custer busts him and sentences him to two months in the brig but carefully prevents his men from lynching him. (I thought of the irony that two decades later, in Lawrence of Arabia, Quinn would also be playing a native leader making common cause with a sympathetic white person to drive an occupying force from his native land.) Crazy Horse gets sprung by a war band from his tribe, and as he (though I’m not sure whether it was Quinn or a stunt double) leaps onto his horse and rides off, Custer tells his men, “That’s the only real cavalryman I’ve seen out here.” Later, on the eve of the battle of the Little Big Horn, Custer tells his men they’re fighting for the “real Americans” and Butler rather inconveniently reminds him that the only real Americans are the ones they’re fighting against. Meanwhile Libby Bacon Custer (ya remember Libby Bacon Custer?) is living on the fort with her and Custer’s faithful maid Callie (Hattie McDaniel, reuniting her and De Havilland from the cast of Gone With the Wind), anxiously awaiting word of each new battle. The crisis is sparked when Custer negotiates a treaty with Crazy Horse in which the Natives cede the rest of the Montana territory to the whites in exchange for a promise that the Black Hills will remain theirs forever. Well, we all know how that turned out: Sharp sparks a fake rumor that there’s gold in the Black Hills, thousands of white settlers flock in, and the Army is obliged to defend the whites even at the cost of breaking their treaty with the Natives. The Sioux put together a coalition of all the tribes in the area (including the Cheyenne, who were usually their sworn enemies), and Custer’s rout at the Little Big Horn is presented here as a deliberate suicide mission to buy time for another white army in the area to receive reinforcements and beat back the Native hordes.

I’m not sure why all those people who raised such politically correct hissy-fits over HBO Max’s showing of Gone With the Wind – first getting it pulled from the streaming channel altogether and then insisting that if it’s shown at all, it be preceded with “woke” content explaining that holding African-Americans in slavery was really a bad thing – haven’t made a similar fuss about this movie when it’s at least as problematic from an historical and moral standpoint. The effort to whitewash Custer and present him as a true friend of the Natives flies in the face of his actual historical record – including one huge event that’s missing from this film altogether: the massacre at the Washita River in Kansas in November 1868. It was this event that gave Custer the image of America’s bravest “Indian-fighter” and led to his assignment to the Dakotas in 1874 (after, not before, the rumors of gold in the Black Hills had led to a mass invasion by white settlers) – even though it was an out-and-out massacre, sort of the 19th century version of My Lai, in which most of the victims were women, children or men too old to fight. It was a slaughter, pure and simple – in modern-day terms, it was a genocide – and in a movie made in 1941, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II (in which it would be our principal enemy, Germany, which would be practicing genocide), it’s easy to see why this battle would be left out of a script that aimed at turning Custer into an inspiring war hero.

One thing this movie does get right was Custer’s actual rank in the Army: on the eve of the Civil War he was a lieutenant, though during the war he was promoted to colonel and later made what was called a “brevet general.” That meant he got a promotion, but only for the duration of the war; after the war he no longer carried the official title of general, and this film correctly refers to him as “Col. Custer” up until his death at the Little Big Horn. It’s also interesting in giving Crazy Horse a much bigger role than Sitting Bull (who isn’t listed on the imdb.com page for the film, at least not as such, and appears in only one scene during the Native war council), though that’s apparently how it was in real life as well. Four years before he made End of the Trail Tim McCoy had participated in an oral history project on the Little Big Horn and interviewed survivors of the battle – on the Native side, the side that had survivors. The braves who had actually fought the battle said it was Crazy Horse, not Sitting Bull, who was the battlefield commander and the officer they gave credit for their victory. They Died With Their Boots On is a problematic film – I remember seeing it for the first time in 1971 at a theatrical revival and shortly thereafter seeing Arthur Penn’s 1971 film Little Big Man, which took almost the exact opposite view in its depiction of Custer (Richard Mulligan) as a vainglorious egomaniac with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. In some ways the attempt to portray Custer as a friend of the Natives in They Died With Their Boots On makes the film even more annoying than if the “Indians” had just been shown as mindless savages the way they would have been if John Ford had made this film – Ford’s films are surprisingly progressive in many ways but one blind spot, at least until his late movie Cheyenne Autumn, was that he bought into the traditional American myth of “Indians” as barbaric beasts whose elimination was a necessary step for the progress of American civilization.

