The Shadow Strikes International Crime!

I had a real treat yesterday afternoon. After a relatively easy morning administering the ACT I came home and busted out a new movie collection I picked up day before yesterday. It's a Treeline collection, 50 Mystery Classics, a set of movies I found at Borders and picked up with a discount for small money. I love these giant collections, and most of the stuff on this one is totally new to me.


Of special interest are two movies starring Rod LaRocque for Grand National pictures. These are two 30's adaptations of Maxwell Grant's The Shadow. Neither is particularly true to the source material, but it's still fun to see how other folks interpret the classic pulp stuff and its especially neat to see what these guys thought would sell in the theaters at that time.

The first movie is called The Shadow Strikes and it's apparently an adaptation of Grant's The Ghost in the Manor. But alas for Shadow fans, there's precious little actual screen time for the Shadow persona and what little there is pretty tepid stuff. Mostly it's Lamont Cranston pretending to be a lawyer who gets involved with a family inheritance situation with murderers and gamblers circling around.

Rod LaRocque is okay in the part as Cranston, though the series of events that make him continue his charade as another man are pretty strained by the end of the flick, as short as it is. I'm not completely sure I got the ending, but I think Cranston, who is the Shadow in this flick to find the man who murdered his father, does indeed do so, though that detail is underplayed. The stage is set for a sequel.

But the sequel titled International Crime ignores all that went before it and sets up a different premise. Lamont Cranston is openly a reporter and radio personality called "The Shadow" who in equal measure assists and afflicts the police while trying to smash up crime in the city. In this one the assistants so important to a Shadow story do show up in the form of "Phoebe Lane" (no Margo here) who is a dithering wannabe reporter, Moe Shrevnitz who is Cranston's reliable cabbie transport and another guy who aides in various ways.

But not once does the hat and cloak appear and this story of extortion and international intrigue trots along without the aide of blazing pistols for the most part. This is a somewhat more entertaining movie than the first, but less of a Shadow movie really.

I'm glad I got to see these, if only to satisfy my curiosity. Now I need to find those Kane Richmond Shadow movies.

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