Friday's Favorite OTR

Favorite Story: "Cyreno de Bergerac" 10/18/47

Ronald Coleman gives a heartfelt performance in this effective adaptation of the tale of the man with a huge nose and no luck at all in love.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Genius vs. Genius.

I know it seems impossible, but a few months ago, I made a mistake. As part of my Read/Watch 'em in Order series, I reviewed the 1932 movie Arsene Lupin, based on the adventure of the gentleman thief created by Maurice Leblanc.

In that movie (based on a play written by Leblanc), Lupin steals from rich people who in some way "deserve" to be robbed--his target in the movie made a fortune as a war-profiteer. When I wrote that post, it had been awhile since I read any of the original prose stories and I stated that Lupin choose his targets the same way there.

But I've just re-read the first book--a collection of the short stories published between 1905 and 1907. I've been reminded that the Lupin of the books robs you pretty much because you are rich. It doesn't matter if you're naughty or nice. Lupin simply wants your money.

It's not that he's any less likable, though. He's still non-violent, clever, honorable in his own way and (as established in the story "The Seven of Hearts") loyal to France.  But several of his victims seem perfectly nice people in their own right.

But they can afford the loss when Lupin robs them, leaving us with enough room to enjoy his adventures without having to feel badly about it.  Besides, there is even a very effective acknowledgement that Lupin's chosen profession does have its downsides--he can never be with the woman he loves, sighing "What a pity I am not an honest man!"

The Lupin stories are clever and exciting. In their own way, they are mysteries. One story, for instance, opens with Lupin in prison, having been captured in the previous tale. But a rich guy is still receiving letters from the thief, stating that the rich guy's art treasures will be stolen on a specific night.

This is, of course, impossible, especially since police guards are brought in to babysit the treasures. But it happens anyways. Learning how Lupin pulled it off is great fun. The following story, which ends when we find out how Lupin escaped from prison, is even greater fun.

Having Lupin's genius explained to us, by the way, is never a problem. The thief is not without ego and he fully enjoys telling someone in detail how he pulls off his capers. Heck, sometimes he'll tell the cops.

But Maurice Leblanc is careful to give Lupin enough humanity to allow us to identify with him. For instance, "The Black Pearl" has Lupin stumbling across a murder victim while attempting to steal a valuable pearl. This elicits several moments of pure terror before he pulls himself together and sets out to find the killer to see that justice is d...well, actually, so he can still get the pearl for himself. But in his own way, he makes sure the killer is punished.

"Madame Imbert's Safe" is a flashback to one of Lupin's early capers, in which someone manages to out-con him and actually cost him money. Like Arthur Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes, Leblanc gives us a man who is undeniably a genius, but fails just often enough to keep him grounded and allow us to accept him as real.

And speaking of Sherlock Holmes, Lupin does run across the Great Detective in one story. The two, working separately, each solve a centuries-old riddle that allows them to find a secret passage into a castle. Lupin gets to one-up Holmes in a small way at the story's conclusion, but both men get their Moments of Awesome. The tale is a delightful one because Leblanc presents Holmes in a faithful and respectful manner. We have no problem accepting this Holmes as the real one.

Doyle, by the way, complained about this, so a couple of future encounters with an English detective  (recounted in the second Lupin novel) saw the thief matching wits with a guy named Hemlock Sholmes.

Doyle had every right to complain, of course. Holmes was his baby, after all. But I do wish he had just gone along with it. It's very easy to think of Lupin and Holmes as living in the same world. Of course, in Leblanc's stories, Lupin manages to just barely get the best of Holmes/Sholmes and fans of the characters can argue that point endlessly.

But in the Holmes stories "The Five Orange Pips," Holmes does say "I have been beaten--three times by men and once by a woman."  Maurice Leblanc gave us a clever and believable character when he created Arsene Lupin. I'm okay with the idea that one of the three men who beat Holmes was the Gentleman Thief.


You can read the first Lupin book--The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin--HERE.

Magical Sneezing

The anarchy that reigned throughout the classic Looney Tunes cartoons are a large part of what makes them the best cartoon shorts ever. These cartoons had simple plots--but these served as the structure needed upon which to hang one gag after another. They were not concerned with telling an actual coherent story. Nor should they have been. They are perfect for what they are.

But this has always meant that it can be difficult to translate the Looney Tunes characters to other media and still be funny and true to their personalities. So comic book Bugs Bunny, for instance, is inevitably going to be different from cartoon Bugs. There will be more structure to the comic book version, a little less anarchy in both the story and Bugs' personality--and the bad guys will fire guns that might actually kill you.

Well, okay, there is more structure--but I've just sat here thinking for a few minutes and discovered that it is still impossible to coherently summarize a Bugs comic book story. The goofiness level is still a little too high for that.

"The Magic Sneeze," from Dell Four Color #376 (Feb-March 1952) is a great example of this. I simply don't know how to concisely explain the plot and still do it justice.

