Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe

 

 

 

The Ming From Another World

Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe
Directed by Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor
USA 1940 Image DVD Region 1

So here we are and into what is... probably my least favourite of the Flash Gordon serials but, you know, it’s still brilliant, goes at a fairly cracking pace and is still miles better than the majority of serials which were being made at around the same time. Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe also seems to be the one serial of the three which has weathered the years relatively well with a print that seems to be in a lot better shape than the other two... so, while it’s still not in brilliant condition, the DVD is pretty clear and fairly sharp (apart from the odd tear here and there) when compared to the other two. I wish someone would save and restore these things before it’s too late... if that time is not already passed and they’re already vinegar. These serials are absolutely invaluable to show future generations the kind of thing people were spending their money on at the cinema... not to mention the fact that they are wildly entertaining.

Once again we have the three actors back reprising their roles who were the only ones to star in all three Flash Gordon serials... so Larry Buster Crabbe as Flash, Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov and Charles Middleton as Emperor Ming the Merciless. Joining them all for the first time are Carol Hughes as a brunette but, alas, still almost superfluous Dale Arden, Universal horror lady Anne Gwynne as the traitoress Lady Sonja, Roland Drew as a kind of new, slimmed down Prince Barin (it’s like chalk and cheese compared to the guy playing him in the first two) and Shirley Deane as a blonde Princess Aura (looking lovely but with nowhere near the moxy of her predecessor in the first serial). Plus a fair amount of newcomers including Lee Powell as the adventurous Captain Roka.

Flash’s father has been replaced in this one by actor John Hamilton, who I’m sure many of my readers would recognise from his regular role as Daily Planet editor Perry White in the 1950s TV show The Adventures Of Superman, opposite George Reeves as The Man Of Steel. Another newcomer is Don Rowan as Captain Torch... I mention him last because he’s playing a promoted version of Officer Torch from the first serial (which makes sense since the action of this one does take place on Mongo again) but, well, unless I’d looked him up I would have sworn it was the same guy who played him previously. He looks and sounds pretty much the same to me (maybe if we had a clearer print for the first one I would have rumbled that they'd replaced him).

So Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe is a very interesting serial for a number of reasons.

For starters... well look at the date this was made. A war was happening in Europe and the Americans weren’t in it yet but this one was clearly propaganda loaded. For instance, instead of the Fu Manchu like costuming on Ming The Merciless, he’s costumed more as a military dictator and there’s talk in the very first episode of him keeping concentration camps. Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering how Ming survived being disintegrated at the end of the last serial... wonder away. It’s not addressed and alluded to only briefly with an off hand comment... “So Ming is alive!” or some such. There was no way of writing themselves out of that one, must have been the general consensus, I suspect. Interestingly enough, due to the success of the last one, the writers do write a line into the script for the final episode here implying that there was a slight chance Ming might be able to escape his doom via another route... just in case a fourth serial was called for (alas, the studio policy after this was to lay off the space fiction for a bit so it never happened... at least that’s what I understand of the situation).

Another interesting thing is the two, even more blatant, shout outs to George Lucas’ future Star Wars movies (my kind way of saying how much he ripped off from these kinds of serials). The obvious one being the episode recaps. Each Flash Gordon serial has a different recap style with the first one having just text on a dark background, the second one having comic strip style pictures swiped through on a viewing screen and, in this third one (and in line with what Universal were doing in a fair few of their serials at this point, more on that in my next review), a proper single point perspective title crawl... just like the Star Wars movies. The other thing... and I remember almost jumping out of my seat the first time I saw The Phantom Menace, is the televiewers. The way the images are tuned in and also the exact same sound effects when this happened were used by Lucas in Star Wars Episode 1 so, yeah, I loved that Lucas included this all those years later. Again, these were actually used before this and... okay, tomorrow’s review for the final word on those televiewers.

