LOST CITY OF THE JUNGLE (1946 serial)

In San Francisco, the World Peace Foundation is concerned that known gunrunning warmonger Eric Hazarias (Lionel Atwill) is on the trail of a mysterious element, Meteorium 245, that can be used as a defense against atomic bombs and would be worth a lot of money on the illegal weapons market. It would seem that Hazarias has recently died in a car accident, but we discover that Hazarias had a double of himself killed so he could take on the persona of a scientist named Geoffrey London and provide the backing for an expedition to the Himalayan city of Pendrang in the country of Zalabar. An archeologist named Elmore and his daughter Marjorie are working with London to find the mysterious Glowing Goddess, which is actually a chunk of Meteorium, in a hidden temple in the jungle outside of Pendrang. The Peace Foundation sends agent Rod Stanton and his associate Tal Shan to investigate. They discover several things. First, they realize that London is indeed Hazarias, and that Elmore and Marjorie are in the dark about Hazarias and his real reason for wanting to find the temple. The jungle tribes may be difficult to negotiate with in order to gain access to the temple, and London has gone to Indra, owner of the Light of Asia Casino—like Rick's in CASABLANCA, everybody comes to the Light of Asia—for help. Eventually, Stanton also approaches Indra, but she (like Bogart's Rick) is reluctant to take a moral stand and won't commit to not helping Hazarias. Through the thirteen chapters of this serial, a lake is blown up, an earthquake is caused by radio transmissions, people are threatened by a fire pit and a guillotine, and finally, when the Glowing Goddess is found, it might be too dangerous for either the good guys or the bad guys to handle.

This Thanksgiving week, I'm reviewing a couple of the best of the classic-era serials. The budget for this one seems higher than the norm, or at least the budget for the sets is—the Light of Asia comes off as a low-rent but still respectable double of Rick’s Café. Instead of numbingly repetitious action scenes leading to cliffhangers leading to more action scenes, this movie actually develops a story along the way, while still keeping the cliffhanger tradition alive. Most notably, instead of a text crawl at the beginning of each chapter to keep audiences up to date on the plot, we get scenes at the World Peace Foundation in which the executive members discuss what they know based on communications from Stanton and Tal Shan. Yes, this becomes predictable but at least it's a shot at something different. Unfortunately, chunks of dialogue that provide exposition are still laced throughout the chapters, slowing the action down. But that's an occupational hazard of making movie serials.

The acting is, for the most part, nothing special. Russell Hayden (Stanton) is a bit lacking in the rough and tough hero qualities—he's mostly known for B-westerns, particularly for playing the sidekick in a couple dozen Hopalong Cassidy films, and he would have come off better here as a sidekick. As usual, the heroine, played acceptably  by Jane Adams as Marjorie, has little to do except get in trouble and help get the hero out of trouble. The case of Lionel Atwill is unusual. During filming, he became ill with cancer and had to bow out (and died just a day before the serial premiered). His climactic scenes in the last chapters had been filmed, but a character named Malborn was written in—ostensibly an underling of Hazarias's, he is revealed to be the actual mastermind of the search. Plotwise, this makes hash of the story, but it doesn't really ruin anything. Keye Luke as Tal Shan (pictured with Hayden) is the best actor; Helen Bennett as Indra is the worst. She gives an artificial performance full of whiny petulance, on top of which her character is often saddled with delivering exposition with the same petulant tone in her voice. There are lots of secondary characters, too many to really keep track of, but knowing them isn't necessary to following the plot. I'd recommend this for serials fans, and maybe even for newcomers to the genre. Viewed in chunks of 3 or 4 episodes at a time, this was quite enjoyable. And Zalabar is my new favorite fictitious country name. [TCM; available on DVD]