So I'll just give you a few bullet points. Bugs gets a hat that trickles magic dust (formed from the disintegration of a magic plant) onto him and causes him to sneeze. When he sneezes, bizarre creatures appear. When he sneezes again, the bizarre creatures disappear.


This, by the way, makes sense in context.

He and Porky, seeking help, run into a couple of villains who have imprisoned the world's greatest
magician as part of a ill-defined plot to conquer the world.

They escape, find the magician, and ride to freedom on hypnotized sharks, later switching over to magically summoned polka-dotted birds.

This also makes sense in context.

More shenanigans ensue, with Bugs inadvertently summoning up a pterodactyl, then a polka-dotted dinosaur, then a surprisingly normal-looking rhinoceros. The end result is that the villains are captured.






This also makes sense in context.

It really does.

The Dell version of the Looney Tunes was not as anarchic as the cartoons--for any medium other than animated cartoons, that would probably be impossible. But the world created for them by Dell was a fun one, allowing for stories that followed a bizarre logic of their own, giving them a relatively coherent beginning--middle--end and rarely failing to entertain us.

Cover Cavalcade

No one can make reading a list look ominous the way the Shadow can!

Friday's Favorite OTR

Escape: "The Loup Garou" 11/16/52

A newcomer to the Louisiana bayou is soon suspected of being a supernatural monster. William Conrad is especially good at giving the illiterate and uneducated protagonist a three-dimensional personality.

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"She's Worth Her Weight in Hog Livers!"

Read/Watch 'em in Order # 61

To get to the 1942 movie Private Snuffy Smith, we have to start in 1919. That's when cartoonist Billy DeBeck began producing the comic strip Take Barney Google, F'rinstance, which recounted the adventures of a sports-loving ne'er do well. Soon renamed Barney Google, the strip gained enormous popularity beginning in 1922, when Barney became owner of a race horse named Spark Plug.

In fact, the horse was popular enough to make "Sparky" a common nickname among boys--including the future creator of Peanuts, Charles Schulz.

But the strip changed again in 1934, when Barney took a trip to the remote town of Hootin' Holler and meets a hillybilly named Snuffy Smith.

Snuffy was so popular that he took over the strip, much the way a supposed guest-star named Popeye took over E.C. Segar's strip Thimble Theater a few years earlier. Before long, DeBeck's strip was titled Barney Google and Snuffy Smith--retaining this title even after Barney largely disappeared from it (though he would return to Hootin' Holler sporadically over the years as a guest-star himself.)

So when B-movie studio Monogram Pictures made the first of two movies based on the comic strip, Snuffy was the title character and Barney is nowhere to be seen.

Diminutive actor Bud Duncan is Snuffy, wearing a prosthetic nose and probably looking as close to the comic strip character as an actual human being can.

This is a silly, goofy movie that rambles along, with several story lines and running gags linked together just enough to be able to say that the movie does have an actual plot. Snuffy is being pursued by revenuers who want to close up his still. This makes for a hard life, but then he learns that if he joins the army, he'll get gold buttons, khaki pants, all the vittles he can eat and an astounding $21.00 a month.

At first, the army is rather understandably uninterested in letting Snuffy enlist. He gets in after accidentally saving the life of a general, but life in the army isn't as easy as Snuffy thought it would be. You can't take a nap whenever you want and his sergeant turns out to be the former revenuer who had been trying to catch him at the beginning of the film.

Entwined in this are several other plot elements. Snuffy's wife Lowizy accidentally created an invisibility formula while making soap, so Snuffy is able to bring his now invisible dog with him to the army camp. A fellow soldier (played by future head Mouseketeer Jimmy Dodd) has invented a new range-finder that Nazi spies are trying to steal. The General is desperate to win war games being held near Hootin' Holler, so finds he needs Snuffy as a scout after he's kicked the short hillbilly out of the army. He also needs that range finder, which means catching those pesky spies. All these various elements do end up playing off one another in order to resolve the plot as a whole.

One or two of the numerous running gags fall flat, but the movie is pretty funny as a whole. It won't keel you over laughing the way a classic Capra or Hawks screwball comedy does, but it has more than its share of good moments. Duncan and Sarah Padden as Lowizy play off each other nicely.

And Snuffy teaches husbands the world over how to effectively complement their wives--"She's worth her weight in Hog Livers." Gee whiz, now I want to get married just so I can use this line to woe my wife. It can't possibly fail.




Edgar Kennedy is the long-suffering revenuer/sergeant--in a role that perfectly highlights his ability to get laughs out of perpetual aggravation, with both Snuffy's laziness and the antics of the invisible dog conspiring to drive him to apoplexy. I also enjoy how the movie succeeds in making gentle (not mean-spirited) fun of the military and its customs.