And it’s not just Star Wars either. If you want to see a cloaking device which made a space ship invisible long before the Romulans and Klingons were doing it in Star Trek... well here we have a new Dr. Zarkov invention which cloaks his rocket in exactly the same way (I will also mention this again tomorrow but, in a slightly different fashion). Other technology includes those same cack-handed ray guns from the second serial but also some handsome looking death ray rifles which seem cumbersome but really look the part.

Now there are less strange inhabitants in this one, again, than in the first serial. We basically just have the Rock People and the Annihilants. The Rock People are literally just a race who dress up in Rock uniforms (to camouflage themselves in their rocky desert region of Mongo) and who speak by the sound department running their dialogue backwards. They look like nothing less than rock textured members of the Ku Klux Klan, truth be told. I don’t know how they got away with this. Interestingly, although a good majority of this serial (including the opening titles) is scored with various passages from the Liszt composition Les Preludes... some of the old needle drops from stuff like The Bride Of Frankenstein are retained and this means that the Rock People appear to exactly the same musical cue that the Clay Men in Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (reviewed here) used to morph out of their cavern walls by.

The other beings are Ming’s remote controlled Annihilants or The Walking Bombs. Its a shame they’re only at the end and start of two episodes because these are one of the most beautiful mechanical robot designs I’ve ever seen committed to film, with their big Christmas decoration-like heads, sped up walking rhythms and bizarrely long fingernails. They look like they stepped right out of a silent German Expressionist movie and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that they did just that. They are just magnificent and I wish someone would do an action figure.

Okay, the structure of the thing is a bit of an oddity for a Flash Gordon story too, although it starts off with the usual thing of the Earth in grave danger. I found it oddly interesting that the lethal Death Dust that Ming is poisoning the Earth with produces an almost unstoppable virus called The Purple Death, which is killing people in their droves... given the time that I’m writing this review, during one of the bleakest pandemics we’ve had in a while on this planet. However, once Flash and his crew go to the frozen wastes of Frigia and mine the only known antidote which can be found there, the mineral Polarite, he actually rockets back to Earth and dumps it, curing the plague by the end of episode four. So Ming’s initial plan is quickly thwarted but, since he wants to conquer the universe, you can be sure he has more deadly weapons up his sleeve for Flash and his friends to worry about.

Most of the action in this one takes place in either the unnamed Mongo City (where Ming resides), the forest Kingdom of Arboria (where Prince Barin rules) and the arctic wastes of Frigia for a few episodes near the start of the serial. What this means is... there are plenty of props and costumes which were obviously recycled from other productions to match those last two locations. When you are in Arboria, the obvious dress code is... leftovers from the most recent Robin Hood production. Seriously, everyone there wears forest clothes and the hats with big feathers in. Similarly, when Zarkov invents a thermal spray and extremely warm clothing so that Flash and the others can survive the formerly impenetrable wastes of Frigia... he basically invents a Santa Claus suit for them to wear. It looks bad but I can only assume they did it to match with the various recycled shots from The White Hell Of Pitz Palu, which litter those scenes.

However, I’m not really complaining much because, frankly, although it’s the shortest of the three serials, it still manages to pack a punch, This might be because there are no bottle neck episodes this time around... what with the many changes in the central cast, I guess it would have been hard to find anything that was a match if they’d gone the usual route on flashbacks.

So, anyway, that’s me done again with the Flash Gordon serials for a while... I loved seeing them all again and Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe is no exception. I’ll leave it for you to find out why it has such an aggressive non-sequiter of a title but, it’s a bit of a stretch. I just love these things. However, in between the previous serial and this one, in 1939, Buster Crabbe would once again play a famous science fiction novel and comic strip character in another great serial which has a lot in common with these three... and that one will be the subject of my next review. Coming tomorrow, to this blog!

