Todd’s Serial Blog

Times change quickly when it comes to technology, just look at cell phones over the past five years.  Nothing dates a film quicker than when it’s main focus is highlighting a new bit of technology as a selling point.  Take Universal’s Radio Patrol (1937), based on a popular comic strip that promoted a major technology break through for the time, a police car that had a two way radio in it, novelty for the time but it quickly became standard in law enforcement.  Luckily the serial itself is more concerned with a locked room murder mystery and car chases than highighting the stars constantly talking into a microphone.

The serial opens with patrolmen Pat O’Hara (Grant Withers) and Sam Maloney (Adrian Morris) pulling up to the local junkyard  where they stop a thief.  After showing off the new radio patrol car to yard owner Jeremiah Crockett (Earl Dwire) and Pinky Adams (Mickey Rentschler) who is living at the yard with his inventor father John Adams (Harry Davenport), they receive a message from the radio that Adams has had his life threatened.

They rush over to the Wellington Steel Foundry, where Adams is demonstrating his latest invention to foundry owner Wellington (C. Montague Shaw) and visiting Egyptian dignitary Tahata (Frank Lackteen), a flexible steel that can be worn as a lightweight shield and able to stop bullets.  After the successful demonstration, Adams goes to the workshop Wellington let him use while perfecting his invention, to write out the formula for his benefator, when his is impossibly shot and killed in the empty room.

Wellington and Tahata see a man (Max Hoffman, Jr.) running away from  the workshop.  Just then Pat and Sam arrive and quickly capture the man.  A quick search uncovers a gun and he is promptly arrested.  The formula that Adams had written out is missing but it isn’t found on the arrested man.

Meanwhile industrial spies report the completion of the flexible steel formula to W. H. Harrison (Gardon Hart), a business rival of Wellington’s, who believes by rights the formula should belong to him because the preliminary work had been done at his company before he fired Adams and  ruined his standing in the scientific community for opposing the millionaire’s unsafe factory conditions.

Unknown to Harrison, his secretary Molly Selkirk (Kay Hughes), is actual the sister of the arrested man, Harry Selkirk.  She took the job under an assumed name to find proof that Harrison framed her brother for embezzlement.  After work she goes to visit her brother in jail, where he claims he didn’t kill Adams, but did steal the formula so he could use it as leverage to force Harrison to exonerate him.  He tells Molly where he hid it.

Tahata returns to his rented place in the Egyptian Quarter of the city, where he has hidden Franklin (Leonard Lord) a man hypnotised into a robot, who Tahata keeps in a sarcophagus with an automatic opening lid.  He sends Franklin and some men to Wellington’s to search for the formula.  Harrison sends men led by his head chemist Stevens (Wheeler Oakman) to Wellington’s for the same purpose.

Meanwhile, Pat and Sam follow Molly after she leaves the police station and she leads them to the factory as well.  Molly finds the formula but is grabbed by Stevens and his men, who in turn are jumped by Franklin and his gang.  A huge fight breaks out.  Pat and Sam wade into the fracas.  Molly manages to slip away in the confusion, but Pat is knock out and falls onto a conveyor belt that is heading toward a smelter……..

Radio Patrol was the second of three cops and robbers serials Universal based on popular comic strips, coming between Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9 (1937)  and Will Gould’s Red Barry (1938). Like the other two serials, this adaptation of Charles Schmidt and Eddie Sullivan’s popular comic strip (it ran well into the fifties) concerns a maguffin that several parties are after and will switch hands several times.  There is also a mystery villain, though this one turns out not to be another character in disguise as was done in Agent and Red.

This is my favorite out of the three serials, due to the slight supernatural aspect that gets added to the plot.  Along with an impossible murder in a locked room, there is the clever bit of Universal horror with a zombie like henchman kept in a mummy case till he is needed.  His introduction is a nice ghoulish bit of business with the mummy case opening automatically and then a big closeup of Frank Lackteen’s leaned and creased face with his eyes highlighted with pinpoint lights, ala Lugosi in Dracula (1931), as he orders his slave to awaken. I also like the fact that there is an Egyptian section of the city that looks like downtown Cairo (thanks to sets from The Mummy (1932)), lending an exotic feel to some of the action scenes.

There is also some thinly disguised social commentary in the serial, contrastiing the squalor that the orphaned Rentschler lives in at the city dump with the plush surroundings of both Lackteen and Gordon Hart’s lifestyles, as well as their attempts to cheat the boy out of the wealth he is due from his father’s invention.

