The Untouchable Dick Tracy

This entry is dedicated to the lovely Fay Wraith, my life partner in crime. She walked into the den while I was watching Republic’s Dick Tracy Returns (1938). As Ralph Byrd’s Tracy waded into a room full of thugs, she glanced at the screen and commented, “Oh, you’re watching Eliot Ness again.” It’s a perfectly understandable case of mistaken identity. Especially when you know the origins of plainclothes Tracy…

Chicago,1931 - Dick Tracy makes his comic strip debut in the Chicago Tribune, a paper whose front pages would have been filled with daily accounts of Eliot Ness and The Untouchables and their battle to put Al Capone behind bars and break the back of the Chicago Mob. No coincidence then. Even the trademark rogue’s gallery of cartoon villains like The Blank and Flat Top can be traced back to “Scarface” Capone.

As Tracy’s popularity grows, so too does the public’s fascination with real-life G-Men and their war against public enemies like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. More and more papers pick up Tracy’s exploits. Republic wins the rights to produce the detective’s serial adventures, beginning with Dick Tracy in 1937. They even consider casting real-life G-Man Melvin Purvis in the lead role, before settling on actor Ralph Byrd.

The first Tracy serial is a huge success, prompting a sequel in 1938. Instead of the pulp-inspired Spider and his gang, Dick Tracy Returns draws its villains from the front page headlines. Pa Stark and his boys are obviously inspired by the notorious Ma Barker and her killer brood of murdering sons. This changes the tone of the whole serial. In fact it makes Dick Tracy Returns the only true hardboiled crime serial.

Serials almost always exist in a pulp fantasy world, one that appeals directly to 12-year old boys of all ages. By contrast, the first chapter of Dick Tracy Returns begins with newsreel footage of real G-Men firing tommy guns on a shooting range. (They fire short, measured bursts and aim low. It’s amazing what a kid can learn at the movies!) We see this as Dick Tracy shows the film to a classroom full of FBI recruits.

One of those recruits, (stuntman Dave Sharpe) is shot in the back by Kid Stark when he attempts to foil an armored car heist. When Pa Stark (Charles Middleton) finds out his sons didn’t make sure that Sharpe was dead, the Kid heads back and guns down the wounded G-Man again! Badly wounded, Sharpe is put into an iron lung. Once Pa Stark finds out, he sneaks into the hospital and pulls the plug.

This is a serial for children? It surely is. And though the hard-edged violence and nastiness of this first chapter is never quite equaled in the 14 chapters that follow, Dick Tracy Returns is a serial unlike any other. The action piles on fast and furious. Most of the Stark’s criminal schemes are all too real: extortion, blackmail, robbery, terrorism. When they threaten to blow up a planetarium, they don’t hesitate to murder a crowd of innocent visitors inside. That’s just “Too bad for them.”

Pa Stark and his sons are simply violent sociopaths, not the hooded madmen and super villains you’ll usually find in the serial world. One plot to kidnap a schoolbus full of children and hold them for ransom was considered so vile it never made it past the scripting stage. Accentuating the down-to-earth action is terrific location shooting. Shootouts and fistfights take place at airports, docks, an abandoned rock quarry and the now-famous Griffiths observatory.

All of the Dick Tracy serials are good, even great. Dick Tracy Returns, with its hard edge and fine performances from Byrd and Middleton, just may be the best. And if you want a double-dose of 30s crimebusting action with straight-shooting fedora-wearing heroes, pair it up with a black-and-white TV episode of The Untouchables (1959-1962). Any resemblance between Eliot Ness and Dick Tracy won’t be a coincidence at all.

Some Days Will Never End

“Every child should be allowed to enjoy his own precious days of thrills and adventure while those fleeting days of youthful escapism are still available.”

Alan G. Barbour - on the American sound serial.

“Nostalgia I feel is ruinous to film criticism. It has absolutely no place in film history.”

Jon Tuska - on guys like Alan G. Barbour.

From out of the past, two books come my way – Days of Thrills and Adventure, a fanzine of serial ads and poster material published by Alan G. Barbour in 1969; and The Filming of the West by Jon Tuska, a massive 500-page history of the American Western film published in 1975. As you might gather from the quotes above, they share the bookshelf somewhat uneasily.

I value them both.

I love Jon Tuska’s writing. He’s opinionated, high-falutin’ (try a Jungian interpretation of the 1934 serial Mystery Mountain on for size!), and a terrific story teller who spent face time with a lot of the actors and directors who made the movies and made history. But on the subject of nostalgia, Tuska’s just plain got it wrong.

