Todd’s Serial Blog

Well, supposedly Spring is finally here (not that you could tell from the weather we’ve been having for the past couple of weeks) and with the coming of Spring it is time to stop sitting in doors all day, to get out and enjoy sunshine and fresh air. But if you are too fat and lazy to do that (like me) then the next best thing is to sit inside and watch somebody else being outside and enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, and if they happen to be fighting a bunch of Axis stooges, so much the better.

Universal’s Junior G-Men of the Air (1942) was the third and final serial for the Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys.  Not long after, Billy Halop would leave the group to try his hand at playing more adult roles, something he wouldn’t really accomplish until the fifties and his transformation into a character actor.  Huntz Hall and Gabriel Dell would move over to Monogram and join fellow Dead End Kid  alumni Leo Gorcey and Bobby Jordan in the East Side Kids films (though Dell wold usually play an antagonist of the gang rather than a regular member), and Bernard Punsley  would trade in acting for med school.

The serial starts in late 1941 with Billy “Ace” Holden (Halop), and his best buds “Bolts” Larson (Hall), “Stick” Munsey (Dell) and “Greaseball” Plunket (Punsley) looking for scrap metal for Ace’s dad Jed (Eddy Waller), who runs a junkyard. As often happens with the gang they run into a rival gang, which starts a fight that ends up blocking the street, and gets Bolts in trouble with his girlfriend Grace (Kathryn Adams) who spots him and is furious because he had promised not to get into fights anymore.

As fate would have it at that exact moment a group of Japanese spies led by Araka (Turhan Bey) rob a bank.  Trying to get away they run smack into the fight and have to swerve to avoid hitting the gang of kids in the middle of the street.  The car smashes into a store and is disabled.

So they steal Ace’s truck.  Seeing this Ace jumps on the truck to try and prevent the theft.  He gets knocked off but rips Araka’s lapel pin off with him.  The police come and try to get statements, but Ace is distrustful of cops and blows them off, deciding he and his gang will get his Dad’s truck back themselves.

Outside of town, Araka gives the loot to pilot Monk (Noel Cravat) then goes to dispose of the truck.  Monk flies to a farm where the plane is stored in a fake a warehouse.  He takes the money underground to The Baron (Lionel Artwill).  The Baron berates Monk for arriving late and then when Araka arrives, berates him for losing the car, seems he had heard the whole story on the latest radio newscast.

Meanwhile Ace and the gang return to the junkyard, where Ace gives his genius brother Eddie (Gene Reynolds) some things he picked up to help him with the airplane muffler Eddie is trying to invent.  Just then their father spots Ace and tells him  he needs him to go deliver some parts to a customer and notices the truck isn’t in the yard.

While Ace is trying to think up a story to tell his father, Don Ames (Richard Lane) drives up with the truck.  Mr Holden wants to know whats going on and Ames thanks Ace for letting him borrow the truck.  After Ace’s father has gone off to deal with another customer, Ames explains that his an FBI agent and that they had found the truck abandoned.  He returned it to Ace and hoped that Ace could tell him something more about the men who stole the truck.  Helping cover Ace with his father doesn’t cut enough ice with the street kid and he refuses to tell the G-Man anything, only saying he’ll take care of the bums himself.

Seeing that an adult won’t be able to wn Ace’s trust, Ames goes to see teenager  Jerry Markham (Frank Albertson), head of the local Junior G-Men organization.  He discusses the problem with Jerry, who knows Ace as they are both plane enthusiasts and are both competing in a big air race later that week.  Jerry goes to see Ace, who is working on the plane he and his gang rebuilt themselves, under the guise of being a fellow competitor, but does no better at winning Ace’s trust as Ames did.

Later Ace is doing some trial flights at the local air port.  Watching along with the gang is local hooligan Doubleface Gordon (David Gorcey) who bad mouths both Ace and his plane.  The gang jump him and Doubleface ends up dumped face down in a barrel.

The day of the race arrives and Doubleface shows up.  After trading insults with Bolts, he swipes the teenager’s initial stamped pliers and tampers with Jerry’s strut wires, leaving the incriminating pliers in the cockpit.  The race gets under way, and it quickly comes down to between Ace and Jerry, but Jerry’s plane starts having trouble and he has to drop out halfway through the race.

With the course now wide open, Ace is clearly going to be the winner.  But the overtaxed rebuilt engine develops a problem and starts overheating. Bolts, who is the co-pilot, sees flames coming from the engine and tells Ace.  Ace tells Bolts to bail out and he will follow him.  But once Bolt’s is out and has safely opened his parachute, Ace continues on the win the race, but once across the finish line the engine finally gives out and the burning plane crashes with Ace still aboard…..

As was becoming more and more prevalent with the Little Tough Guys serials, it takes longer and longer for the serial to get to the actual plot.  In Junior G-Men (1940) the actual plot didn’t start until the end of the first chapter, in Sea Raiders (1941) things didn’t get going till after Chapter Two.  In this serial the actual plot doesn’t get going till Chapter Four.

For the first three chapters we get treated to a lot teen comedy as the gang fight the frame from Doubleface (which is done away with almost as quickly as it was started) and then start work on a new plane which they secure from a rich millionaire who, after making a forced landing, actually pays them to get rid of it for him, and Hall gets the airplane muffler to work by putting it on backwards (even the Bowery Boys never did comedy that lame).  Then suddenly the plot moves into gear as the spies kidnap Eddie and steal the only working model of his muffler for their Zeroes, and we learn that the bank robberies were to fund gun smuggling for the December 7th  planned attack on Pearl Harbor.

