Captain America (1944)
The best thing you can say about this old-time serial (and to paraphrase that guy from Slap Shot, "piss on old-time serials!) is that you sure do get a lot of serial for your buck. Of course, after sitting through it for about ten minutes, it becomes quite clear that the worst thing you could say about this old-time serial is that you sure do you get a lot of serial for your buck. At 244 minutes, this baby is only four minutes shorter than notoriously long aneurysms like Liz Taylor's Cleopatra. For those of you who don't possess my Rainman-like math skills, 244 minutes is somewhere in the neighborhood of about a week.
Some background on all of this is probably called for since I'm hoping most of my target demo aren't the kind of old (and therefore irrelevant) folks who eat dinner at 3:30, go to bed at 5:00 and drive into crowds of people because the accelerator on their Buick got "stuck". Since we aren't all old and used up and stuff, we weren't around for the heyday of the serial. This was back during the times when pudgy guys could put on cheap costumes, carry pistols and battle a criminal mastermind who worked in a museum and used an undercover shoeshine boy to get the dope on what the good guys were up to and people would go sit through it for fifteen straight weeks.
I guess before every Rob Schneider movie was two hours long, they had to pad out your movie going experience with pre-movie activities like cartoons and these cliffhangers. Broken up into different chapters (usually either 12 or 15) lasting about fifteen minutes each, you'd get a new and exciting adventure each week all following the same format: set up the bad guy's latest scheme, good guys investigate, get into fight, get into another fight, and then face certain death. I'm not sure where the suspense was in any of this except in maybe parts 12 or 15 since you knew from the genre's format there would be another chapter next week. (That and they would always announce the next chapter at the end of the current chapter.)
It was only after watching the first part of this serial that I discovered another irritating gimmick these things employed. At the beginning of the new chapter, they would just replay the last three or four minutes of the previous chapter. This was always some type of climatic, apocalyptic showdown in a barn or paper warehouse or something and I waited breathlessly to see how our hero had escaped the explosion that blew the model house to smithereens. I would watch and say "oh, so Captain America just rolled out of the way of the runaway tractor, or he just ran out of the house before it blew up. How ingenious!"
I quickly grew to love these highlight packages that opened up every new chapter since I could just fast forward them, making the movie only about six days long. I was determined to watch the whole thing though because the back of the videotape box promised that we'd go behind enemy lines, battle the Red Skull and even get some help from Cap's faithful love slave, err, sidekick that is, Bucky Barnes. The Captain America of World War II was the best, battling racially offensive stereotypes of various Axis powers, always having to rescue some gal or Bucky from a weird enemy death machine that usually involved some serious bondage.
The Red Skull was his greatest foe, a creepy-looking thing who was a Nazi henchman that unsurprisingly had a horrific red skull for a head. Cap himself was the ultimate hero, a regular dogface who volunteered to take a little super soldier serum to help out Uncle Sam (the country - not the comic book hero - Uncle Sam appeared in National Comics from Quality, while Cap was a Timely property making a team-up unlikely). Shoot, he even had that way cool shield that he slung around like a really bitchin' Frisbee. What's not to like about Steve Rogers and his Nazi-fighting antics? Nothing of course, except that the losers that made this serial have apparently never heard of Bucky Barnes, the Red Skull or even Steve Rogers!
Instead of saving the free world from the machinations of the Red Skull or some other scourge of war and death, he is reduced to fighting a constipated Lionel Atwill who is still using the same monocle as he did in Son of Frankenstein , though thankfully he has both arms this go round.
That might be okay since Lionel has adopted a supervillainish moniker and calls himself the Scarab. If that conjures images of a guy dressed up as a supercool beetle or something (and you usually think of supercool beetles when think of Cap's greatest battles, right?) you would be wrong. Lionel just calls himself that, like I might call myself the Tapeworm or Susan or one of my other various "clubbing" names.
He does sometimes leave a little scarab collector's broach at the scene of a few of his crimes early on, but that gets pretty expensive and he quits doing that after awhile, resorting to just showing people the broach in his office and putting it back in his desk for later use. The key to success in the supervillain is keeping overhead under control - I mean, Lex Luthor had to try and take over the world just to recoup his investment in all that lab equipment, while someone like Solomon Grundy was content to just rampage through Green Lantern's town periodically, because he lived in a modest swamp.
