Toofani Tarzan

Director: Homi Wadia
Writers: JBH Wadia, Pandil Gnyan
Producers: JBH Wadia, Homi Wadia
Cast: John Cawas, Gulshan, Ahmed Dilavar
Year of release: 1937
Country: India
Reviewed from: UK TV screening (Channel 4)

It’s amazing the stuff that turns up on late night TV. Buried away in a ‘Bollywood Gold’ season on Channel 4 was this 65-year-old Indian Tarzan movie. And for all that one must make allowances for geographical, cultural and generational differences - this is still pretty crappy. It’s of historical interest certainly, in fact it’s fascinating, and it’s sporadically entertaining - but at 160 minutes you’ve got to be pretty determined to be entertained.

We start by seeing scientist Ramu making the breakthrough in his search for the nectar of immortality. Already we’re in murky territory: it’s not clear if this elixir actually makes people immortal or is just a powerful medicine (Ramu says, “This will save millions of lives.”); also Ramu is referred to later as Ranmick; and quite why he has set up his lab in a hut in a jungle village... who knows?

Ramu is married to Uma (Nazira - a lot of the actors have only one name) and has a young son, Leher, around whose neck he places an amulet containing the formula for the ‘nectar.’ When lions attack the village for no reason, Ramu is killed. Leher is rescued by family servant Dada and they fly off in a balloon, accompanied by their jack russell terrier Moti. Uma is left behind and goes mad.

A word here about Dada: he is the single most amazingly offensive racial stereotype I’ve ever seen on screen, a character who makes Stepin Fetchit look like a sensitive portrayal of the African-American experience. Played by ‘Dare-Devil Bonan Shroff’ (also credited as Assistant Director), Dada is Bollywood’s view of an African - one step up the evolutionary ladder from a chimpanzee. Dada lollops around, bent double, knuckles dragging on the ground, vacant expression on his face, communicating only by simian whoops and grunts. He is presented as completely subhuman and, absolutely incredibly, wears what can only be described as ‘nigger minstrel make-up’ - the full Al Jolson huge white lips and everything. Gobsmacking. He is also, incidentally, massively irritating.

Anyway, we flash forward 15 years and little Leher has grown into hunky, loincloth-clad Tarzan, played by a bodybuilder named John Cawas (credited here as ‘John Cavas [sic] (Indian Eddie Polo)’ whatever that means). He lives in a treehouse accompanied by the faithful Dada (which apparently means ‘brother’) and the Rintintin-like Moti, who is actually fourth-credited as being played by ‘Professor Motee (trainer - Omar)’.

Ramu’s father (who is never actually named) is an old man with a Colonel Sanders beard and glasses. The fact that he is clearly a young man in terrible make-up leads me to think that the same actor (Dalpat) may have played Ramu in the prologue too. He is leading an expedition to search for his lost grandson, both of whose parents died. With him is his adopted daughter Leela (Gulshan); a bounder named Biharilal (Chandrasekhar) who really is only interested in locating the nectar formula; faithful guide Dilavar (Ahmed Dilawar); and comic relief servant Bundle (Bandal) who is even more irritating than Dada. Bandal was clearly a fan of Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy films, playing every scene like a cross between Lloyd and Laurel, even occasionally lifting his straw boater to do that thing with his hair.

The party sets off with a couple of dozen native bearers and are attacked by a tribe of cannibals - the chief is played by ‘Professor Buloch (Sandow)’ - who are driven off by the timely arrival of Tarzan, alerted by Moti and assisted by a herd of stampeding elephants led by Dada on a 'phant named Raja.

Biharilal spots the amulet around Tarzan’s neck, but suddenly the proceedings are interrupted by the arrival of a cackling mad woman. It’s Uma, who didn’t die after all but is still insane. She is still played by Nazira, made to look 15 years older by having heavy lines drawn on her face, and has a really tatty-looking, misshapen ‘human skull’ (papier mache by the looks of it) strapped to each arm. Confused, Tarzan runs off, speeding up even more when Biharilal takes a potshot at him.