They Died With Their Boots On was also the final straw for Olivia De Havilland: she was tired of working at Warner Bros. and getting mindless roles like this. In 1941 Warner Bros. had lent her out to Paramount for a romantic comedy about immigration, Hold Back the Dawn, directed by Mitchell Leisen from a script by Billy Wilder and Charlie Brackett. She was so impressed by the movie and the overall working conditions at Paramount that she decided to file suit to break her Warners contract and in particular to have the “suspension and extension” clause abolished. “Suspension and extension” meant that if you turned down a role the studio was ordering you to do, they could put your contract on hold without pay and then extend the length of the contract pretty much however long they wanted to. De Havilland won her case; she was freed from Warners and allowed to free-lance, and “suspension and extension” was modified so the suspension and extension could last only for the length of time it took for the studio to make the film with someone else. (This put an end to a particularly exploitative use of the clause: sometimes a studio would deliberately offer an actor a bad script they had no intention of actually filming, just to give themselves an excuse to take the actor off payroll and keep him or her in limbo, unable to work either there or anywhere else, until the actor caved and met the studio’s demands.) Along with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision against Paramount in 1948, which forbade movie studios from also owning theatre chains, and the advent of television, the De Havilland decision helped break down the studio system that had kept actors, directors, writers and virtually all the creative personnel involved in filmmaking in long-term bondage to their employers. It also shaped the politics of minor Warner Bros. star Ronald Reagan, who blamed the collapse of the studio system in general and the antitrust decision that had severed studios and theatres in particular for the decline in his own career. Decades later, President Ronald Reagan virtually halted antitrust enforcement in the U.S., at least partly because he had never stopped blaming the whole idea of antitrust for the end of his movie career.

We’re Still Here: Johnny Cash’s “Bitter Tears” Revisited (Gigantic Films, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After “Chasing Heroin” KPBS showed a quirky 2015 film called — to give it its full title — We’re Still Here: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited, though the KPBS Web site listed it only as Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears. Bitter Tears was a concept album Cash made for Columbia, his long-time record label, in 1964, part of his “Americana” series, that contained eight songs about America’s historic mistreatment, verging on genocide, of its Native population. (The album’s full title was Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.) The inspiration of the film was a re-recording of the Bitter Tears material in 2014 to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the original album, called Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited, featuring modern alternative-country artists like Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Dave Rawlings, the Milk Carton Kids, Steve Earle, Nancy Blake, Kris Kristofferson (who has every reason to be grateful to Johnny Cash because Cash’s recording of Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” launched Kristofferson’s own career), Rhiannon Giddens (an utterly fascinating singer who, like Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix, is part African-American and part Native American, and who added a new verse to the song “The Vanishing Race” by Cash and Johnny Horton to indicate that America’s Native people haven’t “vanished” — despite our best efforts to get rid of them — but are still very much here, alive and part of our culture) and Norman Blake, the only person who played on Cash’s Bitter Tears album who was still alive in 2014. For some reason KPBS’s Web site on this show said Cash’s album was “lost” — which might make you think it was either never completed or never released, or if it had been released has been out of print for years — yet it’s currently available on CD (amazon.com lists it and I’m sure many other online retailers do too) and, contrary to the hype, it was a success at the time.

