Hey, Isn't He Cheating?

It Happens Every Spring (1949) is a great movie to watch at the beginning of the baseball season. It's a funny, charming and completely unpretentious film that mixes a little bit of slapstick with a lot of clever, dialogue-driven comedy.

It stars Ray Milland as a mild-mannered college professor who is in love with the college president's beautiful daughter (Jean Peters). He doesn't make enough money to marry her. But when a foul ball from a nearby baseball diamond crashes into his lab and smashes his latest experiment, he ends up with a solution that repels wood. That means if you rub it on a baseball, the ball would loop around a baseball bat.

Milland is a baseball fan (which proves he's pretty smart), so he comes up with a plan to make money. He'll try out as a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, keep a small piece of felt coated with the solution in his mitt and pitch balls that literally cannot be hit.

Both the owner and the manager think he's just a nut when he shows up at the stadium, but he manages to annoy them both enough to get a tryout just so they can watch him make a fool out of himself. But, to their surprise, he consistently strikes people out.

From there, the movie draws comedy from several situations: his growing friendship with his catcher (Paul Douglas); his desire to keep his new career as a pitcher a secret (he's working on the assumption that it would bring shame to the science department at the college); and his girlfriend's growing conviction--drawn from several misunderstandings--that he's become a gangster.  It's great comedy.

But the movie also shows how a work of fiction can--on occassion--blissfully ignore some problems with the logic of its plot. For instance, Milland has a pitch that can't be hit. He's shown to be winning consistently and becoming a national star, which is fine. But shouldn't his fame be even greater? Shouldn't the solution on the ball mean he's pitching no-hit shutouts with 27 strike outs every single time?  He probably walked a few guys, but all he really had to do was lob the ball into the strike zone three times for every batter. No one mentions his stats, but this is something that should have been impossible to ignore.

Perhaps more importantly, Milland is cheating by coating the ball with a foreign substance. He's throwing the world's most effective spitball. Even if he's never caught in-universe, shouldn't our attitude about him be tarnished by this?

But we like him just fine. It Happens Every Spring is a perfect example of how ambiance, humor and the likability of the characters allows us to overlook logical holes in the plot. The problems I detail in the above two paragraphs really aren't problems at all. Even if we think about them while watching the movie, it really won't bother us. The movie exists in a world where coating a baseball with a secret scientific formula doesn't constitute cheating. And that's just fine. It's too funny and just too darn pleasant to allow us to worry about such things.

From Prose to Radio to Comics

Tarzan first appeared in the pulp magazines in 1912, but his enormous popularity soon had him spilling off the page into film and radio. In 1934 and again in 1936, there were two 39-part syndicated radio serials produced that were nothing less than superb, telling excellent stories and capturing the Ape Man's personality perfectly. 

{For more detailed information on these serials, check out the chapter about Tarzan in my book Radio by the Book or read this article I wrote a few years ago.}

The 1936 serial was Tarzan and the Fires of Tohr. And, since Tarzan's wanderlust is insatiable, he soon wandered off the airways and onto the pages of Dell Comics' Four Color, bringing the Fires of Tohr with him. 

Four Color #161 (writer unknown, cover and interior art by Jesse Marsh) is a 30-page streamlined version of the radio serial. The story is greatly simplified, with several characters and sub-plots dropped, but what is left is a strong, entertaining and exciting Tarzan adventure. 

Tarzan and his friend Paul D'Arnot are travelling through the jungle when they find two people--a scientist and his daughter--lost after having been abandoned by their safari. Tarzan agrees to help them, which soon means protecting them from some hostile natives.

Jesse Marsh has never been my favorite Tarzan artists--I don't think his figure work is as strong
as Kubert or Manning--but he was an excellent visual storyteller all the same, with strong compositions and some beautiful-looking jungles and backgrounds. So his art quickly draws us into the story and carries us along quite nicely.

The escape from the natives via canoe eventually takes them through a cavern and into completely unknown territory. And.... well, Tarzan can't run out to the corner store to buy a newspaper without stumbling across a lost civilization. So it should be no surprise to anyone that he finds a lost civilization here. The natives are claw-footed and, for reasons we are never told, speak English.

To be fair, the justification given in the original radio serial was pretty weak, so this is a flaw in an otherwise strong story that has simply carried over from the source material.

The natives come from the city of Tohr, which is ruled by the evil queen Ahtea. Ahtea soon demonstrates her penchant for evil by sacrificing someone to the titular fires of Tohr.