Having made camp, and after we have suffered through a ‘comedy’ scene of Moti stealing Bundle’s food, Biharilal spots Dada and shoots at him too. Moti alerts Tarzan to his friend’s plight in true Rintintin/Lassie fashion. Later, when the slimy Biharilal is coming on to Leela in her tent, Tarzan appears, knocks him about and abducts Leela to his tree-top eyrie. Fortunately for Dada, Leela is a trained nurse and removes the bullet from his arm.

Gradually Tarzan and Leela come to understand each other and fall in love yada yada yada, same as in most Tarzan movies. (Let’s face it: Tarzan is a great character, and the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels are fantastic, but most Tarzan movies - like this one - are rubbish.) She’s swiftly decked out in a leopard skin mini-dress, and he’s rescuing her from tigers and crocodiles. The tiger fight is actually pretty exciting; it certainly looks like Cawas wrestling the beast, although Gulshan obviously was more careful and so only looks on in admiration by the miracle of back projection.

Back at camp, Dilavar sings a song, then the cannibals attack and make off with everyone, taking them to their fortified village where they worship - a 30-foot tall gorilla idol! Yes, the film-makers had clearly seen King Kong and decided to throw it into the mix. Fantastic! Meanwhile Leela is bathing ‘naked’ in a lake (her swimming costume is plainly visible), chases Moti when he cheekily runs off with her dress, then both girl and dog are captured by the cannibals. Taken to the village, they’re tied up in the same hut as their five friends.

Who can save them? Why, Professor Moti of course! The dog unties itself, jumps out the window and down a hundred-foot cliff, races off to Tarzan’s treehouse and barks out what has happened. I’ll just repeat that for emphasis: the dog doesn’t bite through the ropes, it actually unties itself!

In the village, a terrified native is picked up by the most extraordinary giant grabber thing and swung out over a pit, wherein lives the sacred gorilla himself. And it’s the worst bloody gorilla costume in the history of cinema. Big circular eyes, strange white whiskers - quite honestly, if we hadn't already seen the statue, we wouldn’t know this was supposed to be a gorilla. The native is dropped in the pit and killed by the beast, then just as Leela is about to suffer the same fate, Tarzan arrives! He fights the natives and helps the explorers all escape, while Dada and Moti are busy rescuing the native bearers tied up elsewhere in the village. A big chase ensues.

I should explain about the chases. For some reason, every chase or fight or any other sort of action scene is undercranked so that all movement is speeded up slightly. This makes the gang of cannibals chasing the explorers along the skyline look like nothing less than a 1930s episode of The Benny Hill Show. Having crossed a gorge with Tarzan’s help, our heroes are finally all safe. Now Biharilal threatens Tarzan with his gun, but Moti knocks it away. Uma appears - and Biharilal shoots her instead. The little dog leaps at the trigger-happy swine - who falls to his death over a handy cliff. The bullet has brought Uma to her senses, and before she dies she explains everything: that Tarzan is Leher, that she was Ramu’s wife, that the amulet has the nectar formula etc.

Tarzan carries his mother’s body away, and Leela elects to stay with Tarzan (and Moti and Dada) in the jungle, much to her father’s alarm. Off they go - man, woman, dog and subhuman stereotype - leaving the three remaining explorers, and their remaining bearers, to head back to civilisation on a dodgy back-projection screen behind Dilavar, singing one final song.

Well, goodness gracious me (to coin a phrase)! What a find. This is a very early Tarzan film, only a few years after Johnny Weissmuller starred in Tarzan the Ape Man, though it seems to have been influenced more by the silent versions starring Elmo Lincoln (Cawas’ appearance is certainly modelled more on Lincoln’s than Weissmuller’s). It is also completely unauthorised - there is no mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs anywhere and it is debatable whether the Wadia Brothers didn’t know about him or simply didn’t care. Maybe they thought Tarzan was a public domain legend. The sepia-tinted print shown on Channel Four was a brand new one, supposedly digitally remastered, though there were still plenty of scratches and crackles.

