The Shadow was a tremendously popular character in the heyday of the pulps and radio. It's only logical that the folks behind this phenomenon would attempt to make the jump to cinema. As it turns out there were several efforts of varying degrees of success. I recently came into possession of a very nifty collection of all of these early efforts.
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 from 1937 is called
The Shadow Strikes and it's apparently an adaptation of Grant's pulp novel "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 Granston (that's not a typo, he was called "Granston" and not "Cranston" for some reason) 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 Granston, though the series of events that make him continue his charade as another man are pretty strained pretty quickly and become largely absurd by the end of the flick, as short as it is. The attempts to get La Rocque into a Shadow costume are pretty meager. And I'm not completely sure I got the ending, but I think Granston, who is the Shadow in this flick to find the man who murdered his father, does indeed do so, though that detail is underplayed.
There is a sequel. Look for a quick review of that flicker later today.
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