Cash was discouraged enough at radio programmers for refusing to play the album’s single — “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” a shattering account of the Native American among the six Marines who raised the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in what became one of the most iconic photos of World War II, only to find when he got home that he was still the victim of anti-Native discrimination; he responded by drinking himself into an early grave — that he took out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine in the form of an open letter to his record label and the radio stations asking, “Where are your guts?” Yet “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” got played on enough stations and sold enough copies that it reached #3 on the Billboard country charts, and the album as a whole reached #2. For a film that was only an hour long, the movie did an awful lot of rambling, touching on the controversy over Bitter Tears and Cash’s response to it (though she didn’t participate in the re-recordings, Cash’s daughter Rosanne, a country-music star in her own right, was interviewed extensively), showing footage of the re-recordings and offering background on Cash’s unseen collaborator, Native American singer-songwriter Peter LaFarge, who wrote “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” and four of the other songs on the album. (Bitter Tears featured eight songs — relatively short for a 1960’s LP — of which LaFarge wrote five, Cash wrote two, and the last was a collaboration between Cash and Johnny Horton.) In some ways, Bitter Tears can be compared to Tim McCoy’s remarkable and awesome film from 1932, End of the Trail, in which McCoy, a long-time star of “B” Westerns who had also participated in an oral history project in the Dakotas in the 1920’s, interviewing survivors of the battle of the Little Big Horn (on the Native side, the side that had survivors), made a film that not only sympathized with the Native struggle to keep their land but presented the whole sorry history of the U.S. government’s dealings with them, including all the solemn treaties the U.S. had made with Native tribes and then broken, often barely after the ink on them had dried. Both End of the Trail and Bitter Tears are remarkable works by white people who identified with the Native Americans and their rights, and while McCoy’s film doesn’t seem to have aroused any particular controversy, Bitter Tears did — it was at a time when the country-music industry, centered around Nashville, Tennessee, was essentially circling the wagons and establishing itself as the last redoubt of old-time American values in music while other forms, particularly folk music (and, later in the 1960’s, rock), were embracing progressive values in general and civil rights in particular.

Cash actually said that part of his inspiration for Bitter Tears was seeing the African-American civil rights struggle render the centuries of oppression of Black people visible to white Americans who hadn’t thought about it before, and he felt it was time to do the same for the oppression of Native Americans as well. (It reminded me of the interview I read in the 1970’s with film director Don Siegel, who in 1960 made Flaming Star, a quite good pro-Native Western with Elvis Presley as a half-white, half-Native hero; Siegel recalled that people were coming up to him and asking if he’d made a film about the oppression of Native Americans as a metaphor for the oppression of Black Americans, and he’d say, “No, I made a film about the oppression of Native Americans because I wanted to make a point about the oppression of Native Americans.”) Apparently at the time Cash made Bitter Tears he thought he might be part-Native himself, though later he did genealogical research on himself and found all his traceable ancestors had been Scotch, Irish or German. One thing that really shocked me was that the opening song on the album, “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow,” wasn’t about a broken treaty from the 19^th century but one that had been broken as late as 1961 under the administration of President John F. Kennedy, which authorized construction of a dam in upstate New York even though that would flood the reservation of the Senecas, one of the Six Nations in the Iroquois Confederation, whose treaty guaranteeing them that land in perpetuity had been signed 175 years earlier by President George Washington and his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson. (The documentary included footage of the Senecas’ homes and farms being bulldozed or burned to make room for the dam, as well as a news clipping announcing that since the construction of the dam the land formerly occupied by the Senecas had become a major tourist attraction.) I can’t watch shows about the U.S.’s genocidal treatment of its Native population without recalling Adolf Hitler’s comment when Edward R. Murrow interviewed him: “I don’t know why you Americans make such a fuss about the Jews. I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians.” And he was doing it for the same reason, Lebensraum — to clear the land of a supposedly “inferior” population so there would be more room for a self-proclaimed “Master Race.”

Dick Tracy (Republic serial, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had run a couple of quirky movies, also downloaded. One was the first episode of the 1937 serial Dick Tracy, made by Republic and written by the usual committee (Morgan Cox and George Morgan, story — wouldn’t it have been more fun if the names had been switched and it had been Morgan Morgan and George Cox? — and Barry Shipman and Winston Miller, screenplay), who for some reason changed him from a detective with the Chicago Police Department to an FBI agent, and moved the story to San Francisco — where the first chapter deals with a sabotage attempt against the newly opening Bay Bridge. The serial was actually quite good for the genre; Ralph Byrd played Tracy, his girifriend Gwen Andrews (Kay Hughes) was also his partner in crime-fighting and an intelligent and savvy action heroine in her own right; the “comic” relief of his stupid sidekick Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette, carrying over from his usual role as comic foil to Gene Autry) and the tearjerking of Junior (a 12-year-old foundling played by Lee Van Atta, a surprisingly tough child actor who here, as in the contemporary Undersea Kingdom, is frequently the voice of reason and experience in the cast!) are both held in check.