Jamshed Boman Homi Wadia (1901-1986) and his brother Homi Boman Wadia (b.1911) were born in Surat, Gujarat. Jamshed wrote and co-produced his first film (Vasant Leela) in 1928 and established Young United Players with his brother in 1931. Sound films took a while to make it to India and they made five silents between 1931 and 1933 starring Boman Shroff, all inspired to some extent by Douglas Fairbanks’ 1920 classic The Mark of Zorro, including Diler Daku (aka Thunderbolt, 1931) which was a straightforward (unauthorised) remake.

The Wadias were populist film-makers through and through, beloved of stunts and action. They founded Wadia Movietone in 1933 and Jamshed directed Lal-e-Yaman (aka Parviz Parizad, 1933, also with Shroff) which features a magic ring, an ape-man and a genie. In the chorus was a girl called Nadia who as ‘Fearless Nadia’ became the Wadia’s biggest star and India’s top action actress, starring in the classic Hunterwali (aka The Lady with the Whip, 1935, also starring Gulshan, Shroff and Cawas) and many other films, usually with Cawas or Shroff as the leading man. Astoundingly, Nadia wasn’t actually Indian - she was born Mary Evans in Perth, Australia in 1910 to a Welsh father and a Greek mother!

By 1942, Jamshed (who was a supporter of Communist reformer MN Roy) wanted to put more social relevance into the Wadia Movietone films, so Homi left to continue making action epics under the Basant Pictures banner. Homi married Nadia in 1961 (making her Nadia Wadia!), made his last film - his fourth version of the Ali Baba story - in 1978 and retired in 1981. Nadia died in 1996.

Any other Indian Tarzan films? Why, yes. Tarzan ki Beti (Roop K Shorey) was made in 1938, then John Guillerman’s Tarzan Goes to India/Tarzan Mera Saathi (1962) kicked off a whole subgenre: Toofani Tarzan (AR Zamindar, 1962 - I don’t know whether this was a remake of the 1937 film), Tarzan and Gorilla (Pyarelal, 1963), Tarzan aur Jadugar (Radhakant, 1963), Tarzan and Delilah (A Shamsheer, 1964), Tarzan and Captain Kishore (Jal, 1964), Tarzan aur Jalpari (Radhakant, 1964), Tarzan and King Kong (A Shamsheer, 1965 - I believe this ‘King Kong’ was actually a popular wrestler).

Then there's Tarzan and the Circus (Shiv Kumar, 1965), Tarzan Comes to Delhi/Tarzan Delhi Mein (Kedar Kapoor, 1965), Tarzan and Hercules (Mehmood, 1966), Tarzan aur Jadui Chirag (Babubhai Banjhi, 1966), Tarzan ki Mehbooba (Ram Rasila, 1966), Tarzan in Fairyland/Tarzan Paristan Mein (Sushil Gupta, 1968), and Tarzan 303 (Chandrakant, 1970). More recently there was The Adventures of Tarzan (B Subhash, 1985) and Tarzan and Cobra (Bhagwant Choudhury, 1987)

If and when Toofani Tarzan is repeated, I urge you to set the video because it's a true oddity. As a final note, the film features what may well be my favourite movie credit of all time: ‘Matte effects in co-operation with Mino the Mystic’!

MJS rating: C

Bulldog Drummond Escapes

Director: James Hogan
Writer: Edward T Lowe
Producer: Edward T Lowe
Cast: Ray Milland, Heather Angel, Guy Standing
Country: USA
Year of release: 1937
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Classic Entertainment)

One of the interesting aspects of Bulldog Drummond movies is that, for the most part, they have entirely interchangeable, generic titles. They’re all called things like Bulldog Drummond at Bay or Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, so remembering which is which can be a bit of a headache.

This triple bill disc contains three films: BD’s Bride, BD Comes Back and this one. And the ironic thing is that, although Bulldog Drummond Escapes starts with the title character coming back from somewhere and finishes with him proposing to his future wife, at no time does he escape from anyone or anything. He is handcuffed at one point but he is released through the timely intervention of his drily salubrious butler, Tenny - so that’s Bulldog Drummond Gets Released, isn’t it? And when he is held prisoner towards the end, again it is outside intervention which precipitates his freedom, not any sort of escape. One gets the impression that these films were made without titles and one was then picked out of a hat when it came time to do the credits.

