Todd’s Serial Blog

Back in ‘79 this was my favorite of the three Cliffhangers! segments. I have often wondered if that had anything to do with Phantom Empire being one of my favorite serials. They both are a wild combo of western action and sci fi intrigue.  I’ve also wondered if it had anything to do with NBC premiering Buck Rogers in the 25th Century later in the fall, both dealt with a man from the past dealing with intrigue in a futuristic setting.

The serial starts with Chapter Three.  Masked Raiders have been stealing gold that is being shipped out from the local mines.  Marshall Jim Donner (Geoffrey Scott) attempts to stop them.  After one such attempt, Jim takes a strange key off of one of the Raiders, they chase him, firing a strange ray gun.  Jim is chased off a cliff, but luckily lands in a lake.

Getting back to town, Jim gets himself patched up by Doc Millie Thompson (Carlene Watkins).  Just then local kid Billie (Tiger Williams) burst in and says he saw where the Raiders hideout is.  Billie takes Jim to a mountainous area and tells him they went inside through a hidden door.  Jim finds a hole in the rock face that matches the shape of the key he stole.

Inserting the key, part of the rock wall rises and reveals a hidden stable that holds the horses of the Raiders.  Jim investigates a strange chamber that turns out to be an elevator which activates and starts descending with Jim aboard.  At the same time the rock wall closes back up, trapping Billie in the stable.

Jim descends into a futuristic city.  He has little tiime to marvel at the sights as two guards chase a woman (Pamela Brull) past him, and Jim immediately steps in and rescues her.  Hiding, the woman reveals her name is Maya, and she and others are fighting the evil dictator Thorval (Mark Leonard) and his daughter Tara (Diane Markoff), who have enslaved her people with a machine that deadens the will.  Even worse, the gold raids are for the purpose of powering an even bigger machine to be used on the surface world.

Jim has little tiime to ponder this information as they are discovered and chased.  Jim is shot with a ray gun and falls over, frozen solid…..

Of course what everyone remembers about this segment, besides it being a “coincidental” reworking of Phantom Empire (sans singing), is the simple, but clever, bit of having the futuristic scenes being in color, while the western scenes were in sepiatone.  The announcer would open every episode with the grandios statement that “Portions were filmed in glorious black and white!”  Another funny running gag was that everyone in the underground city would call the hero Donner Jim because that is how he started to introduce himself.

This is the most complexly plotted of the three Cliffhangers! segments.  Not only is there a rebellion brewing in the underground city and gold raids on the surface, but unscrupulous mine owner Keller (Peter Breck) is using the raids to take over control of the smaller mines.  Evetually he is contacted by the Raiders and enters an agreement to run the surface for them since they can’t go above ground without special breathing masks.

There are also two love triangles.  Tara shows a lustful interest in Jim, which raises the ire of Captain of the Guards Roe (Peter Tomarkin) who is in love with the Princess.  Plus there is a more genial friendly rivalry between Maya and  Millie for Jim’s affection.

Also added to the mix is a cute, but ferocious creature called Taz, friendly to the heroes and nasty to the vilains.  So of course he ends up becoming devoted to to both Jim and Billie.  Taz was a typical sci fi TV convention of the ’70’s that could be marketed for kid toys.

Geoffrey Scott makes a typical flippant hero, he has a wise crack for every dangerous situation. Carlene Watkins is good as Millie, tough and smart.  Tiger Williams makes a bland juvenile.  Pamela Brull  is an uninteresting heroine.

Peter Breck is great as he sneers nastily through the proceedings.  Mark Leonard is regal and cruel, while David Opatoshu pops up as Leonard’s adviser Hatur, and makes for a sly and clever compliment to Leonard. Meanwhile Tomarkin spends all his time glowering.

Diane Markoff comes off as regal but wooden.  Then something weird happens at about the two thirds mark.  The Princess goes to a salon to have her face made over.  Suddenly she is played by Stephanie Kramer and also gets a personality, snapping out threats like whip cracks and outsneering Breck.

All and all it was a strange, amusing and exciting experiment for TV and should have been a bigger success than it was.

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Back when I first started to periodically created ficitional What If…. serials and had the Universal monsters star in my debut effort, it never occurred to me that this segment of the short lived Cliffhangers! TV show might have been an influence on that work.  Stands to reason, a cliffhanger of monster hunters fighting the king of the vampires just fires off the imagination doesn’t it?