 

Buster Crabbe Serial Week at NUTS4R2

Flash Gordon (1936)

Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars (1938)

Red Barry (1938)

Buck Rogers (1939)

Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (1940)

 

Flash Gordon (1936)

Ming In The Tail

Flash Gordon (1936)
Directed by Frederick Stephani & Ray Taylor
USA 1936 Image DVD Region 1

So... I'm finally revisiting one of my favourite things.

I first saw the original Flash Gordon serial on the BBC in... it must have been the early to mid-1970s. I’m going to say 1973/74 as a guestimate so, that would have made me somewhere between five and six years old. This first one consists of 13 episodes running between around 15-25 mins each (including the usual replay of the last few minutes of the previous episode at the start of the new one, to remind the audience what dire predicament Flash or one of his 'team' had been left in at the end of the last chapter).  

My father spotted it was being shown and, I believe this may have been the first time it was broadcast on television in the United Kingdom, although my dad certainly remembered seeing the serials at the cinema in the early 1940s... so they would have been either very quick re-releases or we got them a few years late over here. He always used to rave about these and also about a certain Western star when I was a kid so, when he spotted that the BBC were showing a special version of this, with the serial spliced together and run as two large parts, including a Hopalong Cassidy feature film showing bang in the middle of this wonderful, visual sandwich, there was no way we were going to miss this one.

And it was fantastic. It was one of my all time favourite things to think about, talk about and act out when I was a kid... taking its place alongside Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, King Kong, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Planet Of The Apes, Doc Savage and, eventually, Star Wars (which really does owe its beginnings to Flash Gordon... I’ll get to that eventually, bear with me... you can read my review of that movie here). I was absolutely hooked and, I guess the screening must have proved pretty popular because, for the next 12 or so years, the BBC would televise the three Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s (and some other classic serials too), one episode a day and usually in the school holidays in the mornings (Christmas was always good) or, occasionally, at 5.40pm on BBC2 in the same time slot they used to show the Charlie Chan, The Saint, The Falcon and the 1960s Fu Manchu films in. And you can bet my whole life revolved around them when they came on. Everything would be planned around me watching the latest installment as far as the way the rest of the day would go. Everything about these things hit big with me. And remember, these were the days before video recording. So I used to have a microphone set up next to the television and everybody had to be quiet so I could sound record the show and then listen to it numerous times after because I loved it so much (I only upgraded from a VHS player to DVD player a year or two after those machines first came out because I discovered that the Flash Gordon serials were out in the US on the format... the very same discs I’m re-watching now... oh, for a Blu Ray restoration).

Now, Flash Gordon was a cartoon strip owned by King Features that was created and written by Alex Raymond. And I say created loosely because, just a few years ago, I found out that it was he who had been working for a while with Edgar Rice Burroughs to try and develop a comic strip based on John Carter of Mars. It almost came to pass when, suddenly, work on the forthcoming strip was cancelled, the Burroughs contract rejected and... not soon after, Flash Gordon burst on the scene with a cast of creatures and locales which, it could be said, bear a certain resemblance to some of the ideas in Burrough’s Barsoomian chronicles. Funnily enough, around about 15 years ago I finally read a collected reprint of the first story of the Flash Gordon newspaper strips and the travelling to and fro from various places on the globe (in this case, the globe is the planet Mongo) and meeting strange creatures while fulfilling mini quests to get to the end of the story... in other words, all of the things that you would associate with a typical 1930s -1950s theatrical serial adventure... were all inherent in that original story. Not only that... and I certainly never realised this at the time... but the first of the three serials is absolutely spot on a fairly straight adaptation of the original adventure (I can’t say the same for the other two because I never read those strips thus far). So, that threw me when I found that out... in as nice a way possible.

