THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though famed animation director Don Bluth got his start working on classic Disney cartoon-features, most of his independent works seemed to attempt to outdo Disney in the sentimentality department. Bluth was not alone in this reaction to the Disney corpus. In the book SEVEN MINTES author Norman Klein asserts that during Disney’s heyday in the 1940s many animated shorts of the period emulated what their creators assumed to be the appeal of Disney cartoons: lots of ootsy-cutesy critters. Those cartoon-makers often missed the darker, harder aspects of the Disney oeuvre, and I regard Don Bluth followed in their footsteps with works like AMERICAN TAIL and ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN.

That said, Bluth’s first animated feature, THE SECRET OF NIMH, suffers the least from oversentimentality. This may be because NIMH adapts a 1971 children’s fantasy, MRS. FRISBY AND THE RATS OF NIMH. I have not read the book, but apparently the NIMH-film is reasonably close to the original. Both chronicle the efforts of an intelligent mouse-mamma—whose name is changed to “Mrs. Brisby” in the cartoon-- to save her brood from extinction. The widow Brisby, whose husband Jonathan died under mysterious circumstances, attempts to raise her four children in a makeshift home made from an abandoned cinderblock.

Unfortunately for her, her home is in a farmer’s plowing-field. I’m not clear on the reason why this circumstance hasn’t been a problem for her family in earlier years, but at the time of the film, Mrs. Brisby can’t pick up and leave her domicile without endangering the life of her youngest child, who’s sick with pneumonia. Her only option is to get help in moving her whole house out of the path of the farmer’s tractor.

She gets some help from her family doctor (also a mouse) and a comic-relief helper, a crow named Jeremy. But the only ones who can mount the resources necessary to bodily move her house are the mysterious Rats of Nimh.

A backstory eventually reveals that these rats, as well as several mice in the vicinity—including the late Jonathan, though not his wife—had their intelligence boosted in government experiments. One probably shouldn’t inquire too closely as to why both the experiment-subjects and “wild” creatures like Mrs. Brisby all share the same intellect and the same propensity to wear clothes. The important distinction of the Rats of Nimh is that they have the capacity for technological advancement, which means that they can mount the resources necessary to move the house with the sick child still inside. On the down side, Mrs. Brisby learns that there’s a schism in the Rats’ society, between those who want to keep stealing some of the resources from human culture, and those who want to make their society independent of humans.

The moral debate isn’t framed with any particular depth: the “naysayers” are represented by a scurrilous evildoer named Jenner, while the “independence party” is represented by a wise old rat named Nicodemus and a handsome figure of a rat named Justin. Romance between the mouse-widow and the swashbuckling rat is suggested. This may seem remarkable because Mrs. Brisby is one of the few female protagonists of an animated film who is neither a cute little child nor a hot babe.

There are some clever slapstick scenes with Jeremy, and one strong scare-scene worthy of Disney’s best, when Mrs. Brisby must seek counsel from the spooky-looking Great Owl, despite her awareness that owls eat mice. But the storyline, emphasizing the Rats’ mastery of science, is somewhat confused by the intrusion of a magical talisman of no precise origins. The talisman’s only function in the plot seems to be to give Mrs. Brisby some supernatural help at the climax, a plot-device that seems drawn more from Steven Spielberg than from Disney. But weak ending aside, at least some of the characters in NIMH aren’t constantly deluging the audience in cute-osity.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IN NEW YORK (1976), THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1987), WITHOUT A CLUE (1988)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *uncanny* (2) *marvelous* (3) *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair* (2) *fair* (3) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *adventure (2) *drama* (3) *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

For a character conceived to fit a very specific time, place, and genre, Sherlock Holmes has proven remarkably agile in leaping into new variations on all three.  However, in respect to his phenomenality Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation was quite variable, which may have made it easier for the reader to think of Holmes in altered circumstances.  Though the majority of the Doyle stories possess a naturalistic phenomenality, one tale, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” takes the plunge into the marvelous subject matter of SF, while a fair number of stories, particularly the famed “Hound of the Baskervilles,” follow the tropes of the uncanny.

The telemovie SHERLOCK HOLMES IN NEW YORK follows the uncanny pattern, though only in a marginal respect.  Though NEW YORK is fairly versed in the Sherlockian mythos, it does not attempt to follow the prose tales’ story of the master detective’s encounters with Professor Moriarty.   At the start of the film, Holmes, having decimated Moriarty’s organization, confronts his nemesis (John Huston) in the crime-lord’s house.  Moriarty demonstrates to the detective that the house is tricked-out with a small assortment of death-devices—a throwing-knife trap, a falling chandelier—but then he promises that he has worse plans for Holmes than simply killing him.  The villain flees London, and when Holmes is called abroad to consult on a robbery case in New York, the hero finds that Moriarty has preceded him there.

