The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: 1937
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If you tilt to just the right angle, for a while you can see Dead End as the tale of three people from a poor neighborhood and how life has worked out for them as they got closer to their thirties. Humphrey Bogart grew from a “not too bad” young punk to a public enemy…
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For maybe the first ninety minutes of The Good Earth, it seems like the most interesting thing to talk about is going to be how the filmmakers were able to make the lead characters in the film appear sympathetic while they were being, frankly, un-American. It makes sense, since the main characters are Chinese. The…
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The Emperor’s Candlesticks starts with an exceptional display of chemistry from Robert Young and Maureen O’Sullivan. They’re at the opera, it’s the late nineteenth century, it’s a masked costume ball, Young is a Grand Duke dressed as Romeo, and O’Sullivan is the sun. Then it turns out O’Sullivan is working with a bunch of Polish…
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It Happened in Hollywood is very nearly a success, which is surprising since most of the film is entirely mediocre. There’s a great lead performance from Richard Dix, as a silent movie cowboy who can’t make it in talkies (though, to be fair, the one bombed screen-test scene was more used to comment on the…
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Dick Tracy starts reasonably strong, which one forgets as the serial plods through the near five hours of its fifteen chapters. The first chapter’s a decent enough pilot, with lead Ralph Byrd actually solving a crime, something he doesn’t really do later on. It doesn’t even open with him, instead there’s a creepy introduction to…
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Brothers United, sadly, does not feature much in the way of brothers uniting. Much of the chapter is spent with Ralph Byrd begging Carleton Young to remember his identity and Young not remembering his identity and running away. There’s no uniting. It’s actually the most red herring of a chapter title as Dick Tracy gets.…
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Brothers United, sadly, does not feature much in the way of brothers uniting. Much of the chapter is spent with Ralph Byrd begging Carleton Young to remember his identity and Young not remembering his identity and running away. There’s no uniting. It’s actually the most red herring of a chapter title as Dick Tracy gets.…
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The Devil in White is the penultimate Dick Tracy chapter, which is great. It means there’s only one left. And it even has an interesting cliffhanger. It doesn’t have an interesting cliffhanger resolve. It has another easy cliffhanger resolve; I don’t think the serial’s had a single good resolve. But the cliffhanger is solid because…
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The Devil in White is the penultimate Dick Tracy chapter, which is great. It means there’s only one left. And it even has an interesting cliffhanger. It doesn’t have an interesting cliffhanger resolve. It has another easy cliffhanger resolve; I don’t think the serial’s had a single good resolve. But the cliffhanger is solid because…
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So, unfortunately, Ralph Byrd (you know, Dick Tracy), doesn’t get shot in the cliffhanger resolution. He dodges. Because they all heard the Spider approach because the Spider has a club foot. Except they also all think the Spider is wearing a disguise, implying the club foot is a part of that disguise. The distinct, noisy…
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So, unfortunately, Ralph Byrd (you know, Dick Tracy), doesn’t get shot in the cliffhanger resolution. He dodges. Because they all heard the Spider approach because the Spider has a club foot. Except they also all think the Spider is wearing a disguise, implying the club foot is a part of that disguise. The distinct, noisy…
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The Trail of the Spider is the clip chapter. After the current winner for laziest cliffhanger resolve in the serial–Ralph Byrd turns a steering wheel to get out of danger–Byrd and the cast get together with three new characters to hear all about the Spider. Although Byrd’s been hunting the Spider Gang since chapter one,…
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The Trail of the Spider is the clip chapter. After the current winner for laziest cliffhanger resolve in the serial–Ralph Byrd turns a steering wheel to get out of danger–Byrd and the cast get together with three new characters to hear all about the Spider. Although Byrd’s been hunting the Spider Gang since chapter one,…
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Harbor Pursuit starts and finishes in the harbor. For some reason, crackerjack G-Man Ralph Byrd never pieces together the harbor might be a base of operations of the Spider Gang. Just one of the many obvious connections Byrd’s been missing since chapter one. Or two. Byrd at least seems competent in the first chapter. After…
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Harbor Pursuit starts and finishes in the harbor. For some reason, crackerjack G-Man Ralph Byrd never pieces together the harbor might be a base of operations of the Spider Gang. Just one of the many obvious connections Byrd’s been missing since chapter one. Or two. Byrd at least seems competent in the first chapter. After…