The best part of it — aside from the cool special effects (including the magnificent “Flying Wing” aircraft used by the bad guys, which just about everyone who’s seen this or the follow-up, The Fighting Devil Dogs, which wasn’t a Tracy story but recycled the Flying Wing — incidentally there were experiments in building actual aircraft of this type but they foundered because it was hard to keep them stable, though Charles said the current “stealth” planes reminded him of the Wing) — is the excellent direction by Alan James and Ray Taylor. This isn’t one of those all-too-typical serials in which we get a lot of boring exposition scenes to set up the action-porn serial audiences wanted; it’s (so far, anyway) a quite consistent, highly taut thriller with genuine suspense editing and an overall level of excitement instead of the long lulls between action sequences typical of the serial genre.

Ralph Byrd acts his part as Tracy with power and authority (even though I tend to disagree with the critical consensus that his physiognomy made him especially suited to Tracy because it matched Chester Gould’s drawings), Kay Hughes is likewise a real figure of strength (you want liberated women in 1930’s movies? There were a surprising number of them in serials, especially Republic’s!), and the overall production values are excellent (reflecting Republic owner Herbert Yates’ insistence on maintaining a physical plant and equipment that were technically the equal of the major studios) — and the plot gimmick is pretty audacious: the bad guys are a group of criminals led by “The Lame One” (clearly there’s going to be a last-minute revelation that he’s an outwardly respectable person pursuing a criminal career under an assumed identity — and doing it much the way Moriarty and Mabuse did, hiding his real identity even from his subordinates and communicating with them in convoluted ways to preserve his incognito) and one of them, a mad surgeon named Moloch (John Picorri), takes Tracy’s kidnapped brother Gordon and gives him an operation that not only alters his appearance so totally he’s played by a different actor (Richard Beach “before,” Carleton Young “after”) but changes his moral sense so that he’s now a tool in the hands of the villains (a plot gimmick Republic pulled in Undersea Kingdom as well). — 8/31/09

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Actually what we ended up watching were episodes two and three of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “The Bridge of Terror” and “The Fur Pirates,” which pretty much confirmed my good impression of episode one (especially both the cool design of the villains’ “Flying Wing” aircraft and the precision of the special-effects people, John T. Coyle and future Republic stalwarts Howard and Theodore Lydecker, in getting it to fly absolutely convincingly on screen) except for one detail: the utter idiocy of the writing of Dick Tracy’s escapes from the cliffhangers. At the end of episode one he’s about to be crushed by a bunch of girders released from a construction crane on the Bay Bridge (one wonders why a crane and girders were there since the bridge had supposedly already been finished) when, at the start of episode two, he simply rolls away from the danger. The end of episode two was even worse; Tracy (Ralph Byrd) and his sidekick Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette) have stolen a plane from the villains and are making their escape when the baddies shoot off the plane’s propeller, it goes out of control, crashes into a bridge tower and falls to the ground below, leaving Tracy and McGurk facing certain death … only in episode three they simply walk away from the wreckage, not only alive but totally unhurt, and continue their pursuit of the villains from their conveniently parked car! — 9/1/09

•••••

We kicked off the evening with episode four of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “Death Rides the Sky” — and it certainly does, since this is a really weird farrago of serial-type action centering around the attempt of the master villain “The Lame One” and his hunchbacked (at least as credibly hunchbacked as the Republic costume department could make him, which was not very) assistant “Moloch” (John Picorri, who’s easily the most interesting actor in the whole show — indeed, he seems to anticipate Blofeld in always petting a lap cat while he’s in the middle of plotting his schemes, though his cat is black instead of white) to steal a hideous-looking bauble called the “Mogra Necklace” that looks like a very bad piece of costume jewelry.