The  Curse of Dracula (1979) starts with Chapter 6 so as to apparently get us into the action that much quicker.  In a novel bit that was never used in the original classic serials, Dracula (Michael Nouri) narrates the recap as if he is making an entry into his personal journal.  He is living and working his machinations in the modern ’70’s LA, where he is being hunted by Kurt Van Helsing (Stephen Johnson), the great grand son of the Count’s nemesis from the Stoker novel, and Mary Gibbons (Carol Baxter).

They trace one of his coffins to an old barn and plan to destroy it, making one less sanctuary for the monster.  But it turned out to be a trap and Dracula sets the barn on fire.  Trapped in the burning structure, the two resourceful vampire hunters use the Count’s own coffin to batter open the bolted door and escape to safety.  Later back at Kurt’s university office, they manage to decipher a cryptic comment Dracula had made and uncover that he is teaching a night school course in European history at the same college Kurt teaches at (talk a bout chutzpah!).

Mary uses a fake name and infiltrates the class.  After the class, Dracula takes some of his class out, including Mary.  Kurt follows.  Eventually the class ends up at an estate in the hills where Dracula reveals he knows Mary’s real name.  Mary tops him by disclosing that she has been tracking him down to revenge herself for Dracula killing her mother.

This little tiid bit makes him want her even more than he originally did when she showed up in his class, nothing like a little hate to get the juices pumping, and starts to stalk her.  Mary whips out a cross and gets away from the vampire only to discover that the classmates who had come along are Dracula’s slaves and they easily catch her. Dracula take her upstairs to a bedroom where he prepares to put the bite on her.  Right before popping out his fangs, Dracula tells Mary not to count on Kurt coming to the rescue, he has already been taken care of.

Meanwhile Kurt is rushing along the mountain road to get to the estate in time to help Mary if she needs it, not knowing that his car has been sabotaged.  Fuel has been leaking into the engine, which ignites from the heat and sets the front of the car on fire.  Seconds later the car explodes….

Of the three segments on Cliffhangers! this one was probably the most adult oriented, it was also more horror than action, befiting it’s subject matter, coming off as more an updating of Dark Shadows than a Republic or Universal cliffhanger.  The story’s structure also allowed it to be edited into two interconnected but stand alone TV movies, The World of Dracula and The Loves of Dracula.

The serial has a romantic subtext as the villain changes from just wanting to convert the heroine into a vampire to wanting her to be his bride, a motivation that is further complicated when the heroine’s mother, played by Louise Sorel, shows up as a vampire, and former lover of Dracula, who wants to destroy him and prevent her daughter from sharing her own fate.  Added into this is the fact that the hero has also fallen in love with the heroine (ah melodrama!).

An interesting addition to the vampire myths put forth in this version is that a person who is bitten doesn’t automatically become a vampire, he needs to administer three bites to accomplish the deed.  This allows Dracula to kill victims and not have to worry about dealing with a new vampire on the scene, and adds added suspense for the heroine as she has to keep from getting that final fatal bite that would condemn her to being undead.  An added complication is that after each bite she sinks further and further under his influence, making that final bite more and more certain.  Which also adds impetus to the hero’s attempts to defeat the villain.

The acting is all pretty good.  Stephen Johnson is adequate as the hero, he isn’t going to set the world on fire acting wise but he make for a strong hero, and really sells the fear he is supposed to be experiencing in such cliffhangers and being buried alive or hanging from a railing over a high drop onto some broken spikes.

Carol Baxter starts off as kind of colorless, but as the serial progresses she gets to show quite a range, hate/ attraction for the  villain, fear over her increasing vampirism (woman has a great hiss), and a gut wrenching scene where she is being cured at a convent and contemplates suicide.  Her stand out scene is when she has to stake her own mother.

She is complimented by Louise Sorel who also gives a tortured performance as a woman who despises her existence and works hard to save her daughter, even attempting to seduce the man who creaated her.  The scene were she begs her daughter to kill her is a real tear jerker.

