MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*
Without getting into my phenomenality-categories first this time, the greatest significance of this well-wrought Republic chapterplay is that it's the last of a half dozen sound serials to star, or co-star, a female with combative abilities. This leaves out assorted works in which female support-characters may be able to shoot a little, or one later serial that substantially re-uses most of its action-sequences from one of the earlier six.
DAUGHTER's title was probably a toss-off reference to the Douglas Fairbanks Sr silent movie DON Q SON OF ZORRO, but only because the two narratives share adventurous content, not any story elements-- and both may have been distantly indebted to Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE, even though that story was all about invalidating tales of derring-do. Story-wise, DAUGHTER sounds like some of the silent serials in which some evildoer sought to deprive a rightful heiress of her inheritance. I don't know how many of those old serials showed the heiress fighting off thugs with jui-jitsu, though.
In contrast to the majority of serials, the primary evildoer, one Manning, exists just to get the ball rolling. He learns of the existence of a land grant that was bequeathed to assorted parties, but Manning's the only one who knows of it. Thus, if he hires a gang of thugs to kill off the other heirs, while making the deaths look accidental, Manning claims all the property. However, the lion's share of villainy falls to the hired killers, led by Roy Barcroft of PURPLE MONSTER fame. The murderers succeed in knocking off one or two heirs, but their scheme goes awry when they go after the judo-skilled Dolores Quintero (Adrian Booth). One might think that Manning's plan to make all the deaths look accidental is ruined as soon as Dolores and her reporter-pal Cliff (Kirk Alyn) tell the cops of the organized attempt(s) on Dolores' life. But maybe Barcroft's just one of those guys who never read his Santayana.
Alyn and Booth (the latter under the former billing Lorna Gray) already had assorted serial roles under their belts, with Gray/Booth still renowned as lead villain Vultura in PERILS OF NYOKA, while Alyn's big roles as Superman and Blackhawk were yet to come. But the leads play off one another well and are given good dialogue and bracing action-scenes. The uncanny phenomenality only appears in two of the assassins' attempts to "covertly" knock off Dolores. In one chapter, the thugs take the captured heroine to a closed fishing-shop and set Dolores up to get impaled by a harpoon-- supposedly the contrivance of the Mafia or something. In another chapter, one of the thugs dons a museum's suit-of-armor and attacks Cliff-- and the armored crook is somehow able to defy Cliff's pistol, though in real life medieval armor could not repel bullets. In both of these peculiar stratagems-- which are weird enough to fall into the uncanny domain-- the villains don't create their own odd weapons, but just "find" them. Still, there are some serials in which costumed villains steal their only super-weapons from good-hearted inventors and put those powers to evil usage-- and if I'm going to credit those malcontents with possession of a death-ray as part of their repertoire, then I guess I can also credit Manning's mooks as having bulletproof armor in their arsenal.
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