One gimmick is that there are actually two Mogra Necklaces, a genuinely valuable one and a worthless imitation the jeweler in charge of it, M. Clare Renee (André Cheron) — apparently nobody bothered to brief the writers on which gender is which in French names — had made for security purposes. The thieves have actually made off with the real one — they infiltrated a thug onto the dirigible Pacific Queen and had him steal it at gunpoint, then parachute out, and Dick Tracy (Ralph Byrd) and his partner Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette) gave chase in the plane they had previously docked on the underside of the dirigible (did they really do that sort of thing?), only the parathug landed and was picked up by a rope ladder hanging from the villains’ cool aircraft, the Flying Wing. But Tracy plants a story in the papers that the one they stole was the fake, ensuring that the villains will try to steal the necklace again to make sure they get the real one — and they’ve set up a dummy robot-controlled plane that supposedly carries the necklace, only Tracy’s ward Junior (Lee Van Atta) stows away inside the supposedly uninhabited (and thereby readily sacrificable) plane and Tracy has to lower himself down from his own biplane onto Junior’s and then break into the cockpit by smashing the front windows — and just as the villains are about to shoot him down, the episode ends and that’s the cliffhanger.

The 1937 Dick Tracy has some ridiculously unlikely gimmicks to get the good guys out of danger, but overall it’s one of the better serials; the villains’ plots are well thought out and the effects work, particularly the Flying Wing in action, is utterly convincing — though the whole plot gimmick of Dick Tracy’s brother Gordon (Richard Beach, pre-op; Carleton Young, post-op) having been turned against him and impressed into the villains’ service by a super-operation performed on his brain by Moloch has been horrendously underused thus far — though given that episode five is called “Brother Against Brother,” hopefully that will change! — 9/4/09

•••••

I ran Charles episode five of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “Brother Against Brother.” This was a rather silly one in which Dick Tracy finally confronted his brother Gordon, a formerly ethical lawyer who was transformed into a villain’s minion by a super-operation performed by “Moloch” (John Picorri), the hunchbacked assistant of the serial’s principal villain, “The Lame One.” (As I’ve noted earlier, the operation was so successful that it changed Gordon’s appearance completely — to the point where he’s played by different actors pre- and post-op.) What was most depressing about this episode was that there was absolutely no recognition scene between the brothers — none of the expected explosion of shock when Dick Tracy found his brother working against him on the other side of the villains’ plots — and it seems pretty much as if, after a genuinely exciting and suspenseful opening, the 1937 Dick Tracy fell into the usual serial ruts.

The plotting became simply a series of pretexts for the big action scenes; Gwen Andrews (Kay Hughes), who in the first episode seemed poised to a role as a ballsy action heroine genuinely helping Dick Tracy out of his scrapes, faded out in the subsequent episodes and had virtually nothing to do in this one; and the cliffhangers were pretty dull and unimaginative. (This was always a problem with Republic; for all their skills at making serials, the chapter endings were almost invariably formulaic and tended to cheat — so many of the episodes of Zombies of the Stratosphere ended with the central character jumping his way out of danger that Charles and I started joking about it, calling out to him, “Jump! Jump!” as the cliffhanger approached.) It’s still a fun serial, but nowhere near as good as I thought it would be when I started watching it. — 9/6/09

•••••

I ran Charles and I the next two episodes in sequence of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, chapters six and seven, “Dangerous Waters” and “The Ghost Town Mystery.” These were pretty much the same mix as before, including some surprisingly dorky cliffhangers (at the end of episode five Dick Tracy was shot and fell off the roof of a building; at the start of episode six he was just scratched and fell into a bush, climbed out of it and continued his pursuit of the bad guys; the next cliffhanger was a rope being towed by a boat, in which Tracy’s foot got hooked and he was dragged underwater, but again he escaped absurdly easily at the start of episode seven), too little use made of enviably spunky actress Kay Hughes as Tracy’s secretary/assistant Gwen, and the usual nonsensical plot devices to keep the action going, including a secret new metal called “Nickolodium” which an eccentric inventor has devised (I couldn’t help but be reminded of the “Rearden Metal” in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged — when Wendell Berry wrote in the current Progressive, “If we are destroying both the productive land and the rural communities and cultures, how can we assume that money will somehow attract food to us whenever we need it?,” it occurred to me that a Randite would answer that question by saying that if we allow the genius of the world’s super-entrepreneurs to operate untrammeled by regulation, they will come up with some fantastic new invention that will enable them to make a profit by selling us food produced in ways that literally — like the “Rearden Metal” and the super-engine powered by air Rand actually did create, in her imagination, in Atlas Shrugged — violate the laws of nature) and which the bad guys are, of course, trying to get their hands on.

