GHOST OF ZORRO (1949)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

This was both the last and the least of the American "Zorro" serials, so maybe a better title would have been "giving up the Ghost of Zorro." 

Hero Ken Mason (Clayton Moore) is supposedly the grandson of the original masked cavalier, but aside from his having a Mexican guy serving as his aide-- presumably a parallel to the Bernardo character from the original stories-- there's no attempt to emulate the Zorro mythos. The serial follows a familiar template: a community-- sometimes just a town, sometimes a whole state-- is seeking to gain protection from American jurisprudence, while outlaw elements seek to keep the status quo. The script doesn't show us much of the outlaws' depredations, though there's an offhand comment that gangs like those of "Jesse James and the Daltons" use Twin Bluffs as one of their hideouts. Though the square citizens of the town don't know it, one of their upstanding citizens, Joe Crane (Gene Roth), is the secret leader of the gangs. When an elderly entrepreneur and his daughter Rita (Pamela Blake) try to set up a telegraph office that may lead to the ingress of lawmaking elements, Crane has the old guy killed. 

Fortunately, before he dies Rita's father invites a new engineer to help lay the wires, and this turns out to be Mason. Rita thinks he's an eastern dude, not knowing that Mason's forbears once owned land in that general area, though the script spends no time on these matters. When Mason finds out that lawless elements control the town, he takes up the mantle of his ancestor Zorro, supposedly to convince the crooks that he actually is Zorro's ghost, though Mason does not have any tricks to suggest any spectral nature. Thus none of the villains seem the least bit convinced that the new Zorro is anything but a masked mortal. The serial is largely composed of routine endeavors of Crane's thugs to undermine the telegraph, though one source of conflict doesn't stem from the outlaws. A gung-ho sheriff comes to town for a couple of episodes, trying to bring the vigilante Zorro to justice, and this almost leads to Mason being lynched-- which is the only time the serial becomes a little bit compelling.

The other principals are competent but there's little to work with here, even in the routine action-scenes. Unfortunately Clayton Moore only gets to use his own sonorous voice for Mason, while some other actor dubs Zorro's lines. The only real significance of this mediocre effort is that supposedly in the same year the serial was released, the casting people for the 1949 LONE RANGER teleseries got a look at GHOST, and so Moore secured the role, leading to a long association with that character, to the extent that many fans think of Moore as the quintessential Lone Ranger.

INVINCIBLE, SEASON TWO (2023-24)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

INVINCIBLE Season 2 is more of the same as Season 1, so anyone who liked the first will probably like the second. I admit that I'm probably a bit more torqued at Season 2 because I thought it was the final one. But that's not a sin I can lay at the show-runners' door.

So Mark Grayson, a.k.a. Invincible, survives his brutal defeat at the hands of his father Omni-Man. He's spared because his dad, who's been masquerading as a superhero while operating as a covert agent for an alien empire, feels an upsurge of paternal feeling and deserts his post on Earth. Mark and his mother Debbie are both hugely traumatized by Omni-Man's betrayal, but Mark tries to get back to his regular activities with his girlfriend and his first year at college. At the same time, he desperately wants to validate himself as a real superhero, as against his father's falsehoods, and he accepts more assignments from government coordinator Cecil. 

One of these assignments involves investigating a secret science-facility, even without knowing that the Mauler clone-brothers are involved in its operation. The real mastermind behind the facility is Angstrom Levy, a high-minded idealist with the ability to access multiple alternate dimensions. His big "mad science" scheme involves somehow pooling the knowledge (or something) of alternate versions of himself so as to enforce absolute peace upon all dimensions. (Well, except for the dimension he's going to give to the Maulers for their help.) Invincible's interference results in that stale old trope, the Deformed Villain Out for Revenge on the Hero Who Caused the Deformity. Levy is one of the worst villains but I suppose he was brought in to reinforce another subplot, in which it's revealed that in most alternate dimensions, Invincible and Omni-Man teamed up to bring Earth under the dominion of the Viltrum Empire.

At least slightly more germane to established plotlines is an arc in which Invincible must seek to deal with Earth's impending invasion by Viltrum. However, the hero's first major interstellar adventure starts out as a hoax, as bug-aliens beseech his help with a catastrophe endangering their planet Thraxa. Once Invincible arrives, he finds that Thraxa's real peril is their own impending invasion from Viltrum. And just for a bonus, the current ruler of Thraxa is none other than-- Invincible's dear old dad. Also, during his ascension to kingship, Omni-Man has also mated with a female Thraxan, resulting in a mostly humanoid baby, Thraxa's defense against Viltrum does not go well: Omni-Man is captured to be tried as a traitor, while Invincible must take his infant half-brother back to Earth.