Drummond first appeared on screen in 1922, portrayed by Carlyle Blackwell, and the role was subsequently taken by Jack Buchanan, Ronald Colman (twice), Kenneth McKenna, Ralph Richardson, Atholl Fleming and John Lodge. Ray Milland (Dial M for Murder, X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes) was the last actor to play Drummond before John Howard made the role his own in a series of seven pictures from 1937 to 1939. This is very much a dry run for that series with several soon-to-be-regulars on both sides of the camera, notably the glorious EE Clive as Tenny and Reginald Denny as Drummond’s silly-ass sidekick Algy.

Clive had a small role as a policeman in 1934’s BD Strikes Back (with Ronald Colman as Drummond) and was also in The Invisible Man, Dracula’s Daughter and two Rathbone Holmes pictures - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles - but he is best remembered today as the Burgomaster in Bride of Frankenstein. Denny played opposite two Holmeses - John Barrymore in the 1922 film Sherlock Holmes and Basil Rathbone in The Voice of Terror twenty years later - and opposite Karloff in John Ford’s superb desert war movie The Lost Patrol in 1934. He was also in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Abbott and Costello Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Around the World in 80 Days and the 1960s Batman movie. However, his greatest contribution to history was away from Hollywood: he founded a model aeroplane company which designed and built some of the first successful radio-controlled military drones, used by the USAAF for target practise throughout World War 2.

Heather Angel (who was in the 1932 Hound of the Baskervilles and was the voice of Mrs Darling in Disney’s Peter Pan) as Drummond’s girl Phyllis was replaced by Louise Campbell for a couple of other 1937 productions (BD’s Revenge and BD Comes Back) but then returned for the remaining Howard pictures. However, this was the only film to feature Sir Guy Standing as Scotland Yard’s long-suffering Colonel Nielson (here called ‘Inspector’), a role taken by no less an actor than John Barrymore for the next couple of films and then by HB Warner for the rest of the late 1930s Drummond pictures. Standing might well have continued in the role but he died in February 1937 after being bitten by a rattlesnake. Director Hogan was responsible for four of the seven Howard Drummonds and writer Lowe scripted another two.

The action starts with Drummond returning by plane from a sojourn on the continent, expertly landing in a thick London fog at night, much to the consternation of the rudimentary 1930s equivalent of air traffic control. A bunch of reporters want to get soundbites from him, but he is just concerned about getting back home to Rockingham Lodge. On the way, he nearly knocks down a distraught young lady who faints as he screeches to a halt, Putting her into his car, he sets off to investigate gunshots and finds a dead body on the edge of a marsh. Returning to the road, he sees that the young lady was just faking and she is now driving off with his wheels. He goes back again to the marsh just in time to see the body slide beneath the surface.

The young lady is Phyllis Clavering, who is staying at Greystone Manor, which is next door to Rockingham Lodge (but about three miles away!). Caring for her are pointy-bearded Norman Merridew (Porter Hall, who played a different role in BD’s Peril the following year), his sister Natalie (Fay Holden, the mother in the Andy Hardy films) and bogus psychiatrist Professor Stanton (Walter Kingsford: The Invisible Ray, The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe and Dr Carew in the 1930s/40s Dr Kildare movies). Of course she is being held against her will, but how can Drummond prove this, especially with Inspector Nielson down for the weekend to play golf with his old friend Merridew?

With the exception of the opening sequence at the airport, the film is very obviously adapted from a stage play - Bulldog Drummond Again “by HC (Sapper) McNeile and Gerard Fairlie” - and you can easily imagine the scene titles: ‘The drawing room of Greystone Manor, later that same night.’ Most of the events happen in a few rooms in the two stately homes, or just outside the rooms, visible through the French windows. There are mistaken identities, coshes to the head, surreptitiously passed notes and a bunch of other elements which seem iconic of 1930s theatre. Frankly it is never really explained (a) why Phyllis is being held captive or (b) why she doesn’t just escape with Drummond at the start when she flags down his car.