That’s episode six; in episode seven the MacGuffin (the serial writers seemed to need a new one every week!) is a large gold mine the prospector who dug it is willing to offer the government and the bad guys, of course, want to steal it. This isn’t much of a serial, actually — Republic got better at them later on — though it’s still fun, largely because of the colorful villains and their magnificent (and quite well-done) aircraft, the “Flying Wing.” — 9/8/09

•••••

I ran the next episodes in sequence of the 1937 serial Dick Tracy (eight and nine, “Battle in the Clouds” — something of a misnomer because the titular battle doesn’t happen until the last two minutes or so — and “The Stratosphere Adventure”), which deal with the latest attempt of the principal villain, who’s referred to variously as “The Lame One” and “The Spider” (the “Spider Ring” is the name of his organization), to wreak havoc on the world, this time by stealing a super-fast airplane invented by H. T. Clayton (Wedgwood Nowell) that can go up to 700 miles an hour (20 miles per hour shy of the sound barrier, which wasn’t broken for another decade and then by a rocket plane that had to be taken up by a carrier aircraft) and has been test-flown only by Clayton’s daughter Betty (Ann Ainslee, a personable blonde whose good looks and easygoing manner should have given her more of a career than she had).

Alas, the folks at Republic’s production design and special effects department, which had created an absolutely stunning-looking aircraft for the villains in the “Flying Wing” (recycled a year later in the 1938 serial The Fighting Devil Dogs), let the side down when it came to Clayton’s plane. Despite the model of such state-of-the-art high-tech planes as Howard Hughes’ H-1 (a sleek monoplane with stubby wings and virtually nothing else on its fuselage), the plane they came up with looked all too much like a quite ordinary general-aviation aircraft, complete with a wraparound cockpit and fixed landing gear. No one — not even in 1937 — would have designed a speed plane with landing gear that couldn’t be retracted to avoid air resistance in actual flight.

Still, these two episodes were among the more entertaining ones, complete with an agent with the absolutely preposterous name of “Durston Cloggerstein” (Harrison Greene) who wants either the plans of the super-plane, the plane itself or at least its engine so he can take them back to the carefully unnamed foreign power he’s from on a dirigible that’s scheduled to pick him up within a day. The tensions between the Lame One, his assistant Moloch (John Picorri), Gordon Tracy — Dick Tracy’s brother, who by Moloch’s super-surgery has been converted from a good guy to a villain — and Durston are entertaining enough even though we have to wonder how this criminal gang is making enough money to stay in business given that Dick Tracy is anticipating its every move and frustrating its every attempt to make money off of crime.

At least part of the problem with this movie was summed up by William K. Everson in The Detective in Film: “On the detection level … the scales were always loaded very much in Tracy’s favor. A typical plot gimmick would be for Tracy to find a specific clue, perhaps a fragment of some rare mineral. A rapid check would invariably reveal that such a mineral was handled by only one specific company and, knowing that the villain needed it for some current infernal machine, off Tracy would troop to the warehouse where it was stored, either to forestall the villain’s acquisition of it or to give chase if he was too late. … Its sole purpose was to enable the hero to anticipate the plans of the villain, and keep the action moving constantly.”

