I ran Charles an archive.org download of a 1946 thriller (term intended merely as a genre description, not to convey that this film has any sense of excitement or “thrills”!) called The Shadow Returns, part of a short-lived attempt by Monogram Pictures to do a series based on the famous pulp-magazine and radio character The Shadow. The Shadow had originated in 1931 as a radio promotion by the Street and Smith pulp-magazine publishers, and the original idea was simply to have actor James La Curtom read the magazine stories on the air. As the show developed the producers decided to call him “The Shadow,” start dramatizing the stories, and use the catch phrase, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Street and Smith realized they had a popular — and potentially profitable — character, so they decided to build a magazine around him and hired writer Walter Gibson (though they credited the stories to a company-owned pseudonym, “Maxwell Grant”) to do a full-length story about him. Gibson came up with a man who’s so mysterious, and affects so many disguises to capture criminals, that pulp historian Ron Goulart said even Gibson himself didn’t seem all too sure of who he really was. They also decided to scrimp on the first issue by using an already existing painting in their files for a cover — only the only picture they had of a person’s shadow showed it falling over the face of a frightened Chinese, and not having written any Chinese characters into his story, Gibson had to go back and insert one. The Shadow magazine was a success, and apparently the character’s film debut was in a series of shorts for Universal starting in 1933, but nobody made a Shadow feature until Edward Alperson’s Colony Pictures, releasing through Grand National, made The Shadow Strikes in 1936. This was a boring, seemingly interminable and all too faithful adaptation of one of Gibson’s pulp stories which cast former silent star Rod La Rocque as the Shadow. Surprisingly, the one follow-up to The Shadow Strikes, International Crime from 1938, was a great movie, a marvelous Thin Man-ish mash-up of murder mystery and screwball comedy, though it ignored the Shadow character as established both in the pulps and on the later radio show (where he was given only one alternate identity — millionaire playboy Lamont Cranston — and the ability to “cloud men’s minds” so that he can be invisible, something he supposedly learned from a yogi while on a trip to the Far East); in International Crime the Shadow is basically a radio host doing a program that’s essentially the 1930’s version of America’s Most Wanted.
The Shadow then remained fallow as movie material
until Monogram decided to take him up in the 1940’s, casting Kane Richmond
(frequent hero of Republic serials) as the Shadow and entrusting him to the
team that were making Monogram’s Charlie Chan movies: writer George Callahan
and directors William Beaudine and Phil Rosen (The Shadow Returns is credited to Rosen exclusively but Beaudine is
listed as an uncredited co-director on imdb.com). The name of the producer is a
surprise: Lou Brock, who in 1933 was at RKO running the shorts department when
he was given the opportunity to make a feature — which was a musical called Flying
Down to Rio, less important for its
top-billed stars (Gene Raymond, Dolores Del Rio and Raul Roulien) than the
supporting players, particularly a couple of dancers named Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers. But Brock’s star fell as fast as it rose after he green-lighted
a project about some shipwrecked socialites called Down to Their Last
Yacht and offered it to RKO production
chief Merian C. Cooper as the second Astaire-Rogers movie. It eventually got
made in 1935, but sans Fred and
Ginger, and was a box-office disappointment. The Shadow Returns was a pretty good movie, though most of it was dull
and it didn’t live up to the potential of the character — but then virtually
none of the attempts to bring the Shadow to the screen have; while other radio
dramas (notably The Lone Ranger)
had long and successful transitions to television, the few attempts to do the
Shadow as a TV series never got beyond the pilot stage (and it’s difficult, to
say the least, to do a story in which the central character is invisible in a
visual medium) and the Shadow as presented by Monogram is a rather conventional
superhero whose only concessions to “Shadow-ness” are to change from Lamont
Cranston’s regular street clothes to a black outfit with a mask and a big black
hat and speak in an echoey voice that doesn’t seem to be coming from anywhere
in particular.
Though this Shadow
doesn’t have the power to cloud men’s minds and therefore render himself
invisible, he does seem to get
into all sorts of interesting places as he investigates an odd mystery
centering around a graveyard, the opening of a coffin to extract some clear
pellets that look like contraband jewels, and a succession of people apparently
hurling themselves off balconies but actually being murdered by a man with a
bullwhip who uses it to pull them
off the balconies, so it looks (even to eyewitnesses) like they’ve committed
suicide but they’ve actually been murdered. The chemistry between Kane Richmond
as the Shadow (a.k.a. Lamont Cranston) and Barbara Read as Margo Lane is O.K.
(though hardly at the level of the marvelous love-hate relationship between Rod
La Rocque and Astrid Allwyn in International Crime!), and the first victim is a well-to-do man named
Michael Hasdon (Frank Reicher). After several of his colleagues have fallen
similarly and suspicion has fallen on a mysterious “Joseph Yomans” who was
present at the grave-opening at the start of the film, took off his
ridiculously obvious fake beard and entered the Hasdon home through a secret
doorway (it’s that sort of a
movie), Cranston and Margo eventually realize that the pellets aren’t jewels
but secret capsules containing a bunch of microfilms containing the formula for
making the world’s greatest plastic, which is worth millions and the subject of
industrial espionage, and the culprit is Hasdon’s butler Paul Breck (Emmet
Vogan), who was the mysterious “Yomans” and didn’t want there to be a legal
heir so he could grab the secret and make the millions it’s worth himself. It’s
the sort of resolution that pretty much provokes a yawn — as I’ve joked about
other movies before, this is less a whodunit than a whocareswhodunit — but The
Shadow Returns has some occasional visual
atmospherics and a surprisingly good deadpan performance by Tom Dugan as
cabdriver and chauffeur Moe Shrevnitz, who in the Shadow’s print stories was
yet one more incognito the Shadow
used to get closer to the underworld and gather information, but on the radio
show (as here) became a separate character, largely used as comic relief.