The soap operatics involving Mark's family and friends, and those between the young Guardians of the Globe, are also more of the same: efficient but pedestrian. Surprisingly, Invincible's closest superhero friend, Atom Eve, doesn't get much development until the last few episodes. But then, in between Season 1 and Season 2, Atom Eve was the only hero to get her own hour-long special, so I'm sure the show-runners have big plans for her. 

Season Two might not be my cup of root beer. But I admit it does an okay job of making the lives of its protagonists increasingly messy-- to say nothing of providing loads more scenes showing INVINCIBLE's patented "superhero gore."

DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE (1939)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

This Republic serial, co-directed by William Witney and John English, is generally regarded as one of the best examples of "the Golden Age of Serials." I think it's very strong for its first six chapters, and then loses some momentum due to repetitiveness (and that's not counting Chapter 11, one of the notorious "clip episodes.")

That said, it's hard to beat DAREDEVILS for the simple clarity of the revenge-motives of both villain and heroes. At the opening, an escaped criminal (Charles Middleton) uses his old prisoner-number, 39013, as a nom de guerre as he pursues a monomaniacal project to destroy all the holdings of industrialist Granville. No specific reasons are given for the evildoer's grudge, except a loose allusion to Granville having helped imprison 39013. The villain and his gang of cutthroats don't care if the public gets in the way, and in episode one 39013 strikes at a Granville-owned amusement park. At this park, three superb athletes are performing, and they too have a nickname, "Daredevils of the Red Circle," for the target-like circle each one wears on the front of his shirt. 39013's thugs set the park on fire, and though the Daredevils escape death, the kid brother of one of them does not. The trio dedicate their lives to taking vengeance upon the murderers.

Each of the Daredevils is given a specialty in addition to general athleticism. Tiny (Herman Brix) is a strongman. Bert (Dave Sharpe) is an escape artist. And Gene (Charles Quigley) is a high diver with exceptional reflexes, as well the one who loses his kid brother in the fire. The trio seek out Granville's mansion to proffer their amateur assistance, and Granville's granddaughter Blanche (Carole Landis) proves instrumental in getting her grandpa to accept the guys' help. The athletes thus become independent agents who can get johnny-on-the-spot to any of 39013's sabotage operations-- at least partly because the fiend, like many a comic-book villain after him, is usually considerate enough to announce his next target.

But there's a wrinkle, for Granville is not Granville. The man whom the heroes meet is actually 39013 himself, disguised in a perfect mask (meaning that he's played in those scenes by the same actor essaying the real Granville). The industrialist is imprisoned in a cell beneath the mansion, where a Rube Goldberg device threatens to drop poison gas into the man's cell if said device is not regularly corrected by Granville's captor. 39013's sole desire is that his enemy should hear about every enterprise being destroyed in turn, so that he'll know that his entire life's work has been wrecked before he himself perishes.

The roust-and-repeat actions of the super-athletes, as they dash hither and yon foiling the villain's pawns, might have become tiresome but for an additional angle: someone inside the mansion is privy to 39013's schemes. That someone sends printed notes to the Daredevils, warning them of this or that peril, and each note is signed with the same "red circle" image as the brand used by the heroes. To be sure, there are two or three named characters at the mansion, and surely no one would have suspected the comical Black butler Snowflake (though imagine how 1939 audiences might have reacted, had Snowflake been the Daredevils' secret benefactor). I'll note in passing that aside from the butler's condescending name he doesn't perpetrate any other racial-humor schticks except for his broad accent.

Since 39013 isn't a scientist, mad or otherwise, he only used a couple of diabolical devices besides his poison-gas contraption. In one case, his thugs rig a clinic's curative radioactive device so that it will slay a patient with deadly rays. In another, 39103 executes an expendable henchman by flooding the garage at the mansion with poison gas. But was that really the most efficient way to set up hench-executions? When the heroes survive getting caught in the same trap, they do a whole detective-number on the garage's gas-apparatus, which conveniently gives the good guys a new avenue for tracking down the crooked cabal. But the script makes it sound like 39013 intended to make the gas-apparatus look like it was tampered with by agents unknown. Why would he do so, since he doesn't expect to found out, thinking he can pass off the garage-executions as carbon monoxide poisoning from the automobiles?

The action set-pieces in the first two episodes are the most thrilling in the chapterplay. After that, the rest of the episodes are mostly hand-to-hand fights, well enough done but not that noteworthy. As far as acting, Middleton takes top honors with his hiss-worthy villainy, though 39013 would not make my list of best serial-villains, just as the serial wouldn't make my twenty best of all time.