Moriarty’s revenge would be unthinkable in the world of Conan Doyle, wherein Sherlock Holmes seems to remain a celibate bachelor all his life.  NEW YORK’s script imagines that Holmes’ admiring relationship with the opera-star adventuress Irene Adler went a long way beyond mere admiration.  As a result of a tryst between Holmes and Adler, she conceived a son, now about five years old, without Holmes’ knowledge.  Holmes is forced to back off the case lest his kidnapped son be killed.  Naturally Holmes finds a way to regain his natural offspring, after which Holmes and Irene Adler part without seriously considering a permanent reunion.  The Holmes-Moriarty battle concludes back in London, where Holmes must run the gamut of the death-dealing Moriarty house before coming to grips with the fiendish professor.  There’s enough emphasis on the action-sequences that I feel justified in labeling this one “adventure” rather than “drama.”

Both the action and the detective-work are better than average, though nothing especially memorable.  Roger Moore does decently with the ratiocinative work, though at many points he still seems to be playing a more gung-ho hero along the line of the TV “Saint.”  Charlotte Rampling makes an attractive Irene Adler, though she displays none of the cleverness of the original, and John Huston makes a good, vengeance-obsessed criminal genius.  The character of John Watson is horribly underwritten, giving Patrick MacNee nearly nothing to do.

Just as NEW YORK becomes uncanny through just a few marginal elements, THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES is marvelous by nature of just one device: a cryogenic device that allows Sherlock Holmes (Michael Pennington) to circumvent death in his Victorian era.  He awakens in the 1980s thanks to the ministrations of private detective Jane Watson (Margaret Colin), the great-great granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick.  The script devotes no great attention as to how Holmes acquired/invented a cryogenic device in his era.  Once the setup is done, the remainder of the story stays within a naturalistic sphere, as Watson involves Holmes in one of her cases.

The nature of the crime proves of negligible interest; the script’s emphasis is on the “odd-couple” pairing of the crime-solvers.  What makes the mythicity of RETURN higher than average is that there’s a little more here than the standard “fish-out-of-water” schtick, though the telefilm incorporates many of these.  The setup for Holmes’ frozen time-travel is odd, for though he relates that he successfully killed Professor Moriarty in the Victorian era, just like in Doyle's story of Moriarty's demise, the detective is infected with a fatal disease by Moriarty’s twin brother.  Since neither Moriarty nor any descendant thereof appears in the film, clearly the writer could have just had the original Moriarty infect Holmes.  Why bother with the “twin brother” explanation?  Possibly because the villain’s rationalized resurrection provides a mirror to that of the hero?

The relationship of Holmes and the new Watson is also psychologically intriguing.  In the original Watson, Holmes had something of a “little brother,” constantly following him around and marveling at his elder’s perspicacity.  But upon being brought back to life in another era, this Holmes becomes as a little child, and Watson becomes something of a harried mother, trying to guide him through the complexities of the twentieth century.

That the script is aware of this irony is testified by the fact that it doesn’t propose any romantic interest between Watson and her precocious charge.  Instead, during the case Watson receives some attention from a handsome young FBI agent.  Holmes’ reaction is at first jealous in a childish manner.  Later he makes an attempt to set them up, as if in childish curiosity about what goes on between men and women.

The film’s most amusing scene carries a certain irony.  During an investigation Watson tells Holmes not to enter a certain storefront, because it’s an adult bookstore.  Holmes loftily replies, “Well, I’m an adult,” and goes in—only to emerge moments later with a stunned expression on his face.  The irony of the scene is that in the real Victorian world (if not Doyle’s version of it) pornography flourished. Of course a time-traveler from Holmes’ era might have been repulsed by the sheer explicitness of modern porn, but not by pornography itself.  The tenor of the scene suggests rather than Holmes hails from a more “innocent” time—which was not entirely the case.

WITHOUT A CLUE, the naturalistic Holmes-tale in this trio, reinvents the canon as a species of baggy-pants metafiction.  Doyle experts will know that the author was himself a practicing physician, before Sherlock Holmes’ stories boosted him into prominence as an author, and that in later years Doyle—also an amateur detective on occasion—complained that his association with Holmes harmed his career.

On that peg CLUE’s script hangs the notion that Doctor John Watson (Ben Kingsley) invented the character of Sherlock Holmes as a cover for his own detecting activities, which he thought might imperil his standing as a physician.  He also wrote stories about Holmes so persuasively that all of London came to believe in the detective’s existence.  To maintain the illusion of Holmes’ reality, Watson was obliged to hire an out-of-work actor (Michael Caine) to pretend to be Holmes and take the credit for Watson’s accomplishments—which happen to include foiling the schemes of crime-czar Moriarty (Paul Freeman).

Watson mightily resents the alter-ego he’s created, especially since the reality of the august “Holmes” is a low-class fellow who chases skirts and racks up gambling debts.  For his part, the actor hates being forced to mind his P’s and Q’s all the time.  Thus Watson’s fiction births yet another “odd couple” of crimefighters, constantly quarreling yet being forced to fight crime thanks to the expectations of the audience.