So Tohr is not a healthy place to be. Ahtea, though, wants to make a deal. If Tarzan stays in Tohr as her mate, the others will be allowed to leave. Tarzan is willing to agree to this if it saves the others, but his companions refuse. Even if they were willing to agree to this deal themselves, they figure Ahtea would simply have them killed regardless.

They are likely correct about this, because Ahtea abruptly tosses Ruth Barton (the girl Tarzan had initially rescued) into an arena to be devoured by a hungry lion. Tarzan kills the lion and the incident allows them to befriend Ukah, a rebel leader.

The group, now joined by Ukah, is locked in a vast cavern that supposedly offers no escape. Tarzan, though, soon finds a way out, though it leads them through a chamber in which the Fires of Tohr originate. This sequence is especially riveting, as it involves Tarzan using his intelligence as well as his physical capabilities to bypass several dangers to get his friends back into the city.

But once in the city, they are recaptured. Ruth is about to be tossed into the Fires. Ukah manages to push Ruth to safety and it is Ahtea who falls to a horrible death.

It's a strong ending. Ukah was actually going to sacrifice himself to get Ahtea, but is dragged to safety by Tarzan in the nick of time. It was a nice touch to give the local rebel leader a chance to be proactive in the story rather than having all the action fall solely on Tarzan's shoulder.

For all my complaints about Marsh's figure work, much of this story looks magnificent, especially the sequence set in the caverns below Tohr. The story, though simplified from the original serial, is still a strong one. So both the radio version and the comic book version of The Fires of Tohr have their value.

Next week, we'll return to the Old West to ride again with the Pony Express.

Cover Cavalcade

A Curt Swan cover from 1961. I want one of these as a pet.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Favorite Story: "Tom Sawyer" 6/19/48

A fun adaptation of the Injun Joe portion of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Click HERE to listen or download.

A Quick Trip to a Really Weird Underworld

Read/Watch 'em In Order #102

The October 1938 issue of Weird Tales brought us the third (and penultimate) story about Elak of Atlantis, written by Henry Kuttner. As with the previous Elak story, this one snagged a cover illustration. Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, must have liked these stories. Or at least felt that the vivid and unusually imagery in the stories made for great illustrations.

In "Beyond the Phoenix," Elak and his perpetually drunken sidekick Lycon are working as bodyguards for the king of the city of Sarhaddon. A wizard named Xandar lures them away from the king before sending in a team of assassins. Xandar wants to usurp the throne, release an ancient evil being named Baal-Yagoth and spend his time on the throne torturing people. Xandar is not a nice person.

The king is killed and Elak, Lycon and the king's beautiful daughter have to make a quick getaway on the king's funeral barge. The barge, though, does a bit more than simply travel over water. It's designed to take dead kings back to the land of the Phoenix from which legends say the first king of Sarhaddon came.

So Elak and his allies end up in a very, very strange place, where two powerful maybe-humans are locked in a power struggle, with one of them allying herself with Xandar to release Ball-Yagoth upon the world. Elak is pretty much drafted to help stop this, so he'll have his work cut out for him.

The Elak of Atlantis stories continue to be good, with vivid prose carrying us along through clever and unusual plots. This one is a bit weaker than the first two--it ends a little to abruptly and Elak doesn't get to be as proactive as a hero in a sword-and-sorcery tale should be. At key moments, he's simply being ordered or compelled to take action by a god. Because of this, he's simply not as cool as he was in the first two tales. But this criticism is subjective--if taken on its own without direct comparison to the previous tales, it is entertaining.

We'll see how Elak does in the last story from this series.

Tales of the Pony Express, Part 1

cover art by Sam Savitt

The Pony Express didn't last long. Operating from April 1860 to October 1861, it soon disappeared when intercontinental telegraph lines were strung.

But while it lasted, it served a real purpose, getting letters, messages and newspapers from one coast to another in just 10 days. Buffalo Bill Cody (before he was Buffalo Bill) was an Express rider.

After it faded away, the Pony Express became a part of the romantized history of the Wild West. It's not surprising that when Westerns were at the top of the popular culture pyramid, stories about the Pony Express made their way to various media, including comic books.

Four Color #829 (August 1957) was Dell Comics' attempt to introduce a Pony Express character as a regular character in their line. Like Indian scouts Lee Hunter and Reb Stuart, whose adventures first appeared in Four Color that same year, Pony Express rider Craig Garrett didn't catch on sufficiently to get his own title, but appeared in a total of four stories contained in two issues of Four Color before fading away into Pop Culture Limbo.

We'll take a look at all four of Craig's stories over the course of the next month or two. As usual, I'll alternate these with other comic book reviews to maintain variety.

