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Category Archives: July 1948

Superman (15 chapters) (July 15-Oct. 21, 1948)

Superman Chapter 10
Superman (15 chapters) (1948)
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and Thomas Carr
Columbia Pictures

Here it is, folks — the very first live-action Superman film.

Superman, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is one of the most popular and recognizable superheroes of the 20th century. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman made his first appearance in Action Comics #1 in June 1938. His popularity grew quickly, leading to a second comic series, simply titled Superman, in 1939, a radio serial — The Adventures of Superman — in 1940, a series of Max Fleischer cartoons (1941-1943), and a third comic series, which debuted in 1941 as “World’s Best Comics,” but was changed after the first issue to World’s Finest, and featured stories about Superman and Batman & Robin, as well as other DC Comics superheroes.

Aspects of all of those source materials can be seen in the 15-chapter serial Superman, which was produced by Sam Katzman for Columbia Pictures and directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and Thomas Carr. Katzman produced a ton of cheapjack serials for Columbia, and he was sometimes known as “Jungle Sam” on account of all the action-adventure pictures he made that were set in tropical locations.

I’ve reviewed a few of Katzman’s serials on this blog already — Jack Armstrong (1947), The Sea Hound (1947), and Brick Bradford (1948) — but I’ve barely scratched the surface of his voluminous output. To be honest, I really don’t want to dig any deeper. Katzman produced some fun low-budget sci-fi pictures in the 1950s, but all of his serials that I’ve seen so far have been tedious, cheaply made, and poorly acted, and Superman is no exception.

In 1948, the Max Fleischer animated shorts about Superman were still the most impressive cinematic versions of the character. They were gorgeously animated, full of vibrant color, packed with action, and even featured the talents of Bud Collyer, the voice of Superman on the radio. In short, they were comic books come to life.

In fact, they were so impressive that Katzman’s black and white serial Superman features an animated Superman in all of the flying sequences. It’s a very different approach to a flying superhero than the practical effects featured in Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), which for my money is the greatest serial ever made.

Adventures of Captain Marvel featured a dummy that zipped along a wire, which sounds cheesier than it is. The effect actually works quite well, thanks to simple techniques like reversing the film so the dummy can fly upward, shooting in silhouette, and creative editing. The animated flying sequences in Superman, on the other hand, are well-done for what they are, but the technique of turning live action into animation and back again was always jarring for me.

If you’re a Superman fan, this serial is a must-see for its historical value, but it’s just not that great. The low-budget black and white filmmaking is less vibrant than the Max Fleischer cartoons, the storytelling is less inventive and involving than the radio show, and the physical appearance of Superman just isn’t as impressive as it was in the comic books.

At the beginning of every chapter, the Superman comic magazine flashes on screen, then Kirk Alyn bursts from its pages and stands there for awhile looking as if he’s not sure what he should do next.

Alyn was a 37-year-old actor who’d had bit parts in a bunch of B movies, but this was his first leading role. Alyn has the right face and the right hair to play Superman, but his body, mannerisms, and physical presence all feel wrong. (This is another area where Adventures of Captain Marvel excelled. Tom Tyler looked very much like the Captain Marvel of the comic books, and his physicality was impressive.)

Alyn fares a little better as Superman’s alter ego, mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent. I like the slightly alien edge he gives the character, but in some scenes his alien peculiarity just seems like bad acting.

My favorite actor in Superman is Noel Neill, who was so good as Lois Lane that she went on to play Lois in the Adventures of Superman TV series with George Reeves that premiered in 1951. The same honor was not accorded to either Tommy Bond (who plays cub reporter Jimmy Olsen) or Pierre Watkin (who plays Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White). I actually really liked Watkin as Perry White, but I thought Bond was obnoxious and irritating as Olsen, and not just because he’s the guy who played Butch in the Our Gang comedies.

Also, Los Angeles and the surrounding countryside don’t make for a very convincing Metropolis, but California locations are to be expected in any serial.

