The Captain Sails to Crazy Town

 

Richard Dix really should be better known as an actor. A few years ago, I reviewed a series of movies based on The Whistler radio show. All but one of these starred Dix as the main character--sometimes a good guy, sometimes a villain. And he was very effective in each of those roles.

In 1943, he starred in one of the series of superb horror movies produced by Val Lewton for RKO studios. In The Ghost Ship, his character is Will Stone, the captain of the merchant ship Altair, which sails to ports in the Caribbean. A newly-qualified young officer named Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) comes aboard and soon proves himself capable. 

In fact, when one of the crew suffers from appendicitis while the Altair is at sea, it's Merriam who performs a life-saving operation while instructions are sent by radio. This happens after Captain Stone tries to operate but freezes up. Merriam, concerned about hurting the captain's image with the crew, allows Stone to take the credit.

But, in the meanwhile, the movie begin to give us hints that all isn't well with Captain Stone. Aside from his self-serving explanation to Merriam about why he couldn't perform the operation, there are other indications that he might not always be rational. 

Then things come to a head. A sailor comes to the captain to complain about the crew being short-handed. The next day, the sailor dies in an "accident" in the ship's chain locker.

But Merriam knows it was no accident. When they reach their next port, he makes a public accusation against Stone. This doesn't go well. He has no proof and the crew thinks the captain bravely saved the sailor who had appendicitis. 

Merriam is out of a job and off the Altair. Before the ship leaves port, though, Merriam is knocked out in a fist fight and brought aboard by a sailor who didn't know he was no longer part of the crew. 

This leaves Merriam aboard a ship at sea, cut off from the rest of the world, with an insane captain who wants to kill him and a crew who won't believe him.

As I mentioned, Dix's performance is excellent--subtle when it needs to be and more overt when that is called for. He even generates a modicum of sympathy for himself when he talks to a lady friend, telling her of his fears that he is going insane without realizing that he's already there.

The direction (by Mark Robson) is sharp and the black-and-white cinematography (by Nicolas Musuraca) is downright beautiful. Most of the film is set aboard the ship and, of course, an old-school tramp merchantman is an inherently cool setting. The Ghost Ship is suspenseful and creepy, leading us forward to a brutal and superlative climax.

Willy Schultz, Part 5

 

cover art by Rocke Mastroserio

The first four parts of "The Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz" were uniformily excellent, with each successive chapter arguably better than the last one. So, perhaps its inevitable that the next chapter, appearing in Fightin' Army #80 (1968) is a tiny bit of a letdown. At some point, there was bound to be a merely good--rather than superb--chapter in Capt. Schultz's story. Sam Glanzman's art work is great, but Willy Franz's script has a contrived element to it.

Willy was back in an American uniform at the end of the last issue, so this is still the case at the beginning of this issue. He comes across some dead Luftwaffe personnel next to bodies of the Arab renegades who had ambushed them. There's one survivor, a Luftwaffe nurse named Ilse.

Isle is temporarily blinded by a concussion during the ambush. When she hears Willy approaching, she tries to shoot him. But after disarming her, he speaks to her in German. Not surprisingly, she assumes he is a German soldier.

He takes her to a nearby cave to rest. A short time later, he exits the cave to check out a noise he heard. This leads him into a brief firefight with a German patrol supported by Arab scouts. One of the Germans, despite being wounded, gets away.

Willy knows that if the German survives to get back to his own lines, the enemy will be coming back in force. But in the meantime, he and Ilse spend the afternoon in the cave. This is the contrived part. That the two might like each other and be attracted to each other is perfectly fine. But within a few hours, the two are madly in love with each other. I know they needed to care for each other for the ending, in which Willy must leave her and know he'll never see her again, poignant. But gee whiz, you don't fall in love that quickly. No one does. Despite what Disney movies often try to tell us, love at virtual first sight is nonsense. 

To be fair, I will grant that the stress and danger of war can cause people to rush into relationships and fall in love (or think they've fallen in love) very quickly. But I just have trouble buying into it as being a real and healthy emotion. Perhaps if we just assume it's the war playing with Willy and Ilse's emotions, the story can work just as well. 

Anyway, Willy sees Germans approaching and hits the road, leaving behind his helment in his haste. Ilse, who's eyesight has gradually returned, is shocked to discover the helmet is American.

Willy is on the run again. The story is still good and the plot point I find contrived might not bother another reader. I half-expect to have someone comment that they fell in love in the space of an afternoon and have a joyously happy marriage. But for myself--heck, I "dated" my wife for a year before I even realized we were dating. Love takes time, Willy. Ilse will be confused, but she'll be fine.

