Dick Tracy

This is one of the better serials I've seen...especially of the less glitzy pre-1940 productions. There are few (in fact only one I think) cliffhanger ending that doesn't ring true (the kind where we see the action...and then the resolve shows different actions happening in the next episode). That puts it up real high in my book on just that point.

There isn't all that much care put to keeping the serial like the comic strip. Tracy became a g-man instead of a city police detective and gone are the maladjusted and malformed villains of his colorful rogues gallery. The Lame One, the villain of this chapterplay, doesn't compare to the grotesqueries of The Brow or Little Face.

Ralph Byrd is excellent as Tracy...in fact he IS Dick Tracy. Forget Morgan Conway's forgettable appearances in Dick Tracy's Dilemma and Dick Tracy Vs. Cueball (a horrible film)...and especially forget the primary color extravaganza that Warren Beatty put out. Ralph Byrd does them both in...stolid, straight forward and eager for action.

I would rate this serial right up there with other great chapterplays, like The Adventures of Captain Marvel, The Masked Marvel and the like.

Republic Pictures were clearly hitting their stride in superior (and super) serial production with this quite sensational 15 chapter crime-terrorism drama made in 1936, released in early 1937. For any faults: too long as 12 chapters would do; the tedious antics of the infantile Smiley Burnette, there is a dozen truly astonishing and eerie/creepy moments that easily compensate. The first episode is so weird, and on a huge screen in a giant old theater full of screaming kids (or even adults) has several hair raising scenes where master evildoer The Lame One has maximum effect. The first chapter ending sees The fabulous Lydecker Brothers in full big budget special effects mode on a thrill set piece aboard the Golden Gate Bridge. The opening two chapters also features an astonishing triangular flying wing plane (looks like a cross between a stealth bomber and a flying sandwich) which for its day is a genuine masterpiece of inventive and graphic/realistically clever sci fi imagination. The recent film SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW owes a huge debt of imagination to this one flying apparatus alone. Republic clearly intended this serial to play to adults and it is not a G rated serial at all...given the menace, action and violence. It has three great villains one of whom is Gordon Tracy (Dick's brainwashed bro) who, after getting the treatment, sports a very fetching Bride Of Frankenstein hair stripe along with a mean scar. Another hideout menace is Moloch, a cat patting hunchback akin to a lost Uncle of Peter Lorre. Incredible action stunt sequences abound and very inventive use of miniatures and special effects..the chapter endings of 9 and 10 especially with a huge blazing Zeppelin and then a sheet of hull metal swinging from a repaired ship are very well thought out. Often the resolves cheat with Dick just getting up and running off, or rolling out of the way, but given the very high standard of the rest of all parts of this huge and complex production it was a major step forward for Republic at the time proving their willingness to make a serial for all ages that employed excellent craftsmen...especially the incredible Lydecker Brothers they inherited in their merger with Mascot Pictures. Remove them and the serial industry would have been all chases and fights. No wonder this serial was so successful it offered a big marker for two more Dick Tracy epics in 38 and 39. Excellent! Beware of dud dvds though, the one I saw was awful and bleached, in good quality this 15 chapter pre-noir horror serial must be a knockout.

After watching all 15 episodes I have to tell you that this Dick Tracy seems to have paved the way for some of today's action heroes taken from the classic comics. The plot line is simply put - silly (a big crime ring cooperates with foregin goverments, wants to blackmail their own government, brainwashes people...). There seem to be hundreds of things going on and not a single case is solved. Tracy comes in, gets in a fight, the evil scheme is spoiled (case closed), bad guys escape, Dick follows them and get's in terrible danger. End of episode, right before Dick is about to die a horrible death. The next episode opens with a long revision of the previous story and Dick escapes unharmed. Meets with friends and the new problem arises. They investigate for a few minutes and then the same story all over. All right, the effects were awesome for the time when this was made and the ideas for how the villains planed to take charge were probably highly original back then (but were copied ever sense), still, not a single episode seems to have any depth. It was just jumping from one quick and shallow attempt by the Lame one to do whatever it was he wanted to do (there never seemed to be a grand plan behind his actions) to another. All in all, if they wouldn't repeat those previous episode scenes at the beginning of each episode and if the episodes took some time to develop a story it might have been good. Now (especially after watching it at once) as one long Dick Tracy session, I was really disappointed by the shallowness, but pleasantly surprised by the great effects.

Today's youth has no idea that smartwatches (I-Watches) began with detective Dick Tracy, a comic strip character first drawn by Chester Gould in 1931. His two-Way Wrist Radio inspired the invention of the mobile phone-and then the I-Watch. Six years after his newspaper debut, Dick Tracy's first portrayal on the screen was released by Republic Pictures in February 1937's "Dick Tracy: Chapter One-The Spider Strikes."

