Cover Cavalcade

I really like the way the overcast sky in the background both highlights Lancelot and adds to the overall atmosphere of the painting.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Lone Ranger: "Tonto Takes Charge" 9/19/41

As part of a plan to expose the head of a smuggling gang and catch the rest of the gang, the Lone Ranger allows himself to be captured.

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It's the Little Mistakes That Will Get You Killed

Plunder Road is a little gem of a Noir/heist movie. Made in 1957, it stars Gene Raymond as the leader of a five-man gang that pulls off an elaborate train heist, getting away with 10 million dollars in gold.

The first 10 or 12 minutes of the film covers the heist--which, for our "heroes"-- turns out to be the easy part. The gang divides the gold into three trucks. The plan is for them to travel (singly or in pairs) to California, where they have a scheme set up to smuggle the gold out of the country.

That seems simple enough compared to pulling off the heist, but the rest of the movie shows us just how hard this can be. The cops have roadblocks set up in an effort to catch them, so any little mistake is likely to give one of them away. And when fear and paranoia gradually build up inside you, it is notoriously difficult not to make little mistakes.

It's a simple plot--following the gang as they drive across the country, cutting back and forth between the three trucks. The gradual building of tension and suspense is expertly done, helped along by both the subtle performances of the actors and Hubert Cornfield's tight directing.

I also appreciate that the movie remembers just how heavy gold is. Even otherwise great heist films, such as Kelly's Heroes, often gloss over or ignore this. In fact, the gold's weight is a factor in Plunder Road's mildly contrived but still tense conclusion.

There's another interesting part to the film. Inevitably, in any heist film, we end up kind of rooting for the bad guys to get away with it--even if the movie isn't otherwise trying to justify the theft in some way. That's certainly the case here for most of Plunder Road. Intellectually, we know that the robbers are in the wrong. But the whole movie is told from their point-of-view and we can't help emphasizing with them and appreciating their cleverness.

Then--about halfway through the movie--one of the robbers commits a particularly brutal act of violence. It's a stark reminder that these really are bad guys.

Of course, the violence also adds to ever-building tension. Maybe this particular scene was in the movie for that purpose and any moral statement was simply an afterthought or side effect.

For me, that scene also highlights one of the reasons I like classic Film Noir. We often hear the story told from the perspective of bad people, but great Noir never forgets that they are indeed bad and that there are always consequences when we do evil.

I'm embedding a YouTube version of the film--but if you have Amazon Prime, a better quality print is available there.

Don't Step On the Rug!

John Stanley is best remembered for writing the brilliantly funny Little Lulu comic books. But, boy-o-boy, Stanley could shift gears and get really creepy if he needed to do so.

Of course, there are some pretty creepy elements to a few of the Lulu stories, so perhaps its not that surprising.

Stanley wrote what might be the scariest comic book story ever for Dell's Ghost Stories in 1962. That same year, Dell did an 84-page one-shot titled Tales from the Tomb, for which Stanley provided what might just be the second scariest comic book story ever.

It involves a young man named Harry, who needs a room for the night. No one answers the door at the first rooming house he tries. This seems fortunate, because the landlord there is a crappy old man, while the next house down is run by a sweet, kindly old lady named Mrs. Wittly.  Heck, she even provides a freshly cleaned throw rung for Harry's room.

Later, when she knocks on Harry's door and asks him to open up for a moment, he casually tosses the book he's reading to the floor. This has an unexpected result.

It turns out the rug is the home of a creature named Mr. Green. And, as Mrs. Wittly calmly points out: "Mr. Green MUST be fed!"

In the ensuing struggle, Harry realizes Mr. Green must stay close to the rug, so he tosses the rug out the window. Mr. Green leaps out after it.

In the meantime, the crappy guy next door has heard the commotion and called the cops. But that darn rug is now just sitting there on the sidewalk--a horrific booby trap that no sane person would suspect represents a danger.

With strong art by Frank Springer, "Mr. Green Must be Fed" is a concise horror story that sets up its premise effectively, then brilliantly uses this to provide honest terror. It has one of those "the bad guy doesn't get caught" endings that often seem contrived and unsatisfying, but in this case fits the rest of the tale perfectly.

The story is available to read online HERE.

Next week, we'll watch two of Marvel's Old West "Kids" team-up with one another.

Cover Cavalcade

The top cover is by Joe Kubert. The bottom is by Jerry Grandenetti. Two great examples of how effectively the DC war comics covers used dramatic points-of-view.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Hopalong Cassidy: "Four to Go" 9/10/50

A list found on a dead man contains four names. One name is that of the corpse. One of the other names is Hopalong Cassidy.

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THAT'S Who Shot Liberty Valance!

Sometimes, a great movie is so good there is danger of forgetting that it was based on a great novel or short story.

This isn’t always the case. Alan Lemay’s The Searchers or Charles Portis’ True Grit, for instance, are well-known enough by themselves to be remembered alongside the movies they inspired.

But I’ll bet a lot of movie fans—and even a lot of fans of prose Westerns—don’t know or remember that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is based on a 1949 short story written by Dorothy M. Johnson.

Johnson combined a sparse writing style with wonderful characterizations. She was able to give us an effective snapshot of a character and a setting in just a few words, setting up the ensuing story without wasting any words. To a large degree, her Westerns remind me of the best hard-boiled detective stories.