LUPIN III: THE COLUMBUS FILES (1999)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Since the original LUPIN III manga was unquestionably more "comedy" than "adventure," unlike many of the anime adaptations, it's fairly appropriate that the last Lupin III adaptation for the 20th century was totally in the comedic mode of creator Monkey Punch. It was also the last of three Lupin screenplays by writer Shinzo Fujita, and the best.

First, let me dispose of the film's obligatory MacGuffin over which the factions battle. The Columbus Files comprise a treasure map that can lead one to the Columbus Egg, which in turn contains some ancient civilization's techniques for controlling the world's weather, and even creating things like giant water-geysers. But the connection to the explorer Columbus is entirely meretricious: the script might as well have used the subtitle "Plato Files" and claimed that Plato preserved a techno-egg from ancient Atlantis.

What isn't meretricious is how Fujita not only recaptures the raucous, licentious spirit of the manga, but uses it to ask a new question: given all the constant conflict between Lupin and his adversarial amour Fujiko, would he still want her if she lost all of her contentiousness?

So Fujiko summons Lupin to a meeting, and while he tries earnestly to get in her pants, she explains that she has a map that will lead her, and any partners, to the Columbus Egg. A gunship appears and attacks them. Lupin and Fujiko escape the strafing, but the map is destroyed, so that the coordinates are preserved only in Fujiko's memory. Then before Lupin can catch her, she goes over a cliff into the sea below.

Lupin and his gang don't find Fujiko, but a young female treasure-hunter named Rosaria does-- and this Fujiko has no memory of anything. However, the guy in the airship, one Nazalhoff, somehow tracks Fujiko to Rosaria's lair, and abducts Fujiko, whose personality has vanished along with her memory, so that she's an entirely helpless damsel in distress. For reasons that are not clear-- though the script implies some lesbian desire on Rosaria's part-- Rosaria is willing to risk her life to rescue the distressed damsel.

The young treasure-hunter hooks with the three males of the Lupin Gang and joins forces with them-- though at times she shows a Fujiko-like tendency to betray Lupin. The master thief makes a few passes at Rosaria, but for the most part he's intensely confused at Fujiko's change in personality. In one scene, he rips off his clothes and makes as if he intends to ravish her, just as he constantly did whenever she was in her "normal" persona. It's not clear whether Lupin really means to follow through, or if he's applying "shock therapy." But trembling Fujiko gives him permission to take her, in the hope that she'll regain her normal memory. Lupin declines and treats her like a gentleman from then on, suggesting that he really doesn't want only Fujiko's body; he wants her to be with him, body and soul.

It turns out that Nazalhoff-- who shares Lupin's tendency to mack on both Fujiko and Rosaria-- is one of a small army of henchmen serving a mad scientist named Barton. Barton's the one who wants the hidden technology of the Columbus Egg, in order to create a weather-weapon whereby to rule the world. And as a cherry on top of all that James Bond goodness, Rosaria is his daughter, who becomes involved in stopping him even before she knows he's involved. Rosaria's got a bad history with her papa, who killed her mother in his scientific experiments, and seems willing to use his daughter as a test subject too. 

Lupin and his associates delve into a mysterious pre-Columbian temple, where they face a sampling of Indiana Jones perils, and even quote RAIDERS overtly. I forget how Barton gets the Egg from them, but soon he's creating waterspouts to show off his power (though I could swear he creates one early in the movie, before he has the full technology). One waterspout even works to Lupin's advantage, separating him from Zenigata just as the obsessed cop catches up with the thief. And just to demonstrate that anime writers share the American tendency to use technology to achieve any magic-like effect desired, toward the end Barton even uses the Columbus Tech to transform himself into a super-strong, nearly invulnerable monster. This frustrates Rosaria's chances to avenge her mother directly, but without revealing too much, the young woman's potential "lover" does it for her.

As for Jigen and Goemon, they're largely relegated to support roles. Goemon gets the best scenes: he uses his katana to slice a waterspout in two (!) and uses artificial respiration to revive a waterlogged Jigen, much to the gunman's disgust. Lupin is more in line with Monkey Punch's image of the character as "the trickster who tricks himself," taking many comical pratfalls not seen in the more serious iterations. And like the comics version, the master thief is able to assume instant disguises and use assorted gimmicks concealed on his person to thwart his foes. And of course, Fujiko must regain her normal personality: vain, unscrupulous, and venal-- though of course there's always the implication that she enjoys her bouts with Lupin. Though not everything in the script makes perfect sense, the writer's take on the "war between male thief and female thief" elevates FILES to the top of the Lupin heap. 

