Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

Michael Anderson, the director, did some fine movies, but stumbled badly here, and the sometimes cliché-ridden script didn't help matters. The huge problem with this movie is that a lack of respect was shown for the character of Doc Savage and his chums. No movie about a superhero can succeed if the filmmakers seem to snicker and jeer at their own lead character! The approach to Doc was much like the approach to "Batman" in the 1960's TV series--making the hero appear silly, not heroic. Amazingly, Ron Ely nearly makes the film work, despite the wrongheaded direction.

It's similar to how filmmakers, trying to cash in on James Bond, didn't understand that the magic of Bond movies was, they took themselves seriously. The humor was not aimed at the story being told. The Matt Helm movies didn't take themselves seriously, and neither could audiences. Doc Savage could have been a classic! Making it a farce is an example of what not to do with a superhero!

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.

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.

I started reading the Bantam paperbacks in 1968 as a boy in England. They are a tremendous read and for years they promised, '..And there's a feature motion picture and a television series in his future' and for years I waited, only to be disappointed by this far too camped up film version. If they wanted to be amusing they only needed to treat it seriously, the far fetched aspects would have made strangers laugh and fans overjoyed. As for casting, Ron Ely's okay but Clint Walker would have been my choice (certainly when I started reading the books anyway) as for the 'Monk' in this movie, casting is appalling, the fellow is fat, Monk was like ' a good looking gorilla' and therefore an Ernest Borgnine, Bob Hoskins look-a-like would have been more suitable. No mention of Ham ever having a moustache in the books, but Renny was good casting. Having said that, like other commentators I usually watch the first half-hour and the last ten minutes which are set in period New York and do retain the flavour of the books. The rest of it is sadly clap-trap. And why in the film 'Rocketeer' did they substitute Howard Hughes for Doc Savage (as it is Doc who appears in the graphic novel) that might just have rekindled his cinematic career.

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.