CLUE has some funny bits, and it shows more than passing awareness of the canon.  For instance, it includes John Clay, the villain of “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,” cast here as a minion of Moriarty.  However, CLUE’s script offers only a shallow take on the relationship of “Watson-figured-as-Doyle” and “Holmes-figured-as-fictional-construct.” The nature of Moriarty’s big scheme—which Watson and Doyle succeed in solving together, to show how well they end up influencing each other—proves eminently forgettable, and little is done with the fact that Moriarty alone realizes that Holmes is a fraud and that Watson is the villain’s real foe. The flick is a pleasant enough comedy, but as far as real psychological insight, the movie doesn’t have a CLUE.         

SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, metaphysical*

It could be argued that SLEEPING BEAUTY is the first “Disney prince” film, since so much of the action revolves around the male lead.  Certainly my best childhood memories of the film—possibly in an early re-release, as I would’ve been age four for the first release—are of the bravura closing act of the film, with particular emphasis on Prince Philip’s escape from the castle of Maleficent.  As a child I was particularly fascinated by the magical transformations in the escape-scene, wherein the Three Good Fairies change arrows into flowers, or protect Philip from boiling oil with a rainbow.  This was perhaps my first exposure to an “otherworldly fantasy” in the form of a full-length film, though I imagine I’d seen short cartoons on similar subject matter.

Two earlier “princess films,” SNOW WHITE and CINDERELLA, followed a pattern common to many European folktales, in which a girl of high standing is reduced to domestic drudgery, only to recover her former status by marrying up. What this trope meant in the folktales has received a good deal of speculation, but in this essay I can only deal with what it may’ve meant in the Disney films.  For SNOW WHITE and CINDERELLA, it’s essential that the central female characters should accept their domestic duties with grace and good cheer.  This in turn earns them the regard of woodland creatures and of supernatural benefactors, both of which are oriented on helping the “princess-brought-low” to escaping the life of drudgery through marriage.

SLEEPING BEAUTY is not the same sort of animal.  Though the Disney film works in a sequence about Princess Aurora being raised in lowly circumstances—though to be sure, she never knows any other state of affairs—the main trope of the original folktale is that of “the princess enchanted.”  In the standard “Sleeping Beauty” narrative, the princess’ enchantment causes her and her kingdom to sleep for hundreds of years, until she’s awakened from her sleep by the kiss of a prince. 

 

 Though waking the princess with the kiss of a total stranger passed muster in 1938’s SNOW WHITE, for whatever reason the script of 1959’s SLEEPING BEAUTY chose a diametrically opposed approach.  Precisely because Aurora is raised in humble circumstances—a “fortunate fall” if there ever was one—she has the chance to “meet cute” with Philip, so that they can fall in love prior to discovering that they have already been engaged to one another by their parents.  This comic plot means that both Aurora and her kingdom don’t descend into sleep for more than a day or so, so that Aurora can be rescued, not by the mere stereotype of a marriageable prince, but by a true love aroused with no thought of one’s improvement in social standing.

Still, though many viewers might not mind the excision of domestic drudgery from Aurora’s program, it must be admitted that without these or something similar, Princess Aurora seems to have it a little too easy.  Without the necessity to show “grace under pressure,” she seems to exist for two purposes, to be beautiful and to be married.

All this said, it might not be correct to consider BEAUTY as either a “princess” or a “prince” film.  The true conflict is, for the first time in a Disney film, between two feminine forces—quite in contrast to the original folktales, where both good and bad fairies exist solely to establish the circumstances under which the princess is first cursed, and then allowed to survive the curse under certain conditions.  At times the whole thing is brought about by some functionary simply forgetting to invite the “bad fairy,” which brings about the whole conflict.

BEAUTY, in contrast, polarizes the forces of good and evil more decisively.  It’s no accident that malicious Maleficient isn’t invited; good fairy Meriwether makes this explicit.  Indeed, Maleficent is so deliciously in love with being evil that one imagines she might’ve cursed Aurora even if she had been invited.  The king-fathers of both Aurora and Philip are utterly impotent in this conflict, and neither child has a mother with any function in the story—doubtless because Maleficent and the Three Good Fairies subsume the roles of “bad mother” and “good mothers” respectively.  From the first, the battle-lines are drawn between the three fairy-sisters—who are chubby and somewhat competitive with another, but eminently forces of life—and cadaverous Maleficient, who rules a gloomy death-realm and has but one totem-animal, an unnamed raven, who provides her with affection.  Further, it could be said that the script takes the essence of the folktale’s concern—that of an enchantment that stands outside time—and reverses it.  Maleficent mocks Philip with the threat of keeping Philip imprisoned until he’s a bent old man, so that he cannot possibly be united with his ever-youthful beloved.  The fairies intervene to foil the time-binding enchantment and thereby to restore the proper alliance of young lovers.

