Doc Savage, el hombre de bronce

I was fortunate enough to meet George Pal (and still have my DS:TMOB poster autographed by him) at a convention shortly after the release, and asked him why he chose to do the film "camp". Before he could answer, two studio flacks intercepted and lectured me on how the studio "knew best" and how "no one will take such a film seriously". I had been reading the Bantam reprints for a couple of years thanks to a friend (ComiCon attendees of the 1970s will recall Blackhawk and his band? I was in a couple of years of that with him), and had higher hopes than what we got.

The flacks insisted that no high adventure would ever be done seriously, and so doing 'camp' was the only way. Several other fans jumped in on my side, with Pal listening as best he could. At the end of the little event, Pal came up to us and apologized, wishing he could have done more and better.

STAR WARS put the lie to the flacks, and a year after Pal's death, Spielberg and Lucas proved that Doc Savage could have easily been the next major movie franchise...if it hadn't been for the flacks.

Tear out the memory or history of Doc, and the film would have been worth a 6/10 rating as nothing more than a mindless popcorn seller.

But destroying the legacy like that was no less an abomination than killing a baby in the crib.

Doc Savage can still come to the screen, and survive the inevitable comparisons by the ill-informed to Indiana Jones, but it would have to be done in all seriousness and earnest to reclaim the glory that we should expect from the First American Superhero.

SIDENOTES: Yes, there was a second script for ARCHENEMY OF EVIL, and it's a lot more serious. Yes, there was simultaneous footage shot, but mostly establishing shots and very little with actors. And, yes, there _is_ a one-sheet of Ron Ely leaping over a brick wall and blasting at something over his shoulder with a specially built bronze pistol. Ely's wearing a duster over a button down white shirt with a bronze tie, and the words "DOC SAVAGE: ARCHENEMY OF EVIL...Coming Next Summer!" POSTSCRIPT: If anyone knows who the studio flacks were that accompanied George Pal in 1975 to San Diego for the convention, smack the idiots up the side of the head and call them the idiots that they are. At the time, they were doing dorkknobs and Fu Manchu in stripes and baggy canvas pants, and carrying Paramount portfolios.

The 1930's was the heyday of Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, the Spider, the Green Hornet, Captain Midnight, Gene Autry, Flash Gordon, and eventually Superman and Batman. A great pantheon of pop culture heroes flourished in pulp magazines, comic strips, radio shows, and movie serials.

The 1960's gave us Adam West as Batman, Derek Flint, Maxwell Smart, 007, and many other hero spoofs(not to mention the theater then unfolding in the socio-political realms); the concept of the hero emerged from this period battered and shaken.

The early 1970's saw the emergence of a new type of rather angry anti-hero: Dirty Harry, Shaft, Billy Jack, Superfly, etc.

Producer George Pal had accurately predicted the sci-fi craze of the 1950's, and so he produced the first picture of that cycle as well as producing the classic and best versions of 'War of the Worlds' and 'The Time Machine'. George Pal correctly understood that by the mid-1970's the collective unconscious of America was hungry for a return of the old school hero, 1930's style.

George Pal knew that to make an adventure of this sort with a hero like Doc Savage that you had to somehow acknowledge the absurdity of it all. Unfortunately, while Indiana Jones and the Rocketeer gave the audience the equivalent of a knowing wink, Doc Savage's director stopped just an inch short of having Doc Savage slip on a banana peel. This film, then, is an uneasy mix of authentic 1930's style pulp magazine adventure and ham-fisted attempts at camp.

The single worst thing in this film is the soundtrack, a creative but ultimately dreadful batch of John Phillip Sousa marches, including a custom Doc Savage lyric, which is especially loathsome. It is indeed fortunate that a good many parts of this film managed to escape this score.

Negatives aside, this film will be mildly enjoyable to fans of pulp magazines, old comics, radio and serial heroes, etc. Fans of Doc Savage should be mollified by the many elements of the source material which were faithfully realized, and that compared to more recent super-hero flicks, the writers took relatively few liberties. Overall, the cast is pretty good, and Ron Ely looks exactly like the vision of Doc Savage on the covers of the original pulps. I think he pulls off the role pretty well. And there are old style cars, airplanes, clothes, and fight scenes, so it's a pretty fun ride.

George Pal might have missed the mark here, but not by much. Just a year after this film came 'Star Wars,' which was basically a retooling of the old Flash Gordon serials. In 1978 came 'Superman, the Movie.' Two years after that came the 1st Indiana Jones flick, set smack dab in the 1930's, just like Doc Savage. All of these latter productions, however, benefited by taking their source material or inspiration just a little bit more seriously than Pal did.

