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| The
Running Carnage Tally |
| For
Chapter One: |
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Our
first chapter wastes no time as we open on the bustling streets of
Casablanca in North Africa during World War II (and
I’ll point out right now that we never actually make it into the
African Jungle.) Janet
Blake (Joan Marsh),
a reporter for some unknown news service, makes her way into a busy
hotel.
She
asks the hotel manager if the Sultan has arrived yet. He hasn’t
but his assistant, Ernst Mueller (Kurt
Krueger) is here. She then asks to
interview him instead. But before she can get permission a
procession of cars arrive and Sultan Abou Ben Ali (Lionel
Royce) and his entourage sweep into the
hotel.
Janet
intercepts Ali in the lobby and asks if he and the other sheiks will
side with the Allies or the Axis. Ali is the big dog among the
sheiks and the others will do what he says. He’s convened all the
sheiks here at the hotel and plans to make his announcement very
soon. He has no comment for Janet but promises Allah will guide his
choice.
The
hotel manager tells Janet she has a phone call. It’s Pierre La
Salle the prefect of the local police. LaSalle (Duncan
Renaldo) (Yes,
you read that right. The Cisco Kid is playing a French cop.)
tells her that Rex Bennet, American super-spy, has reported that
there is an assassination plot hatched by the Nazis against the
Sultan. (Nazi intelligence says
he plans to side with the Allies.) Janet
thought Bennet was killed in Stalingrad but he’s alive and moved
on to safer places - Berlin.
La
Salle asks her to warn the Sultan immediately.
The
Sultan has retired to his suite with Mueller. (Lesse,
Mueller, Mueller, kind of has a Teutonic ring to it don’t it? Is
that a blackjack he’s hiding behind his back?) Mueller
shows his treachery by sneaking behind the Sultan at his desk and
raises a blackjack to strike but is interrupted by a knock at the
door before he can finish the deed.
Janet
busts in and warns him. He thinks it’s a ridiculous notion and
Mueller (of
course) seconds that notion.
Janet tells him the information comes directly (sort
of) from
thee Rex Bennet from Berlin of all places. That's different. The
Sultan massages his beard and promises to be careful and to please
keep him informed. Janet leaves.
As
soon as she’s gone, though, Mueller whacks the Sultan over the
head and he falls unconscious. The Nazi traitor moves to the
fireplace and flips a switch. A panel on the floor slides open into
the fireplace revealing a hidden staircase. Down in the hidden room
two gents in Nazi uniforms and an Arab sympathizer come out and one
of the Nazis looks very familiar.
The
familiar one is Baron Von Rummler (Royce
again) and he’s a ringer for the
Sultan. (That
Dr. Mengele is doing wonderful things. Yikes.) He
takes the Sultans tunic and ring of power while Luger (Sigurd
Tor) the other Nazi and Wolf (Frederic
Brunn) drag the Sultan down into the
secret room and chain him to the wall.
The
Nazis have the whole hotel bugged and overhead the girl talking
about the Rex Bennet being loose in Berlin. He orders Luger to
contact Berlin and warn them. Mueller closes the trapdoor. The
remaining two give each other the Nazi salute then leave to meet the
other sheiks.
Meanwhile,
in Berlin, an SS Commander has found the perfect agent for the next
top secret assignment. He’s agent G-27, the man who killed thee
Rex Bennet in Stalingrad. He sends the agent to meet Colonel Haupman
for some special equipment and instructions. G-27 leaves as an
orderly tells the Commander he has an urgent call from Casablanca.
G-27
finds Haupman and he reveals his special assignment. It seems
there’s an old prophecy that the sheiks of Africa believe. You
take the Dagger of Solomon to an ancient tomb (of
somebody, sorry I couldn’t interpret it.)
and the Dagger is a key to open the tomb. Inside is an ancient
scroll and it will allegedly tell the sheiks who to side with. (And
it took only six writers to come up with that.)
The
Nazis have the Dagger and have created a fake scroll that tells the
sheiks to follow the sign of the swastika. G-27's job is to go to
Africa and plant the fake scroll in the tomb and then secret the
Dagger to the fake Sultan. A stolen American plane awaits for him at
the airfield to allow him to sneak onto the continent. Haupman’s
phone rings. The SS Commander tells him Agent G-27 is dead and the
man he just gave the scroll too is thee Rex Bennet (Rod
Cameron).
It
starts as a fistfight that devolves into a wrestling match as they
tear the basement to pieces. They throw each other around the room
and eventually pull a pair of sabers off the wall. Bennet easily
disarms Haupman but he’s a gallant hero and flips the sword back
to him but time is short so he eventually skewers him. He takes up
the satchel containing the Dagger and fake scroll. Before he leaves
he takes his saber and plunges it into a portrait of Hitler hanging
on the wall. (I’m
sure the audiences back in 1943 got a big kick out of that.)
He
makes it to the airport without incident. A flight tech has the
plane ready and waiting. Bennet jumps in the plane and slips the
flight tech a tip. The plane takes off and the flight tech examines
the coin he got that plainly reads God Bless America. (What
a guy.)
We
switch locales and find Bennet and La Salle meeting with the fake
Sultan and his sheiks. He tells them about the Nazi conspiracy. Von
Rummler rumbles that it sounds like an Allied plot to soil
Germany’s good name and asks to see some proof. Bennet says the
Dagger and Scroll are in his hotel room but he can get them. (Why
he didn’t bring them in the first place is another mystery worthy
of a 15-chapter serial.) He
phones Janet who’s guarding them in her hotel room that La Salle
is coming to fetch them.