There is an old saying that your hero is only as good as the villain he faces, and Michael Nouri is so good, he blows everybody else off the screen.  He makes Dracula a romanticly tragic figure (obviously taking hints from Frank Langella’s portrayal from earlier in the year), mixed with a hint of cruelty befitting his noble status.  He also uses a low key but distinctive Eastern European acent without doing a Lugosi impression.

Nouri gets some interesting scenes, such as his teaching history class and wowing a bar with his immpecable jazz piano playing. There are also some nice speeches he makes about the hardships and thrills of immortality.  The best one is where the hero is hanging off that aforementioned railing and Nouri conversationally lectures him on how he doesn’t understand the burden that is being Dracula, while slowly and sadistically using his foot to knock each tightly grasping finger of the hero loose, one by one.  Now that’s a villain!

This segment of Cliffhangers! has the distinction of being the only one that had the final episode broadcast in the US, it ended while the other two still had one and two episodes left to go which were t be wrapped up in the final show, but never got shown.  How’s that for off putting when you’re a kid, not mention a real slap in the face for the number of loyal fans the show had at the time.

But as you see, things worked out and now all three can be enjoyed online, so, all’s well that ends well, which is the perfect sentiment for a serial.

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Like with any genre, there are the great “lost” titles, where for one reason or the other, some films have fallen out of circulation and the prints have been left to deteriorate, and serials have had more than their fair share of titles that have gone missing.

The “lost” serials tend to take on a mythical quality in the eyes of fans, becoming the best the genre ever offered in the hearts of many fans. Some, like The Lone Ranger (1938), live up to the hype, while others, like Daredevils of the West (1943), though enjoyable as well made cliffhangers are unable to live up to the fantay concocted in the minds of many fans.

Such is the case of King of the Mounties (1942), the sequel to King of the Royal Mounted (1940), a serial that exists with missing sound and footage in various chapters.  Long believed to be superior to the first serial, a version has been released on DVD with subtitles to cover the missing parts and proves to be a good serial, but not as great as some fans believed.

The serial opens with Canada under attack by a strange flying craft that appears, bombs it’s target and then disappears before any fighters can get to the area. Prof. Brent (George Irving) and his daughter Carol (Peggy Drake) invent a detector that can locate the mystery plane, requiring Canadian skies to be clear of all but one spotter plane so that he can more easily discern it from from the other plane.

His device works as he spots the plane and radios it’s coordinates to Sgt Dave King of the Mounties (Allan Lane).  The strange ship, piloted by Japanese Admiral Yamata (Abnier Biberman), who is demonstrating it to two representatives of his country’s Axis allies, Germany’s Marshal Von Horst (William Vaughn) and Italy’s Count Baroni (Nestor Pavia).

King spots the plane and radios in a description of it, calling it a Falcon Plane (a designation that both good and bad guys will therafter use to refer to it for the rest of the serial). King engages the Falcon Plane in a dogfight and is quickly shot down, but manages to bail out in time.

Yamata decides to head for his hideout before pursuit planes can be scrambled to the area.  His hideout is inside a partially active volcano that can only be accessed by the vertically maneuverable Falcon Plane.  Once inside their hideout, Yamata realizes he cannot use his plane again until the detector is taken care of.  He radios his confederate, trading post operator Harper (Douglas Dumbrille) to send someone to Winnipeg and steal the detector.

Harper contacts men in Winnipeg, who inform him that Brent and the detector are being moved to Tombstone Landing, which is where they are operating, since that is where the Falcon Plane keeps disappearing, so they can get more accurate readings.  When Harper relays this to Yamataa, plans are changed and it is decided to kidnap Brent and ship him to Japan so his scientific knowledge can be used by the Land of the Rising Sun.  Harper dispatches his two best men for the job, Blake (Bradley Page) and Stark (Anthony Warde).

Sgt King is dispatched to meet Brent’s boat at the Caribou docks but is attacked by a sniper.  Dropping from his horse, he works his  way through the brush until he spots the sniper and shoots him with his trusty service revolver.  Continuing on to the Caribou docks, he finds Mounty Ross (Willaim Bakewell) tied up.  Releasing him, King is told of the abduction of Prof. Brent in a truck and which way they went.