At least — unlike such later and more pretentious feature films as The Guns of Navarone — serials like the 1937 Dick Tracy made no bones about being anything other than action porn, with the exposition sequences good for nothing but setting up the next action highlight and keeping things going at a breakneck pace (though later Republic serials worked much better in the pace department than this one, which still has a bit of the leaden-ness that often afflicted serials at Republic’s predecessor studio, Mascot). I also liked Betty Clayton as a character and only wish we’d got to see more of her! — 9/13/09

•••••

We ended up watching episodes ten and eleven of the 1937 Republic Dick Tracy serial, “The Gold Ship” and “Harbor Pursuit,” in which the big action centered around a freighter that had just docked in San Francisco (where the serial is mostly — almost totally, in fact — set; not only did they change Tracy from a Chicago police detective to an FBI agent, they moved him to San Francisco) with $1 million in gold missing. It turns out, of course, to be the Spider Ring again (apparently every other criminal in America has just stopped doing anything illegal in deference to the Spider Ring’s priorities); they have agents on the ship and other agents on another ship that struck the gold freighter in mid-ocean, causing damage to one of its outer plates that needs to be repaired — the gimmick being that the Spider Ring operates a ship-repair company as a front and will make sure they get the job so that, under cover of removing the plate and replacing it, they will simply take the gold out of the place on the ship to which they had relocated it instead of actually stealing it.

It’s a ridiculously complicated criminal scheme even by serial standards, and naturally Dick Tracy foils it absurdly easily despite the intervention of a cliffhanger when the heavy steel panel the bad guys have removed as part of their phony “repair” starts hurtling down and Tracy rolls away and gets out from under it just in time. In episode 11, after the titular harbor pursuit ends with much of the Spider Ring arrested and the whole enterprise coming out empty-handed (again!), their new plan is to kidnap master engraver Henry Coulter (Forbes Murray) — I couldn’t help wishing they’d kill him before he could continue his line and allow a later generation of his family to bring forth Ann Coulter — so they can force him to make plates for counterfeiting U.S. currency on the grounds that, as the mind-controlled Gordon Tracy puts it, “It would be more convenient for us to make our own money.” “Yeah, right — especially since you haven’t been able to steal any!” I fired back at the screen.

Episode 11 is also the one in which it finally starts to dawn on Dick Tracy that his brother Gordon is part of the criminal enterprise he’s fighting — indeed, at one point he thinks Gordon might actually be the head of it — after he compares a note from Spider Ring headquarters they confiscated from one of the harbor crooks they arrested to an inscription on a photo of himself Gordon once gave him. The fact that on at least two occasions Dick Tracy actually saw his brother Gordon post-op doesn’t seem to enter into it — though maybe we’re supposed to believe that the hunchbacked henchman Moloch’s super-operation on Gordon to eliminate his will and allow the gang to brainwash him also changed his appearance so much even his own brother wouldn’t recognize him … which is at least plausible, since Republic cast two actors as Gordon Tracy: Richard Beach pre-op and Carleton Young post-op. — 9/16/09

•••••

I ended up running chapters 12 and 13 of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial, “The Trail of the Spider” (which makes one wonder what the first 11 chapters were about!) and “The Fire Trap.” “The Trail of the Spider” turned out to be a so-called “recap episode,” in which Tracy and his crew interrogated newly discovered witnesses to the events of the exposition in episode one (which wasn’t altogether a bad thing considering how much more imaginative episode one was than the rest of it!), and there was a lot of business about the Spider, a.k.a. the Lame One (the writers seem uncertain as to whether “Spider” was the name of the criminal mastermind or just the name of his gang), coming to Tracy’s office to assassinate him — that was the cliffhanger of episode 12 — and Junior (Lee Van Atta) getting a photo of him, not that that does the good guys any good because in episode 13 the Lame One and Tracy’s brother Gordon (still under the Lame One’s control and still played by Carleton Young rather than Richard Beach, who played him before the operation by John Picorri as the Lame One’s hunchbacked sidekick Moloch undid his moral sense) sends an agent to Tracy’s house (how did they know where it was?) who walks in (apparently the super G-man is too dumb to lock his doors!) and enters the darkroom where Tracy and crew are developing the photo (how did he know where it was?) just in time to ruin the print, after which he destroys the negative, so the best clue Tracy and company had to the Lame One’s real identity is lost.

