Read/Watch 'em in Order: The Book

Pretty much because I just wanted to see what it looked like, I have converted the first two dozen posts from my "Read/Watch 'em in Order" series into an ebook, available as a downloadable PDF via the link below:

READ/WATCH 'EM IN ORDER

It doesn't look half-bad.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Cloak and Dagger: “The Secret Box” 7/23/50

A pair of OSS agents, trapped behind enemy lines in Burma, end up as prisoners of a headhunting tribe that’s fallen under the influence of a Japanese officer.

But one of the agents is an ex-vaudevillian and it just might turn out that his unique skills will save the lives of him and his companion.

Click HERE to listen or download.

I'm a farmer. If I lose my farm there must be a reason for it. The sacrifice of one poor village - what will it accomplish?

Edge of Darkness (1942) is a film that can be downright heartbreaking at times.

It’s set in a small fishing village in occupied Norway. The people are just people—they fish, work in the cannery or run small shops. They want to resist the Nazis, but don’t have the resources to do anything beyond a few minor acts of sabotage. There are some—such as the town doctor played by Walter Huston—who just want to wait it out and avoid getting everyone unnecessarily killed.

Then they learn that the British will be smuggling in guns and ammo. The plan is to arm a number of villages along the Norwegian coast, then launch a general uprising. But this must be done according to plan. The villagers must wait until the right moment before they fight.

But several acts of brutality by the Germans might anger them enough to rise up too soon.

What makes all this work so well—to resonate with so much effective emotion—is how average and normal the villagers are. Their leader is a fisherman played by Errol Flynn and he’s not average, of course. Whenever Flynn is on the screen—no matter when and where the movie is set—you always expect a sword fight to break out at any moment.

But that works fine in context to the film—he’s the leader because he’s above average. But everyone else is just normal, everyday guys and gals who are essentially now living in a hell on earth. They don’t look and act like soldiers—they look and act like fisherman and shopkeepers who are struggling to figure out what they should do next.

There’s a scene in which most of the townspeople are meeting in church. The pastor is on the pulpit, making it look like they’re having a regular church service if a German looks in. But a man sitting in one of the pews is doing the talking, telling them about a village that rose up against the Nazis and was wiped out.

So what should they do? One man thinks it’s always wrong to kill. Others think that fighting would be senseless and only get their families killed. Others think they must fight no matter what, but when and how to fight is open to further debate.

This is a war-time film, so in the end it takes the side of those who want to fight. And, of course, history has justified this—the irony being that the Nazis turned out to be even more brutal than they were portrayed in propaganda films such as this.

But during that church scene, everyone is given their say. There’s no derision or condemnation of those who don’t want to fight. The film seems to understand how difficult a decision this is for the townspeople—how much courage it would take to pick up a weapon and charge a machine gun nest full of trained soldiers. Edge of Darkness represents people who want a free society and it remembers that in such a society people are allowed to have different opinions and debate with each other.

There’s not a lot of action in the film until the climax—the film effectively uses character moments to help build up the tension. The running time is just under two hours, but the various characters all get sufficient time for us to get to know them and to like them.

Little moments of dialogue are used with laser-like precision to define individual characters. During the climatic battle, for instance, a maid who has always been deferential to her employer is told that the women and children are being evacuated to England. “The women with children are going,” she replies. “I’m staying to fight.”   Then she adds a modest apology for speaking above her social station. But, by golly, she stays and fights.

The film does such a great job of getting us to like the villagers that the climatic battle is actually a little painful to watch. There’s no punches pulled here—people we’ve gotten to know and like are being killed and we actually hate it when we watch them die.

I have a real love for the war-time films. I recognize them as propaganda as well as entertainment, but I think the message they preached about confronting evil is a moral and still important one. Edge of Darkness is one of the best of these because it is very intelligent and very, very human in the way it makes its point.

What is WRONG with historians nowadays?

DC Comics recently published a Showcase volume of the early issues of Rip Hunter: Time Master.

Reading this has got me wondering. What the heck is wrong with all the historians of the world? It’s obvious from reading Rip Hunter and from watching episodes of Doctor Who and Time Tunnel that the history of the human race usually involves aliens and monsters. In fact, if you’re a time traveler, you can’t go anywhere or anywhen without pretty much tripping over either a visitor from another planet or a huge and biologically unlikely man-eating beast.

Sometimes, you meet them both. In Rip Hunter #2 (May/June 1961), Rip and his companions are visiting an archeological dig near Greece. But when an old cave is opened, a giant and bullet-proof monster is aroused from suspended animation and goes on a rampage.