Given this relatively cosmic scope— suggested in part by Maleficent’s claim to harness “the powers of hell”-- one might argue that even though Prince Philip slays the matriarchal dragon in the end, he’s just as much a pawn as Aurora in the fairies’ chess-game.  At the very least it seems evident that the fairies can’t conquer the Dragon of Death without Philip, and he needs their help just as much to counter Maleficent’s forces.  It’s an unusual take on the heroic tale, where mothers, even magical ones, usually do not participate much.  One can find a smattering of hero-tales in which male hero and female heroine team up to defeat evil—say, Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering, whose alliance dates back to 1929.  But how often can one see Buck Rogers defeat evil thanks to an alliance with Wilma’s mother?

In a DVD commentary on BEAUTY, it’s said that SLEEPING BEAUTY was the end of an era for Disney, due to the rising costs of making such sumptious, highly stylized fantasies.  Certainly none of Disney’s 1960s animated features are quite as ambitious as BEAUTY, and I’d say that even the best works of the Michael Eisner years—LITTLE MERMAID being among the main contenders—there’s not quite the same focus on otherworldly enchantment.

I've labeled the mythos of SLEEPING BEAUTY as being akin more to "drama" than "adventure" given that the heavy emphasis on romance, while I label it "combative" due to the invocation of a "good vs. evil" battle at the climax.

 

CINDERELLA (1950)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

CINDERELLA’s never been one of my favorites.  It may be the United States’ best feature-length cinematic adaptation of the French folktale, but for me it feels too much like a repeat of tropes made familiar from Disney’s 1938 SNOW WHITE.

I can see the reasons why the Disney scripters chose to ring in a seemingly endless number of adorable little animals, predominantly mice.  The storyline isolates Cinderella from anyone but her cruel stepmother and nasty stepsisters, which would have been a lot of tragedy to endure without some comic relief.  I might have even liked the mice if I’d found them funny, but their efforts on behalf of “Cinderelly” have always seemed like nothing but Disney recycling routines from their cartoon shorts—not least during their “Tom-and-Jerry” battles with the stepmother’s evil cat Lucifer.

The strongest mythicity of CINDERELLA can be found in its revisiting of the theme of 1938’s SNOW WHITE: the heroine, by accepting her duty to perform meaningless drudgery, displays a “grace under pressure” that indicates her fitness to become a princess. Cinderella also becomes a surrogate mother to the mice and birds attracted to her kindness, though I can’t help remarking that in real-world households the mice, not the cat, would be the enemies of good housekeeping.

This Cinderella—who is given that name by her widowed father, rather than as a comment on her being dirty with fireplace-cinders-- is a little more fully realized than Disney’s Snow White.  She doesn’t defy her stepmother directly, but she does have a minor moment of temper, threatening to use a broom to thrash the cat for continuing to chase mice. At the climax, when she’s confined to a closet by the evil stepmother, Cinderella even takes a degree of action in telling the birds to bring the hound Bruno to chase off Lucifer.  This order ends up being a little more deadly than she might anticipate, since Bruno’s advent causes the cat to fall to his probable death in one of the film’s gutsier moments.

Were there no fairy godmother in the film—and Drew Barrymore’s EVER AFTER shows how the same story could be told without the element of magic—the only fantasy-elements would be those of the anthropomorphic animals.  This lesser emphasis upon magic—at least in comparison with SNOW WHITE— seems to evolve from the original tale more than any decision by Disney.  Indeed, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” J.R.R. Tolkien commented on a want of “faerie” in fairytales of French ancestry.  That’s certainly true of “Cinderella,” where the stepmother-villain is an entirely ordinary domestic tyrant and the fabled “glass slipper” may have been a mistranslation of a more mundane “fur slipper.”  Curiously, for the sake of a last minute peril, the slipper brought by the prince’s emissary shatters, just like it was already real glass (making one wonder how the girl ever danced in them).  But Cinderella has happily kept the other slipper, thus proving her identity—which seems like an odd rewriting of the original tale.

On the plus side, it does keep consistent its theme of believing in dreams despite all evidence to the contrary; significantly, when the fairy godmother shows up, she tells Cinderella—in a blue funk from having her dress torn up—that the godmother couldn’t have shown up if Cinderella had really lost all faith.  It would have been interesting had the script expanded on this point a little.  At worst, such expansion might have taken away one of the mice-scenes.    

KING OF THE ROCKET MEN (1949), RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON (1952), ZOMBIES OF THE STRATOSPHERE (1952)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

One of the most memorable creations to evolve during the serial chapterplay’s declining years was Republic Studio’s “Rocketman.”  He may be the most recognizable original creation of the sound-era serials, thanks to his metal helmet, personal rocket-pack, and the now-archaic dial with which he controls his flight—all adding up to the very personification of 1930s “Buck Rogers” SF.  Yet, because his adventures take place in modern times, he suggests the increasing awareness of 1950s audiences that scientific miracles no longer required the distance of centuries to evolve.  Such gimmicks could become the path of the future for law enforcement, as opposed to the eccentric productions of “death rays” arising from assorted mad scientists like the one in THE VANISHING SHADOW.