It all finishes with the discovery of a counterfeiting operation producing fake ‘series D war bonds’, a form of investment which is given the most extraordinarily unsubtle plug earlier in the film. In amongst all this is a subplot about Algy’s (unseen) wife Gwen giving birth to his first child, so that his priority is always to try and phone the hospital. Denny plays Algy as a bumbling but good-hearted chap, the sort frequently spoofed by Harry Enfield; he’s a cross between Time Nice-But-Dim and Mr Cholmondley-Warner’s friend Grayson.

In many ways, Bulldog Drummond Escapes is an archetypal Bulldog Drummond film. It’s not quite tongue-in-cheek, certainly not a spoof or pastiche, but there is a delightfully light touch to the dialogue, especially that involving Tenny. When the butler recovers his master’s car and finds Phylllis’ handbag in the footwell we get the following gem: “Does it portend, Tenny?” “It portends, sir.” Marvellous! Milland seems to be having a ball, playing a grinning young Drummond who can’t believe how exciting his life is, while Standing is terrific as the senior policemen who doesn’t want Drummond’s exciting life interfering with his work.

With the exception of Porter Hall, the entire principal cast is British - and so are most of the supporting players. Patrick J Kelly (the 1939 Tower of London) provides heavy support as the Merridews’ looming butler Stiles and others in the cast include Charles McNaughton (who had an uncredited role in 1934’s BD Strikes Back) and Clyde Cook (who was a clown in Lon Chaney’s He Who Gets Slapped and had bit parts in five later Bulldog Drummond films) as policemen; Doris Lloyd, who was in 1933 versions of Oliver Twist and A Study in Scarlet, and also had bit parts in The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, the 1941 Jekyll and Hyde, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, Son of Dr Jekyll, The Time Machine, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music(!), as a nurse; and David Clyde, who played policemen in BD’s Peril, Arrest BD, BD’s Secret Police, The Scarlet Claw, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The Lodger and several other films.

Uncredited actors include Robert Adair, who was the other hunter alongside John Carradine in Bride of Frankenstein, J Gunner Davis (also in BD Strikes Back), Zeffie Tilbury (Werewolf of London and three other Bulldog Drummonds), Colin Tapley (Blood of the Vampire, Shadow of Fear), Pat Somerset (Zita Johann’s dancing partner in The Mummy), John Power (rentacopper roles in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula’s Daughter etc) and Barry Macollum (Revenge of the Zombies).

Director James Hogan started out in the late 1910s and followed this film with BD’s Peril, BD's Secret Police and BD's Bride and Arrest BD. In the 1940s he made six Ellery Queen thrillers, the bizarre propaganda vehicle The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler and one of Universal’s lesser known horror pictures, The Mad Ghoul. Edward T Lowe’s other writing credits include not only BD’s Revenge and BD Comes Back but also House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, three Charlie Chan films, The Vampire Bat and the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hans Dreier (Island of Lost Souls, the 1931 Jekyll and Hyde, The Monster and the Girl, Dr Cyclops and numerous Bob Hope pictures) and Earl Hendrick (two other Drummonds) are credited with art direction and AR Freudeman (the 1939 Cat and the Canary) with ‘interior decoration’. Sound recording was by Gene Merritt and John Cope, the editor was William Shea and the musical director was Boris Morros (Stagecoach) who spent his time away from the studio spying for the Soviet Union! The uncredited cinematographer was Victor Milner whose work is adequate throughout but becomes strangely effective towards the end, bordering on expressionism in some of the candlelit corridors.

MJS rating: B+
Review originally posted 18th March 2006

Blake of Scotland Yard

Director: Robert F Hill
Writer: Basil Dickey, William Buchanan
Producer: Sam Katzman
Cast: Ralph Byrd, Herbert Rawlinson, Joan Barclay
Country: USA
Year of release: 1937
Reviewed from: UK DVD

’Reckless action’ says the poster. ‘Spectacular thrills. Baffling mystery.’

Baffling is right. This could be the least comprehensible 73 minutes of your life. And the longest.