A coin found in the cave establishes the date (500 BC) that the monster was originally sealed in the cave. Well, the obvious solution is for Rip and his partners to travel back in time to discover the origin of the monster and perhaps learn how to deal with it. Because that’s much easier than calling the army and having them send over a tank or a bazooka team.

I shouldn’t make fun, though, because this story is a good, solid example of how much fun Silver Age stories could be if you just accept them for what they are and enjoy them at that level.

Rip and his crew head back to ancient Greece. They eventually learn that an alien big game hunter crashed on Earth and three large monsters—each a natural enemy to the other two—have escaped from his ship. A local despot has gained possession of the device that controls one of these monsters, using it to conquer a local city.

Rip gets the other two control devices from the alien. He sends the other monsters up against the despot’s monster. One of these is the creature he encountered in the present and—sure enough—it gets chased into the cave and sealed in.

Eventually, Rip manages to get the control device away from the despot, thereby freeing the city from his evil rule. He heads back to the present with the control device for the monster rampaging about there and disintegrates it. Everyone’s happy. Well, everyone but the despot and the dead monster, but they both had it coming anyways.

It really is a fun yarn. The story flows along in a contextually logical manner and artist Ross Andru designs some pretty cool monsters and gives us a couple of too-short but visually awesome monster-on-monster brawls.

And that’s what history was really like—full of aliens or monsters or both. Why history books blather on about wars and social change and natural disasters but fail to mention alien monsters is simply beyond me. Some sort of government conspiracy, I should imagine.

Silver Age comic book stories were frequently silly and often we can enjoy them with our tongue in our cheek, making gentle fun of that silliness.

But just as often, we can accept them at a more basic level and enjoy simple, imaginative storytelling. Here we have Rip Hunter’s cool-looking Time Sphere, a trio of monsters with bizarre abilities, an alien and an ancient Greek despot; all portrayed by a skilled artist and used to tell an internally consistent and exciting story. What more can one want out of life?

Cover Cavalcade

Two eye-catching Marvel covers from December 1969. The top one is by John Buscema. The bottom one is by John's younger brother Sal. The Sub-Mariner really got around that month, didn't he?

I know a guy who knows a guy

The post this last Thursday was about two extremely entertaining Superman novels published concurrently with the first two Christopher Reeve films. In it, I talked about the reason (as I understood it) this original novels were published rather than novelizations of the films.

Well, it turns out that through a comic book/gaming forum I frequent, I know a guy who knows Mr. Maggin. And Mr. Maggin was kind enough to provide the following quote about how his novels ended up being published when they were:

"I think Mario wanted to snag the novelization jobs for his son Gino who, it turns out, was a boyhood friend of my little brother. Then Mario felt overused by the rewrite process on the scripts and was on the outs with the Salkinds after that. I actually wrote Last Son a year before the movie came out (and I was out of print at the tender age of 27) although the original idea was to release my book midway between the release of the first two movies in order to keep the market steeping. The market got hotter than anyone realized it would and I got incredibly lucky when they decided to move my book up to a movie tie-in. I still feel a little scabby about getting pushed into what probably ought to have been Gino's spot, but the thing bought me a house in New Hampshire. Who could argue with that?"

And speaking of Superman, a few weeks back I provided a link to a great "From the Bookshelf" interview with the author of a new history of Superman. I read the book yesterday and it really is superb--a extremely well-researched and well-written tale about the history and cultural impact of the Man of Steel. So if your in a Kryptonian mood any time soon, read Mr. Maggin's two mind-numbingly fun novels (HERE and HERE) and read Mr. Tye's history of the character.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Mercury Theater on the Air: “Passenger to Bali” 11/13/38

A very effective adaptation of the story by Elias St. Joseph. A man buys passage on a tramp steamer sailing from Shanghai to Bali. But when the ship arrives at Bali, the captain discovers the passenger’s nefarious past makes him a man with no country, refused entry at every port. The passenger becomes a Flying Dutchman and the ship becomes a phantom vessel, unable to stay in any port as long as they are stuck with their unwanted guest.

Click HERE to listen or download.

To novelize or not to novelize

Novelizations of movies are not uncommon. During the 1970s, they were very, very common. It seemed that just about every movie—regardless of its subject matter or genre—was novelized. Heck, I remember reading a novelization of Young Frankenstein.

Probably the oddest novelization was when John Carpenter remade The Thing in 1981. Alan Dean Foster wrote a novelization of that movie. DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT WAS BASED ON A SUPERB NOVELLA BY JOHN CAMPBELL!  Oh, well, Foster is an excellent writer and did a good job producing a book that was otherwise completely unnecessary.

But there were two movies from this era that were never novelized. The first two Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve never saw their plots turned into prose.