In three weeks or so, we'll check in again to see how Willy is doing. Next week, we'll visit the Tomb of Dracula.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode 32: The Cave Girl Part 1

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode 32: The Cave Girl Part 1:   Jess, Scott and Tim discuss the novel  The Cave Girl . Click HERE for the audio version. Email us at: edgarsmailbag@gmail.com. This is al...

Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

A 1972 cover by Larry Lieber.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Broadway is My Beat: "The Laura Burton Murder Case" 11/3/50

A wealthy heiress is found strangled to death in a fleabag hotel. The obvious suspect is her husband, but the case proves to be less straightforward it originally seems.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

We Were There, Part 3

 

We Were There at the Boston Tea Party (1959), by Robert N. Webb, was the third in the overall We Were There series but the first to deal with the American Revolution. We've looked at the later volumes dealing with Ethan Allen and Yorktown respectively. Now we jump back to time just before the real fighting began.

As per the series' usual format, the main characters are a 15-year-old boy and his younger sister. In this case, it's Jeremy and Deliverance ("Del") Winthrop, children of a collage professor. The two young ones have gotten involved with Sam Adams, Paul Revere and other Sons of Liberty, delivering messages and doing other tasks.

But they want to do more. And here, I must pause in my plot summary to insert a bit of historical trivia. In 1865, a decendant of Sam Adams wrote that Adams' had a dog named Queue--a huge Newfoundland who was friendly with most people, but absolutely hated the Redcoats. It was said the he was covered with scars from his violent encounters with the British soldiers who were occupying Boston. 

There are no contemporaneous accounts of Queue, so there's a good chance he didn't exist. Or if he did, his private war against the Redcoats is merely a legend. But the We Were There novel treats Queue as real and, by golly, he's awesome. He easily rates a spot alongside other great dogs of fiction such as Buck, White Fang, Slasher and Nobs.

He also gives Jeremy and Del a motivation for doing something more for liberty. Or at least do something nice for Sam Adams. The dog is currently held by the British, who have tired of his canine shananigans. 

With a sympathetic British sergeant looking the other way, Jeremy and Del manages to sneak up to Queue and cut him loose. But the dog won't leave without taking vengence, charging through the mess tent and scattering food over the dining soldiers.

It's a great scene, interjecting some humor into the story and using the incident to show that the problem wasn't with the individual British soldiers, who were often decent enough fellows, but with the stripping of the colonists' liberty.

The story progresses, with Jeremy and Del spying out the waterfront and discovering when ships carrying tea will be coming into port. Later, Jeremy actually sneaks aboard one of this ships to find out when the captains plan to offload their cargo. This involves the Winthrop siblings in the planning and eventual carrying out of the Boston Tea Party.

It's another strong entry in the series. Unlike the other two books we've reviewed, the author is dealing with a situation in which the siblings aren't necessarily in physical danger. But Jeremy and Del still find useful and legitimately exciting tasks to perform. And additional tension is added via their father, who they see visiting the Tory Governor Hutchinson. Is their dad pro-British? Will their work in the cause of liberty eventually put them at odds with their own parents?

I also like the historical accuracy. Heck, Queue MIGHT have existed. And the book is full of little touches showing the author knew his stuff. For instance, when the kids take a message to John Hancock, the wealthy merchant is having dinner with Paul Revere. Jeremy notices that Hancock is dressed in the richest finery (which he did in real life) while Revere is dressed very plainly (also, a real-life touch). Small touches like these add to the strength of the book.

We have one more We Were There book to cover. As a reminder, I'm doing blog entries on these books because I might eventually be doing a talk about them at a DAR meeting and so needed a handy place to preserve my notes. So we'll eventually cover the classic novels Johnny Tremaine and April Morning as well. 

Batman vs. Magic

 

cover art by Carmen Infantino

We're continuing to look at the reprints that appeared in Detective Comics #439 (1974). So far, we've gone back to the Golden Age for a Hawkman story and a tale of Dr. Fate. We've visited the Silver Age to time travel with the Atom. This week, we stay with the Silver Age to look at "Batman's Bewitched Nightmare," reprinted from Detective Comics #336 (Feb. 1965). 

This one was written by Gardner Fox, who would actually be the writer for 4 of the 6 reprints we'll eventually talk about. That's not surprising. The super-prolific Fox was a creative driving force behind much of what made both the Golden Age and the Silver Age of comics so much fun.

The art is by Sheldon Moldoff, ghosting for Bob Kane. 

A witch is helping crooks rob a bank, disguising their car as a pumpkin being pulled by mice (because apparently no one in Gotham City would notice this) and transforming the vehicle and the crooks back into their normal forms outside the bank, which she's already broken open for them.