The
Nazis in the secret room overhear this and Wolf runs off to beat La
Salle back to the room and recover the Dagger and Scroll. He knocks
on the door and Janet assumes it’s La Salle and opens it. Wolf
forces her into the closet and gathers up the goods. There’s
another knock on the door and Janet warns La Salle. Wolf shoots
several bullets through both doors and jumps out the window. La
Salle breaks in and lets Janet out. He tells her to call Poncho, I
mean Bennet, and tears off after Wolf, guns a-blazing.
Bennet
and Janet wait for word from La Salle at police headquarters. He
finally reports in that he traced Wolf to an old fruit warehouse
along the river. They arrive and find La Salle’s hat and gun
discarded on the ground. Bennet gives Janet the gun and tells her to
not let anyone get away.
Inside,
La Salle is tied up and another henchmen whips him while Wolf
gleefully watches but La Salle won’t talk. Wolf tries to stick his
lit cigarette into La Salle’s eye but Bennet gets the drop on them
and stops him in the nick of time. But the guy with the whip whips
the gun out of Bennet’s hand and they all start beating the hell
out of each other.
La
Salle tries to help as best he can by kicking anybody who gets close
to him (including
Bennet.) Wolf
escapes outside but has to duck several shots from Janet. He runs
down the loading dock and escapes in a motor boat. Janet goes inside
and blasts the whip guy who was about to smash Bennet’s head in.
They untie La Salle and he tells them Wolf gave the Dagger and
Scroll to the captain of a German munitions boat and they’re
taking it down river to plant it in the tomb.
We
cut to the S.S. Fisher Price chugging up river. The captain warns
the man behind the wheel to not run onto any sandbars or the
volatile fuel and munitions they’re carrying will explode and then
heads down to the boiler room. (Well
if it was obvious before it's obvious that this is all going to end
in fire.)
Bennet
manages to catch up to the boat with his car. He gets ahead of it a
ways and then dives headfirst into the river and intercepts the
boat. He sneaks aboard and knocks out the guard on the deck and
makes his way into the hold. (I
point out that the hold with all the explosives is the same room
with the open hearth where two workers are chucking firewood as the
captain oversees them.)
Bennet
again gets the drop on them and demands the satchel containing the
Dagger and Scroll from the captain. The skipper nods at one of his
crew and he throws a switch and Bennet is blasted with hot steam. He
of course drops his gun and for a third time a room is destroyed as
the protagonist battles the three men. The odds are made better when
the captain accidentally kills one of his own men. He killed the
wrong one though because the other genius throws a keg of powder at
Bennet but misses and it flies right into the fire.
Outside
the guard wakes up and hears the ruckus inside but the door is
locked. He grabs his Thompson machine gun and starts blasting the
door. Bennet dodges the bullets but the other two aren’t so lucky.
He gathers the satchel and takes cover as the guard outside
continues to blast away. Bennet looks back into the fire as the
flames lick around the barrel.
He’s
trapped.
We
cut to a long shot of the boat and it explodes.
| To
Be Continued In |
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The
Origins of the Cliffhangers
You
have to trace the origins of the movie serial all the way back to
1912. The motion picture itself was in its infancy when the
Mclure’s Ladies Word magazine came up with a new circulation
strategy. They would have a story done in installments so the
readers would have to keep buying the magazine to find out what
happened. It was a hit and they decided to turn it into a movie.
They
turned to Thomas Edison’s film company who adapted it into What
Happened to Mary. It wasn’t a serial
cliffhanger as we’ve come to know them. Each vignette was for the
most part self-contained but the ending always hinted towards
something coming in the next chapter.
The
template for the serial as we know it was set with Pearl White’s The
Perils of Pauline. The story involved
her character receiving an inheritance and some evil co-conspirators
conspiring to bump her off and take the money for themselves.
Intricate deathtraps and travels to exotic locations around the
world started here and most importantly the heroine came into some
kind of peril at the end of the episode and you had to wait at least
a week to find out what happened. (In
fact that’s how the term cliffhanger originated because the
protagonist often found themselves dangling from a cliff.)
The
silent serials flourished with everyone getting in on the act. Harry
Houdini, Red Grange and Jack Dempsey all took their turn. With the
twenties coming to a close the advent of sound crippled the serial
making business. Serials were simple to make and relatively
inexpensive but with the new technology (sound)
most studios
focused there energies and money on bigger efforts. The studios had
already over saturated the market anyway and the popularity of the
serials was dwindling.
The
western serials still did good business because they were for the
most part still cheap to make. Buck "Red Rider" Jones (Yes,
it was his BB gun that Ralph wants in A
Christmas Story) Tom
Mix and Ken Maynard were very popular. John Wayne also cut his
acting teeth in the cliffhangers but not very many westerns. He was
in The Hurricane Express
where he tried to stop train saboteurs and The
Three Musketeers that found the Duke in
the Foreign Legion.
The
serials started to bounce back when they shifted their focus away
from the adult audiences to the matinee crowd. While biplanes
barnstormed the country, everybody got plane happy and wanted to see
them on the big screen. Serials took the next big step and started
adapting Sunday comic book heroes to the screen with the
dog-fighting adventures of Tailspin
Tommy and Ace
Drummond.
The
serial cemented itself as a matinee staple when Mascot Studios
combined the elements of every serial ever made (a
singing cowboy, wild stunts, exotic locales and plenty of
fisticuffs) with The
Phantom Empire. Gene Autry made his
screen debut here defending his ranch from an underground
civilization. It also introduced science fiction, fantasy and
several serial staples, big clunky robots (decked
out in metal cowboy hats)
hidden civilizations hell bent on conquering the surface world and a
big-honking death ray.
The
film was a big hit and the serials were set for golden age. They
just needed a spark to ignite it and they got it from a certain
ray-gun firing rocket jockey.
Stay
tuned!
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