Todd’s Serial Blog

Originally I ha planned to highlight this serial last month, but I got so caught up in childhood nostalgia for a favorite Saturday morning show and made an executive decision to move it back a month. Which works out okay because G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra opens tomorrow and if I hadn’t just typed this you would have thought I planned it as the perfect tie  in.  If I was a little smarter I would have skipped telling that, but constant blogging seems to cause one to constantly confess things.  Well enough of this meandering introduction, lets get to some patriotic action.

The serial starts with Marine Corporal  Larry Lawrence (Grant Withers) and Marine Sergeant Mack McGowan (Adrian Morris) staging a heroic rescue of Sergeant William Schiller (George J. Lewis) from a band of rebels and return with him  to the United States, where Schiller is scheduled to demonstrate his new invention, the DX-19 Gyro Compass.

On the day of the big test, which is to be used on a flight to Halfway Island (so named because it is halfway between California and Hawaii), where the Marines are planning to building a base for refueling, Colonel W. R. Bennett (Robert Warwick) is visited by construction engineer H. R. Douglas (Robert Frazer).  Douglas is opposed to building the base as it will mean that the Marines won’t buy his new Floating Airport (i.e. a modern aircraft carrier).  He reminds Bennett that every plane that has attempted to land on Halfway Island has crashed and disappeared without a trace.

After a brief bit of tomfoolery, wherein Larry hides Mack’s  boot so that he can  beat out his friend in asking Schiller’s sister Frances (Ann Rutherford) for a date, Schiller takes off with the DX-19 guiding the plane.

Unknown to the world at large, a modern day pirate called the Tiger Shark has set up his headquarters on Halfway Island, and is responsible for all of the plane crashes.  He sends word to Metcalf (Warner Richmond) of the approaching plane.  Metcalf uses a magnetic ray to down the plane and has Schiller captured.

News reaches the base that Schiller’s plane was lost and no survivors found.  Later Douglas has Frances come to his office, he is wanting to offer her a job  as she is now on her  own.  While there she discovers that Douglas has the DX-19.  She phones this to Colonel Bennett and tells him she will bring it to the base.

The Tiger Shark learns of this and orders his henchman M-90 (Tom London) to retrieve it.  As Frances approaches the base, M-90 runs her off the road and grabs the DX-19.  This is spotted by Larry who, after making sure Frances is okay, chases after the hoodlum.

Running into Mack, M-90 cold cocks him and the Marine falls unconscious into a new radio controlled plane about to be used in an artillery test.  Larry breaks off the chase and climbs into the plane to get Mack.  The plane takes off  with both men aboard.  Flying over the artillery field, the plane is hit with a  shell and plummets toward the ground……

Mascot has an unusual distinction among the serial producing companies of the sound era.  While all the rest showed a visible drop in quality as they got closer to the end of their serial making days, Mascot’s serials actually got better, with each one being just a little bit more exciting  and inventive than the previous one.  Of course, unlike Universal and Columbia, the company didn’t so much stop making films as they were absorbed with some other studios into a new company, Republic.

As the final serial from Mascot, The Fighting Marines (1935) is the perfect transition serial.  It retains the look and feel of a typical Mascot serial, while at the same time the plot is faster paced and more streamlined than the typical Mascot fare, without all of the usual subplots that constantly cluttered up the story, clearly laying the ground work for the Republic style that would emerge during the late thirties.

This is most evident in the mystery set forth. Instead of half the cast acting suspicious, you get three suspects, Robert Frazier and James Glendon (who gets introduced in Chapter Four) as rival businessmen who want to sell the military similar inventions, and in a bit of trick casting, perennial villain Jason Robards, Sr. as Warwick’s constantly in the background Asian manservant. The mystery isn’t that hard to figure out, just from reading the list of suspects you have probably guessed who the villain is.

The fights scenes are better choreographed than usual.  Instead of a large hodgepodge of wildly swinging punches between combatants, some  care was taken to allow the viewer to actually see individual punches being thrown and landing as they smoothly move around a room instead of just slamming into each other and rolling around for a while.

The miniature work is excellent, and rivals the work done on Phantom Empire (1935).  Most impressive is the magnetic ray that rises from under ground and swivels in to position, ready to fire.  Shown several times throughout the serial it isn’t overused to the point of becoming monotonous.

If anything in the serial shows that it is a Mascot, besides the lack of background music, it is in Levine’s typical penny pinching over use of recap scenes.  The Fighting Marines doesn’t have one recap episode, nor does it have two, but incredibly has three.  Chapter Four, Chapter Seven and Chapter Eleven are mostly made up of previous footage.

An odd thing about the serial is that Rutherford completely disappears from the serial after Chapter Six.  She isn’t mentioned, even in the recap scenes, nor does she pop up for an obligatory appearance in the final self congratulatory coda in the last chapter.  Which is odd since for the first half of the serial, Withers and Morris are friendly romantic rivals for Rutherford’s character, and then just seem to forget about her.

Grant Withers and Adrian Morris make a good action team, though it is odd that Withers is the lower ranked one in the group as he’s the one who is obviously in charge, coming up with most of  the plans.  Withers makes for a good lead in the serial, easily showing he’s tough with crooks and tender with Rutherford.

Morris is good comedy relief during moments in between action set ups, always getting the short end of the stick against Withers smarter character, but is less successful as a ferocious fighter where he looks more petulant than tough. His best moment is in a shoot out in Chapter Twelve when he notices a henchman waking up near his cover and takes time out to whack him on the head with a board, then dust his hands off before Withers yells at him to get back to the fight. Withers and Morris would play similar roles two years later as uniformed policemen in Universal’s Radio Patrol (1937).

Rutherford is okay as the heroine, displaying an equal amount of courage in the face of danger and concern for the welfare of the heroes.  What few romantic moments in the serial are handled in a nice platonic fashion, which is good when you realize Rutherford was only fourteen when the serial was being filmed (which probably accounts for her Betty Boop sounding voice) and her co-stars were both about thirty.

Warwick is his usual dignified authority figure, while Frazier and Glendon both do good jobs of looking suspiciously menacing as suspects.  Robards is a little hard to take as an uneducated houseboy, but he gives it the old college try.

Warner Richmond and Tom London head up a great cast of henchmen, including Richard Alexander, Stanely Blystone, Ted Adams and Millburn Stone(!?!?!) in an early role. But best of them is Frank Reicher as the scared to death scientist forced to make the Tiger Shark’s equipment like the Magnetic Ray.

Tags: Reviews //