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The Gold Ship is the tenth chapter of Dick Tracy. It’s the first chapter where Ralph Byrd even entertains the notion his brother might still be alive, even though brainwashed and surgically disguised brother Carleton Young has been running afoul of Byrd since the second chapter. Young just hasn’t said anything. Even though the big…
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The Stratosphere Adventure isn’t much of an adventure, but it is a fairly interesting chapter. The entire chapter takes place right after the cliffhanger resolve. A cop-out cliffhanger resolve, where federal agent Ralph Byrd puts his own safety before civilian Wedgwood Nowell (big surprise), but still–it’s continuous action, something the serial hasn’t done. There’s also…
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Nowhere near as many wipes this chapter, but that lack doesn’t really help things. The cliffhanger resolve is another reveal one; turns out it wasn’t the bad guys shooting those guns off-screen, it was the good guys. So there wasn’t really a cliffhanger at all. Like always. It’s never a cliffhanger in Dick Tracy and…
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The Ghost Town Mystery has a lot of wipes. Half wipes, quartering wipes, circular wipes. Wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe. I swear there haven’t been this many wipes in the serial until now. There’s also some terrible insert shots of lead Ralph Byrd when he’s listening to someone. Edward Todd, Helene Turner, and William Witney’s editing…
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The Ghost Town Mystery has a lot of wipes. Half wipes, quartering wipes, circular wipes. Wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe. I swear there haven’t been this many wipes in the serial until now. There’s also some terrible insert shots of lead Ralph Byrd when he’s listening to someone. Edward Todd, Helene Turner, and William Witney’s editing…
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Dangerous Waters opens with an unbelievable cliffhanger resolve. Not unbelievably good, unbelievably cheap. I can’t imagine what made me think they wouldn’t go unbelievably cheap. I was clearly giving Dick Tracy too much credit. After the resolve, the chapter’s back to “formula.” It’s even about a missing scientific formula. Thanks to Kay Hughes reading the…
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There’s no great action in Brother Against Brother. There’s what might be a real cliffhanger–Ralph Byrd shot (figure it’s safe to spoil since Byrd’s the lead and it’s chapter five of fifteen). I guess there’s some good effects at the beginning with some of the plane stuff. It doesn’t figure in much to the rest…
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Death Rides the Sky does not follow the concerning pattern of the previous two chapters where information falls into Ralph Byrd’s lap and he ignores it only to discover it’s of vital importance. In Rides, he knows the information of vital importance right off. Cuts down on later confusion. The chapter opens with a predictably…
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With The Fur Pirates, Dick Tracy starts to show some problems; outside the obvious acting ones considering the supporting cast. There’s another fast cliffhanger resolve, with the disaster not being anywhere near as dangerous as originally suggested. After that resolution, there’s some decent special effects–miniature–of the bad guy’s Wing aircraft taking off. Then the chapter…
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The Bridge of Terror gets off to a somewhat rocky start. The special effects on the cliffhanger resolution are outstanding. The actual resolution itself? Pretty lazy stuff. It immediately goes into Ralph Byrd (as Dick Tracy) getting in a police plane to track the giant villain aircraft, just called “The Wing.” Little does Byrd know…
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The Spider Strikes opens the Dick Tracy serial with an awesome sequence–a group of crime bosses meeting up on a train to meet with the big boss (The Spider). One of them tries to stand up to the unseen Spider, only to have his plans foiled… supernaturally it seems. The Spider then hunts the man…
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Young and Innocent is about Nova Pilbeam (Young) and Derrick De Marney (Innocent). She’s a county police constable’s daughter, he’s an escaped murder suspect. They first meet during his interrogation, when he faints at discovering he’s not just accused of murdering a woman, but that woman has also left him some money. Pilbeam nurses De…
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Parábola is a series of objects, usually with parabola shapes (a U), shot at different angles, made with different materials, moving and interacting, with lighting and editing making the objects move or interact in one way or another. The objects are sculptures by Rutherford Boyd; they’re sometimes art deco, sometimes just appear art deco because…
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As Captains Courageous enters its third act, Spencer Tracy (as a Portugese fisherman) reminds Freddie Bartholomew (a spoiled blue blood kid Tracy rescues after he falls overboard from an ocean liner) it’s almost time to go home to his regular life. It’s a shock for Bartholomew, but also for the viewer. Even though the first…
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Until the halfway point or so, A Day at the Races moves quite well. Sure, it gets off to a slow start–introducing Chico as sidekick to Maureen O’Sullivan and setting up her problems (her sanitarium is going out of business), which isn’t funny stuff. I think Allan Jones even shows up as her nightclub singing…
The Stop Button 