Clearly in the minds of the Republic writers, the costume, not the character, was the star.  In these three serials, the rocket-suit is parceled off to three separate heroes, none of whom are related to one another.  Jeff King, inventor of the suit in KING OF THE ROCKET MEN, disappears and “Commando Cody” dons the rocket-pack in RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON.  Allegedly ZOMBIES OF THE STRATOSPHERE was planned as a direct sequel with Commando Cody again as the hero, but for whatever reason the hero became one “Larry Martin.”  The Commando did get the most exposure of them all, though, as he later appeared in his own 1950s teleseries.  All three serials saw old hand Fred C. Bannen in the director’s chair.  Though his direction was never outstanding, the “Rocketman” serials show Bannen at the top of his game, as he and his collaborators devised ingenious ways to work a flying man into the usual gunplay and car chases.

KING follows a by-then familiar pattern: a mystery villain, one Doctor Vulcan, is killing off the world’s scientists.  Jeff King, who happens to be one of those scientists, elects to use his newly invented rocket-suit to chase down Vulcan and his thugs.  The serial is a good basic romp, but only comes alive when Rocketman’s doing his specialty stunts.

Tristam Coffin, a familiar serial-face usually seen playing heavies, does a competent job as Jeff King, but doesn’t have much heroic charisma.  Mae Clarke, best known in genre-circles as the female lead in 1932’s FRANKENSTEIN, was somewhat older than the general run of serial-heroines, and her role—that of yet another female reporter—is largely thankless.  Still, Clarke delivers her flat serial-dialogue with aplomb, and during one fight-scene with a male thug, actually bounces a punch off his jaw before he decks her—a rare self-assertion for a female support-character in the rowdy serial-world.  The villain is merely seen in shadow to conceal his identity until the last chapters, and so doesn’t take on any iconic stature, as one sees with the villains of MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN and THE WHISPERINGSHADOW.  He does, however, have an interesting line of dialogue in the climactic chapter, when he chooses to explain his name to the hero; something about “Vulcan” being a symbol of his desire to “forge” his own destiny.  It’s a rare serial-villain who stoops to admit that his chosen cognomen is a little on the weird side.

A new writer is credited on the next two serials: Ronald Davidson, who had previously scripted FLYING DISC MAN OF MARS.  Instead of his battling a mundane mad scientist, Commando Cody (George Wallace) is placed in a more cosmic conflict, albeit one that reads like a rewrite of WWII scenarios, no doubt still potent seven years after the close of the war.  Acts of sabotage alert Commando Cody to the presence of a truly alien presence on American shores.  The saboteurs have recourse to atomic technology that Earth has not yet mastered, so  Cody, fearing that this means America will find itself on the wrong end of an arms race, takes a quick hop to the Moon and meets with alien leader Retik (Roy Barcroft).  Retik is pleased to reveal his entire plan to Cody: after his agents soften up Earth’s defenses (which seem covalent with those of the United States), the Moonmen will invade Earth with a fleet of ships armed with atomic technology.  Retik’s motive is a familiar one: since the Moon has lost so much of its air that its natives can barely traverse the surface without suits, the denizens plan to dispossess the Earthlings of their planet—a science-fictional rewriting of that old excuse, Liebenstraum.  Naturally, Cody survives his commando raid and returns to Earth, taking an atomic weapon with him in order to even up the arms race—though Earth’s possession of the weapon never adds up to much in the way of plot-developments.

Instead, the plot follows a path more like that of 1937’s DICK TRACY.  Cody figures out that the invasion will be delayed or foiled if he and his allies can keep the saboteurs from fully weakening their target’s defenses.  At the same time, the alien assigned to Earth, a fellow named Krog, finds himself short of funds and starts sending out his hired Earth-thugs to bring in more money, usually on such ill-considered schemes as kidnapping Commando Cody to hold him for ransom (!)  Once again, the bulk of the serial deals in mundane action-stunts, but the scripter and FX-team put together a better variety of rocket-suit stunts than KING boasted.

George Wallace plays Cody with even less charisma than did Tristam Coffin in KING.  Aline Towne puts forth a spirited girl-helper type, but modern audiences will perhaps groan when she’s only allowed to go on the trip to the moon because she’s a good cook.  Barcroft is as always a fine larger-than-life villain, but he stays out of the action except in the early and late chapters.  Clayton Moore compensates quite a bit as Krog’s number-one henchman Graden, as Moore’s resonant voice alone makes his scenes pleasurable.

