With another Halloween upon us and having exhausted all of the Lugosi serials by this point, it’s time to look at the one great Karloff serial, made just a few months before he would don the makeup of Frankenstein and instantly become too big a star to ever appear in another serial, Mascot’s King of the Wild (1931).
The serial opens in India where machinery salesmen Robert Grant (Walter Miller) makes the aquaintance of the Raja (Miller again), who takes an instant liking to the salesmen due to their close resemblance to each other. Tragedy strikes when the Raja is attack by a tiger during a hunt and mortally wounded. Dying, the Raja makes Grant promise to pretend to be the Raja until his brother (Earl Douglas) can take over the throne before his cousin Prince Dakka (Mischa Auer) can pull off a coup when he learns of the Raja’s death.
Witness to this is visiting hunter Harris (Tom Santschi), who sees money to be made from this and sells Grant out to Dakka. Before the coup can be pulled off the Raja’s brother unexpectedly arrives for a visit, spots that Grant is a fake and has him arrested for murder.
After Grant is carted off to prison, Harris tries to extort money from Dakka, using an agreement he had signed detailing the coup, the letter would ironically also exonerate Grant. But Dakka was smarter than Harris and made the agreement out with a special ink that turned invisible after a few hours. Dakka tells Harris to leave India or share Grant’s fate. Harris leaves, vowing he will fiind a way to make the paper legible and have his revenge.
A year later, Grant manages to escape from jail and learning of the existence of the paper, tracks Harris to Africa. Harris is eking out a living trapping animals for zoos when he learns that a young man named Tom Armitage (Carroll Nye) has discovered a hidden diamond field and plans to steal it from him before he can report it to the authorities. Needing help, Harris hooks up with Mustapha (Boris Karloff), a notorious slave trader, cutting him in on a piece of the field. Both men secretly plot to do away with the other once the location of the field is gotten from Armitage.
They hire gold digging Mrs LaSalle (Dorothy Christie) to vamp him. She fakes a meet cute with him at his hotel and begins working her charms on him. Armitage is seemingly smitten by her. His sister Muriel (Nora Lane) is suspicious of her and warms him to watch out for her. Armitage scoffs at her warning, saying LaSalle is just a lonely widow looking for company in a foreign land.
That night Grant is searching Harris’ room when he hears Armitage and LaSalle arriving and hides. Armitage gets suspicious of the woman’s questioning and tries to leave. Panicing, LaSalle pulls a gun. The two struggle and the gun goes off. Armitage falls to the ground, unmoving.
Grant comes out of hiding and grabs LaSalle, only to be clubbed unconscious from behind by Mustapha, who had been watching from the window. Examing Armitage, Mustapha finds he has only been slightly wounded, but tells LaSalle he is dead. Pocketing her gun, he tells the frightened woman she will need to get out of the country.
After they leave, Armitage revives and stumbles in an ajoining room where he encounters Bimi (Arthur McLaglen), a shaggy, beast man who is intensely loyal to Harris, he grabs Armitage starts to squeeze him to death. Grant recovers from the blow to his head, and hearing Armitage’s cry for help, leaps into the room. Bimi drops Armitage and grabs Grant by the throat, strangling him…..
This is one of the most complexly plotted serials of the sound era, due mainly to being an early talky. Not only is Grant after the letter, but an exitible Scotsman named Peterson (Victor Potel) befriends Harris, but is really working for Dakka to get the letter back. When Mustapha learns about the letter, he just also happens to be the only one who can bring out the hidden ink, and wants to get it for his own purposes. As if that wasn’t enough, a sweet old lady named Mrs. Colby (Martha LeLande) befriends Muriel and reveals herself to be a government agent on the trail of a dangerous criminal. Lastly there is a mysterious man in dark glasses (Otto Hoffman) who keeps popping up periodically, sometimes helping the heroes, sometimes hindering them. Whew! That is a lot of stuff to cram into twelve chapters.
The first chapter is a bit different from the usual Mascot serial, there is very little action, it is mostly dialog as it take s time to explain who everyone is, what they are doing, and why. After the first chapter, the action ramps up and we get not one, but two cliffhangers at the end of every chapter, one for Grant and one for Muriel.
This was Wallter Miller’s last leading role in a serial, he would move over to playing villains and henchmen after this. As a farewell to derring do, he does a great job, projecting just the right balance of nice guy sincerity and tough guy strength. Miller projects a strong personality and is the only one to avoid getting blown off the screen by Karloff.
Karloff blows everybody else off the screen with little effort. Not yet a star he still projects a star quality and that eerie menace he was known for. Sly and manipulative, he is the perfect brains heavy, playing playing most of the characters against each other while staying out of the fray so he can come out on top.
Tom Santschi is a thugish villain, using his husky physique to good effect as a brash and brutally threatening bad guy not afraid to get his hands dirty. He is complimented by Arthur MacLaglen’s man beast. A scary, shaggy pseudo monster that is fiercely obedient to Santschi, he only gets a few scenes where he actually attacks the heroes, spending most of his time being kept in a cage and used as a threat against one of the heroes when captured. His final scene, mourning Santschi death is a movingly sad ending to the serial as he carries the body off into the sunset.
Nora Lane plays a gutsy heroine, getting in on most of the action and proving to be more than able to handle things herself, which is a good thing since Carroll Nye spends most of the serial tied up as a captive or injured and unconscious.
Despite being billed under the name Martha LeLande as Mrs Colby she is obviously played by a man, so that he can do a dramatic reveal in the last chapter. Victor Potel is amusing as an excitable Scotsman.
Disappointing, for me at least, is that Mischa Auer is only in the first chapter, so you never get to see his eventual capture.
Most interesting, again at least to me, is that the unveiling of the mystery man turns out to be the actual actor who played the character, though it is not a big surprise and most first time viewers will easily guess who it is.
While not as full of scary stuff as other serials I’ve highighted in October, this early sound serial is still a good one for Halloween with Arthur MacLaglen’s growling man beast and a great villainous performance by Boris Karloff, supplying some genuine chills.
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