Both the stories appearing in FC #829 are tentatively credited to Dan Spiegle and it does look like his work to me. The writer is uncredited.

Craig's premiere adventure is "A Letter from Lincoln." The story is actually a bit contrived in setting up its premise, since it involves incredibly poor planning on someone's part.

Way out in Nevada, war between settlers and the Paiute tribe seems inimate. When a calvary officer is seen talking to the Paiute troops, the local commander assumes he's a traitor.

The officer explains that he's on a secret mission from President Lincoln to negotiate a peace. But the only other person who can confirm his story was recently killed. So the poor guy is sentenced to be executed by firing squad.

That really is contrived. Why an attempt to make peace is something you would keep secret from the local military commander is unexplained and inexplicable.

But if you just go with this, the rest of the story is excellent. There are no telegraph lines in place to the fort yet, so by the time word gets back to Lincoln, there's only a week left before the execution. But it's normall a nine-day trip to get a message back. Someone needs to ride like the wind and cut two days off that record.

And so we are introduced to Craig Garrett, one of the Pony Express' best riders. He takes the challenge and we are treated to several pages of an exciting and beautifully illustrated montage of Craig's lightning ride across the continent.

But when he is approaching his goal, things start to go wrong. His horse goes lame and he's soon captured by the Paiutes. But here we learn that Craig is as quick a thinker as he is a rider. Employing some off-the-cuff diplomancy, he gets the Indians to release him AND give him a fresh horse. He arrives at the fort in the nick of time to stop the execution and peace with the Paiutes is soon negotiated.

Despite the contrivance necessary to get the story started, "A Letter from Lincoln" is a strong start for Craig Garrett's all-too-brief comic book career. The art is excellent. The exchange of dialogue between Craig and the Paiute chief is effectively and realistically written. The last-minute reprieve regarding the execution might be cliched, but it is well-paced and well-drawn.

You can read this issue online HERE.

We'll return to Craig in a couple of weeks. Next week, we'll jump over to Africa for a visit with Tarzan in a story adapted from a radio serial.

Cover Cavalcade

Nifty cover from 1953. The artist is unknown.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Dragnet: "The Big Quack" 10/12/50

Friday goes after a "doctor" who splits his time between offering fake degrees in psychology and simply robbing his students.

Click HERE to listen or download.

"If I hadn't got shot, I wonder if I'd stuck around."

My favorite TV series is Combat!, so one of the reasons I wanted to watch the 1961 b-movie The Cat Burglar when I saw it available on Amazon Prime was that it starred Jack Hogan, who played the sometimes goldbrick Kirby on that series. He was one of a group of skilled character actors that helped make Combat! the classic it is. 

In Combat!, he played a guy who had grown up in a rough neighborhood, but eventually learned to be a fairly decent human being. We can assume that Jack Coley, the guy he plays in this movie, also grew up in a rough neighborhood. He's still living in that neighborhood, staying in a fleabag motel while scrapping out a living by robbing apartments.

His last score looks like it will barely net him enough to pay his $9/week rent. Certainly the notebook he took, containing nothing but numbers and drawings, isn't worth anything. He uses a few pages from that to prop up the leg of a wobbly dresser, then tosses away the rest.

Well, that might have been a mistake. It turns out the papers contain a valuable secret formula recently acquired by enemy spies. The spies, naturally, want the formula back.

Jack stole the notebook from the lovely Nan Baker (June Kennedy), who actually isn't a spy herself. Her boyfriend is, though, and he was using her as an unwitting mule to bring the papers into the city. When she tells him about the theft, he tells her the papers contain sensitive business contracts for one of his clients. He puts her to work trying to track them down without involving the police.

This drops her into a sleazy world of sleazier informants and even the world's sleaziest pawnbroker. This eventually brings her to Jack, who tries to pawn a fake notebook off on her. Remember, he thinks the real thing went out with the trash. Actually, though, they ended up lining his landlady's cat box. The papers are now kind of smelly, but they are still valuable.

Jack, by now, has been beaten up by the spies and the pawn broker he worked with has been murdered. He has realized what the papers must be and tries to sell them back, using Nan as a go-between. But Nan is slowly realizing that her boyfriend is a fink and to also realize what the papers are. She wants to do the right thing. Jack wants to get some quick cash and not get killed.

Everything comes to a head in an abandoned warehouse, where Jack takes a bullet wound, but then suddenly finds himself in a position to do something heroic for the first time in his otherwise rotten life.

The movie has its flaws. Most notably, the initially cool-sounding jazz score gets repetitive over the movie's relatively short run time.