Though the title of the next serial-- ZOMBIES OF THE STRATOSPHERE—doesn’t make much sense, it may have come about from scripter Davidson’s penchant for odd word-associations.  There are of course no zombies in any of the Rocketman serials, but in RADAR Cody, just returned from the Moon, tells his allies: “Retik plans to invade the Earth with the zombie from the moon.”  Retik’s aides on the Moon—all two of them—do have a sunken-eyed zombie-look to them, as does Krog.  One may assume that Cody used the term “zombie” as a general comment on the appearance of the Moonmen—though I have no idea why Cody would use the singular form.  As for “stratosphere,” the word is tossed out in one of RADAR’s chapter-titles, so one assumes that Davidson needed a catchy title for the next serial and jammed the two together.

The final Rocketman serial provides no more explanation for the use of “zombie” than did the previous entry, and apart from the title the word’s only used three times by my count.  This time the villains are Martians, wearing roughly the kind of bodysuits seen in RADAR but lacking the hollow-eyed look.  The aliens’ leader Marex (Lane Bradford) thinks on an even bigger scale than Retik.  Because Mars can’t sustain life any more, Marex—more adventurous than the rather retiring Retik—lands on Earth with just one Martian helper, Narab (Leonard Nimoy).  Marex recruits a crew of thugs and one renegade American scientist named Harding, a traitor who’s already in contact wth America’s foreign enemies.  The grand plan: detonate a hydrogen bomb on Earth that will hurl Earth out of orbit, so that Mars can take its place.

“It may sound ridiculous, but it’s theoretically possible,” claims hero Larry Martin (Judd Holdrin) in the final chapter’s wrap-up scene.  I tend to doubt that anyone in 1952 would have believed that, beyond just playing along with the cosmic imagery for the sake of a slam-bang story.  Still, at least ZOMBIES doesn’t suggest an impending large-scale alien invasion and then wimp out, as did RADAR.  Because Davidson’s script never implies a level of alien activity above that of lowly saboteurs, the serial doesn’t promise more than its budget can deliver.

That said, ZOMBIES feels less expansive than RADAR with its frequent use of outdoor location shots.  Granted, RADAR could never convince anyone that its characters had walked on the moon.  But in ZOMBIES the greater concentration on indoor sets removes a lot of the Rocketman’s raison d’etre.  Rocketman just doesn’t “rocket” as much this time.  The villains have less personality than in either of the previous entries, though Nimoy’s scenes are rendered more interesting purely by virtue of the actor’s later SF-icon status.

The stunts are decent but not overly memorable, with the exception of two cliffhangers. In one scene, the hero’s gal-pal Sue (Aline Towne) gets dragged into the briny deep by an anchor.  Ironically, she doesn’t make a sound, though this would have been a perfectly justified occasion for a scream.  The other cliffhanger pits Larry the Rocket Guy against the Martians’ slow-moving tin-can robot—a robot-suit recycled from Republic’s MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR SATAN.  Firesign Theater’s serial-parody J-MEN FOREVER best described the robot as an “enraged water heater.”  Still, the sight of Rocketman clashing with the robot displays a good superhero vibe, though the scene gets a little wonky when the robot tries to kill Larry Martin with a mundane axe.

Despite the limitations on “rocket-action,” Judd Holdrin comes off as having the greatest heroic charisma of the three Rocketmen.  No one asks Aline Towne to cook this time.  She helps out a bit more, firing a pistol at the attacking robot (to no effect, of course) and helping the guy-heroes short out the mechanical man’s circuits.  In a late chapter Bannen and Davidson bring the robot back into the fight under the control of the good guys.  Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately for patrons of “so bad it’s good” flicks—in the robot’s last big scene, it simply scares a bad guy into jumping off a cliff by wielding a handheld sparkler at the thug.

My rating of the three thus boils down to:

KING= most interesting villain

RADAR= most exciting stunts and sets

ZOMBIES= most charismatic hero

   

 

 

        

                

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (1952)

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Before reviewing this film I chose not to reference any real biographies of the famous Danish teller of original fairy-tales.  Ckearly this musical biofilm, whatever points of comparison it might have with the real life of Andersen, is first and foremost a one-sided retelling of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse.

The name of the screenplay’s author comes as a slight surprise: Moss Hart, best known for an assortment of naturalistic stage-plays and 1947’s hard-hitting “relevance drama” GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT.  Hart and director Charles Vidor succeed in capturing the delicate charm of Anderson’s tales, related by “country mouse” Anderson (Danny Kaye), a small-town cobbler who seeks to make his fortune in the big city of Copenhagen.  However, like the 1960s Rankin-Bass film THE DAYDREAMER—which imagined Andersen as a fanciful young boy—this film seems ambivalent on the subject of fantasy’s value.