The antagonist of the serial is called The Spider Lady (Carol Forman), a master criminal who wears a slinky black cocktail dress and a black domino mask. The Spider Lady is after a MacGuffin called a “reducer ray,” and like every good serial villain, she has an army of disposable goons who carry out her cockamamie plans in chapter after chapter. She also has a henchman named Hackett who is introduced in Chapter 6, “Superman in Danger.” Hackett is a brilliant but deranged scientist who has broken out of prison. He’s played by Charles Quigley, who starred in The Crimson Ghost (1946), and other serials.

Superman Chapter 6

I love serials — even the bad ones — and I certainly enjoyed aspects of Superman. But every superhero movie is only as convincing as its lead actor, and Kirk Alyn just isn’t up to the task. I’m sure in 1948 it was thrilling for plenty of kids to see their hero come to life on the big screen. It was a time when Superman was such a mythic, larger-than-life figure that the actors who played him were never credited. When Bud Collyer made an announcement about something that wasn’t a part of the radio show’s serialized story, he was still introduced as “Superman.” Similarly, in the cast of characters list that flashes on the screen at the beginning of every chapter of Superman, Kirk Alyn is the only actor whose name isn’t listed. The first name in the credits is simply SUPERMAN.

Still, I wonder how many children in 1948 were somewhat disappointed by Kirk Alyn (perhaps in ways they couldn’t verbalize). After all, he doesn’t have the impressive voice of Bud Collyer, and he’s so much scrawnier than the strapping hero of the comics. Worst of all, he flits around like Peter Pan, and his cape frequently gets in the way during the action.

Key Largo (July 31, 1948)

Key LargoJohn Huston’s Key Largo was the fourth and final film Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart made together.

Hard to believe, isn’t it? Bogie and Bacall are one of the most famous couples — perhaps the most famous couple — in Hollywood history. And yet, their onscreen work together boils down to just four films made over the course of five years: To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo.

Key Largo is very loosely based on the 1939 play by Maxwell Anderson. I often don’t like films adapted from plays. The dialogue and the way the characters enter and re-enter the action usually feels very strange. But Key Largo never feels “stagey,” and confining the action to a single location only heightens the tension between the characters.

The film opens with beautiful footage of the Florida Keys. By opening with establishing shots of the steamy, summertime Keys, by the time the action is confined to a hotel while a hurricane rages outside, nothing about Key Largo feels stagey or stilted. The viewer is right in the middle of the action, and the suspense grows as the film goes on.

Summertime is the off season in the Florida Keys, when the mercury never dips below 100 degrees, and all the hotels are closed. Bogart plays Frank McCloud, a veteran of World War II who is in Key Largo to visit James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), a wheelchair-bound man whose son George was killed in the war. (McCloud was George Temple’s commanding officer.) Temple runs a hotel in Key Largo with George’s widow, Nora (Lauren Bacall).

When Bogart sits down at the bar in the Largo Hotel, he laconically introduces himself to the boozy moll Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor) as “McCloud. Frank. By John, out of Ellen.”

Gaye is not the only oddball occupant of the Largo Hotel. There are also a trio of men — Curly (Thomas Gomez), Angel (Dan Seymour), and Toots (Harry Lewis) — and with names like those, it’s clear that their story about coming down to the Keys from Milwaukee to do a little fishing isn’t on the up-and-up.

The full terror of the situation becomes apparent when we catch our first glimpse of gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), sitting in a bathtub in one of the upstairs rooms of the hotel, chewing a cigar and exuding menace.

Robinson is a great actor, and Johnny Rocco is one of his most memorable creations. Rocco craves power and money, and there will never be enough power and money to satisfy him. He delights in toying with his hostages, taunting them with their helplessness. He even goes so far as to give one of them a pistol, daring them to kill him. But his bullying takes all forms. One of the most harrowing scenes in the film is when he humiliates Gaye by forcing her to sing for everyone before he’ll give her another drink. And like most bullies, Johnny Rocco is a coward at heart. As the hurricane builds in ferocity outside the hotel, so does his fear.