Days of Thrills and Adventure has no text. Zip, nada. Just page after page of glorious ads and posters for serials. It was pure nostalgia, assembled for those who remember their own “Days”, watching serials in the 30s and 40s. Or is it. There’s history and insight aplenty in these pages too for those who seek it. You’ve just gotta dig…

An ad for Republic Studio’s Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) reveals the studios serials were marketed as a brand, built on each new release: “The exciting exploits of Captain Marvel – brought to you by REPUBLIC, whose serial adventures of Dick Tracy, The Lone Ranger, Red Ryder, Dr. Fu Manchu, Zorro, Doctor Satan and King of the Royal Mounted you’ll never forget.”

Columbia’s ads for the Buster Crabbe vehicle Pirates of the High Seas (1950) proudly proclaim that this is serial excitement “from the company that gave you SUPERMAN.” A full two years after the Superman serial and they’re still trying to milk its success. Superman truly was the last hurrah of the sound serial.

Most important of all, on page after page, ad after ad, you see the fusion of pulp magazine art, comic strips, and movies, the synthesis of three vibrant, young American art forms feeding off each other’s strengths, driving each other forward. Which is why Days of Thrills and Adventure doesn’t just have a place in film history, it IS film history alive on every page.

Night of the Cliffhanger's Return

It had been nearly twenty years since William Witney, Republic's ace action helmer, had directed his last serial - The Crimson Ghost in 1946. And it was nearly ten years after the curtain had fallen on the last new American serial, "new" being a generous description since the last of the chapterplays ground out by both the once-proud Republic and by Columbia in the fifties were so filled with stock footage that it was rare to find a fresh cliffhanger or action scene among the lot.

Then, on the night of September 24th, 1965, it happened. The cliffhanger returned and William Witney was once again behind the camera, calling the shots. For this was The Night Of The Deadly Bed on the new CBS show The Wild Wild West. The screen was a lot smaller, but the action and the heroes and villains were just as big as they had always been at the Saturday matinees of the thrities and forties.

Robert Conrad as Jim West was cocky as Don Barry in The Adventures of Red Ryder (1940). About the same height too. He took on a supervillain who styled himself after Napoleon and who plotted to take over Mexico with the help of a monstrous super-train equipped with a steel battering ram.

It was a fast-paced 50 minutes of high octane pulp. Best of all it featured true cliffhangers - ones that were "to be continued" after a set of commercials instead of next week, but cliffhangers all the same. One sees Jim West drugged and lying in the titular deadly bed as a heavy canopy bristling with razor spikes lowers down towards him. Another has West strapped to an oversized gong as a heavy log is drawn back, ready to ram forward and, uh, take its toll on our hero.

These perils are beautifully framed and cut, a return to Witney's salad days. They're not the only echoes of the golden past either. In the opening teaser alone we encounter former Republic serial stuntman Dale Van Sickel as a mariachi who plucks a guitar string and uses it as a garrote. West then hurries to a warehouse where he has arranged to meet another agent. A bomb explodes and the man is cut down. Dying, his face and mustache covered in dust, he utters a single word: "Flory". Shot in extreme close-up. it's a sly reference to the opening of Citizen Kane and Orson Welles' deathbed whisper of "Rosebud."

The episode climaxes with a peasant revolt in the madman's undeground lair, a labyrinth of monstrous machines, spurting jets of steam and a roaring open furnace. It harkens back to Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon leading a revolt in the atomic furnace room of the Hawkmen's city in the clouds.

There's a lot of joy and energy in William Witney's work on screen. Unfortunately, there wasn't lot of joy offscreen. Bobby Conrad insisted on performing beneath the crushing weight of the deadly bed's canopy. Witney thought it was too risky and insisted on using a stuntman for the shot. They fought so long and hard the set was shut down. In the end, Conrad won and Witney let him do the stunt.

Then again, maybe Conrad didn't win at all. Witney only made one more Wild, Wild West, then left the show to never return.

The Ghost of a Christmas Present

Wrapped under the Christmas tree this season is The Crimson Ghost (1946), a good serial that in many ways signals the end of the Golden Age of American sound serials.

This is the last of William Witney's serials, co-directed with Fred Brannon, and made after his return from serving as Lieutenant in a Marine combat photography unit during WW2. His direction is up to par, staging wild slugfests and fluid camera movement that gives scope to the confines of lab sets and sweep to the action.

Compare the fights here to later Spencer Bennet and Brannon directed serials. The stuntmen hurtle over tables and slide along their lengths. In one bravura moment a stuntman half-runs up a wall to gain momentum then hurls himself back into the fray. The cutting is quicker, the angles more varied and Witney always seemed to get just that bit more from the very same stuntmen as other directors.