In the opening scenes, it’s established that Andersen’s original tales are a source of great charm to the children of a small village, and at first it seems that the film is going to take the position that fantasies are good because they’re an anodyne for those times when “the world is too much with us.”  This seems the point of the film’s most famous Frank Loesser song, “Inchworm,” in which Andersen urges his audience(s) to stop and appreciate the beauty of life.  Unfortunately for Andersen, his fellow villagers don’t like him distracting their children from the business of making a living.  They plan to exile him, and the only reason they don’t is because Andersen’s adoptive son, a young teen named Peter, talks Andersen in picking up his business and moving to Copenhagen.  Andersen never learns of the negative opinion his fellow “country mice” have toward him, perhaps because the rest of the film places so much emphasis on shattering his dreams in another department.

In the big city Andersen and Peter immediately fall victim to small-minded authorities.  Andersen is jailed for having shown disrespect toward the statue of the king—a fitting touch, since the first story Andersen tells in the movie is “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  However, Andersen’s cobbling skills come to the attention of a Copenhagen ballet company.  Andersen meets and instantly falls in love with the prima ballerina Doro (real-life ballet superstar JeanMarie).  He also witnesses her have a row with her husband, the ballet impresario Niels (Farley Granger).  Andersen begins nurturing fantasies about freeing Doro from her tyrannical husband.  Doro does nothing to encourage Andersen’s fantasies, and neither she nor Niels—fundamentally a happy couple despite their quarrels—are even aware of the cobbler’s “love from afar” until the end of the picture.  Andersen goes from being the master fantasist who inspires children to being the victim of his own self-delusion, as much as the courtiers who testified that they could see the Emperor’s clothes.

Throughout this misadventure Peter remains the sober-sided son constantly trying to pull his foolish father back from disaster.  His efforts only create a rift between the boy and Andersen, though it’s eventually healed when Andersen realizes his folly and returns to his old village.  Here the film indulges in a major cheat for the sake of a happy ending. It seems all the villagers have missed Andersen so much that they have put aside their old quarrels with his quirkiness, and Andersen can return to his “country mouse” life after being chastened by his encounter with the city variety. 

From start to finish, then, Hart and Vidor choose to portray Andersen as a “child-man,” obsessed with his inner world rather than making connections in the real world.  His decision to adopt orphan Peter signals his desire to acquire a ready-made family without ever having troubled to find a wife.  Perhaps there were elements of the real Andersen’s life that encouraged the filmmakers to expouse this view of him, but it seems more likely that they were simply playing to the image of Danny Kaye as the nerd who can’t get the girl.  However, in most of Kaye’s other comedies, his characters do find connubial happiness through various merry mix-ups.  Despite the false cheer of the conclusion, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN is a rare exception to this rule, making one question as to whether the filmmakers don’t really have as demeaning a view of fantasists as Andersen’s blinkered neighbors.  

Though the film has ample opportunities to adapt the famous fairy tales into separate scenes in their own right, it does not do so.  In contrast to the many fantasy-episodes of THE DAYDREAMER, here Andersen experiences only two daydreams, and one of them is not a story, but Andersen’s mundane fantasy of fighting George for the hand of Doro.  Later, when Andersen is prevented from seeing his story “The Little Mermaid” performed as a ballet for Doro, he simply imagines the whole ballet-sequence in his head.

In my phenomenological system, a film qualifies for the status of “uncanny” if it presents dreams with such fidelity that they have their own reality within the film’s diegesis.  HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN does not do this.  The challenge-daydream doesn’t maintain any level of fantastic verisimilitude, nor does the ballet.  In terms of my system, a bunch of stage-players enacting a play with fantastic content uses my trope “delirious dreams and fallacious fantasies” purely in a naturalistic manner, since in such scenarios the real-life framing-story nullifies the fantastic content. 

This is not to say that my problem is with the artificiality of a stage-bound fantasy.  If someone took the “Little Mermaid” stage-show from ANDERSEN-- presented here as an adjunct to the main tale-- and presented the sequence by itself as a straightforward adaptation of the Andersen tale, with no framing-diegesis, then that adaptation would possess marvelous phenomenality, no matter how creaky or artificial the stage-adaptation might appear.  

                           

JUNGLE GIRL (1941), PANTHER GIRL OF THE KONGO (1955)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *uncanny,* (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

JUNGLE GIRL is a fairly engaging Republic Studios jungle-serial, though it’s nowhere near the best offered by the director-team of William Witney and John English, whose repertoire includes many of the best-regarded serials-- not least JUNGLE GIRL’s one sequel, PERILS OF NYOKA. JUNGLE’s success with exhibitors not only made the sequel possible.  Its success may have encouraged the very small spate of heroine-focused serials of the 1940s, such as DAUGHTER OF DON Q (1946) and THE TIGER WOMAN (1944), and helped spawn a NYOKA comic book that lasted about six years—which is a bit surprising given that the first version of Nyoka isn’t a very dynamic heroine.

