646f9e108c A mysterious detective called The Masked Marvel battles Japanese saboteurs intent on blowing up America. Warrwen Hamilton and Martin Crane, chief executives if the World-Wide Insurance Company, enlist the aid of the Masked Marvel to find Mura Sakima, a former Japanese envoy, whom they suspect of being responsible for extensive sabotage of war industries. But CRane is secretly in league with Sakima, and they arrange for Hamilton&#39;s murder. The murdered man&#39;s daughter, Alice, joins the Masked Marvel and his three aides in a campaign to expose and apprehend Sakima. The Masked Marvel is one of four men - Bob Barton, Frank Jeffers, Terry Morton and Jim Arnold; he hides his identity beneath a black mask and only Alice knows he is one of the four investigators. In 1966 or so during the &quot;camp&quot;craze, the 1943 Columbia serial of &quot;Batman&quot; was released to ride the publicity generated by the Batman-TV program. (As an aside,a True Believer I quickly tired of that program, haven&#39;t watched it since) Republic edited several of its much better made serials into 2 hour or so movies, sold them in syndication. Among the ones I remember were &quot;Fighting Devil Dogs&quot;, &quot;The Invisible Monster&quot;, &quot;Manhunt of Mystery Island&quot; and of course &quot;The Masked Marvel&quot; My mother joked that the actors hats seemed to be stapled to their heads, I later learned that they wore elastic bands so you couldn&#39;t tell it was a stuntman and not an actor, if in a fight scene one of the performers&#39; hat came off he was a stuntman all along. Sort of a screen convention of the time. That said, this is one of the best wartime serials, I occasionally needed an adult to explain some of the wartime reference-the gas rationing stamps that the Marvel uses to track down Mace&#39;s car, e.g.<br/><br/>One sad bit of trivia, in Chapter One the actor David Bacon looks at a secret message dated September 13, 1943, he was murdered on September 13, 1943. This serial has a number of good moments and will be fun and enjoyable for serial fans but is not representative of the usually high quality for Republic serials of this era. First, the good things: <br/><br/>1. The fights and stunts, the efforts of Republic&#39;s cadre of expert stuntmen and fight choreographers, are all up the usual high standard for this studio.<br/><br/>2. The action and plot are fast moving, and the WWII background and references are interesting.<br/><br/>3. The cliff hangers and escapes are good.<br/><br/>4. Louise Currie playing Alice Hamilton, the plucky heroine whose father was murdered by the Axis spy ring. Ms. Currie was a good actress who never gained the fame she deserved, but did added a lot of class to this serial, and of course, the excellent &#39;Adventures of Captain Marvel&#39;(1941). She is quite appealingwellvaliant in both of these serials, especially the &#39;Masked Marvel,&#39; where she puts herself in mortal peril by going undercover, holds thugs at bay with a rifle, and escapes at least 2 death traps by herself, with no help from the eponymous hero.<br/><br/>5. The villains and thugs are pretty good actors. Of note is veteran character actor Johnny Arthur, playing the master villain Sakima. Mr. Arthur&#39;s performance is, overall, skilled and competent, and he seems sufficiently evil (though not nearlyevilMing the Merciless from &#39;Flash Gordon&#39; or &#39;Dr. Daka&#39; from the 1943 &#39;Batman&#39;). Note however, that like every other U.S. portrayal of a Japanese person from this period, racism is a huge factor.<br/><br/>ButmuchJohnny Arthur is an asset, he is also a problem. That is because Mr. Arthur is going to be immediately recognizablethe actor who played the comic foil to the Little Rascals in a couple of the funniest &#39;Our Gang&#39; comedies (he played Darla&#39;s father, Mr. Hood). Once an actor has been vanquished by Buckwheat and Alfalfa, it is hard believe he is a serious menace to our heroes. Mr. Arthur specialized in playing finicky, effeminate characters, and you get this sense that underneath the evil, Sakima is really just a sissy. This impression is reinforced when Sakima finds out that the Masked Marvel has discovered his hideout: Sakima pauses to pack his things! <br/><br/>Other problems: <br/><br/>1. The running gimmick, that the audience doesn&#39;t know who the real Marvel is, means that you can&#39;t imagine the man behind the Mask. The Marvel has comparatively few lines, is never photographed in close up, and never sticks around very long, so you really don&#39;t ever start rooting for him very much.<br/><br/>2. The 4 insurance dicks, one of whom is secretly the Marvel, never say enough lines, do enough or have enough close ups for the audience to want to root for any of them too much. One of the insurance dicks, David Bacon, is so wooden that Howard Hughes could have built a seaplane out of him. (Unfortunately, poor Mr. Bacon was murdered about a week after shooting on this serial wrapped. The crime was never solved!) <br/><br/>3. The direction shows a profound lack of imagination and only the most primitive understanding of the principles of cinema. While having access to one of the best stunt and fight crews in the world, it seldom occurs to the director to try different camera positions in the fights, and there are only 2 medium close up shots of the Masked Marvel&#39;s face in any of the fight scenes. It&#39;s too bad, because the Mask has a striking dramatic effect, one that would make the Marvel appear more formidable. You know, strike terror into the hearts of evildoers. But no, that seems never to occur to director Spencer Bennett, best known for his work making lousy postwar Columbia serials. How bad a director was Mr. Bennet? Based on the 3 Bennett serials I&#39;ve seen, I&#39;d say he was about ½ step above shooting Mexican porno movies in the desert. But who knows, maybe he actually did some Mexican porn As I said, this is worthwhile to the serial fan, but there are many other serials you should see before this.
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