But since 'Doc Savage,' more1930's throwback films have flopped than succeeded, at least commercially: 'The Legend of the Lone Ranger,' 'The Phantom,' 'The Rocketeer,' 'The Shadow,' and 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.' All of these were big budget affairs. For some reason, certain persons amongst us are irresistibly drawn to that long lost decade, when imagination populated the world with mythic heroes. Too bad these heroes usually remain one step beyond our reach.

This film is wrong in so many ways. It was done on the cheap, the script is bad, the dialogue is horrid, the action non-existant, the acting a travesty, and the music was completely out of place.

The film is loosely based around the first Doc Savage adventure, but makes a mess out of every element. As adventure, it is boring; as camp, it isn't funny. Ron Ely is physically imposing, but has little charisma and no acting talent. There are some fine actors in the roles of Doc's assistants, but their parts are so badly written. Ham and Monk, the comic highlights of the pulps, don't even make a fifth-rate Oscar and Felix.

The Sousa music is fine for a concert or marching band, but doesn't fit an adventure story. A nice John Williams score, ala Indiana Jones would have been far better.

Doc Savage was one of the best of the pulp adventure heroes. Sure, the stories were formulaic, but anything put out on a monthly basis for so long is going to be. There was still a great amount of imagination and character in those stories. There are none of these things in this movie.

Forget this film. Go down to your favorite used book store and hunt up "The Man of Bronze", "The Fortress of Solitude", "The Devil Ghengis" or any other the numerous other Doc Savage books. The James Bama covers alone are worth it.

The problem is that the movie rode in on the coattails of the 60's-created concept that comic books could only be done as "camp" (i.e., the 60's Batman show) for TV and movie. Thus you have combat sequences with subtitles (come on!), a cluelessly unromantic Doc Savage (he was uncomfortable around women in the pulps, not an idiot), Monk Mayfair in a nightsheet (a scene guaranteed to give you nightmares for several nights), and the totally hokey ending with the secondary bad guy encased in gold like a Herve Villechez posing for an Oscar statute. And when they're not doing booming Sousa march scores, the tinkly little "funny" music undercuts much of the drama.

Even as such, this movie is...okay. It's fun, and when it stays serious it's a very accurate representation of the pulps. Except for Monk, as has been mentioned before: he's hugely muscled, not obese. And Long Tom, who is supposed to be a pale scrawny guy with an attitude, not Paul Gleason with an (inexplicable) scarf.

The Green Death sequences, for instance, are remarkably gruesome and not something I'd recommend for children. But they are very close to the feel of the pulps. When the writers and producers get it right, they do get it right - I'll give them that.

But if the producers had done Doc with the loving care and scripting of, say, Reeves' first two Superman movies, think what we might have had then. I think the problem is the movie's schizophrenic. There's a definite sense of trying to do a 30's homage, but they're also trying to give in to the "heroes must be camp" attitude that Batman created. One gets the impression there was a sober, pulp-style first draft and then someone came in and said, "Hey, let's make it funny - it worked with the Batman show 8 years ago!"

But Doc lives on, thanks to Earl MacRauch and Buckaroo Banzai. If MacRauch ain't doing a homage to Doc Savage in that movie, the man is truly demented. So when the series actually gets on TV (allegedly mid-season in '99-00), Doc Savage, updated to the 90's, will live once more.

Out of the 30s came a number of superheroes, some of which are still with us, e.g., Batman, Superman, etc. The comics still have their followers and collectors. If I'd saved all my funnybooks from that era, I no doubt would be a wealthy man today, but I didn't and am not at all wealthy. However, the 30s was also the time of pulp heroes, e.g., the Saint, and Doc Savage. I remember seeing the paperbacks (called pocketbooks back then) with Doc Savage on the cover, usually draped in a torn shirt, showing his hyperdeveloped upper body and sculpted hair, his face in a contorted grimace suggesting pain or constipation. I never read any of the books and in fact, was living in South America when this film was released. In fact, it was a crazy friend and fellow colleague anthropologist who touted the film to me and got me curious. So, when it showed up on the late show, I watched it with interest. Ron Ely was an excellent choice for the title role. He had been a TV Tarzan (one of the better ones, BTW) and handled the action quite well. The story? Well, high adventure, whatever that means. Sadly, the thrills of the 30s do not always play well into the present day. They certainly didn't back in the late 70s when I saw this film. It was fun, entertaining but not particularly memorable. The good guys were good and the villain was villainous. Good triumphed but not without a struggle. What more can I say? There have been some schlock films which play on this theme. Some suffer from terrible writing, some from terrible acting and direction-- some from both. This film comes out a bit better than average in my estimation. Fun to watch but like yesterday's Chinese blue plate special, not very memory-provoking.