Todd’s Serial Blog

Charlotte Henry seemed to be someone who as a child actor was going to be a big star.  A Broadway actress since she was thirteen in 1928, she had had supporting roles in Huckleberry Finn (1931) and Rebbecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1932) before being cast as the lead in Paramount’s big screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1933), which unfortunately bombed at the box office despite the star power of W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.  Things were looking up the following year when she played the female lead in the Laurel and Hardy version of Babes in Toyland (1934).

Despite the success of this film Henry dropped down to B productions for the rest of her career.  He work during this time included Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936) and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937), The Mandarin Mystery (1937) opposite a mis-cast Eddie Quillan as boyishly exuberant Ellery Queen (!?!?!), and The East Side Kids melodrama Bowery Bliztkrieg (1941).  Henry retired from acting after a small role in the Lucille Gleason (as in Mrs Jackie Gleason) vehicle She’s in the Army (1942).

Her one serial was Columbia’s debut effort in the genre, Jungle Menace (1937), which starred real life animal trapper Frank “Bring ‘em Back Alive” Buck as famous animal trapper Frank Hardy helping rubber plantation owners Henry and William Bakewell fight a gang of river pirates trying to take over their lucrative businesses in Southeast Asia.

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I sometimes wonder if during the Golden Age of Hollywood, it was better to have a studio contract or to freelance.  I know that Lon Chaney, Jr. struggled for years until he got a contract with Universal and then became so well known that he continued to work in character roles for years after he was let go by the studio in the late forties. Robert Shayne gave up a studio contract and struggled for the rest of his career.  Tom London never had a studio contract and worked continuously for decades.  is it talent, luck or some combination of the two that differentiates these three men ?  I don’t know.

Robert Bice seems to follow in London’s footsteps, a character actor who worked continuously in films with no studio affiliation.  Starting in the early forties, Bice worked on poverty row productions like Monogram’s The Ghost and the Guest (1943), an early screen writing credit for comedian Morey Amsterdam, while also appearing in major film productions like Dragon Seed (1944).  Other film roles include Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947), Captive Women (1952), The Ten Commandments (1956) and It! the terror From beyond Space (1958).  His TV work spanned The Lone Ranger, I Love Lucy, Peter Gunn, Burkes’s Law and The Wild Wild West.

But for serial fans he will always be Frank James in Republic’s The james Brothers of Missouri (1949), the studio’s third and final reworking of the infamous western outaws into good bad men trying to redeam themselves.  This time around they help the sister of a former gang member trying to etablish a freightline that is being sabotaged by an unscrupulous rival.  Bice later made a small appearance in Republic’s Trader Tom of the China Seas (1954), which was pretty much it for his serial career.

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It is amazing what you can learn about a person when you start researching them.  Take German born character actor William Vaughn.  Before his acting career even started it was almost over.  Vaughn was arrested in 1915 for violating American neutrality.  He was later released in 1920 with the ruling that moral turpitude hadn’t been a part of his crime (my, how times have changed).

It was then that he went into acting, appearing in A Woman of Paris (1923) and The Merry Widow (1925).  With the coming of sound Vaughn’s continental accent and bearing was perfect to garner him steady work, such as playing Von Richter in Hell’s Angels (1930).  Other films included Shanghai Madness (1933), Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937).

Of course as hostilities grew in Europe, Vaughn became a popular actor to portray Nazis.  His films during this time included Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Atlantic Convoy (1942), Tarzan Triumphs (1943) and The Hitler Gang (1944) which was his final film.

Serials also used his talents in two highly regarded entries from Republic.  His first serial was King of the Mounties (1942) playing one of three Azis representatives overseeing sabotage along the Canadian borders.  Next he had a smaller role in Secret Service in Darkest Africa (1943), playing a German office who slaps the heroine around in an effort to get information from her (he displays a pretty nasty back hand in the scene).

Sadly he died before the end of the war and never saw the Allied victory.

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