FANTASIA OBSCURA: The First Superhero on the Big Screen is a Real Marvel
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, history can be confusing, as well as deep; Lords help you when it’s both confusing and deep…
The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941)
Directed by: John English and William Witney
Distributed by: Republic Pictures
If you’re like most casual fans, someone says to you, “Hey, let’s see Captain Marvel,” and this comes to mind:
And if you’re with someone who is a lot more invested in comic history, you talk about the above and they may say that they meant they wanted to see the other Captain Marvel:
Okay, yeah, this gets complicated…
There are places with more bandwidth to better explain this; the TL;DR version is, that there was a lot of bad blood that spilled over the name “Captain Marvel” and the first such character with that title. It’s a tale that covers 70-plus years, three comic book companies ultimately, one federal lawsuit that took 12 years to argue, and some of the biggest names among both comic book companies and intellectual properties. It was a real drek shturem all around for everyone. And that’s the simple version!
And we’re about to make it a little more complex as we talk about the Captain Marvel movie that came out before the actors playing the leads in both of the current films were born…
We open in the Valley of Tombs in Siam, which no, is not a real place, stay focused here. The archeological party looking for the remains of the Scorpion Kingdom (again, focus) is headed by Dr. John Malcolm (Robert Strange). Among the folks brought along is radio reporter Billy Batson (Frank Coughlan Jr.) who while the rest of the party is desecrating a tomb to discover the fabled Golden Scorpion, decides to honor the warnings on the tomb not to enter, betraying some of his journalistic sensibilities.
By not going into the tomb, however, he avoids getting caught in a cave-in caused by the Golden Scorpion, the world’s oldest death ray. He also, for showing respect, gets an audience with the wizard Shazam (Nigel De Brulier), who grants Billy an extraordinary boon: Should the reporter speak the wizard’s name, he will be granted the powers of the gods, in a new larger form who answers to the name… Captain Marvel (Tom Tyler)!
The Captain is able to free Malcolm Archeological Expedition from their own hubris and stupidity the sealed-up cave and fend off the Siamese natives trying to kill them; again, just go with it. The expedition agree that the Golden Scorpion is too dangerous to allow others to possess, and so break up the device into pieces, each member of the team responsible for their own portion.
Soon after they get back to the states, members of that team start to die in a horrible manner, thanks to the cloaked and enrobed Scorpion, who hides his face as he steals these pieces to reassemble the Golden Scorpion. Billy confides in his co-workers Betty Wallace (Louise Currie) and Whitey Murphy (William Benedict) how helpless he feels in the face of this madman. Considering how little success his better half has had, the one with the wisdom of Solomon, strength of Hercules, etc., with stopping the Scorpion, that’s quite understandable…
But there’s not a lot of time for self-doubt, as there’s not a moment to lose between a guillotine getting ready to remove a head here, a driver losing consciousness sending her car careening there, a death ray melting this mountain, a ship caught in that typhoon, and all sorts of mayhem getting our characters oh so close to death every few minutes, their fates not to be revealed until next-
Oh, did we forget to mention that this was a serial? Which meant that you’d go the theater for the afternoon, catch a chapter of this between the cartoon and the newsreel, before the main attraction, and if you getting into this story, you’d have to commit to 12 weeks of going to the movies to catch this in first run. So enough complaining about how long movies are now!
(And since you’re probably asking, the total run time of all pieces to this story from end to end came to 216 minutes, which meant that when it had a release in this format in 1966, hoping to get the “Big Red Cheese” the same kind of attention Batman had gotten, it was a four-hour run.)
In terms of stuff to complain about, there were a few aspects to more than make up for that. The one big effect that kept fans happy was watching Captain Marvel fly (most of the time). For shots that involved him coming onto the scene and going over the terrain, VFX masterminds for Republic Howard & Theodore Lydecker came up with a brilliant idea: They made a seven foot long paper mache dummy of our hero that weighed only 15 pounds. They would then run this on a set of wires hanging over the scene. This allowed their flying hero to be in the same shot with the other actors, giving the audience the most authentic looking comic book hero they could see at that time.
Mind you, not that they had a lot to compare him to. The Adventures of Captain Marvel has the distinction of not only being the first “Captain Marvel” film, but also the first ever live-action adaptation of a comic book superhero for the screen. Republic beat everyone to market, including Columbia, whose effort to put Superman on film in Superman would not be out until seven years later. (And of course this gets brought up during deposition in the National-vs-Fawcett case, which as we said, is complicated, so…)
But is it worth watching for other than some innovative VFX and historic significance? Well… Keep in mind that serials tended to be quickie affairs, where you pump the actors through grueling shoots following hastily-written scripts done on cheap sets and backlot exteriors, so…
…which, by the way, really looks like a huge mega-million dollar project when you compare it to the next time Captain Marvel comes to a screen near you, this time on Saturday mornings on CBS in 1974…
Add to that Tyler’s lanky hero, who unlike other superheroes on film to come displays two states when on screen, confused and way too into beating the snot out of everyone. Sure, maybe he’s only got as much strength of Hercules as Republic Pictures could afford to put in a serial, but does he have to look like he’s enjoying all the pain he’s causing?
(The level of pain he engenders is something the serial becomes infamous for, so much so that Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman of Firesign Theater would- ah, but that’s a different column for another day…)
Still, if you have four hours and can’t decide which recent Captain Marvel you want to commit to, this might help you split the difference if you’re looking deeper into the whole history of the name and all the battles between publishers that made Infinity War look like a pre-school slap-fight…
NEXT TIME: They say close only counts with horseshoes and nuclear weapons; our next film we look at doesn’t touch on either of these…
