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Directors: Elmer Clifton, John English
Writers: Royal K. Cole, Ronald Davidson, Basil Dickey, Jesse Duffy, Harry L. Fraser, Grant Nelson, Joseph F. Poland
Cast: Dick Purcell, Lorna Gray, Lionel Atwill
Runtime: 244 mins. (25 min. premier and fourteen 15 min. episodes)
1944
The first and most perplexing thing to note about the 1944 Captain America serial is that it has absolutely nothing to do with Captain America. When I learned about the serial's existence, I was fully anticipating a propaganda-heavy war story, especially considering the time in which it was made and released. Instead, we get the story of Grant Gardner, a District Attorney who occasionally dresses up in a red white and blue costume to fight bad guys. Sometimes he doesn't dress up though, and it's just Grant Gardner fighting them. Also, Captain America doesn't have a shield and just wastes people with his pistol. Seriously, Gardner and Captain America rack up quite an impressive body count over the course of this serial, a fact that none of the authorities seem at all concerned about.
To top it all off, Captain America doesn't seem to have any powers, and, hilariously, he just drives around in a regular car. Unsurprisingly, Timely Comics (to become Marvel Comics in the 1960s) was unhappy with Republic's blatant gutting of their character, but Republic's response was basically, "None of that stuff was in the sample pages you sent us, plus we're in production already." Film historians think Republic just pasted the Captain America likeness over a pre-existing project they had in the pipe. Thus Captain America's first onscreen appearance is aggressively non-canonical.
That doesn't make it bad, though. The serial follows Captain America's pursuit of mysterious criminal The Scarab over a 25-minute premier and fourteen 15-minute episodes. In classic cliffhanger serial fashion, each episode ends with Cap in grave danger, to be resolved in the next chapter. These serials are considered to be cinema, but structurally they're really more like proto-television.
The initial thing that struck me about Captain America was the extreme economy of storytelling. The story opens with a rapid fire montage of The Scarab's victims somehow being hypnotized into killing themselves. The lickety split editing and simple, naked exposition feel revelatory in our time of operatic garbage bin blockbusters. The stakes are set, the admittedly thin characters established, and the plot is off to the races. Of course, this sort of stripped down urgency is required when you're trying to stuff a couple hefty action sequences and some plot movement into fifteen minutes, three of which are dedicated to recap.
The characters are unabashedly flat, and you can hardly blame them for it. A serial is supposed to deliver on the same exact thrills every week: familiar heroes and whizz bang action. Captain America does so with zest. Everyone in the show is likable enough, and Lionel Atwill is operating at peak camp as The Scarab, sinister monocle and all. His first evil plan revolves around a device called the Dynamic Vibrator (no joke) that can vibrate at a frequency that will crumble the foundation of any structure.
Garner's secretary, Gail Richards (Lorna Gray) gets damselled on occasion, but she actually acquits herself quite well as a thoughtful and productive member of the team. She's kind of a badass, even getting to waste a few thugs of her own.
Regarding the action, it's great fun to go back to the source and see the genre that Adam West's Batman lampooned so well. The fight choreography is delightful, with people tumbling about and throwing crates at each other. Captain America sets up its tension with a precise sort of whimsy. Cap must beat up a couple of thugs in order to save the people locked in the closet before the timer ticks down and the whole place explodes. It's simple and effective.
Unfortunately, that's also Captain America's greatest shortcoming, at least from a contemporary perspective. It's repetitive as all hell. Once you get a few episodes in, it's as if they're fresh out of new premises, so they just toss a new coat of pain on the same idea. Captain America always ends up fighting two thugs, no more no less. If it's not a fistfight, it's a shootout that also play out identically to every other shootout. Meanwhile, there is always some sort of ridiculous dial counting down to an explosion that will put somebody in danger. The dial could be on a machine, or a bomb, or a car, or an airplane, but make no mistake--it will always explode when the indicator makes its way to the end. Finally, it is always the case that Captain America will appear to die in the explosion, but only in the next episode do we see that he actually jumped out of a window just in time to survive. This is the worst kind of cheating-with-editing, and is only excusable when you keep in mind that a week is supposed to pass in between each chapter. Time enough to forget.
I'm not well-versed in serials, but some people call Captain America the pinnacle of its genre. I can buy that. Republic broke the bank with this one, their most expensive serial. They also broke their star; Dick Purcell collapsed and died weeks after filming completed, likely due to overexertion. The filmmakers may not have cared one bit about Captain America as a character, but they put a lot of effort into squeezing the most pizzazz they could out of this story. I wouldn't recommend watching too far past the first episode, though. This may be the pinnacle of its genre, but sometimes it's for the best when genres descend into obscurity.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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