Key Largo was John Huston’s second film to be released in 1948. (The first was another collaboration with Bogart, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) Key Largo is a masterfully directed film. The actors are all at the top of their game (Claire Trevor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role). The film’s music, by Max Steiner, is perfect; full of tension and menace, and — when the scene calls for it — a crushing sense of inevitability. Rudi Fehr’s editing accentuates the tension, and Karl Freund’s cinematography is beautiful.

Return of the Bad Men (July 17, 1948)

Return of the Bad MenReturn of the Bad Men was the fourth and final film in a series of westerns that director Ray Enright made with legendary horse opera star Randolph Scott. The previous three were Trail Street (1947), Albuquerque (1948), and Coroner Creek (1948).

Most modern viewers will know Randolph Scott primarily for his final role — in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) — and be blissfully unaware of the roughly one hundred films he appeared in prior to it.

Ride the High Country is a great western (it co-stars Joel McCrea), but it’s not Scott’s only claim to fame. The westerns he made in the ’50s with director Budd Boetticher are highly regarded among connoisseurs of western cinema. He also appeared in plenty of workmanlike westerns like the ones directed by Ray Enright that aren’t great works of art, but are well-made entertainment, and a cut above the average B western.

Return of the Bad Men takes place in 1889, in the Oklahoma Territory. The U.S. government has just opened up two million acres of prime land for settlers. At high noon on April 22, 1889, the great Oklahoma Land Rush will begin. On the tails of the settlers, however, are a bunch of no-good outlaws (the “bad men” of the title) who only hope to prey on honest folks.

The land run sequence is exciting, although I suspect that most of the footage is taken from an earlier RKO picture, the Oscar-winning Cimarron (1931).

One of the settlers is a beautiful young widow named Madge Allen (Jacqueline White) who has a young son named Johnny (Gary Gray). She also has a boyfriend, Vance Cordell (Randolph Scott), who only wants to marry his sweetheart and move her and her son out to California.

But when Madge’s father, John Pettit (Gabby Hayes), the folksy and tough-talking president of the local bank, picks up stakes and moves from Braxton, Oklahoma, to Guthrie, Oklahoma, Vance, Madge, and Johnny follow. Once in Guthrie, a cavalry officer appoints Vance U.S. Marshal. As a former Texas Ranger and peace officer, he’s the most suitable man to keep order.

Madge just wants her son to grow up in a peaceful, law-abiding world. Her deceased husband was a peace officer killed in the line of duty, and she refuses to marry Vance until he puts things right in Guthrie, trains officers to take his place, and retires.

Meanwhile, a whole mess of outlaws is amassing against the peaceful homesteaders of Guthrie. They’re led by Wild Bill Doolin (Robert Armstrong) and there’s even a woman among them, Doolin’s niece Cheyenne (Anne Jeffreys). When the rough-and-tumble bad men tell her that busting banks is man’s work, she responds that Belle Starr did OK.

The crew of outlaws includes plenty of famous names — the Younger brothers, Cole (Steve Brodie), Jim (Tom Keene) and John (Robert Bray); the Dalton brothers, Emmett (Lex Barker), Bob (Walter Reed), and Grat (Michael Harvey); Billy the Kid (Dean White); the Arkansas Kid (Lew Harvey); Wild Bill Yeager (Tom Tyler) — but the only member of the crew who has much of a chance to distinguish himself (besides Cheyenne) is Robert Ryan as the Sundance Kid.

Sundance is the most vicious of the lot and becomes Vance’s archenemy over the course of the film. Robert Ryan was on his way to becoming a big star after his memorable role in Crossfire (1947). There’s nothing particularly remarkable about his role in Return of the Bad Men, but he plays a charming villain well, and the growing antagonism between Ryan and Scott provides the dramatic push of the film.

