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.

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.

This is a pretty unusual serial. It took me two tries to get into it, but then I was hooked. The plot is no more than perfunctory and seems like it was stitched together out of random clichés as the writers went along, but a few episodes in things take a truly delightful turn into the bizarre. It feels as if the writer, director, and/or cast began to feel bored by the tripe they were enacting and decided to have some fun with it. The supposedly diabolical mastermind suddenly seems like the headmaster at a school for painfully inept crooks, constantly bemused but tolerant of his incompetent charges, and the cliffhangers and action sequences begin to feel like big jokes. My favorite shot: the hero is trapped in one of those rooms that slowly fill with water and the villain, after setting the trap in motion, turns to his cohort with a shrug and a wry grin that seems to say "The old flooded room trick again --- well, what're ya gonna do?" Unfortunately the serial runs out of steam towards the end and falls back on the usual tired hi-jinks, but for a while it's a delight.

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.

Altho QUITE a bit different than the Edgar Wallace story on which it's based, this is an excellent serial, none-the-less. Why? Because it's QUITE a bit different than the usual "mad-genius-taking-over-the-world" sort of thing that was the usual theme of serials at that time.

A crook & his henchmen move into a castle (to be used as a "base of operations"), but they didn't reckon on the "ghost" of the Green Archer who haunts the place. He continually thwarts the crooks in their shady deeds, and it's quite a surprise when he is unmasked at the end of the film.

An enjoyable film!