The plot is complicated with several factions all vying for the same thing, you have Lackteen wanting it for his country and to make himself rich, Hart wants to produce it and  make himself richer, Hughes wants it for leverage in proving her brother innocent, Shaw wants to produce it and give a share of profits to Rentschler to make them both rich.  Finally there is Withers and Morris, who want to figure out who murdered Davenport and make sure Rentschler isn’t cheated out of his inhieritence.

Along the way, the patrolmen take time away from the investigation to perform their regular patrol duties, like catching thieves and breaking up fights.  Then a weird bit of plot twist happens at the halfway point.  Withers and Morris are promoted to detectives, and the rest of the serial they are wearing plainclothes and no longer drive a radio car.  That’s a head scratcher to me, because,well, first of all the title is Radio Patrol and is supposed to be about two patrol men in a radio car, and second, it started out as highlighting the average cop on the beat, a true novelty in serials, but then changes to make the heroes look just like all the other serial detectives of the time.

The action is pretty good, with lots of frenic car chases full of screeching tires going around curves and bullets popping off of windshields and mirrors.  The many fist fights are well handled, though Eddie Parker is clearly visable doubling Withers in several scenes.

Withers is good in the lead, being a tough no nonsense cop with a soft heart underneath for the orphaned boy and understanding of Hughes’ motives, but he is man with a job to do and that always comes first.  Withers also does a great long suffering exasperated expression over the antics of his partner.  Morris is a good comedy relief sidekick.  Moderately chubby, he looks like  man who has been a cop for years, a little soft in the middle but still able to pack a punch, which he proves in several fights.  A running gag is his constant attempts to finish a crossword puzzle, and having to ask for help with clues.  A real funny bit is in Chapter Seven when he is promoted to detective and dresses  like he is still in uniform, with his badge and gun worn on the outside.

Hughes gets her best role in a serial, not stuck behind a desk or kept a captive as she was in her Republic serials, she gets in the thick of the action, contantly doing her own investigative work and even defending herself on occasion from the villains.  Even after teaming up with the rest of the good guys, she doesn’t get pushed into the background but teams up with Rentschler to keep looking into the mystery of his father’s murder.

Rentschler is the best of the child actors who worked in serials.  He is able to do both amusing kid scenes and play heart felt scenes, like his father’s murder, without being maudlin or annoying.  He is helped by the German Shepherd Silver King as his pet dog Irish, who helps in many of the action scenes, chasing down henchmen and disarming attackers by grabbing their gun wrist with his jaws.  Included in every few chapters are some comedy bits of human business for King to perform, like pulling up a blanket over himself to go to sleep or closing and locking a door.

Shaw plays his usual affable, fatherly figure, always willing to help and concerned about Rentschler’s wellfare.  And of course since there is a mystery killer around, this automatically makes him suspect number one, or maybe that’s what the film makers want you to think, hmmmmm, tricky stuff figuring out a serial mystery villain.

Gordonn Hart is a great villain, and it is a pity he didn’t get to play more.  He is the epitamy of the oily, two faced, double crossing, unscrupulous businessman.  He sneers, schemes and swaggers like he has every right to ruin the lives of everyone around him just to make a two cent profit. He has a great moment in Chapter Ten, when his illegal activities have been revealed and he has to go on the run, gone is the snarling of orders and he is almost begging his men for help.

Wheeler Oakman gives another of his patented henchman roles, tough and nasty when he has the upper hand against the heroes, a sniveling coward when things go against him.  No one plays the cringing henchman telling his boss about another failure better than Oakman.

Lackteen counters Hart’s egomaniac by being quietly sinister.  He has no need to bark out orders, his menacing screen presence frightens more than any number of shouted rantings ever could.  He also knows how to play those scenes were his hypnotic eyes are highlighted where he is contacting his zombie henchman.  Lackteen is the true villain of the piece and knows it.

Unfortuantely his zombie henchman Lord doesn’t give a consistent performance.  When awakened in his mummy case and in his scenes wth Lackteen giving him orders or contacting him mentally from a distance, he is trance like and robotic, the rest of the time he acts and speaks normally.  It is never explained if this is a personae he effects when out in public to pass as normal or if they just didn’t think the thing through.  Complicating things further is that after he is released from his trance and his true identity revealed, Lord acts the same as when he was under Lackteen’s power.

Burt such minor complaints aside, this is a great serial, produced by Universal when the studio was at the top of their game, going up against those upstart serial producers Republic and Columbia, and more than holding their own.

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