You have a metropolis menaced by a mysterious, masked
villain called the Black Tiger (in Web,
it’s the Octopus) who seeks to take over all of the city’s industries by
terrorizing its powers-that-be. The hero is a scientist/criminologist
whose secret identity as The Shadow (in Web,
it’s the Spider) gets him in Dutch with both the authorities (who suspect that
he and the Black Tiger are one and the same) and the underworld.
Naturally, to keep tabs on the underworld he must don another disguise (in Web, it’s Blinky McQuade): that of Lin
Chang, an Asian antiquities dealer. (Let me just say that those of you
horrified by Sidney Toler or Peter Lorre’s performances as Asians need to take
a gander at star Victor Jory’s Lin Chang—a character that makes Charlie Chan
and Mr. Moto the very picture of
political correctness.) He is assisted by his confederates, Margo
Lane (played by Veda Ann Borg…who I actually like
in this part, even though I usually associate Borg with floozy roles) and Harry
Vincent, Cranston ’s wheel-man
(played by Roger Moore…and not the one you’re thinking of). If I had to
nitpick, I wished someone had eliminated the Vincent character—popular in the
pulp stories—and substituted Moe “Shreevy” Shrevnitz instead. (“You was
wantin’ somethin’, Mr. Cranston, you was wantin’?”)
However, the major difference between Web and Shadow is that
the latter refuses to take itself too
seriously—the goons working for the Black Tiger are among the most inept
henchmen in serial history, which provides some wonderfully comic moments; my
favorite is in Chapter 9—“The Devil in White”—when the Tiger’s chief henchman,
Flint (played by TDOY fave Jack
Ingram) tells his fellow thugs: “Now listen, men…we’ve got to do something—he’s
really gettin’ mad!” (I know it
doesn’t play funny in print, but Ingram’s performance has a sort of “Will you
guys stop pissing around?” quality to it.) Much has also been said about
the uninventiveness of the cliffhangers, a goodly portion of which consist of
the ceiling falling down on Cranston/Shadow at each episode’s end. Sure,
this is undeniably funny and off-putting to those who shun comedy in
serials…but I like how these events act as violent comic punch lines, similar
to Wile E. Coyote tumbling off a cliff or Daffy Duck getting his face shot off
by Elmer Fudd. By contrast, the thugs in the Spider serials (well, Web,
anyway) are pretty ruthless customers, despite the fact that they can’t seem to
hit the broadside of a barn. (The speculation on this is that the
serial’s producers were ordered to downplay the violence as a result of rulings
by the Hays Office.)
But the strengths of Shadow
are many, chiefly Jory’s performance in the title role. (He not only has
a great voice, he can do the Shadow's laugh...which is more than Orson Welles
could ever do.) Jory was apparently banished to this serial by the studio
for some slight or troublemaking he caused, and it’s a shame that Columbia
didn’t punish him more often because he really grabs hold of the role and
refuses the temptation to do shtick with it (he reminds me a bit of Basil
Rathbone, who would have been the ideal choice to play the Shadow though that
would in all likelihood not have happened). I also like the serial’s
brisk pacing; despite its fifteenth-chapter length it never gets boring (this
might be due to the fact that director Horne would often direct scenes of
people running or driving in slightly sped-up fashion…or as Laughing Gravy so
memorable put it, “People moving as if their asses were on fire”)—and the
effective atmospheric backdrop of a city under siege by sinister forces is
grade-A. Though the identity of the villain is pretty easy to dope out, the
ride there is nothing short of entertaining.
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