The titular fire trap is set for Tracy when a lantern on the boat where the Lame One has his headquarters (at least in this episode) overturns and sets the old tub ablaze — though knowing Republic’s writers, the way they have him get out of it will probably be a cheat … — 9/19/09


Charles and I ended up watching the last two episodes of the 1937 Dick Tracy as our movie offering last night — a bit disappointing in that the final action sequence was surprisingly unexciting, a confrontation between Tracy and the villains in the catacombs under the abandoned power station that was the lair of the Lame One, a.k.a. the Spider (the writers seemed undecided between episodes — and sometimes even within the same episode — whether “the Spider Ring” was simply the name of the villainous gang or whether its leader was actually called “the Spider”). The Lame One, a.k.a. the Spider, turned out to be a minor character named Walter Odette (Edwin Stanley), who made a surprise appearance at FBI headquarters (or was it Dick Tracy’s home? They started to look alike after a while!) in episode 14, “The Devil in White” (presumably a reference to the hospital orderly who spirits out the heavily bandaged patient they think is the master engraver Henry Coulter, played by Forbes Murray, when he’s scheduled to be released — only it’s not Coulter at all, it’s Dick Tracy hiding under the bandages and allowing himself to be used as a decoy so his fellow FBI men can follow the crooks and find their secret hideout), which set up the unsurprising revelation in the next and last episode, “Brothers United,” in which Dick Tracy and his brother Gordon finally come together after the operation by the Lame One’s henchman Moloch (John Picorri) that converted Gordon from good to evil.

In fact, the cliffhanger between the last two episodes is Moloch stretching Dick Tracy out on his operating table and threatening to perform the same operation on him. The irony was that in at least two previous episodes Dick Tracy saw Gordon in his villainous identity without any apparent awareness that this thug with a white streak in his hair was his brother (Gordon was played post-op by Carleton Young — another actor, Richard Beach, had played him pre-op and maybe we were supposed to think that Moloch’s surgery had altered Gordon’s appearance so drastically that Dick wouldn’t recognize him!), but on the operating table at the end of episode 14 Dick finally awakens some shreds of Gordon’s conscience and in episode 15 Gordon and the Lame One are fleeing in a car, Gordon is driving, and he swerves to avoid hitting Junior and Gwen (whose job description seemed to change from episode to episode; sometimes she was Dick’s lab technician, sometimes his general assistant and sometimes merely his secretary), who are in the middle of the road.

The car swerves off the road, the Lame One is killed instantly, and I was rather hoping that Gordon would survive long enough to make it to the hospital, where the operation to relieve the concussion on the brain from the crash would also reverse the effects of Moloch’s surgery and restore the good Gordon Tracy (and Richard Beach as the actor playing him!) to Dick’s family. No such luck, probably due to the Production Code and the unwillingness of the Code authorities to forgive all those reels of Gordon’s villainy just because he was under medico-psychological compulsion and therefore not responsible for his actions; instead Gordon has to die, too, though he and Dick have a surprisingly moving last scene together in which Ralph Byrd plays with real sensitivity and emotion after 15 reels that haven’t called on him to do anything but stand tall and look butch.

The 1937 Dick Tracy as a whole doesn’t deserve the opprobrium William K. Everson heaped on it in The Detective in Film (“not very good … extremely slow, cheaply made, with a maximum of back projection and other studio economies and with a dearth of imaginative chapter endings”); he’s right about the chapter endings and the low budget, but the scenes of the Flying Wing are beautiful and effective even though, alas, the Wing totally disappears in the second half of the serial — the villains talk about using it to escape but they never get that far. Interestingly, built into the last episode after it creaked to a climax (and Smiley Burnette got the final fade-out for one of his not-particularly-funny comic-relief scenes) was a trailer — back when the term meant literally that, a commercial for a future release stuck at the end (“trailing”) of the last reel of the feature film — for a Western serial called The Painted Stallion that featured Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and Kit Carson as on-screen characters. Now that might be interesting! — 9/23/09