Cutting cross country on his horse, King overtakes the truck and jumps off a small outcropping to the back of the truck bed, where he engages in a terrific fist fight, knocking several henchmen over the side before Stark tosses King himelf off the truck.  Brent drves the truck to Gus’s, a closed down speakeasy, where he leaves a tied up Brent with Gus (Carleton Young) to await a Japanese plane that will pick up the scientist.

King returns to the Caribou docks dejected at losing the men who had grabbed Prof Brent.  He questions Ross to see if he can remembr anything to tell where they were taking the professor.  Ross remembers a mention of Gus’s.  King knows where that is and he and Ross jump into a boat and head for the speakeasy.

The pilot that is flying in to get Brent spots the two Mounties and realize where they are heading.  The co-pilot starts to drop bombs on the Mounties.  Ross retaliates with a tommy gun, which backs the plane off long enough fo their boat to get to shore.   Heading to the speakeasy, Gus spots them and starts shooting from a window, pinning the two Mounties down.

Ross lays down covering fire while King sneaks his way onto the roof of the speakeasy and gets inside, where he jumps Gus.  The two  men struggle and Brent ends up getting shot.  While this is going on the plane flies in low for another pass at Ross, who straffs the plane, hitting the pilot.  The plane goes into a dive and crashes into the speakeasy, exploding the building in a huge fireball…….

The serial is famous for it’s novelty of being the only serial to have all three Axis countries represented, usually it is only Germany and Japan either acting independently or as grudging partners, but never all three.  And as usual with Hollywood, Italy is given little dignity or respect from the other two Axis powers, with the Italian representative generally pushed aside so that the real powers can get down to work.

The Falcon Plane is of course the Bat Plane from Spy Smasher (1942), redressed with a Rising Sun emblem on it’s tail and the propellers removed.  It is a great prop and the highlight of the serial are the scenes of it descending or rising from the villains’s volcano lair (wonder if Cubby Broccoli was a fan of this serial when he was growing up, hmmm).  One of the things that amuses me is how spacious the lair is, once the plane is parked in their makeshift hanger, the villains go through a door and enter a masive map and radio room, with doors leading to other rooms in view. Just how thick are the walls of this volcano?

Footage from the first serial are used throughout the serial, including Lane and his stuntman leaping off a tunnel onto a racing train, Lane running through a raging forest fire, and many shots of Lane riding hell bent for leather through pine trees. Ironically footage from this serial would get reused in future Mounty serials, right down to Dangers of the Canadian Mounted (1948) casting Anthony Warde and dressing him in the same costume from this serial.

The acting is all generally good.  Allan Lane proves himself once again as one of the best serial leads, projecting a strong personality on screen, where his smiling and easy going character can turn deadly serious at the first hint of danger.

Peggy Drake is underused.  Only put in danger a couple of times, she spends most of her screen time running the detector, which gives her a real distinction among serial heroines of coming off as extremely smart.  William Bakewell is too old to play a young gung ho sidekick, so instead he plays a serious and competent Mounty, making himself appear to be a co-hero at times.

Like Drake, Douglas Dumbrille is also underused.  A great character actor who specialized in slick and suave vilains, here he is little more than a glorified mesenger, spending almost the entire serial in his back office relaying instructions to henchmen or information to his boss. Bradley Page takes over the slick and suave villainy here as the main henchman who mostly engages the heroes, while dressed in a natty back woods suit. He is  complimented by Anthony Warde’s more brutal thug, the only man who make a simple word like “Yeah” carry more menace than an actual threat.

The main villains don’t come off quite as good, mostly due to there being too many characters here to give everybody something to do. Abner Biberman comes off the best as the obvious leader of the trio, devising most of the plans and giving the henchmen orders.  He is one of the most overconfident villains ever, never letting a setback faze hime for even a second before devising a way around it.  William Vaughn gets to offer a few choice comments  now and then, but mostly he and Nestor Pavia stand around the volcano lair gazing in awe at Biberman as he details his next scheme.

Reading the opening to this  article, you may think I hate this serial.  I don’t, it is a good serial, made by Republic during their peak period and directed by thier best director, William Witney.  But I don’t think it is one of their best. When compared to Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939) or Perils of Nyoka (1942), it comes off a little weak.  Like it’s predecessor, King of the Royal Mounted, it is a good second tier serial like The Painted Stallion (1937) or Haunted Harbor (1944).

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