Enright keeps the pace fast in Return of the Bad Men. The editing is quick, and the camera frequently moves within shots, which is not the case with a lot of B westerns. For a B western the production values are good, the acting is solid, and the characterizations are well-done.

Below is a clip from the film. I suppose I have to put a spoiler warning on it, since it’s the climactic fight of the film. I think the biggest potential spoiler about it is a single line of dialogue that alludes to the fate of a couple of characters, because if you consider finding out whether the guy with the white hat or the guy with the black hat wins the final fight in a B western a “spoiler” … well … let’s just say I envy your childlike naïveté:

The Street With No Name (July 14, 1948)

By the time William Keighley’s The Street With No Name was released, noirish docudramas were practically a genre unto themselves. The docudrama craze began with The House on 92nd Street (1945), which was loosely based on a real case of nuclear espionage during World War II and was produced by Louis de Rochemont, the creator of the March of Time newsreels.

More “ripped from the headlines” stories followed. Spy thrillers like 13 Rue Madeleine (1947) and The Iron Curtain (1948), tales of miscarried justice like Boomerang (1947) and Call Northside 777 (1948), and even films like Kiss of Death (1947), which wasn’t based on any single real event, but presented its crime story as realistically as possible by eschewing a musical score and filming all the action on location — in prisons, schools, and city streets.

The Street With No Name begins with the following words: “The motion picture you are about to see was adapted from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wherever possible it was photographed in the original locale and played by the actual F.B.I. personnel involved.”

Then, a quote from J. Edgar Hoover appears as it is pounded out by invisible hands on a sheet of paper stuck in a typewriter:

The street on which crime flourishes is the street extending across America. It is the street with no name. Organized gangsterism is once again returning. If permitted to go unchecked three out of every four Americans will eventually become its victims. Wherever law and order break down there you will find public indifference. An alert and vigilant America will make for a secure America.

The docudrama that I think The Street With No Name most closely resembles is Anthony Mann’s T-Men (1947), which uses the same kind of “government-approved” patriotic opening, but eventually devolves into a film noir in which the underworld setting and stylistic elements are more interesting than the clean-shaven protagonists. T-Men, however, showed its protagonists becoming drawn deeper into their undercover roles while The Street With No Name doesn’t really develop its protagonist beyond his play-acting heroics.

The Street With No Name opens with a murder at the Meadowbrook night club, a typical road house in a typical city called “Center City.” (The Street With No Name was filmed in and around Los Angeles, and while there is a neighborhood of San Diego called “Center City,” I think that “Center City” was just meant to be a generic name for “Anytown, USA.”)

A second crime by the same masked gang — the murder of a bank guard — draws the FBI into the case, since bank robberies are a federal crime. Leading the investigation is FBI Inspector George A. Briggs, who is played by Lloyd Nolan. (Briggs is the same character Nolan played in The House on 92nd Street.)

According to Briggs, these new gangs are “the juvenile delinquents of yesterday” and they are even more ruthless than the pre-war gangs. The only way to break this gang is to send in an undercover agent.

Enter Mark Stevens as FBI cadet Gene Cordell, who we know is a prime candidate for the assignment because he knows exactly which targets to shoot — and which ones not to shoot — in a Hogan’s Alley sequence filmed at Quantico, VA.

Stevens goes undercover as “George Manly” in the skid row section of Center City, which is full of pool halls, boxing gyms, and peep show machines, and where apparently the only song anyone ever plays on the jukebox is an instrumental version of “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.”

Despite Stevens’s total lack of proficiency in the boxing ring (he looks less competent than Charlie Chapin was meant to in City Lights), the robbery gang he’s after is impressed with his skills and takes him in as one of their own.

