Rating: ★★½

The Shadow is one of the original non-comic book superheroes. The Shadow began after publishing house Street and Smith created the radio show Detective Story Hour (1930-5) to promote their publication Detective Story Magazine (1915-49). To introduce the series, the radio producers came up with a mysterious figure called The Shadow. This prompted listeners to request copies of Shadow Magazine and so Street and Smith quickly launched The Shadow Magazine, which premiered in 1931 and produced 325 issues up until 1949. Most of the stories were written by Walter R. Gibson under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant. The popularity of the pulp stories led to The Shadow being given his own radio show, which broadcast for 617 episodes from 1937 up until 1954, where the role was voiced by a 22-year-old Orson Welles during the first season.

The character of The Shadow developed over time. The character’s eerie menacing voice and laugh was part of the original Detective Story Hour appearances. The Shadow was always characterised with distinctive black suit, fedora and sometimes his face hidden by a scarf. In the pulp magazines, The Shadow was a more mundane crimefighter who had a more complicated genesis as WWI flyer Kent Allard who threatened playboy Lamont Cranston and agreed to adopt Cranston’s identity while Cranston was out of town, although this was one among several identities he used. The radio show streamlined this down and made Cranston into The Shadow’s civilian identity. The supernatural elements came in in the radio show due to the writers not wishing to be bogged down in explaining how The Shadow snuck around. The radio series also introduced Margo Lane and explanation of The Shadow’s powers being learned among the Eastern yogis.

The popularity of the pulps also saw several films based on The Shadow. The first of these were the B films The Shadow Strikes (1937) and International Crime (1938) where Rod La Rocque was an amateur detective who adopted the disguise of The Shadow. The low-budget studio Monogram produced a series of films The Shadow Returns (1946), Behind the Mask (1946) and The Missing Lady (1946) starring Kane Richmond. There was then this fifteen-chapter serial from Columbia. Subsequent to this there was Invisible Avenger/Bourbon Street Shadows (1958), which was made as a tv pilot but ended up released to theatres. The character was revived in the big-budget The Shadow (1994) starring Alec Baldwin, which is a fine film, although was not a box-office success.

Serials were a form of film-making that has disappeared today. A serial would run to about 15-20 minutes in length and would appear before the main feature (usually along with a cartoon and a newsreel). Each episode would end on a cliffhanger – the genre literally gave birth to the term – with the hero or heroine in some form of peril or thought killed, where audiences would have to wait to the following week to find out how they survived. The serials began in 1913 and found their greatest popularity between the 1930s and 40s. The last serial was produced in 1956, around the exact time that commercial television started to become widespread.

The Shadow sold me from its vivid opening episode. One of the Black Tiger gang is in court, The Shadow (Victor Jory) bursts into the courtroom through the skylight as someone turns the lights out and then immediately flees the room to quickly don disguise as Lin Tang on the stairs outside as people come out in pursuit where he misdirects them. Jory then walks out to a waiting cab, which heads to Chinatown and behind a sliding wall panel where he removes his disguise to become Lamont Cranston.

The disappointment of the serial is that it waters down the character of The Shadow. This was a common problem of serial superheroes whose superheroics were singularly mundane – we even had a Superman who became an animated figure when he flew in Superman (1948). This is a Shadow stripped of his supernatural abilities, not even the ability to control men’s minds, which would surely have been easy to pull off on a serial budget. Victor Jory is simply an ordinary man in a black fedora, cape and bandana mask that covers the bottom half of his face. Certainly, he is one of the few serial superheroes who actually looks like his counterpart rather than comes with crinkles in his tights. And he does deliver The Shadow laugh. The serial also introduces Margo Lane, along with his assistant (Harry) Vincent who becomes combined with the character of the cab driver Moe Shrevnitz.

The problem is also the casting of Victor Jory as Lamont Cranston/The Shadow. Jory gets the laugh right, but when it comes to the dialogue he speaks too fast and with his lips too tightly held together, giving the effect of the words being run together with no spaces between them like a racing announcer. And then there is his Lin Tang disguise, where Jory adopts makeup. This means that he is made out with Fu Manchu mustache and slant eyes and speaks in horribly racist sing-song lallation with no articles, which is the way people believes all Chinese spoke back in the 1940s – see the popularity of the Charlie Chan films from this same period.

There is an undeniable appeal to the gadgets on display. The Shadow’s saloon car emits tear gas against pursuers; The Black Tiger sends one of the businessmen a cigarette lighter that has a miniature dart gun built inside; Cranston smokes a cigarette that emits a knockout spray (one that seems to knock out all except him when used in the confines of a car). Or when Victory Jory knocks on the front door of the bad guys’ hideout and the welcome mat proves to be a trapdoor. The villain The Black Tiger uses an Invisibility ray – the scenes of the Black Tiger standing under the ray and fading out and then entering the room to sit at his desk are repeated every episode – although the ray is never put to any use other than he hiding his face from his gang. The Tiger also has a nifty habit of electrocuting recalcitrant lackeys.

Also rather amusing is watching some of what would have been cutting edge gadgetry of the day. One has lived through the era of the tape cassette recorder to the modern electronic equivalents so it proves rather amusing to watch when The Black Tiger delivers his recorded messages on wax cylinders!. I would have loved to have seen The TV Exhibition – this was made before the advent of commercial television – but this gets blown up before it can be demonstrated.

The main problem with the serial is that while it moves at a reasonably snappy pace, it is allowed to drag out far too long at fifteen episodes. It gets repetitive – the same stretch of hallway and the same office sets that get used over and again multiple times. There are one of two okay room-destroying fights, although the stunt people over at Republic pulled these off with far more ferocity.

The cliffhangers and their denouements are singularly unmemorable. Six of these cliffhangers involve The Shadow being caught in a room that is blown up and then he simply brushing the rubble covering him aside and getting up. The best of these is probably one where Veda Ann Borg, Roger Moore and J. Paul Jones are tied up as a ray beam burns a path along a wall towards them.

Among the cast, Victor Jory played numerous parts, mostly bad guy roles, in films between 1930 and his death in 1982, including other genre films such as Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) and The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957). Veda Ann Borg was a minor actress who did a modest body of work between the 1930s and 50s. Roger Moore who plays one of the businessmen is unrelated to the British actor Roger Moore, best known for roles like The Saint and James Bond.

James W. Horne (1881-1942) was a director from the mid-1910s until his death. Most of his work was for Hal Roach Studios, including a number of Laurel and Hardy shorts. He directed several other serials including The Spider’s Web (1938), Terry and the Pirates (1940), The Spider Returns (1941) and Captain Midnight (1942).

Full serial available here