Here’s the background. The first Blake of Scotland Yard was a 1927 silent serial, directed in 12 chapters by Robert F Hill from a script by Hill and William Lord Wright. There is very little information on this version which Wikipedia reckons is lost. However, it is described in Phil Hardy’s Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, proving that in these online days there is still no substitute for a damn great doorstep of a book (even if the photo alongside the review is from the 1937 version).

The uncredited review in Hardy praises the serial, comparing Hill to the likes of Feuillade and Lang and observing that “instead of relying on the usual death ray or new explosive gimmick to initiate the action, this picture uses the more exotic alchemist’s dream of turning metals into gold.” Hayden Stevenson starred as retired Scotland Yard inspector Angus Blake with Gloria Gray (or possibly Gloria Grey) as the young woman who calls on him to protect her father’s invention from the mysterious criminal known only as ‘the Scorpion’ (Monty Montague).

Ten years later, Hill remade Blake of Scotland Yard as a sound serial, changing pretty much everything except the basic premise and the villain’s name. The Scorpion in this version is a hunched figure who hides his face behind a rubber mask, then hides that rubber mask under a floppy-brimmed hat, then holds his cape up in front, in true ‘Hooded Claw’ fashion, just to make sure that nobody knows who he is.

He also has a deformed hand which is like a crab’s claw, hence his name of, ah, the Scorpion. Well, I suppose it’s a bit like a scorpion’s claw too. Not that it is a deformed hand, it’s just another rubber appendage. Good for disguise, not so clever for operating equipment. Fortunately the Scorpion has a whole squad of goons based in Limehouse to do his dirty work for him.

Sir James Blake (Herbert Rawlinson, who started out in about 1911, made literally hundreds of silent shorts, and topped off his career with Ed Wood’s Jail Bait) is no longer called Angus but is still a retired Scotland Yard inspector, helped by serving copper Chief Inspector Henderson (Sam Flint: The Monster Maker, The Crimson Ghost and an uncredited role in Psycho). Instead of the alchemical machine, this version does indeed “rely on the usual death ray”. This has been invented by Jerry Sheehan (top-billed Ralph Byrd, the same year that he began his three-decade career as Dick Tracy) who is walking out with Blake’s niece Hope Mason (Joan Barclay: Black Dragons, The Corpse Vanishes). There is also a gee-whillikers kid, Hope’s brother Bobby (Dickie Jones, who was the voice of Disney’s Pinocchio and is still alive, aged 82, as I write this in 2009).

Sheehan, Hope, Blake and Henderson demonstrate the death ray to a bunch of international top brass at their palatial stately home. The target is an old warship, anchored many miles off-shore. Remarkably, as well as the death-ray (we never see where that emanates from), Sheehan has devised some sort of remote televisual device which allows them to actually see the ship being destroyed. However they still wait for a phone call from the Admiralty to confirm that one of their planes has looked for the ship and failed to locate it.

All the bigwigs are terribly impressed but Sheehan reminds them that the device is designed to stop wars: if every nation has it, none will dare start a conflict. Ah, if only it was that simple...

Unbeknown to the assembled toffs, they are being spied on by members of the Scorpion’s gang, who have been let into the building by nefarious butler Daggett (Theodore Lorch, whose many uncredited roles include Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials plus the 1939 Hunchback of Notre Dame). The Scorpion resolves that he must have the machine so sets about stealing it, which he later does, holding Blake, Sheehan etc at gunpoint.

And then, well then it all becomes awfully confusing. I mean, it’s been a bit vague and unexplained and arbitrary up to now, but you expect vagueness and unexplainedness and arbitrariness at the start of a film. It will all become clear later. Except that here, it won’t. And the problem is very simply that more than five hours of serial running time has been condensed into less than an hour and a quarter.

There is no way that this could possibly make sense, even if the sound was clear (it’s not really), the camera-work was good (a few imaginative shots notwithstanding, it’s pretty routine) and even if the print was superb quality (it’s so-so). Maybe you could follow this if you had already seen the full episodic serial version, but if you’ve seen that, why would you want to watch this feature-length re-edit - unless you’re some sort of weird Robert F Hill completist.

