Cover Cavalcade

From 1969. The cover is by Jerry Bruck and is apparently a variant of a 1963 Perry Rhodan cover. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Mini-Podcast #11--Tarzan of the Apes Chapter 3--"L...

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Mini-Podcast #11--Tarzan of the Apes Chapter 3--"L...: A discussion of this chapter of the first Tarzan novel, which cover the brief and ultimately tragic life the Greystokes live while stranded ...

Friday's Favorite OTR

Suspense: "I Never Met the Dead Man" 1/5/50

Danny Kaye plays a guy who happens to witness a murder and, despite not knowing the dead man, ends up being the prime suspect.

Click HERE to listen or download.

TWO Tarzans for the Price of One!

Johnny Weissmuller was perfect for the movie version of Tarzan, but outside of that role, it has to be said that he was a little bit on the flat side as an actor. All the same, he always comes across as an amiable guy that you can't help liking.

That's what makes it enjoyable to watch him in the 1946 film Swamp Fire. I have this mental image of a poor, put-upon director tearing his hair out as he shouts "Put at least a LITTLE emotion into the line, Johnny! Please!" But all the same, he's likeable enough to cause you to suspend disbelief and accept him in his role.

His role in Swamp Fire is Johnny Duvall, a former bar pilot coming home to the bayou after serving in the war. Johnny, we learn, had lost a ship and quite a few of his crew in combat and he is struggling with what we would now call PTSD.

What's a bar pilot? The movie is kind enough to provide some opening narration to explain this to us. If you are sailing into New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico, the bar pilot is the guy who comes aboard to guide your ship in and make sure you don't end up stranded on a sand bar.

Johnny doesn't have the confidence to pull this job off any more, so takes a berth on a Coast Guard ship as a deck hand instead. But the captain fakes getting sick to force Johnny to take over as a pilot on an incoming ship--a move that rebuilds his confidence and gets him back into full time work as a bar pilot.

In the meantime, there's a lot of melodrama going on, involving Johnny's sweetheart and a rival who is jealous both of Johnny both because of that sweetheart and because of Johnny's wartime service. There's also a snooty rich girl who sets her eyes on Johnny as well.

The rival, by the way, is played by Buster Crabbe, another former Tarzan. This is only the second time I've seen Crabbe in a straight bad guy role and he does a fine job of building his character up from someone who starts out as self-centered and stubborn to a guy willing to go on a destructive arson-fueled rampage at the movie's conclusion. 

I like Swamp Fire, though I think the melodrama could have been toned down a little to make room for some more action. But in the end, it was a good story and gives us the pleasure of watching two Tarzans fight each other. That is something not to be missed.

As is true with many movies in the public domain, existing prints are of so-so quality. In this case, I think the version on YouTube looks a little better than what you can find on Amazon Prime:

 

Project Pegasus, Part 3

cover art by John Byrne

Marvel Two-in-One #53 (July 1979) was co-written by Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio, two excellent writers who have penned many exciting comic book tales. But this issue, which brings Ben Grimm back to Project Pegasus after a 10-issue absense, sadly lacks excitement.

The art looks great. John Byrne did the breakdowns and Joe Sinnott provided the finished art. But the overall pacing is slow, with a lot of unnecessary filler. I can almost see what the problem was. This is the beginning of a five-issue story arc and they wanted it to end with an effective cliffhanger that will bring us fully into that story, while still providing us with all the exposition we need. 

Jamming all that into 17 pages wasn't easy and the end result isn't completely successful. In fact, I think the issue stumbles right out of the gate, as it takes Ben four pages (nearly a quarter of the story's length) just to get to Pegasus and get through security.

Ben is there, by the way, to do a stint on the Project's security staff, something he's agreed to do so that he can check up on Wundarr, the super-powerful but child-like being that Ben had sort of adopted. 

 

By the time Ben meets Quasar and has a fun-to-watch but ultimately unnecessary fight and by the time Quasar explains his origin, we are halfway through the story. Before we reach the end, another couple of pages will takes us back to New York to watch Thundra (the superstrong woman from another dimension with a cruch on Ben) get involved with a wrestling promoter, though to be fair this is setting up the plot of an upcoming issue and is by itself another fun-to-watch interlude. We also get an update on the still-comatose Wundarr, which also sets up future plot points. 

There's very little that actually moves the plot along. We find out that the Project's security still stinks. For the second time in its short history, one of their scientists is a bad guy. In this case, he's a former bad guy pretending to be a reformed but is really still a bad guy. He launches a plan that involves sending the cyborg assassin Deathlok after Ben. 

This is the third Project Pegasus story I've reviewed and--gee whiz--I've complained about two of them being slow-paced. I really do like this story arc. I really, really do. Despite my criticisms, there are fun moments throughout Marvel Two-in-One #53 and, now that we've got introductions and exposition largely out of the way, the remaining four issues of this story move along at a better pace. 

Also, we get a nifty cross-section view of Project Pegasus in place of the letters page. I love stuff like this.

That's it for now. Next week, we'll visit with the brilliant rabbit Uncle Wiggly as he goes on a epic quest to recover stolen piggy banks. 

Mini-Podcast #10: Tarzan of the Apes, Chapter 2--"The Savage Home"

Tim DeForest discusses the second chapter of the 1912 novel "Tarzan of the Apes," in which Lord and Lady Greystoke find themselves stranded in the African jungle.