THE POSTMAN (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Although I can see a lot of reasons why this Kevin Costner passion-project failed at the box office, and although I probably would have been bored watching in a theater, THE POSTMAN goes on my list of "interesting failures." This may be because I recently re-watched it on streaming, where I was free to pause this or that section as I pleased. But it's also because it was an attempt at producing a modern film in the vein of "Americana." More on that later.

Star-director Costner and two writers adapted the same-name 1985 novel by David Brin. I read the novel years ago and at the time liked it better than the film, though the main thing the POSTMAN film utilizes is the basic setup. It's 2013, and the mostly unexplained apocalypse has been recent enough that the older generation still remembers all of the events. The centralized government in the U.S. has been devastated, and as in most post-apoc films, the survivors have formed assorted small farming communities with little technology. But armed raiders have become the scourge of the countryside, levying tribute from the communities and threatening to become the de facto government. The raiders, named "The Holnists" after their deceased leader, are given a patina of sexism and racism, but their major evil is their insistence on a Spartan-like culture of military tyranny.

A wandering actor (Costner) travels from enclave to enclave, entertaining the residents with garbed Shakespeare performances. in contrast to the novel, the actor's name is never known. Then the current leader of the Holnists, General Bethlehem (Will Patton), decides to induct three men into his forces from the community the actor's visiting, and the actor is one of his victims. There's a little fencing between the actor and Bethlehem, in that both are familiar with the Bard, but for the most part, becoming an unwilling soldier is no picnic for our hero. He ultimately manages to escape the ranks of the Holnists.

On his own again, the protagonist comes across the long-deceased body of a U.S. postman. The actor appropriates the dead man's uniform and gets the idea of trying to deliver the leftover mail in order to cadge free food at communities. From then on, he becomes The Postman in much the same way that Clint Eastwood's hero from PALE RIDER becomes known as "Preacher." Why he never feels it useful to use his own real name, or to come up with a new one, goes unexplained.

As The Postman successfully mingles with one or two communities, his scam becomes his calling. His lie, that he's been empowered by a reconstituted U.S. government, becomes a dream that the scattered American tribes want to believe, and without his intent to do so, a new postal service grows into being. However, Bethlehem deems this organization a threat to his power, and he initiates reprisals. Coincidentally, he also abducts, for his own pleasure, a woman named Abby (Olivia Williams) -- though the general indirectly does the Postman an indirect favor by killing off Abby's husband, which will clear the decks for the romantic couple later on. Eventually, in marked contrast to the Brin novel, the quarrel of hero and villain is settled in a one-on-one battle.

Though Costner and his collaborators invoke paeans to the American Way of Life a little too often, and the film's length was surely one of the things that worked against it, the script does put across a strong sociological myth. The lines of communication, represented by the Postal Service, are what bind a country-- any country-- together, beyond the simple level of convenience, and such family-based community is exalted over the divisive nature of military culture.

POSTMAN, coming two years after the moderate success of WATERWORLD, may have done worse, but the script of the former isn't the only thing that's better. Costner, who was utterly unable to pull off the selfish loner of WATERWORLD, fits perfectly with this "hero of few words who can quote Shakespeare in a pinch." The star has good romantic chemistry with his leading lady, and Will Patton made an atypical villain: one who didn't look scary like the average adventure-antagonist but conveyed a sense of tangible menace. The climax, which builds upon the early events of the narrative, is in my book superior to that of the David Brin novel. 

SAMSON AND DELILAH (1949)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological, metaphysical*

In contrast to 1953's SALOME. the scripters for Cecil B. DeMille's SAMSON AND DELILAH had a wealth of Biblical material to work with, for the Samson material in Judges is replete with all the spectacular incidents a Hollywood moviemaker could ever want. However, unlike many of the narratives in the Bible, that of Samson and Delilah is infused with the wild illogicality of myth and folklore.  Not surprisingly, DeMille did not attempt to depict some of the more eyebrow-raising deeds of Samson, like tying torches to the tails of three hundred foxes in order to set fire to Philistine crops.

Male heroes in American-made religious epics tend to be depicted as either righteous men from beginning to end, or men who stray from righteousness but end by re-affirming the Judeo-Christian ethos. The script for SAMSON intends to portray its hero (Victor Mature) in this manner: an early scene has Samson's mother chastising the hero for wenching, roistering, and being too friendly with the Philistines who hold dominion over the Jewish tribe of Dan, Samson's own people. The mother urges the hero to settle down and marry Miriam, a nice Danite girl. His response is to chase after Philistine girl Semadar (Angela Lansbury).