The other thing you'll notice about the Scarab is that his motives seem to shift to and fro depending on what chapter we're in. Initially, he is intent on getting revenge on all the people that were on some expedition with him because once they got back home he feels like he got the shaft as far as the credit for the discoveries they found. A bit on the whiny side if you ask me, since he still has his easy job directing the Drummond Museum.
In theory, his scheme is quite simple: kill all the showboats that stole the credit that was rightfully his. And he gets a good start by using his purple death drug (has anyone else noticed the odd coincidence that Chapter One of this serial is entitled "The Purple Death" and that Chapter One of Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe is also called "The Purple Death"? I didn't think so.) that hypnotizes people into killing themselves.
For some reason, he abandons this scheme and resorts to increasingly convoluted methods to off his enemies. A standout is of course the infamous "blow gun from the rooftop" assassination attempt on some scientist. It's a one of a kind blowgun that ends up falling into Cap's hands and provides valuable clues about the Scarab, leading one to think that there isn't really enough going on at the museum and that the Scarab is merely concocting these crazy schemes to alleviate his boredom.
Sometimes though, the Scarab seems to lose his focus and abandons his efforts to get revenge on these guys. (There seem to be about a hundred people he's after because he's always killing everyone, but immediately announces he's going after someone else after successfully killing someone. He is so good at wiping these old farts out that he actually starts going after the brother of one of the guys who he hated!)
The he moves on to some scheme where he's trying to steal all these scientific inventions. There's the time he goes after the Electric Fire Bolt. Then you had the time he stole the life restoring machine and brought back to life his second in command. But the best scientific gadget he gets his hands on is the Giant Vibrator! This thing vibrates matter and causes buildings to collapse, but elicits lots of laughs when you here lines like "who told you about my vibrator?" and "with his vibrator, he could bring this city to its knees!" It goes without saying that everyone, especially Captain America's girlfriend Gail, is saddened that the Giant Vibrator was used for evil and ultimately destroyed along with the plans for it.
Girlfriend? Captain America's sidekick is a woman? You are surely wrenching your ugly face into an even uglier expression as you wonder what sort of fruitcake Captain America this movie is trying to pass off on us as the real deal. We all know that any real superhero only pals around with his young teen boy friend who is usually decked out in form fitting spandex tights and is always getting his supple form all tied up by some big, burly bad man in a dungeon.
This movie perverts the whole superhero gig, because this Captain America is a district attorney named Grant Gardner, he has a girlfriend, no shield, shoots bad guys with the pistol he carries in his tights (it's just a snub nose in there - probably a .22 or something, but certainly not like the .44 I pack down there) and no where is young Bucky to be found.
This goon that plays Captain America, Dick Purcell, isn't really the prime physical specimen you would expect in a crime busting superhero, and sports a rather beefy midsection that isn't helped by his tight costume. I don't like to watch a superhero in a fight scene and hope that he doesn't stroke out or something. If you think I'm lying about the importance of conditioning, all you need to know is that Purcell dropped dead of a heart attack the same year this serial was released after playing golf! Golf, I say! And I was supposed to buy that he could survive multiple explosions, being thrown down a mine shaft, falling out of a building, and escape a runaway tractor?
Also, is it just me, or is the reason that most superheroes can fly or swing around on webs or have Batmobiles is that guys in silly-looking costumes look even sillier when they're driving down the road in their Packard?
You're not going to get four hours worth of enjoyment out of this one, even if you're looking for laughable superheroics from an out-of-shape guy with as much personality as the robot truck he hijacks somewhere along the way. Aside from the crappy version of Captain America, the Scarab isn't an interesting or charismatic villain and his various plots grow tiresome after you sit through about four different ones, giving the serial a repetitive and padded feeling, while robbing things of a cohesive story line. Maybe this kind of stuff was tolerable a hundred years ago when you only had to sit through one fifteen minute chunk a week, but watching all of the chapters one right after leaves you feeling you like you had an unwanted run in with the Giant Vibrator.