Of course, what makes this chapterplay truly memorable is its grisly villain. The Crimson Ghost's skull-mask and skeletal gloves look eerie enough in stills. Add in a distorted voice and his propensity for brandishing hypodermic needles, held menacingly up to the wide eyes of his victims before he administers a drug that robs free will, and you have the true stuff of nightmares. No wonder "The Fiend" has become the iconic logo of punk rockers The Misfits, his death grin leering at fans since 1979.

Fast-paced and loaded with varied thrills, The Crimson Ghost never ascends to the heights of Witney's golden age serials, especially his work in tandem with John English from 1937-1941. Post-war budgets grew smaller and, crucially, the length of individual chapters became shorter and shorter. Shrinking from 20-minute instalments to a mere 12, moments of character and mood vanished altogether. Frenetic pace, superb stunting and Lydecker effects masked the loss for years. But by 1946 the golden days were over.

The serial had begun its inevitable decline. But like its own heroes escaping from exploding cars and certain doom every week, the serial would rise up and dust itself off and more than once. You just have to know where to look to see it return...

TO BE CONTINUED

Chapter 2: The Return of Adventure

The Time: 1981.

The Place: Hundreds of darkened cinemas.

The Paramount Pictures logo dissolves into the view of a real mountain top. Raiders of the Lost Ark begins. Pulp adventure in the grand style of 30s and 40s golden age Hollywood returns.

The lost art of non-stop thrills and cliffhanging suspense that generations of kids had been raised on was suddenly lost no more. Indiana Jones wields a bullwhip and transfers from his horse to a truck, just like in Zorro Rides Again (1937). He fights nazis on and around a flying wing, just like Spy Smasher (1942). The spirit of the Saturday Matinee serials and B pictures is back, this time an epic with state-of-the-art effects, location shooting around the world, and major studio A-list talent at the helm.

As the first adventure of Indiana Jones unfolds, an on-screen title tells us it's 1936 - the year Buster Crabbe became Flash Gordon and Republic Pictures opened its doors and started grinding out an unchecked avalanche of thrills through 20 years and 66 adventure serials.

Coincidence. Of course not. And George Lucas and Spielberg were the first to admit that this was a knowing, loving homage to the serials and adventure pictures of the thirties. Like their new hero Indy, they were raiders too, uncovering cinematic relics that were buried in the past and forgotten. Treasures that would bring them "fortune and glory".

And I became a raider too... Digging deep into Hollywood's past, uncovering lost art like serials and the pulp magazines and old time radio and adventure comic strips that inspired them... Discovering why these things were lost to us or what they evolved into, so they really weren't lost at all - like the great adventure TV shows of the 60s whose cliffhangers came with every commercial break instead of every chapter.

I don't really know why I'm drawn to these things. Only that I always have been. And I suspect if you are reading this, then you just may be too.

This blog is just beginning. We ARE the Raiders of the Lost Art and we have close to 100 years of moviegoing thrills to unearth and dust off, to hold up to the light in wonder. Especially now, when it's 2008 and Indiana Jones is about to return after a 19-year absence!

To be continued?

Well, that's an understatement.

FIRST CHAPTER: LEGACY OF ADVENTURE

The time: 1936.

Place: America. A country struggling to recover from crushing economic depression. Battling poverty and gangsterism. Watching the dark clouds of war gathering in the Far East and over Europe.

It's a time that needs heroes, new myths to shine a little hope and show the way forward.

As always the light comes from the strangest places, where no one is looking. And the first to see it are the kids. Flocking to Saturday matinees with hard-come-by dimes clutched in their hands, eager to see adventure, wilder and more vivid than anything their young eyes have seen before.

In 1936 that adventure explodes off the screen with the exploits of Flash Gordon on Mongo, Lion tamer Clyde Beatty in Darkest Africa and Crash Corrigan in the Undersea Kingdom. The Golden Age of the sound serial arrives. Luring you in with promises of exotic adventure on other worlds, in distant jungles and lost cities, wherever thrills can be found. Ray guns zap, bullwhips crack and fists fly with the bone-crushing force that only a hero can summon up.

Every chapter delivers non-stop intrigue and action, ending with a cliffhanger that spells certain doom for heroes plunged into a dragon's lair or the lion's pit. Unstoppable moving walls lined with spikes close in, an ore crusher descends upon a masked vigilante knocked out cold. Will they escape?

Of course they will. But to discover how, you MUST return to the theatre next week for the next chapter. This is cinematic pulp adventure fiction distilled to purest form. A lost art?

To Be Continued.