To be sure, she’s more formidable than most of the female characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose 1931 novel is credited as the source of the serial.  The title is the only thing the serial has in common with the Burroughs novel, which includes one of Burroughs’ least memorable, most wimpy lead females.  This was par for the course for Burroughs, who rarely created forceful female characters—making it ironic that one of the few action-heroines created for classic Hollywood was credited to his inspiration.  Patently the filmmakers wanted a female Tarzan designed according to their needs, since the “girl” of the title, Nyoka Meredith (Frances Gifford), is seen doing such Tarzan-ish feats as killing lions and crocodiles and swinging through the trees.  Her skill-set is more naturalistic than Tarzan’s, though, and the only animal she commands is a trained elephant.  Her attire—a belted mini-dress with leoapardskin trimmings—just barely edges into the category of the “outré outfit,” in that it’s not quite as unusual as Tarzan’s “au naturel” appearance, but it’s not ordinary attire either.

The jungle-environment in which Nyoka operates is strange enough to justify the uncanny version of the “exotic lands and peoples” trope.  Nyoka, who assists her father’s medical outpost in the heart of Masai country, falls afoul of a group of white treasure-hunters out to despoil a horde of diamonds in the vicinity of a tribe called the "Masamaba" (note the resemblance to the real name of the "Masai" people, who deified lions as the fictional tribe does).  Nyoka’s father wants to persuade the African natives to use their wealth to construct a new hospital.  The thieves find a way to work around his popularity with the natives.  The villains kill Doctor Meredith and enlist Meredith’s crooked twin brother to take his place, in order to get past the Masamba's defenses.  These defenses include various “outré devices” set to discourage trespassers, not least being that old Republic favorite, the Flooding Room.

Very few serials of the period depicted heroines who could fight.  It was a commonplace notion that any time a fight-scene broke out, any female characters would get shoved to the ground, where they would bump their heads and immediately pass out for the length of the scene.  Perhaps one could deem this a roundabout chivalry.  But though Gifford’s Nyoka gets knocked out a few times, she’s allowed a few scenes where she vanquishes male opponents with a judo-toss or the like, to say nothing of her most impressive scene, where she kills a lion with a knife.  To be sure, she’s dressed in a concealing lionskin at the time, which takes away some of the aesthetic pleasure.  However, most of the punchups are handled by Nyoka’s male helper Stanton (Tom Neal).

As with most serials there’s no real plot: just a series of machinations on the part of the villains to get what they want, against which the heroes respond with due heroics.  The potential for a dramatic encounter between Nyoka and her evil uncle is tossed aside, for though the heroine comes to suspect her “false father” in the last few chapters, the uncle is rubbed out by his evil partners.  In addition, the main villain, the one most responsible for the killing of Nyoka’s father, is killed not in a battle with Nyoka but with her "stand-in" Stanton.  In terms of sociological mythicity that so often infuses African-jungle tales, we see once again the trope in which African resources become a “bone” over which good whites and bad whites contend.  Still, JUNGLE GIRL generally treats the African natives without belittlement or condescension—which is more than one can say of PANTHER GIRL OF THE KONGO.

PANTHER, one of Republic’s last chapterplays, was crafted with an eye toward recycling footage from JUNGLE GIRL.  To that end, actress Phyllis Coates played a new character—Jean Evans, nicknamed “Panther Girl” for no explicit reason.  She’s usually seen wearing an outfit identical to that of Nyoka Meredith, so that the filmmakers could re-use any scenes that didn’t clearly show the face of Frances Gifford.  The main plot again revolves around getting diamonds, although the new script injected overt SF-elements.  A group of lawbreakers desire to scare both natives and “good whites” away from a diamond mine, so their leader Doctor Morgan creates an enlarging-ray and turns loose super-large crayfish to menace the locals. Since these locals include wildlife photographer Jean Evans and her friend big game hunter Larry Sanders, they end up battling Morgan’s thugs—though neither Morgan nor his oversized crawdads appear very often.

Sadly, though the original photography is crisp enough to match the re-used footage, and some of the original action-scenes are decent, the filmmakers chose not to give their Panther Girl even the minor fighting-skills of Nyoka Meredith.  Discounting scenes in which Panther Girl duplicates the feats of Nyoka—chiefly the lion-killing scene—Jean Evans succumbs every time to the old “head-bump/ instant faint” schtick, bowing out so that Larry can do the fighting.  Phyllis Coates gives the role as much heroic stature as she can manage under the circumstances, but on top of getting knocked out so often, Jean screams an awful lot.  She’s at least handy with a rifle or handgun, but rarely if ever does her skill as a markswoman save the day.

In this scenario the African natives are either passive helpers or impediments.  Early in the story, prior to the white characters finding out that the giant monsters feared by the natives are for real, one of the whites remarks on the “superstition” of the Africans.  The giant crayfish are of course merely normal-sized specimens given the usual rear-projection, and were probably added in imitation of the proliferation of giant-monster sf-flicks in the period.