You can listen or download HERE. 

And here's the video version:

Cover Cavalcade

A Rudolph Belarski cover from 1950. Wearing Blue with a Tommy Gun is a bold fashion statement, but I think she pulls it off. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Saint: "Shipboard Mystery" 3/11/51

While investigating one crime, Simon has a run-in with a thug who thinks he's investigating another crime entirely.

Click HERE to listen or download.

The Beaver's Dad Turns EVIL!!!!

When an actor is enshrined in our consciousness for a particular role, it can actually make it more entertaining to see him play an entirely different type of character. This is especially true for actors who play absolutely likeable characters in their signature roles. For instance, it's always entertaining to see the Professor from Gilligan's island play a bad guy. 

We run across this phenomonon again in the 1948 film noir Money Madness, in which Ward Cleaver, the Beaver's wise father (Hugh Beaumont), plays a crook who is guilty of armed robbery and murder and might just be a little bit on the crazy side as well.

The movie starts a little awkwardly, with a courtroom scene that takes us a few minutes to realize is a flash forward showing us the eventual fate of the woman with whom Beaumont's character becomes involved. Then we jump back to his arrival in town by bus.

Beaumont is playing Steve Grant--though we eventually realize that's not his real name. He's got 200 grand in ill-gotten gain stuffed in his suitcase. He's soon transferred this to a safe deposit box. He's unwilling to start spending it too soon and drawing unwanted police attention to him. He takes a job as a cab driver for the time being.

We know that Grant is a crook, but we quickly get evidence that seems to indicate he might have a good side to him. He helps out Julie Saunders (played by Francis Rafferty) when the jerk she's on a date with gets too fresh. He and Julie soon hit it off. Julie, though, is living with her bitter and perpetually angry aunt, which makes her social life awkward.

Grant and Julie soon elope. Gee, maybe he really is a nice guy.

No, he's not. Though in his own twisted way, he has some feeling for Julie (though this is more of a sense of possesiveness than anything resembling real love), everything he's doing is part of a plan. He poisons the aunt, making sure it looks as if Julie was in on it if anyone gets suspicious. Then he plants the 200 grand in a trunk in the attic of the aunt's house. The doctor misses the fact that she was poisoned (she was old and sickly, so no one thinks to look that closely) and it is assumed that she was an eccentric who hid her fortune in the attic rather than trust a bank. Once the probate clears, Grant and Julie will be rich. 

The scene in which Julie finds out what Grant is doing is particularly well-played by Beaumont. It's here that his brutal and manipulative side begins to show as he both terrifies her and convinces her that she's trapped. She's got to go along with him or she'll also go up for murder. 

Of course, since this story is set in the universe of Film Noir, things start to go wrong. Julie is trying to overcome her fear and tell her lawyer what's going on. Grant is suspicious of her and jealous of the lawyer, who doesn't know Julie is married and obviously likes her. And an old partner-in-crime is looking for Grant with the intention of getting a share of the money. All this comes together to eventually bring everything crashing down. 

The plot is a bit thin, but Beaumont's performance as the villain brings it to life and makes it work. This is a Poverty Row film, but like many such films, it gives us a well-told story and generally does a good job of hiding its low budget.

Amazon Prime has the best looking print, though this never restored film does look a bit shabby after more than 70 decades. Here it is on YouTube:

Cave Girl--Story #3

We've reached the third story in Cave Girl's premiere issue (#11--1953) and, by golly, we discover that Cave Girl is too darn pretty for her own good!

In the previous story, Cave Girl discovered she didn't care for civilization, so she's heading home. Along the way, she pauses to save Alan Brandon, a rich big-game hunter, from a leopard.

Brandon is immediately enamored of the young lady. This, by itself, is understandable. What man wouldn't immediately fall for a beautiful woman who defeats a leopard in hand-to-hand combat to save his life. Heck, that's exactly how I met Angela.

But Alan is a bit too forward in expressing his admiration, so Cave Girl dumps him in a puddle, forgets about him and continues home.

Alan, though, refuses to give up. He trails Cave Girl, which isn't that hard since she leaves a trail of dead animals behind her after killing them in self-defense.

By now, its obvious that writer Gardner Fox and artist Bob Powell are having fun with the Jungle Girl genre, deliberately going over-the-top with the action. But at the same time, Powell draws the action in a truly exciting way. Cave Girl, I think, walks a nice line between being a parody and a straight-forward adventure story. It works on both levels.

Anyway, when Cave Girl twists her ankle, Alan is able to catch up with her and save her from a leopard. It's a hard day for leopards in the jungle. 

Sadly, at this point, he loses all his Man Points by going into Completely Despicable Mode. He's decided that he's gonna marry Cave Girl whether she wants to or not and takes her prisoner. But she manages to chew through her bonds during the night and get away.

When a frantic Alan runs into Luke Hardin, Hardin says he ought to horsewhip him, but unfortunaely fails to follow through. After all, Cave Girl's beauty would twitter-pate any man!

Even by 1953 standards, Alan really does deserve a horse-whipping. But I think his instant obsession with Cave Girl is intended to be another over-the-top parody and it can be looked at on that level. In either case, we have one more story in this issue before we say goodbye to Cave Girl, so we'll see if Alan can do anything to redeem himself. 

You can read this issue online HERE. 

Next week, we'll head back to Project Pegasus.