The Black Widow

Along Came
A Spider Woman

The Black Widow
USA 1947
Directed by
Spencer Gordon Bennet & Fred C. Brannon
Republic Pictures

I really love the old cinema serials... starting right back from my passion for Feuillade’s silent French serials and with more than much love for the American talkie serials, which met their ultimate demise at some point in the 1950s. I mean Universal, Republic, Columbia... they all had their own, distinct style of serial making and I could watch these things forever. So it brings me no joy to say that The Black Widow, a theatrical serial I wanted to see so much I had to look for it as a non-commercial release (if you catch my drift), is probably my least favourite of them all... although it’s still quite watchable and has at least a little entertainment value for sure.

I don’t know what went wrong with this one though. It’s got all the ingredients of being another fast and furious serial from Republic which, if you know their serials, means the odd car chase and lots of fist fights where everything at a location or interior set which isn’t nailed down will, within the course of a few minutes, get thrown or used as a breakable weapon by protagonists and antagonists alike. And The Black Widow looked like a real good one... not only that but it’s directed by the team of Spencer Gordon Bennet & Fred C. Brannon, who both had a very good track record with directing exciting serials. And it’s even got special effects by Howard and Theodore Lydecker, who did absolutely fantastic work in many a Republic serial. Think of the cave melting effects of the decimator in King Of The Rocket Men (a serial I hope to revisit in a high definition restoration very soon) or their work on getting the title characters in that and The Adventures Of Captain Marvel (reviewed here) to fly to their destinations in various shots.

Okay, so this one is about Sombra, aka The Black Widow... a fortune teller who is a female spy working in the USA, under the instructions of her father who will sometimes teleport to her headquarters in a puff of smoke, instructing her in which secret gadgets and inventions to try and steal from the American authorities to hinder their war effort and help their own. Now it’s not really said which foreign power she’s working for but the implication is that she’s supposed to be Japanese, I think... although the ‘yellow face’ make up job is pretty unfathomable most of the time and she just seems like the US girl she is... played here by all American gal Carol Forman (who made a name for herself playing leading villainesses in similar productions and who would, of course, go on to play the lead villain, The Spider Lady, in the first Superman serial a year later).

Anyway, the big flies in her ointment here are the two main protagonists, detective fiction writer Steve Colt, played by Bruce Edwards and his ‘side kick cum damsel in distress’, lady reporter Joyce Winters, played by Virginia Lee. These two, week after week, put themselves in danger trying to thwart The Black Widow’s plans for world domination. Except, there’s no chemistry between the two at all, it seems to me and not much interaction besides the odd argument as Steve tries to stop Joyce from going along with him on dangerous missions. It just all feels kinda limp and there’s not even a hint of romantic interest suggested between the two leads either so... yeah, these two are not helping the serial much, it has to be said.

And that’s even with the inclusion of a number of neat gadgets and ideas littered throughout the ‘13 exciting chapters’ of this one. Such as the fact that Sombra can disguise herself as anyone via a mask and impersonating their speech, making for many shenanigans and plot twists reminiscent of the modern Mission Impossible films. This obviously wasn’t a new idea then, of course... Fantômas was doing the same thing back in the 1913 serial and the books which pre-date that but, this may well have been one of the earlier American examples of the ‘mask madness’ which we’re all so familiar with today... the impossibility of which is always overlooked by whichever film maker is going with it.

Other interesting novelty features for the serial are a fake looking black widow spider that pops out from a compartment in a chair and bites Sombra’s victims to death and also a drug which feigns death by slowing the victims heart so it looks like they’ve passed on. Sombra uses this heart stopping pill to escape from jail at one point. There’s even that neat trick which I’ve seen used in a couple of other serials (such as Batman in 1943) where, at the flick of a button, the fleeing enemy car changes its colour so the good guys miss it... but even that is badly done here on two occasions, where it looks nowhere near as good in this serial as I’ve seen done elsewhere... I was surprised at how this turned out for the Lydeckers, to be honest.

And, yeah... not much more for me to say in this one. It’s got the usual quota of fights and chases (none of which were that exciting here, it seemed to me) and it’s got plenty of cliffhangers where the director has to reveal a slightly different sequence of events the next chapter, to allow our hero or heroine to survive the certain death we’d witnessed the week before). So, yeah, The Black Widow is certainly still fun but, I dunno, I prefer the other 20 to 30 serials I’ve previously seen to this one so... it was okay. I’m not done with the serials though... I’ve just bought a nice Australian Blu Ray set of seven restored Republic serials, five of which I’ll be revisiting and, with the other two, I’ll be making my acquaintance with them for the first time. So there will definitely be more serial reviews coming to the blog at some point... but I will be watching them an episode a week so, there will be gaps between the reviews, for sure.