It's interesting that Batman automatically assumes the magic must be fake (which, in fact, turns out to be the case) because magic isn't real. But Batman lives in a universe where magic DOES exist. Heck, it's only been a year since Zatanna was introduced into the DC Universe. And Batman has met Dr. Fate and Spectre. To be fair, of course, those latter two live in another universe where the physical laws might be a little different. But still, Batman has no reason to doubt the existance of magic. This isn't really a big deal in terms of this individual story, but it shows that the DC editors weren't that concerned about the overall continuity of their universe. To put it crudely, while Marvel was building a universe that intertwined upon itself, DC was concerned with telling individual stories---individual legends about legendary characters--without a worry about cleanly fitting it all together. Both attitudes produce entertaining stories, so both have their strengths.

Anyway, the crooks go down pretty easily when Batman and Robin arrive, joking about it as they are captured. Then, all of a sudden, Batman and Robin are unable to touch them. The witch has taken away their sense of touch.

The crooks take off in their car. With their sense of touch back, the Dynamic Duo pursue them in the Batmobile. 

But the witch then takes away their sense of sight--or at least limits it so they can't see the getaway car. Instea, the pursue the witch on her broomstick into a large cave.

Over the next few pages, the witch deprives the good guys of first their hearing and then their sense of smell, luring them into traps designed to take them out based on the sense they are currently missing. But Batman foils the first trap and Robin, through an on-the-fly Sherlockian deduction, saves them from the second trap. In fact, Robin really shines during the story's climax, figuring out that the broomstick works as a magic wand. Without it, she's powerless.

Robin takes the broomstick. He himself can't make it do magic, but that doesn't matter. The witch and the bank robbers are easily subdued.

But back at the Bat Cave, the two heroes get one last surprise. Communicating through the broomstick, a villain they've encountered before talks to them. This is the mysterious Outsider, who explains the broom is made from a rare piece of wood that allows someone with ESP (which the witch had) to seem to perform "magic." The Outsider set all this up to destroy Batman and Robin. It's not his first attempt and won't be his last. (Spoiler: The Outsider turns out to be an evil alternate personality of Alfred's. He's eventually cured of this.)

I like the story. The "eliminate one sense at a time" trick is fun and I especially enjoy Gardner Fox allowing Robin to take the lead and save the day at the end. The one-panel explanation of how the broom worked is convoluted even by Silver Age Comic Book Logic. But what the hey, it's the Silver Age. It exists according to its own logic and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Next week, we return again to the Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz.

Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

This 1955 cover is tentatively credited to Don Spaulding.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Inner Sanctum: "Make Ready My Grave" 4/23/46

Betty's new husband subconsciously ties nooses in random pieces of string; the family servant is super-creepy; and someone has dug a grave for her in the family cementary. It's possible that Betty has married... unwisely.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Duty and the Foreign Legion

cover art by Gerard C. Delano

 

It's been a few years since we've looked at one of J.D. Newsom's always-good Foreign Legion stories. (Click HERE and HERE for those reviews.)

As I read more of Newsom's action-packed tales, I'm impressed by their variety. The settings for these stories is always colonial North Africa and the main character is always a Legionnaire. But Newsom manages to generate unique plots and characterizations each time.

In "Duty," (published in the April 1, 1931 issue of Adventure) is told in the first person, as if we are being told the story in a bar over drinks. It's an effective storytelling technique--with my favorite example of this being L. Sprague de Camp's "A Gun for Dinosaur."

This time, the storyteller is a Legionnaire sergeant-major, who is explaining that, when he first joined after fleeing the United States, he was a disciplinary problem. In fact, he ended up getting sent to a camp called Ras-al-Gazer, where all the untrainable riff-raff end up... where the officer in charge and his non-coms treat you with unending brutality in the vain hope of instilling a sense of discipline. Looking back, our narrator realized the place served no useful purpose--"Discipline without justice is a joke," he states. But at the time, he was stuck there.

So was a soldier named Vaillard, a former professor of political science who had abandoned his wife, child and career and eventually found himself stationed at Ras-al-Gazer as another useless incorrigable. But Vaillard has plans. And when those plans involve murdering the commanding officer and stealing a pistol, the other prisoners are unwillingly drawn into a mutiny.

This leads to a stand-off. Vaillard and the mutineers are trapped in their barracks, but they have hostages. Vaillard is certain they'll be allowed to go free and march for the nearest border. But then a young officer comes into the barracks to confront the mutineers. This officer has a connection to Vaillard that changes the situation drastically.

The story is very tense, with the standoff between the mutineers and the soldiers being told very effectively. But its the characters of Vaillard and the young officer who really make the story work, with their specific relationship amping up the tension to 11. Essentially, the story becomes an examination of egotism vs. duty vs. family. And Newsom brings this tale to an effective end.

You can read the story online HERE.