The Green Archer

I would be grateful, if some one, may advise, if it is possible to obtain a copy of the Green Archer, VHS, within Australia. It represents a series of recollections, that usher a time of the Saturday serial and the suspense, to be lived, until the next Saturday. Victor Jory, who spent sometime here in Australia, was always the right person, often for the wrong reason, for each Saturday, in a darkened theatre, often interrupted by a nervous projector.

By accident I stumbled upon a couple of episodes of The Green Archer on a local TV channel. I had not heard of this serial when it came out. I stopped seeing local movies in the fall of 1940 when I was sent to boarding school. I enjoyed seeing this, hokey as it was. It was a surprise to see Victor Jory as a hero! The other bright spot was trying to ID the makes and years of the cars used. I could not quite make out what the roadster with suicide doors was--it looked like a Dodge or De Soto from around 1933-35. Prior to that time I had seen a couple of Jimmy Allen flying films but I can't recall if these were full-length films or serial episodes. In doing some searching I learned that these films were preceded by a Jimmy Allen radio series, but I had not heard of that, either, before now. Other radio serials I was familiar with were Jack Armstrong, The Phantom Pilot, Radio Orphan Annie and General Shafter Parker and his Circus. Ray Mac.

I remember with relish a Saturday afternoon at the 'flicks' - quite often the projection of a film would be delayed and the expression ' put a penny in it' would echo throughout the cinema - usually named as The Roxy.

Victor Jory was a hero of youthful expression of those years of yore. I recently was able to obtain a full copy of Dick Tracy and the spider ring and the lame one. Tracy was portrayed by Ralph Byrd. In an episode of the serial, the not fully seen 'baddie'strokes a black cat - change that to a white cat and you are years ahead with James Bond.

This is one of the better serials. There's a castle with secret doors & passageways everywhere, lots of fist fights, lots of bow & arrow work, bombs, shooting, poison gas, an underground hideaway for automobiles, & spirited acting in an action packed plot. On the down side is redundancy (a trademark of all serials), absurdity (by himself, the hero defeats 6-8 baddies at once in fist fights, even when the baddies have guns!). But overall, a neat serial with a good & satisfying ending. It's also weird watching Victor Jory play the hero, after seeing him play the bad guy in many Hopalong Cassidy movies; he's somewhat more convincing as a bad guy than as a good guy. Iris Meredith is beautiful, if nothing else, as the female lead. I rate it 8/10 for a serial.

Watching episodes of "The Green Archer" took me back some 70 years to the Yorktown Theater which had perhaps the most massive screen of Manhattan's neighborhood houses, where you were engulfed in the action and every close-up literally loomed over you. A Saturday matinée at the Yorktown invariably included a double feature, newsreel, cartoon, comedy short, trailers and the latest installment of a fifteen chapter serial (mostly from Columbia or Republic.) All for 12 cents and sometimes they threw in a free comic book. "The Green Archer" was among the better serials, largely because a genuinely talented actor, Victor Jory, had the lead. And he had just emerged from a screen career largely devoted to skullduggery to cloud mens' minds as "The Shadow" in another Columbia 15-parter. How does "The Green Archer" hold up? The most fun is still watching the hero emerge unscathed from the seemingly hopeless mess he was in at the end of the previous chapter, trapped in a warehouse explosion, driving his roadster off a cliff to crash in flames or stretched out under a ceiling of descending spikes. And there was some pretty good scenery chewing going on from grade B actors like James Craven as evil Abel Bellamy, running a ring of dim-witted jewel thieves out of an ancestral castle with more secret passages than a Poe manse. Only drawback to getting "Green Archer" from Netflix was watching several episodes in a clump --rather than week to week as intended -- which tended to make the bald spots in the plotting sorta' obvious.