It’s interesting to compare Johnson’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to the movie version. In the film, Jimmy Stewart is a tenderfoot coming west—a man who is convinced that the law (and NOT the gun) is what is needed to bring civilization to the West. But he meets and gets the snot beaten out of him by Liberty Valance, a brutal thug who pretty much everyone in the territory fears.  Even after this, though, Ranse (Stewart’s character) is determined to follow the law and not turn to violence. When he does finally take up a gun, it is only after a long and heartfelt moral struggle.

Interwoven with this is his growing relationship with Hallie (Vera Miles) and his antagonistic “friendship” with Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). All of this plays a part in Ranse’s final confrontation with Liberty.

Director John Ford uses these personal stories to make cogent points about civilization, the use of violence within a civilized society, and tensions between fact and legend.

In the original story, though, Ranse isn’t quite as admirable. He’s coming West after a family argument; his encounter with Liberty makes him want to kill the thug; and his behavior is all carefully calculated to lure Liberty into the town so that Ranse can confront him. This version of Ranse has no qualms about using a gun, though he has no real expectation of winning a fight.

Hallie is still there, as is Bert (the character renamed Tom in the film). The interpersonal relationships between these three is pretty much the same, leading up to a similar ending. Liberty himself is much less visible in the story than in the movie—he no longer represents the savage, uncivilized Wild West, but is simply one man’s personal demon.

So the short story is much more about just the characters and only touches lightly on other themes. It is, therefore, a much smaller story. But NOT smaller in a bad way. It is an engaging and suspenseful tale that surprises you by making you care for an unlikeable protagonist.

That John Ford took the story and built it into something else is fine—since he ended up making a truly classic Western. But this is a case where it’s important not to forget that the short story came first and is a classic in on its own terms.

Dinosaurs vs. Evil Corporation

Quasar was a good character, but also a second-tier hero who never hit the big time. So, even though I know a lot of you reading this are up on your comic history, I'll give a brief "Who the heck is Quasar?" recap.

His real name is Wendell Vaughn and he used to be a security guard at Stark International. When a powerful alien artifact called the Quantum Bands were being studied at a Stark facility, AIM agents tried to steal it. Wendell used the Bands to fight them off, became the hero Quasar, got some training from SHIELD, then became chief of security at Project Pegasus--a government research project looking into alternate energy sources.

Ben Grimm and Quasar worked together during a Marvel Two-in-One story arc set at Project Pegasus, so its no surprise when Quasar asks Ben to accompany him an a raid to break up the organization that had been persistently trying to wreck the project. This brings us to Marvel Two-in-One #73 (March 1981), written by Ralph Macchio and drawn by Ron Wilson.

The bad guys are unpowered mooks, so you would think Ben and Quasar could mop the floor with them pretty easily. But they don't count on the villains having a dimensional projector--sending the heroes on an unplanned vacation to a jungle planet in another dimension--a planet inhabited by cavemen and dinosaurs.

Frankly, I don't know why anyone would have to be forced to visit a planet full of dinosaurs. I don't care what the Jurassic Park franchise has been desperately trying to teach us--if it's got dinosaurs, then, by golly, I'm going.

Well actually, in this case, the planet is spoiled by Roxxon Oil, the Marvel Universe's go-to company whenever they needed an evil corporation. Roxxon has gotten the idea of drilling for oil in other dimensions. By itself, this actually isn't a bad idea. But Roxxon has also enslaved the local cavemen as a source of cheap labor. 

Soon, Ben and Quasar are attacked by hovercraft. Ben is hit with knock-out gas and captured. Quasar manages to hook up with free cavemen, who have learned English from their captors and have gathered an army of dinosaurs to use in their fight for freedom. Quasar soon agrees to help them.

Meanwhile, the head bad guy conveniently explains the entire situation to Ben--a contrived and over-used plot device, but justified in this case because the bad guy wants to bribe Ben into switching sides. Naturally, this does not go well for the villian. Not only does Ben rip his way out of his shackles, but Quasar and his dinosaur/caveman army attacks.

This, of course, is the point of the whole issue. The story is a really good one, well-constructed and making complete sense in the context of a comic book universe. But it was clearly built around the idea of showing us dinosaurs wrecking havoc on puny humans. And I, of course, am fine with that. As the ancient proverb teaches us: If you tire of dinosaurs, you tire of life itself.

I also appreciate a clever plot twist at the end. The leader of the villains gets back to Earth via the dimensional projector and takes the projector with him, apparently leaving the heroes stranded on another world. But Quasar realizes that the oil pipeline also travels between dimensions--that's how Roxxon was getting the oil back to their refineries on Earth. So Quasar fiddles with the controls, redirects the oil into the bad guy headquarters, then forms an energy bubble that allows he and Ben to ride the oil flow back home.


It's a neat twist, adding some more tension to the climax and forcing the heroes to use their brains rather than just punch stuff.

So we have a good story plus dinosaurs wrecking havoc. Why scientists in real life haven't invented dimensional portals, time machines or dinosaur-cloning so that we can see this sort of thing for ourselves is beyond me. It really is.

Next week, we'll find out why its a bad idea to step on an unfamiliar throw-rug.

Cover Cavalcade

I've always preferred Dell/Gold Key's painted covers, but I'm becoming more and more appreciative of their effective photo covers.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Gunsmoke: "Letter of Law" 7/15/56

Matt Dillon believes in the law. But if the law requires him to violate his own conscience--well, that's a line he just won't cross.

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