Hero of the Month: Allan Lane
I am always fascinated by comebacks and the strange turns they take, like Jackie Earle Haley, who was a popular teen star in films like The Bad New Bears (1976) and Breaking Away (1978) then disappeared for almost twenty five years before exploding back into prominence with his incredible turn as the unstable vigilante Rorschach in Watchmen (2009). Allan Lane has had an equally topsy turvy career.
A former college football star, he first became a model and then a stage actor, making his screen debut in Not Quite Descent (1929). He spent most of the thirties playing supporting roles in films like Night Nurse (1931) and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1938). Stardom came his way at Republic Pictures when he was cast in the lead for their adaptation of Zane Grey’s King of the Royal Mounted (1940), playing Sgt. Tom King of the Mounties battling a gang of Fifth Columnists smuggling out a new explosive being mined in the Great White North. He followed this up with the sequel, King of the Mounties (1942), battling agents from all three Axis counties committing sabotage in Canada.
Now billed as the king of the serials at Republic, he was paired with their new serial queen, Kay Aldridge in Daredevils of the West (1943) trying to build a stage line through hostile Indian territory, with most of the violence being instigated by an unscrupulous banker wanting the stage line franchise. Lane final serial was The Tiger Woman (1944), which would introduce Republic’s reigning serial queen Linda Stirling in a complicated, for Republic anyway, serial with Lane trying to bring in an oil well while also learning true identity of the sacred Tiger Woman and why the villains are after her.
Lane then became a big Western star, taking over the role of Red Ryder from from “Wild Bill” Gordon Elliott, in films like Stagecoach to Denver (1946) and Vigillantes of Boom Town (1947) before moving on to star in in a long string of B Westerns as Allan “Rocky” Lane with his wonder horse Black Jack in Vigilante Hideout (1950) and Bandits of the West (1953) before his career petered out in the mid-fifites when B Western film series’s stopped being produced due to TV. Lane would make a few TV appearances but was largely forgotten. And then something strange happened. Lane became one of the mot popular stars on TV in the sixties, without ever once appearing on camera. From 1961 to 1966 Lane supplied the voice for the title character on a fantasy sit-com about a talking horse, called Mr. Ed, a beloved show to this day and the role most people think of when the actor’s name is brought up. After this second brush with fame, Lane called it quits and retired from acting, living a quiet life until his death in the early seventies from cancer.