But I still like it and recommend it. It has some nice visual moments, especially while Jack is pulling off his burglary during the opening credits. The plot takes some fun twists and turns, while Hogan brings a sense of humanity to his role--Jack is mostly a rotten person, but he has a few flashes of conscience over the course of the story that give the decisions he makes at the climax some sincerity. This is helped by the fact that to a large degree, he's forced into the role of hero and might still have looked out only for himself if he'd been able to. Both we and Jack will always wonder what he would have done if he'd had more options.

Nan's boyfriend is another good character. He's using her, but there are hints that he might actually care for her--feelings that affect his actions in important ways when he too ends up in that warehouse.

It's a minor point, but I appreciate that the number of bullets fired from revolvers is kept to six apiece in the final confrontation and that this plays a role in the outcome.

I had originally posted a link to the movie on YouTube, but that has sadly vanished. If you have Amazon Prime, it is available there.

Superman is Pretty Smart, Isn't He?

When I was a wee little one, my superhero reading was set largely within the Marvel Universe. I loved the DC war comics, Kamandi and a few other DC offerings, but I only occasionally picked up one of their hero books. I always enjoyed them when I did read them, but it was Spider Man and Captain America who regularly took my 20, 30 or 40 cents from me.

Superman the Movie changed that, with Christopher Reeve's spot-on portrayal of Clark/Superman giving me a better appreciation of the Man of Steel and bringing me more regularly into the DC Universe. So I have a particular soft spot in my heart for Action Comics #493 (March 1979), the first Superman comic I bought and read after seeing the movie.

If I look at the story objectively (or as objectively as I can), I think I can honestly say the story is a pretty good one. UFOs, protected by a light so intense that not even Supes' supervision can penetrate it, have been buzzing Metropolis. They always fly off very quickly and don't seem to be doing any harm, though.

But Clark is soon distracted from this when Jimmy Olsen keels over from a bad case of the flu. He'll be all right, but he needs Clark to fill in for him on an assignment--an interview with a reclusive millionaire named Corliss. Jimmy even gives Clark his Superman signal-watch in case Clark gets into trouble.

But it's Superman, not Clark, who meets Corliss first, saving the millionaire from an attack by an alien probe.

Superman wrecks the probe, then shows up as Clark to conduct the interview (intending to study the remnants of the probe later). But IT'S A TRAP! Corliss is an alien. His plan had been to lure Superman to him by holding Jimmy hostage, but having Superman come personally (Corliss is telepathic, so secret identies don't work with him) is much more convenient.

Corliss' TV is actually an interdimensional portal, which sucks Kalel into a reality in which he's unable to focus his thoughts coherently enough to escape.

Corliss then conveniently explains his mission. And its a mission that makes sense within the tenants of Comic Book Logic. He's an advance scout for an alien invasion fleet. The "UFOs" are actually coded messages he's sending back to the fleet, while the probe that had been "attacking" him was actually just delivering a return message. Now that Superman is out of the way, the fleet will be given orders to attack.

None of the other superheros who pretty much litter the landscape of the DC Universe are mentioned, but that's okay. Superman is on the top of the Most Powerful Hero heap, so getting rid of him would make things significantly easier. And maybe Corliss has a plot in the works to get rid of Supergirl, Wonder Woman and a few other super-powerful heroes. Remember that Power Girl and Captain Marvel lived in different dimensions at that time, so they wouldn't have been a concern.

But what makes scene unintentionally hilarious is that the well-used cliche of having the villain conveniently explain the plot to the apparently-doomed hero is taken to a new level. Corliss had apparently prepared visual aids in advance to help him explain precisely what he's up to. He actually had a picture of the UFO signals just sitting there waiting for this moment. Gee whiz.

Anyway, remembet that Superman was wearing Jimmy's signal-watch. This proves to be a life-saver, as he uses the sound to help him mentally focus long enough to escape the dimension. He captures Corliss, instantly memorizes the alien code being used to send messages, then reprograms the signal lights with his X-Ray vision to tell the invasion fleet to go away.

I like this ending, which reminds us that Superman is pretty darn smart and able to improvise a clever plan, using his powers in concert with his intelligence.

So, yes, the "villain explaining his plan" sequence is silly and I admit that my nostalgic attachment to this issue makes me like it more than I might otherwise. But it really is a pretty good story with some clever elements to the plot. Written by Cary Bates and drawn by Curt Swan, Action Comics #493 was a pleasant window for me to enter more regularly into the DC Universe.

Next week, it's back to the Wild West as we ride along with the Pony Express.