Olympic Bronze and Gold Medal champion swimmer Clarence Linden Crabbe II played Flash under his screen name, Larry “Buster” Crabbe. He’s the perfect Flash Gordon (still is) and out of all the cast, he seems to be one of the more natural of the actors (he’d already played Tarzan by this point and would go on to do a whole series of both Billy The Kid and Billy Carson films, not to mention a couple of other strip characters which... I’ll get to over the next few days on this blog). Starring opposite him as Dale Arden was Jean Rogers who, for me, was always the perfect Dale Arden, although she does, in this first serial at least, spend most of her time swooning or metaphorically ‘twisting her ankle’ and generally putting herself in danger so she can be rescued. She was actually a natural brunette, which would have been fine because so was the character but, Jean Harlow was big at the time so the producers wanted her to dye her hair blonde, just as they’d got ‘Buster’ Crabbe to do. In the third serial she was replaced completely by another actress (I’ll get to that when I review it).

Frank Shannon plays Dr. Zarkov and, he was always one of my favourites but, I have to say, watching it this time around he seems to be one of the more wooden of the actors in the cast, although I’m pretty sure he got a lot better as the sequels progressed. Prince Barin is played here by the somewhat portly (which was more associated with strength in those days, as opposed to obesity) Richard Alexander, who would reprise the character in the next serial but, like many of the cast members here, would be replaced by a different actor in the third). Only the actors playing Flash Gordon, Dr. Zarkov and Emperor Ming The Merciless would stay in their roles for all three serials.

We also have Jack 'Tiny' Lipson, James Pierce and Duke York playing King Vultan of the Hawk Men, Prince Thun of the Lion Men and King Kala of the Shark Men respectively. Thun’s character was given short shrift in the 1980 movie version (reviewed here) and was stabbed by Ming early in the story but he's given much more to do here. It’s pretty obvious Brian Blessed must have remembered Lipson’s performance as the constantly laughing, boisterous Vultan when he played the role... which doesn’t seem that far removed from Blessed’s personality anyway, the way he played it.

Rounding out the main cast are Charles Middleton (who appeared a few years earlier opposite the Marx Brothers in a sequence in Duck Soup) as the evil Emperor Ming and the feisty Priscilla Lawson as his daughter Princess Aura (who is even more dripping with sex appeal than the vivacious Ornella Muti was in the 1980s movie). I’ve heard that Middleton’s make up was deliberately made to resemble, to a certain extent, the look of popular book, serial and movie super villain Fu Manchu although, to be fair, if that’s the case then the comic book character also was. Priscilla Lawson is seen here in what is probably her most famous role of not very many films. She joined the armed forces in the Second World War and, I believe, lost her leg... dying from complications from an ulcer or some such in the 1950s. When the character reappears in the third serial, she not only suffers a complete personality change but she’s also played by another actress.

And it’s a real humdinger of a serial, matching the strip it’s based on with different humanoid species (as you can tell from some of the character names) and with some special effects that, while they may look quite ropey by today's standards, still look kind of beautiful in a charming 1930s kind of way. The crudity of the practical effects is, however, matched by the sleak elegance of some of the designs. And, as there are lots of different mini adventures making up the serial, the special effects team at Universal even got to reprise their startling ‘invisibility’ effects which they’d perfected for The Invisible Man movies... Flash spends the best part of two episodes as an ‘invisible agent’, attacking Ming and his soldiers when they least suspect, aided by the invisibility ray Dr. Zarkov perfects while tinkering away in the laboratory on Mongo.

Of course, there’s loads of recycling going on too. You’ll recognise sets from various Universal horror movies redressed and, of course, no scientific laboratory would be complete without using Kenneth Strickfaden’s unusual scientific inventions which did Dr. Frankenstein so proud (read my review of Frankenstein here for a quick mention of Strickfaden and be on the look out for my review of a biography on him in the New Year). There’s also the odd bit of ‘found footage’ from older productions to flesh out sequences and, well, a lot of Ming’s soldiers, not to mention Barin, are obviously outfitted by leftovers from a Roman legion picture.

