The Adventures of Smilin' Jack

All in all, I liked this for what it was: an un-subtle manipulation of theater patrons. The main enemy in this serial is Japan, and the Japanese are diminished to Japs and Nips (always said with a slight sneer), while the Chinese are simply Chinese. There's a German ubiquitous female agent who fancies herself to be in command of the Japanese, but she is just one dimensional: harsh, nasty, humorless.

The plot is a bit thin. A peace loving Chinese province bordering the Himalayas has a secret passage (the Stillwell Road?) of some sort to India, through which vital troops and supplies could be funneled to fight the Japanese. The spiritual leader of the province agrees to reveal the secret to the Chinese and British, with numerous conditions, and the Axis tries to kidnap or kill him before he can talk. There is delay upon delay for no reason but to string this out to 13 chapters.

There are the usual hairbreadth escapes after each cliffhanger episode, and some of them are pretty silly. As in all serials, the viewer is cheated, in that a bit of film is held back, film in which the hero escapes death in the nick of time. There are also the usual fistfights without a knuckle getting skinned, the usual chases, etc.

As serials go, this is fairly standard, directed toward the puerile audience that filled theaters on Saturday afternoons.

Set just before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Jack Martin helps the Chinese obtain the Mandon Secret, a secret route from China to India, lying in an isolated Chinese sector, which would aid the Chinese in the war effort or cause disaster if fallen into the hands of the Black Samurai, a Japanese espionage organization in partnership with the Nazis, and its leader the elusive Fraulein Von Teufel, who assumes the guise of Trudy, a press correspondent and friend of Jack. For thirteen chapters, Jack goes in and out of danger in order to assist the allied war effort. The serial's main drawback is that it didn't follow the comic strip (with a Jack Holt looking Jack, a Peter Lorre-ish villain called The Head, and aerial escapades) and its characters, which suggests that the character was tied in to the serial, just so it could be used. Its a good serial, but could have been better. A decent cast this serial has was capable of better, but at the same time kept my interest. Rating, based on serials, 6.

There are basically three types of mysteries/adventures:

1. The audience discovers who the villain is at the very end along with the "good guys". 2. Somewhere during the story the villain is found out and the remainder of the story is spent proving his or her guilt. 3. The audience knows who the villain is at the beginning and the entire story is spent watching the "good guys" try to find out who the villain is and then capture him or her.

The third is by far the least entertaining (with the possible exception of Columbo). The Adventures of Smilin' Jack falls into the third category. What is even worse is that the villain is not being chased but accompanies the `good guys' all over the Pacific while leaving behind a string of nefarious deeds.

Before viewing this serial I had visions of Dixie Lee (possibly the most alluring heroine ever to appear in a comic strip), Slickville and everything else that made Smilin' Jack a great comic strip. With Charlie Chan, Number One Son and Danny Thomas' future wife in the cast, my expectations where heightened all the more. Unfortunately, there was no Dixie Lee, no Slickville and very little plot. By the seventh episode I was both feeling extremely sorry for Jack because he was so dumb and bored to boot. Although there was `aerial action', so to speak, it involved planes catching fire and being shot out of the air by a Japanese submarine (if you can believe that). There were none of the aerial stunts and acrobatics that usually accompanies Jack's adventures and made the strip so interesting. Maybe they were not included because of the expense involved.

I am a fan of serials. I really enjoyed the classics like The Masked Marvel, The Phantom, Daredevils of the Red Circle, Captain Marvel, et. al. They were extremely entertaining and usually kept you guessing. Even though you knew who the villain was early in a few of the true classics they managed to hold your interest to the very end. The Adventures of Smilin' Jack can't hold a candle to the classics. It has difficulty holding up to the mediocre serials.