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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YouTube is a great place, I have been watching tons of old movies like Law of the Jungle with Mantan Moreland, The Crooked Circle with Zasu Pitts, The Last Alarm with Warren Hull, The Phantom Express with J. Farrell MacDonald, etc, etc.  But one of the greatest things I have located is the entire run of Cliffhangers!, a show I was fanatical about back in the day (1979).

Cliffhangers! was a midseason replacement show that featured three continuing stories that all ended in a cliffhanger every week and you had to watch the next epsiode to see what  happened.  An interesting concept to bring back the excitement and fun of the old serials for modern audiences (thank you George Lucas for inspiring the idea with Star Wars), but it had several problems.  The biggest was that all three episodes were started in mid adventure, one started with Chapter 2, one with Chapter 3 and one was already on Chapter 6 in the premiere episode.  Another problem and one that led to it’s demise was the expense of doing three complete film productions to fill only one hour of programming, which made it almost impossible for the network to just break even with the show. Low ratings caused the show to be cancelled before the last epsiode was broadcast, so American audiences never knew how two of the stories ended (the final episode was broadcast overseas, dammit!), although two of them were later edited into TV movies and popped up now and then on late night TV.

Jump ahead over thirty years and I am surfing around YouTube, watching serial trailers, when I came upon a Cliffhangers! segment, some searching uncovered the entire run of the show divvied up into individual segments that followed the order the episodes were run (thank you very much SailorsDreamHouse) and spent an entire weekend catching up on all of the episodes I had missed the first time around. (Yes, I know, I have no life.) And I noticed an interesting similarity with the final episodes, all three ended with the main villain getting away. Some research showed that the original idea had been if the show was a success, the segments would have been spun off into full length shows (ironically today all three could have succeeded on their own as fantastic shows with continuing story arcs are almost the norm.)

So of course I decided to feature the show for the first three months of the new year. In the original run the order of the individual segements would rotate so a different adventure would start off the show each week.  I have decided to go with the order of how I remember the first episode I caught running.  so January will highlight The Curse of Dracula, where the great grandson of Van Helsing tracks down the vampire king in modern day LA.  February will be The Secret Empire, a western in which an 1800’s lawman uncovers a futuristic underground city (any similarity to The Phantom Empire is purely “coincidental”, but since the Gene Autry serial is in the pubic domain, the point is probably moot anyway.  Finally March will get into Stop Susan Williams, a Perils of Pauline style mystery where a journalist uncovers a vast conspiracy while investigating her brother’s murder.

So, I’ll see you back here in a couple of weeks.

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