A large part of the film takes place in Paris - for no reason that I can see - where our heroes, plus undercover policewoman Mimi (Gail Newbury - apparently never heard from before or since) and medical colleague Dr Marshall (Lloyd Hughes, who was in the 1929 Mysterious Island and the 1930 Moby Dick) investigate a basement cafe. The entertainment in this place consists of something called ‘apache dancing’ which basically involves swarthy frog Julot (Nick Stuart: Killer Ape, The Lost Planet and a 1930 short called Honeymoon Zeppelin!) arrogantly throwing women around in a way that would constitute assault in today’s climate.

Mimi and Sheehan have disguised themselves as a newly married American couple although it’s questionable how much a false persona can be classified as a ‘disguise’ when it mostly involves being as loud and noticeable as possible. At one point Mimi, faking intoxication, demands an apache dance with Julot in order to retrieve a note tucked in his waistband. Since this unsigned note only says ‘meet me upstairs’ (in English) it’s questionable how much use it could be to the investigation.

There is an enormous amount of running around between various rooms and corridors but, since we are never given any idea of where any particular camera angle is in terms of physical space and relation to the other shots, it’s impossible to follow what is going on. Nor does it help that all the man wear basically the same outfit. At one point, the Scorpion (for it is he) disappears completely after apparently knocking over Dr Marshall, a pretty big clue which should ring a bell even for those people who haven’t worked out the villain’s identity by reading the cast list on the DVD sleeve.

Back in England there is a sequence in Limehouse where our heroes infiltrate the Scorpion’s lair and actually impersonate him. How can an investigation know where the villain lives and what he looks like (or at least, what his mask looks like) without getting some clue as to his identity? There is also a lengthy sequence where someone (Sheehan?) rents a room in a house also used by the Scorpion’s gang and then someone else (Blake?) impersonates the elderly, moustachioed landlord. The Scorpion’s hoods are completely taken in by this despite the fact that Blake is clearly a head taller than the other bloke.

The landlord has a son who is physically massive but mentally retarded, who spend most of the time locked in a room, reaching through the bars on his door, trying to communicate that his dad is tied up under the stairs.

I’m running out of clearly definable bits of action/plot here because the massive editing renders the entire thing impenetrable. Adding to the impenetrability is the very sparse use of dialogue. This really feels like a sound film (well, serial) that has been made from a scenario written for a silent version. As to some extent, it was.

There are long sequences with no dialogue whatsoever, just the occasional short line to convey some information (which, devoid of context, is usually meaningless to the audience). There’s certainly not a word during the many, many fight scenes, all of which are of the terribly genteel sort favoured during the 1930s.

Others among the terribly confusing cast include Lucille Lund (the 1934 Black Cat), George DeNormand (Henry Hull’s stunt double in Werewolf of London), Jimmy Aubrey (The Vampire’s Ghost, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, various Bulldog Drummond and Mr Moto films) and Bob Terry (Dick Tracy’s G-Men, Citizen Kane).

Writers Basil Dickey and William Buchanan collaborated with Hill in another serial-cum-feature the previous year, Shadow of Chinatown starring Bela Lugosi. Buchanan’s career was limited to a few titles in the 1930s but Dickey was incredibly prolific, racking up more than 140 screenplay credits from classic silent serial The Perils of Pauline in 1914 through to Lawless Code, a 1949 western. The IMDB gives him a whole bunch of extra credits up to 1966 (eight years after he died!) but they’re just TV edits of old movies and serials. Among Dickey’s notable scripts are The Purple Monster Strikes, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, assorted Zorro, Tarzan and Green Hornet titles and the 1944 Captain America serial. Ray Mercer, later on The Adventures of Superman, provided the special effects.

The version which I watched was released by the Moving Image company as part of a five-disc Bumper Box of Adventure Films for Boys, which also includes The Mark of Zorro, My Pal Trigger, The Son of Monte Cristo and The Jungle Book, Sabu version). Blake of Scotland Yard was also released on a Classic Entertainment triple-bill disc alongside low-rent Sherlock Holmes features The Speckled Band (1931, with Raymond Massey) and Silver Blaze (1937, with Arthur Wontner).

MJS rating: D

Review originally posted 10th September 2009