At this point the focus of most episodes is the search for the kidnapped Eddie by the gang with help from Jerry and his Junior G-Men while the Baron plans acts of sabotage to soften up America’s defenses (or at least in Chapter Five and Six) and wants to grab Ace to use as a hold over Eddie to force him to make more mufflers.  Oddly enough this causes the Air aspect of the serial to be all but dropped except for a daring rescue Ace makes of his brother using one the Baron’s own planes.  Most of the action is made up of car chases and fist fights instead of high flying dog fights.

The acting is what we have come to expect from the gang.  Halop is his usual tough guy with a heart full of mush when it coms to his brother.  He talks tough with everyboy except Reynolds who he is highly protective and encourging  of.  It is interesting to note the transition his character has made over the course of three serials towards stability.  In the first serial he was a fatherless street kid who practically raised himself, while in the second one he was fatherless but being raised by an older brother.  Finally in this serial he has an actual family with a stern father and worshipping younger brother.  Makes you wonder if they would have give him a mothr if they had made a fourth serial.

As usual with Hall’s serial work he bounces back and forth between being a tough street fighting sidekick to Halop and the comedian of the group.  Besides the aforementioned muffler bit  he also indulges in a few instances of romantic comedy with Adams (unconventional for a serial to say the least), most of which consists of him swearing to never fight again only to break it almost immediately while she stomps off in anger while he apologizes inbetween thrown punches.

Dell’s main function seems to be secondary comedy relief as most of his scenes consist of him on the verge of blabbing some important info to someone that Halop wanted to keep private and getting hit in the back of the had by either Halop or Hall (hmmm, I wonder if Mark Harmon was a fan of this serial.)  As for Punsley, he just sort of fades into the background.  It was becoming obvious at this point he was just marking time till the end of his contract.

Albertson does an okay job as good guy Jerry Markham.  He is amiable nice guy who comes across as trustworthy, or as the gang would call him, a real goody goody.  He does a good job in the middle chapters, after the two groups have teamed up, of displaying indecision on acting as his first inclination is to call the Feds, while Halop and his gang are already taking action.  The only thing wrong with albertson is that he looks thirty years old, now I know that the Little Tough Guys were no longer teens, but they could still pass as 18 or 19 for the most part, but Albertson looks his age and appears to be an adult next to them, an image not helped by his sport jacket and tie.  Ironically Frankie Darro  has a small role as the Junior G-Men’s lab tech and I have to wonder why he wasn’t cast as Jerry instead, he looks the right age and certainly had the acting chops by this time to hold his own against Halop and Hall’s dominating personalities, which unfortunately Albertson does not.

Turhan Bey, in his first serial is given the most interesting character of the villains.  He is an insecure henchmen.  His failures put him on The Baron’s chopping block and the men under him are just waiting to take advantage of it to raise their own position in the hierarchy.  Bey effectively bounces back and forth between needless cruelty, crafty scheming and bug eyed fear.

Of the rest of the henchmen only Noel Cravat stands out thanks to an excellent scene where he is captured by the gang and “tortured” to reveal information.  He is shone a poker being heated on a fire then blindfolded.  When he refuses to answer, Hall presses a piece of ice against his exposed chest and Cravat starts blubbering and spills his guts.  Later when he is rescuesd and the ruse exposed his over the top vow of vengeance is hilarious.

And now we come to Atwill.  Wow, what a disappointment.  Hard to believe such a great thespian could turn in such a bad perormance.  Though to be fair he slathered in make up that makes it appear he can’t see from the way his eyes lids are pulled so tight their practically slits and he is given very little to work with.  Most of the time he is sitting behind a desk, his make up hidden behind the thickest glasses this side of Buddy Holly, and tossing off mildly grumpy threats to his men when they fail, clearly just going through the motions.  Worse is a scene in Chapter Four where he is over enthusiastically describing a sabotage plan with the biggest sh** eating grin and gestures so exagerated it would give Frank Gorshin, Bergess Meredith and Caesar Romero pause.  The only time Atwill is right on the money is in the final confrontation with Halop where he is smugly in control of the situation even though they have guns on him and details to Halop why America is destined to fall to the Rising Sun with a contemptuous sneer audible in his voice.

Despite my carping there are things I ike about the serial.  The flying scenes are good, especially the model work of the hidden plane hanger that contains an exciting moment during Halop’s rescue when he runs out of runway and smashes a wheel on a fence, making his eventual landing a tricky thing.  I also like that for once Halop himself is in on the action at the end instead of the adults swooping in at the last minute to rescue the in over their head kids.  Here Halop and Albertson engage in several shoot outs with spies and capture Atwill themselves.

But the coolest thing about this serial is a small bit of backlighting that creates one of the most powerful propagandic images ever seen in a serial.  To get to the villain’s lair you have to go down a staircase which is near a boarded up window that leaks light, causing the stairs to cast a shadow resembling the Rising Sun emblem on the Japanese Flag.  Durng the climactic fight Halop and Albertson creep slowly down the stairs so that at one point they are obscuring the image, subtly implying that what they are doing on film  we will do in real life.  Heck the whole serial is worth it just for that alone.

Tags: Reviews //