"The 1937 serial seems to be the first work to pit the hero against a foe of marvelous metaphenenomenality; e.g. A villain," noted film reviewer Gene Phillips. The villain, named the Spider or the Lame One, is the head of the crime syndicate named the Spider Ring. One of Spider's associates is a mad scientist with a hunched back, "Moloch," who surgically operates on honest men to convert them into criminal pawns. The Spider also assigns top inventors to construct an acoustic pulsating weapon capable of knocking down the strongest structures, specifically the Golden Gate Bridge. In Dick Tracy's first episode, the Spider threatens to use his 'flying wing' plane containing his weapon to destroy the massive bridge during its opening ceremony.

The "Dick Tracy" serial didn't quite follow the backgrounds of some of Gould's comic characters. The artist was originally inspired by U. S. Treasury Department Agent Eliot Ness to base his strip around. His Tracy was a detective in a Midwestern city, similar to Chicago. But in the Republic Pictures series, Tracy (Ralph Byrd) is a special agent for the FBI operating out of San Francisco. In Chapter One, "The Spider Strikes Back," Tracy's brother Gordon (Carleton Young) is kidnapped by the Spider gang and Moloch transforms him into a criminal.

Actor Ralph Byrd starred as the detective throughout the 15-episode series. So successful was the first "Dick Tracy" serial, Republic Pictures churned out three additional Tracy series: 1938 "Dick Tracy Returns," 1939 "Dick Tracy's G-Men" with future Academy Award Best Actress winner Jennifer Jones as Gwen Andrews, and 1941 "Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc." Author William Cline in his book 'In the Nick of Time,' noted that the serials were "unexcelled in the action field. The four Dick Tracy adventures from Republic must stand out as classics of the suspense detective thrillers, and the models for many others to follow." Four feature films on the detective, including Warren Beatty's portrayal in 1990 "Dick Tracy," followed after the final Republic serials concluded. Ralph Byrd starred in two of them, 1947's "Dick Tracy's Dilemma" and "Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome" the same year. Byrd's characterization as a FBI agent was physically demanding for the number of action scenes he had to labor through. His early death in 1952 at the age of 43, from either a heart attack or cancer, occurred when he was waiting in his car for his wife Virginia to finish shopping.

"Dick Tracy" was the first of three serials based on Chester Gould's popular comic strip produced by Republic Pictures in the late 30s. The title character was played by Ralph Byrd in all three films.

In this installment Tracy and his assistants Steve Lockwood (Fred Hamilton), Junior (Lee Van Atta) and Mike McGurk (Smiley Burnette) are up against a terrorist organization known as the Spider Ring. The gang is led my a mysterious shadowy figure known only as the Lame One.

The gang tries among other things, to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge with a sonic sound wave machine, take over a gold mine and steal the plans for a new high speed aircraft. Tracy and his pals are kept busy trying to foil the gang's moves over 15 fast-paced chapters. Co-directors Ray Taylor and Alan James keep the action moving and provide us with plenty of excitement. There is a least one fight in every chapter. There is also the requisite "flashback" chapter which Republic used in most of their serials. The unmasking of the Lame One in Chapter 15 is almost anti-climatic. I challenge you to remember who the character was who turns out to be the Lame One.

The DVD which I purchased was produced by Marengo Films. The print from which it was duplicated was apparently borrowed from a collector so IT WAS NOT duplicated from the fuzzy public domain print that has been used for several years. The picture quality is very good and the sound crisp and clear.

Some interesting notes. The shooting down of a dirigible foreshadowed the real life Hindenberg disaster the following year. The high speed plane forecast the development of jet planes by some ten years. The Flying Wing used by the gang almost reminds one of the Stealth Bomber even though this was the 30s. And yes there's those great vintage 30s cars too. The running time of 290 minutes makes this I believe, the longest running serial of all time.

Francis X. Bushman who plays G-Man chief, Clive Anderson had been in films since 1911 and was one of the first matinee idols. He is probably best remembered for his role as Messala in the silent "Ben-Hur" (1927). Lee Van Atta and Smiley Burnette both appeared in the serial "Undersea Kingdom" (1936). Burnette of course would go on to be one of the best known "B" western sidekicks riding with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Charles Starrett (The Durango Kid).

Also in the cast in assorted roles, are Roy Barcroft as an air crewman on The Flying Wing, Milburn Morante as "Death Valley Johnny", I. Stanford Jolley as an intern and veteran silent heavy Walter Long in a bit. Future serial director William Witney served as a film editor on this project.

Followed by "Dick Tracy Returns" (1938) and "Dick Tracy's G-Men" (1939).