Even the music is mostly recycled and I wish I knew where half of it came from. Although the re-release of this may have included some selections from Franz Waxman’s score to The Bride Of Frankenstein, this first release doesn’t included those (although the two sequels certainly did). There are various classical pieces which I would love to know the names of here plus various other Universal scores jammed together in one big, quite seductive musical mash up (such as excerpts from the scores of Dracula’s Daughter, reviewed here and Werewolf Of London, reviewed here).

That being said, despite all this recycling, the Flash Gordon serials had huge budgets for their time, three times the amount normally alloted a weekly cinematic chapter play. They were the most expensive serials of their time and this really shows when you compare it to others of their ilk. Universal serials always looked better than rivals like Columbia and Republic and, these (and the Buck Rogers serial) looked even better than the other Universal serials of the time. Yes, there are a lot of clunky bits such as bizarrely miscast voice additions dubbed on to add in lines in post production and, some of the monsters look bizarrely comical (although, as a kaiju fan I still love them)... but they are completely charming and, frankly, I could watch these things over and over again.

It’s no secret that George Lucas wanted to make a big budget version of Flash Gordon in the mid 1970s and that he tried very hard to get the rights but was refused. I guess a lot of Star Wars fans owe a lot to that refusal because he wrote his own space opera along similar lines and, although Star Wars is its own thing, it’s equally a pastiche of several things found in the serials and the history of science fiction (not to mention influences from the cinema of Kurosawa and World War II dogfight pictures, along with a load of other stuff). Indeed, I can’t think of Han Solo being tortured on that static electricity machine in The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here) without thinking of Flash being tortured by the electricity in the static room on Vultan’s sky city (indeed, Cloud City is pretty much Lucas’ homage to Vultan’s city). Similarly, when Flash goes up against a man in suit monster in Episode 2/3 (cliffhanger and resolution)... and changing into a young boy in long shot so the ‘giant monster’ can pick him up... I remember what a debt the Rancor in Return Of The Jedi (reviewed here) owes to this serial. More to come on these kinds of influences as I review each serial this week. Of course, the film-makers here, in turn, were also looking back to their cinematic legacy. For instance, the man working the big dial machine in the atom furnaces in Vultan’s palace was obviously inspired by the workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (reviewed here).

The other thing about this is, although some of the acting is a bit wooden and some of the acting is very ‘silent melodrama’, that the on-screen chemistry between everyone is electric and it really carries it. Crabbe himself is pretty natural as the comic strip hero and you can see why he was cast in these kinds of adventures roles... being an Olympic swimmer he really looks the part and you believe he can do all this running, jumping and fighting... some of which he clearly does himself (and you certainly know it when he doesn’t). And talking about that body... you get to see a lot of it and, frankly, a lot of the actors and actresses in this. The costumes in this one show a lot of flesh and the producers were pressurised into cooling it down and providing more coverings for the various actors and actresses in the two sequels.

And... there’s lots more to say about Flash Gordon but, honestly, watch out for my reviews of the next two serials in this sequence over the next couple of days. When this was finally shown on television in America in the 1950s it became very popular and so, an American/German co-production of a Flash Gordon TV series was produced, starring Steve Holland as Flash (who readers of the 1960s/70s Bantam reprints of the Doc Savage stories will recognise as he was the ‘artists model’ for James Bama’s cover paintings). I’ve got a number of the surviving episodes of this show and, honestly, asides from not sticking to the original concept in hardly any way at all, the shows look really cheap and nasty and certainly don’t live up to the brilliance of the original serials, despite being filmed almost 20 years later. Avoid them like the plague (of sound?*) and stick with these wonderful originals. I have to say that, re-watching these again, they totally hold up and I thoroughly love them. So join me tomorrow when I review the first of the sequel serials.

*sorry, couldn’t resist a little joke to fans of the Alex Raymond branded Flash Gordon novels of the early 1970s there.

 

Buster Crabbe Serial Week at NUTS4R2

Flash Gordon (1936)

Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars (1938)

Red Barry (1938)

Buck Rogers (1939)

Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (1940)