The gang’s leader is named Alec Stiles, and he’s played by Richard Widmark. This was Widmark’s second big-screen role, and it’s similar to his first, the psychopathic Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death. Stiles’s teeth aren’t quite as big as Udo’s were, but his maniacal leer is the same. Widmark delivers a good performance, but character details like Stiles’s germaphobia and wife-beating aren’t quite enough to make you forget Udo if you’ve recently watched Kiss of Death.

But character details and plot points aren’t what makes The Street With No Name a standout docudrama film noir. What makes the film memorable is the overriding sense of tension and the dark, shadowy cinematography of Joseph MacDonald.

Stevens isn’t as strong a protagonist as Dennis O’Keefe and Alfred Ryder were in T-Men, and the most memorable sequences in The Street With No Name are completely wordless. The first is a chase in a ferryboat station (filmed at the Municipal Ferry in San Pedro, CA) and the second follows Stevens as he tries to get ballistic evidence by breaking into the gang’s weapons cache in a warehouse with Widmark hot on his heels.

Despite a generic story and a bland protagonist, The Street With No Name has great pacing, lots of suspense, style to spare, and a solid villain. I recommend it to all fans of FBI stories and film noir.

Man-Eater of Kumaon (July 1, 1948)

Man-Eater of Kumaon
Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948)
Directed by Byron Haskin
Universal Pictures

Jim Corbett was the archetypal “great white hunter.”

He was born Edward James Corbett in 1875 in Nainital, in the Kumaon region of northern India (now known as Uttarakhand), and was the eighth of 13 children. Corbett would go on to work for the Bengal and North Western Railway. He also attained the rank of colonel in the British Indian Army.

Between 1907 and 1938, Corbett killed a documented 33 man-eating tigers and leopards (the first tiger he brought down was responsible for more than 400 deaths). Despite his fearsome reputation as a hunter, Corbett was committed to conserving endangered Bengal tigers and their natural habitats, and India’s first national park was renamed in his honor in 1957.

His book The Man-Eaters of Kumaon was published in 1944 and was a great success, so it was natural that a Hollywood movie would soon arrive that bore little resemblance to it.

That movie is Man-Eater of Kumaon, and it stars Wendell Corey as Dr. John Collins, a successful but disillusioned physician who has given up the Manhattan rat race for the thrill of big game hunting. Dr. Collins bears no resemblance to Jim Corbett, and he’s not meant to. For better or for worse, the screenplay by Jeanne Bartlett and Lewis Meltzer is mostly an invention, and not directly based on any of Corbett’s stories.

The director, Byron Haskin, was a Hollywood veteran, and the film looks great despite obviously having been filmed on soundstages and at the Corriganville ranch in Simi Valley, California. William C. Mellor’s cinematography is dramatically lighted and ominously shadowed, and the nighttime scenes look especially good. The story and dialogue are overly serious to the point of ridiculousness, however, and Wendell Corey has neither the acting chops nor the charisma to carry a mediocre film.

Corey’s facial expressions range from glum to deeply depressed, and voiceover narration strings together much of the film. More than one scene involves Corey smoking a cigarette, pacing back and forth, and looking pensive as the narrator explains to the audience what he is feeling.

Indian actor Sabu plays a young man named Narain, and he acquits himself well, but he doesn’t have very much to do. (Sabu does get top billing over Corey, although I’m pretty sure Corey has more screen time.) Morris Carnovsky’s performance as the village elder Ganga Ram is overly mannered and soporific, but part of the blame can be placed on the stilted dialogue. Joanne Page, who plays Narain’s wife Lali, acts her part well, but she isn’t given much to do either.

The most interesting thing about Man-Eater of Kumaon is the Bengal tiger who is shot by Corey at the beginning of the film. Throughout the film the tiger is wounded and tracking the man who has harmed him, leaving a path of death and terror in his wake. (As one character in the film says, “A tiger will not forget the man who wounded him.”) The footage of the tiger is really spectacular, and it seems to be mostly original, unlike most jungle adventure pictures, which rely heavily on stock footage.