Why not? I’m not completely sure. I actually haven’t researched this as thoroughly as I’d like to (though I cleverly tricked some fellow members of a comic book forum into doing some research for me), but it seems that Godfather author Mario Puzo, who wrote the first version of the Superman film script, had a clause in his contract that stated his story couldn’t be adapted into any other format unless he did it himself. Though Puzo’s script was drastically changed by other writers before the film was produced, that clause was still in effect. He probably wanted to write (and thus get paid for) any novelizations himself, but this never happened.

So there never was a novelization (or a comic book adaptation) of either Superman or Superman II. (Keep in mind that I am not completely sure all this is true.)

Whatever the reason the films were never novelized, it was a good thing. Because though those two films are excellent, the lack of novelizations meant that veteran comic book writer Elliot S! Maggin was able to write two original Superman novels, which were published concurrent with each of the films.

The world is a richer place because of this. Maggin’s two novels—The Last Son of Krypton and Miracle Monday—are more fun than a barrel of red kryptonite.

(You can, by the way, read them HERE and HERE.)

Last Son, for instance, involves an alien master-villain who steals some newly discovered Einstein papers as part of a plan that eventually involves time travel, planetary-scale real estate swindles, and mass mind control. Interspersed within the main plot are flashbacks to Smallville, in which we get details of Clark’s career as Superboy and his early friendship with a pre-bald Lex Luthor. And it’s all written in a witty, entertaining prose style that brings me back to re-visit the novel every couple of years. I never get tired of reading it.

Maggin’s characterization of Luthor is notable as well. This Luthor is still the scientific criminal genius that he always SHOULD be, but he actually becomes kind of likable. He’s a crook, yes, but he’s got a snarky sense of humor and he never seems to actually endanger anyone except Superman. This makes the Smallville flashbacks all the more poignant—Lex’s descent into crime and his hatred of Superman is tragic because we can so clearly see that he could have been a good guy and he could have been Superman’s best friend. It also leaves hope for his eventually redemption—a theme that carries over into a wonderful plot twist in Miracle Monday.

All this makes one plot twist in The Last Son of Krypton, in which Lex and Superman are forced to team up for much of the novel, cool beyond words. Whereas the book itself clocks in at 9.7 on the Bogart/Karloff Coolness Scale, the team-up aspect reaches a perfect 10.

From page 189: Superman: “You’re a good man, Lex Luthor. Ever thought of going into the hero business?”

Lex: “Nah, you never get a chance to sleep late.”

Maggin also does a fantastic job of having Superman use his powers in clever ways. This is particularly notable in a couple of chapters of Last Son. In one chapter, Superman has ten seconds to stop ten mini-helicopters from using sonic waves to break into ten different banks. In a later chapter, Superman spends a night on global patrol, performing dozens of super-feats across the world in his efforts to save/help people.

Since the 1970s, superhero novels have become fairly common, but Last Son of Krypton and Miracle Monday are still two of the best.

To Smash a Spider

Spider Man #91 (December 1970)

Poor Peter has good reason to be down in the dumps this issue. His girl friend hates him.

Well, she doesn’t hate Peter. She hates Spider Man, whom she blames for getting her father killed last issue.

She decides to do something, so she offers to go to work for the campaign of Sam Bullit, a reactionary ex-cop who is running for D.A. Bullit uses Spider Man as a scapegoat in his supposed law-and-order platform, rabble-rousing much of the city against the webslinger.

He also figures there’s a connection between Peter and Spider Man, so he sends some thugs to work Peter over to get him to talk. This, of course, doesn’t work out well for the thugs.

Bullit is too much of a stereotype to be a very interesting villain, but he serves a purpose here, acting as a platform for Gwen to show her anger at Spider Man and giving impetus to some other nice character moments involving Jamison and Robbie. (J.J.J. wants to support Bullit, which gives us a chance to see the normally calm Robbie get really ticked off.)

The issue ends when Spider Man swings back into his apartment—to only then realize Gwen and Bullit are there waiting for Peter. It took Gwen long enough, but she finally remembers that—as far as she knows—the man she loves is in a partnership with the man who got her dad killed.

After last month’s classic issue, this one seems a little slow in its pacing and Bullit really is far too one-dimensional. But he’ll be gone after one more issue and it’s another tribute to Stan’s skill as a writer that he keeps the characterizations of his cast consistent and interesting even in the midst of a merely average story.

In the next issue of Spider Man, he’ll have a gratuitous but still entertaining team-up with a chilly mutant while he continues to mess up his relationship with Gwen. 

Cover Cavalcade

This is a really busy cover, but it's well composed--so everything works out nicely.