Semadar is the name the script gives to the unnamed Biblical wife of Samson, but the script also throws in a few interesting myth-allusions. Semadar is first seen wearing Philistine armor and hurling a spear at a picture of a lion, preparing herself for an anticipated lion-hunt. Her father compares her to the Greek goddess Dictynna, an analogue of the "mistress of animals" Artemis. Perhaps the scriptwriters wished to make Semadar as different as possible from her younger sister Delilah (Hedy Lamarr), who has more in common with Aphrodite, and with feminine arts of persuasion rather than masculine arts of force. When Samson comes calling for Semadar, Delilah hangs around, clearly planning to steal the Danite muscleman from her sister.

I'll pass quickly over some of the "high intrigues" of the story-- how Samson's suit interferes with a Philistine general's desire for Semadar, how the Danite hero's famous bare-handed slaying of a lion impresses the Philistine king, the Saran (George Sanders). In short, the film takes the "bride story" from the Old Testament-- in which the bride's father gives Samson's bride to another man and then tries to convince the Danite to accept an unnamed younger daughter-- and converts the whole plot to the contrivances of Delilah, who wants her sister married to anyone else and herself wed to Samson. Delilah's plan backfires. Delilah convinces Semadar to betray Samson's confidence, bringing about a battle between Samson and his Philistine groomsmen, a battle that results in the deaths of Semadar and her father. In a strong "Scarlet O'Hara" moment, Delilah swears vengeance on Samson, and her words suggest that she experiences some guilt for her own role in causing her family's demise.

After the Philistines fail to capture Samson by force-- yielding the crowd-pleasing scene in which the hero slays dozens of soldiers with "the jawbone of an ass"-- Delilah offers her services to  Saran's court. One courtier asks her if she plans to drive a stake through his head, as Jael did to Sisera (another nice mythic touch), but Delilah promises to conquer her enemy not through the "force of arms" but "the softness of arms."

I need not go into a lot of detail about the familiar conclusion, except to point out that Delilah regrets her betrayal of Samson to the Philistines and allows herself to perish when the blind hero pulls down the pillars of Dagon's temple. One of the effects of Delilah's self-sacrifice, though, is that it works against the film's supposed theme, in which Judeo-Christian modesty is extolled over pagan glamor. The effect of Delilah choosing to join Samson in death, though, is just one of many scenes that impart a heroic, almost Hellenic glory to Delilah, as much as to her strongman lover.

Moreover, even though SAMSON AND DELILAH is plagued with dozens of unintentionally risible dialogue-lines-- often rendered funny simply because they're uttered with midwestern accents-- DeMille's scripters succeed in filling the movie a catalogue with so many sadistic, masochistic, and penis-envy references as to warm the cockles of any Freudian heart. I'm tempted to generalize that while most American Bible-films are all about Freud's "reality principle"-- i.e. learning to respect life and live within limits-- SAMSON AND DELILIAH is more about Freud's so-called "pleasure principle," in which the joy of transgression, of polymorphous sexuality, is the main attraction.

The scripters also show some realization that certain motifs from the original narrative aren't logical in the light of later Christian rationalization.  When Samson does reveal his secret to the temptress, she doesn't believe it: "Do you really believe that this great god of yours gave you power through your hair?" When she clips him of his locks, what she's really doing is shearing away his confidence in God's gift. Thus the film, not wanting to imply that the God of the Fathers would mess about with folkloric gimmicks, strongly implies that Samson never really loses his strength; he merely *believes* that he has. Thus, when he regains his strength, it's not because the blinded hero's hair has time to grow back during his final captivity, as in the Bible narrative.

Yet, for what reason does Samson's strength return? It doesn't come back because Samson re-commits to the Lord of Hosts.  Samson first realizes that his strength is back when Delilah approaches him in his confinement. Full of hatred, he grabs her and lifts her over his head, intending to kill her. However, in so doing breaks his chains-- which leads him to realize that he can spring one last surprise on his enemies-- as long as Delilah doesn't betray him again. And so we see that in this particular Gospel According to DeMille, that a man's strength can not only be drained by sexual love, it can also be restored by the passion of a lusty hatred.  And that may be one reason why, for all its faults, SAMSON AND DELILAH is a helluva lot more fun to watch than most religious epics of this time-period.

HONOR ROLL #248

 VICTOR MATURE to HEDY LAMARR: "Just a little off the top, please."

WILL PATTON didn't have to be a member of the postal service to go postal.

The Lupin gang gets some stiff competition from ROSARIA.

DAVE SHARPE (far left) looked sharp fighting evil.

ATOM EVE's more a fizzle than a bomb.

The Ghost of Zorro gets mundane help from PAMELA BLAKE.