MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR SATAN (1940 serial)

At night, a noted criminologist is shot dead on a city street as he arrives to visit Governor Bronson with information about the mysterious Doctor Satan, the man behind a major crime wave. Later that night, Bob Wayne visits Bronson who had been his guardian and mentor. For the first time, Bronson tells Wayne the story of his late father, a cowboy named Smith who became a masked vigilante called the Copperhead; he wore a chain mail hood and fought against criminals who had slipped through the justice system (pictured at left). Bronson gives him the Copperhead mask, and moments after Bob leaves, a man named Corbet arrives with a threatening note for Bronson. The note bursts into flames and Corbet shoots the governor dead. Bob reenters the office and kicks Corbet's ass as the police arrive, with reporters Speed Martin and Lois Scott. They discover that Corbet is wearing a device strapped to his chest (a "control disc") that allows Dr. Satan to see his every move and communicate with him. It also allows Satan to electrocute Corbet before he can tell all. What we discover by the end of the first chapter is that Dr. Satan is constructing an army of robots, but needs a new remote control cell that has been invented by Lois Scott's father, an inventor. For the serial's fifteen chapters, the narrative throughline involves Satan forcing Prof. Scott to make new remote control cells to install in a large robot that will do Satan's bidding, with Bob (as himself and as The Copperhead) and Speed and Lois—and occasionally Prof. Scott's spunky secretary Alice—hot on his trail. 

Film historians often point to this as a turning point in the development of the serial. With a few exceptions, notably 1936's Flash Gordon, most serials to this point were straightforward westerns or adventures. Here, something of a superhero element came into play. The script, for Republic Pictures, was begun as a Superman serial but when Republic lost the rights, it was turned into a masked hero story with echoes of Batman, whose first stories were published just six months before this serial began filming. The hero's last name, Wayne, is the same as Batman's Bruce and his first name may have been inspired by Bob Kane, the creator of Batman (whereas it's possible that reporter Lois' name was a leftover from Superman's Lois Lane). It’s not completely clear to me why Bob feels the need to have two identities since he doesn't change clothes (just takes off his jacket) and doesn't try to hide his voice. The mask does eventually strike fear, or at least discomfort, in the heart of Dr. Satan's thugs. In the serial’s final minutes, Bob reveals to his friends that he is The Copperhead, though there is no indication that he intends to continue in his life of crimefighting—we never find out what it is that Wayne does for a living.

There are several elements here that put this serial a notch above average. The villain actually is physically involved in the events that play out (kidnappings, car chases, fist fights) instead of just wearing a sparkly robe and giving out orders from a hidden location, though he still does plenty of controlling and observing from afar. There is a wide range of situations and cliffhangers on varied sets—sometimes in rooms, sometimes outside, once in an underwater diving chamber, in cars and trucks, and in secret passages. There is even a room with walls that push together, as used in Star Wars. The best cliffhanger plays out on the tall scaffolding of an oil refinery, bringing to mind the climax of White Heat. Speed gets a control disc strapped to him; if he tries to take it off, he'll blow up, and a clever if wildly far-fetched solution occurs to Bob. The robot is clunky but fairly effective. It can crush people to death in its dangly arms, though it’s fairly slow moving and I kept wondering why people didn’t just dart past it. Nicknamed the water heater robot by some critics, you can see it again (sometimes in the exact same footage) in other Republic serials such as Zombies of the Stratosphere.

Busy character actor Eduardo Ciannelli gets rare top billing here as Doctor Satan (no other name is ever given for the character) and he's good if a bit one-note in his mustache-twirling (metaphorically) villainy. Robert Wilcox (pictured at right) is a bit problematic as Bob Wayne. He's handsome and often broody looking, which works, but he also tends to deliver his lines in a flat tone as though he's trying hard to remember them. After the first chapter, he doesn't get to develop much of a character beyond his single-minded but low-energy drive to avenge Bronson. (Remember him? He’s rarely brought up again.) In her scenes as Lois, Ella Neal looks like an amateur desperately trying to please the directors, the prolific team of William Witney and John English. Alice, who comes and goes, is played in her only movie appearance by Dorothy Herbert who was a stunt horsewoman in rodeos; her biggest scene here involves an escape on a horse which is quite impressive. William Newell as Speed has a goofy comic-relief face but is usually serious and on task. Charles Trowbridge, always a welcome face in 1940's films, is Bronson and sadly only in the first chapter. The stunt work is always dynamic, making the fisticuff scenes in each chapter something to look forward to. Two fairly famous stuntmen appear with their faces hidden: Dave Sharpe is the hooded Copperhead during stunt scenes, and Tom Steele is the robot (he's also briefly seen as a henchman). At 15 chapters and four and a half hours, this is one of the longer serials, but watched over the period of several days, it held my interest, and the last chapter is particularly good with a well shot climax in which Satan gets his punishment. There is a 100 minute condensed version made for 1960s television called Doctor Satan's Robot, but so much material is missing and the editing is so choppy that I don’t recommend it. [Blu-ray]