Monogram would make one additional Snuffy Smith movie that same year, in which we do get a chance to meet live-action versions of Barney Google and Spark Plug. We'll return to Hootin' Holler soon and take a look at that.

In the meantime, Private Snuffy Smith is in the public domain, so here it is in its entirety:

Weaponized Water

The planet Paladra has no water at all. It apparently has some sort of tactical or strategic value, though, since humans keep a garrison there. So that means water has to be shipped to them. This is done in a clever way--millions of tons of water are condensed into basketball-sized metal spheres, so a single ship can transport it to Paladra.

This is the premise of "Raiders of the Waterless World," from Mystery in Space #56 (December 1959). I should mention that my copy is a reprint from 1972, so the panels I'm showing might be colored differently than in the original.

The guy piloting the water ship is typical of any military cargo ship pilot in any work of fiction ever written about cargo pilots--he wants to be a fighter pilot, by golly! He wants to be where the action is! But here he is acting as water boy yet again--as he did on the college football team.

 This is a very cliched characterization, but writer John Broome handles it well and uses this to lead into the story's wonderful action set piece. Warlike aliens called the Megans have besieged Paladra. The pilot has a choice--run for home without delivering the water or try to get through despite having an unarmed ship.

Or is the ship unarmed? The pilot realizes he can use the condensed water spheres as weapons. He launches one out of his ship. The absolute zero of space expands and freezes the water, turning it into a huge bludgeon that crushes a Megan ship.

He launches another out of his ship's jets. The temperature of the jets prevents the water from freezing when it expands and he thus takes out the remaining Megan ships with a tidal wave.

There's a fun twist at the end. The pilot is recognized for his heroic actions and promised a reward. He assumes he'll finally get to fly a fighter. But, no, his reward is a new state-of-the-art water transport!

I'm afraid I don't know if the physics here make complete sense--I don't know how vacuum as well as temperature would affect the water. But this is a comic book story, by golly---real-life physics need not apply. And the whole thing gives artist Gil Kane to draw some awesome images of weaponized water destroying enemy space ships. We don't often get to see a tidal wave in space. When we do get to see one, we shouldn't complain.

Cover Cavalcade

DC Comics' Silver Age war books often had the most dramatically effective covers.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Family Theater: "Pinnochio" 1/31/51

Mel Blanc plays the wooden puppet come to life in this often hilarious adaptation of the story.

Click HERE to listen or download.

A Very Busy Wedding Night

Read/Watch 'em In Order #60

By the time we get to Warren William's fourth and last appearance as Perry Mason, we really need to look at the movies as knock-offs of The Thin Man, rather than adaptations of Erle Stanley Gardner's novels.

To be fair, even a faithful adaptation of the 1933 novel would have been different from the Perry Mason we know. The Case of the Velvet Claws was the very first Mason novel, in which Gardner was still figuring out how best to use the character. Initially, Mason was more of a hard-boiled detective than a lawyer--bribing cops and acting tough while bragging about how he wrapped up cases without ever having to go to court! Boy, did that ever change quickly!

The 1936 movie actually preserves the skeleton of the novel's plot. A woman is accused of killing her husband and, in fact, it seems that she must be guilty. She's actually not a very nice person and ends up attempting to blackmail Perry into representing her by threatening to accuse him of the murder.

But the hard-boiled feel of the novel is dropped. The movie begins with Perry and Della stampeding into night court and asking the judge to marry them. Then its off to their honeymoon--on which they inexplicably bring along Perry's assistant Spudsy Drake. I don't care how much you depend on your Man Friday--you don't bring him on your honeymoon!

But Perry won't have time for romance. A woman with a gun is waiting in his hotel room, forcing Perry to accept a $5000 retainer and dragging him away to help her squash a story that's about to be published in a sleazy tabloid.

Then her husband turns up dead and she goes into her "But I heard you arguing with him, Perry, dear" act. Before long, Perry can't go back to his new wife, because he has to dodge the cops while tracking down the real killer.

Claire Dodd, who played Della Street two movies earlier in The Case of the Curious Bride, returns to the role here and her banter with Perry actually does remind you a little of William Powell and Myrna Loy. The trouble there is that the plot structure requires them to spend most of the movie apart, so their word-play with each other is disappointingly brief.

Another weak point is replacing Allen Jenkins as Spudsy with Eddie Acuff, who simply isn't that good in a part that saddles him with some pretty bad attempts at comedy.

But Warren William's charm and humor manage to keep a so-so film afloat. It would have been nice to see a series of Mason movies made in the 1930s that were more faithful to the novels, but if we are going to get comedy-mysteries instead of straight mysteries, then you would be hard-put to do better than giving Warren William the lead role.

That's it for Perry Mason--there were two more made in the 1930s, but Mason was no longer played by William, so this is a good stopping point. For the next movies in the In Order series, I think we'll pay a couple of visits to a hillbilly family living in the small town of Hootin' Holler.