Created by Bill Parker and C. C. Beck, Spy Smasher was introduced in Whiz Comics #2 and was the second most popular Fawcett Comics hero behind Captain Marvel. Alan Armstrong was a millonaire inventor who decided to use his intelligence to protect America during the war. By the 50s, there was no need for that, so he became Crime Smasher for one issue before disappearing until he made appearances in Crisis on Infinite Earths and The Power of Shazam after DC bought the characters of their former rival.

In the serial, both Alan and Jack Armstrong (both brothers are played by Kane Richmond) are on the wrong side of The Mask (Hans Schumm), including — spoiler warning — a chapter ending that does not end happily, as unlike every serial, one of them is killed.

While the twin idea was invented for the series, The Mask, Admiral Corby (Sam Flint) and his daughter Eve (Marguerite Chapman) are all directly from the comics.

In their book The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound and Fury Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut claimed that this was ” the foremost cliffhanger example of a whole school of Hollywood film-making in the 40s that gloried in matchless pure entertainment.”

At the end of Kill Bill volume 1, there are RIP notices for Charles Bronson, Lucio Fulci, Sergio Leone, Shaw Brothers regulars Cheng Cheh and Lo Lieh, Django director Sergio Corbucci, Lee Van Cleef and the director of this serial, Willian Witney, who Quentin Tarantino has said is a lost master. Witney popularized shooting fight scenes in small bursts, allowing stuntmen to keep high energy throughout the scene. Some of his best regarded movies are The Crimson Ghost, Adventures of Captain Marvel, Master of the World and the very late in his career Darktown Strutters.

Spy Smasher was one of 26 Republic serials re-edited and re-released as a Century 66 film on television in 1966, in the midst of Bat-mania, and titled Spy Smasher Returns. Other films in this series include — thanks to ugglewuggle on the Movie Serial Message Boards — the following (the in parentesis title is the re-edited Century 66 title):

Darkest Africa (Batmen of Africa)
Undersea Kingdom (Sharad of Atlantis)
Robinson Crusoe of (Robinson Crusoe of)
Clipper Island (Mystery Island)
The Fighting Devil Dogs (Torpedo of Doom)
Hawk of the Wilderness (Lost Island of Kioga)
Mysterious Doctor Satan (Doctor Satan’s Robot)
Spy Smasher (Spy Smasher Returns)
Perils of Nyoka (Nyoka and the Lost Secrets of Hippocrates)
G-Men Vs. the Black Dragon (Black Dragon of Manzanar)
Secret Service in Darkest Africa (The Baron’s African War)
The Masked Marvel (Sakima and The Masked Marvel)
Tiger Woman (Jungle Gold)
Manhunt of Mystery Island (Captain Mephisto and the Transformation Machine)
Federal Operator 99 (FBI-99)
The Purple Monster Strikes (D-Day on Mars)
The Crimson Ghost (Cyclotrode “X”)
The Black Widow (Sombra, The Spider Woman)
G-Men Never Forget (Code 645)
Dangers of the Canadian Mounties (R.C.M.P. & the Treasure of Genghis Khan)
Federal Agents Vs. Underworld, Inc. (Golden Hands of Kurigal)
The Invisible Monster (Slaves of the Invisible Monster)
Radar Men from the Moon (Retik the Moon Menace)
Jungle Drums of Africa (U-238 and the Witch Doctor)
Canadian Mounties Vs. (Missile Base at Taniak)
Atomic Invaders (Atomic Invaders)
Trader Tom of the China Seas (Target: Sea of China)
Panther Girl of the Kongo (The Claw Monsters)

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Melanie Novak writes about the Golden Age of Hollywood, infusing her weekly movie reviews with history, gossip, and the glamour of the studio era. You can read her reviews at www.melanienovak.com and follow her on Instagram @novak_melanie or Twitter @MelanieANovak.

Every fiction writer has experienced the moment when a character takes over a story in a way the author never suspected—or intended.  I’d bet this is what happened during the filming of This Gun for Hire.  Like any good writer, director Frank Tuttle knew that when a character muscles his or her way into the spotlight, it’s wisest to get out of the way and hand over the reins.

While Robert Preston gets top male billing, Alan Ladd (with an “introducing” credit) runs away with the picture.  Ladd stars as Raven, a hitman with a soul.  Though he executes his work—and his revenge—with a single-minded ruthlessness, he has soft spots for disabled children, cats, and one Ellen Graham, a woman who shows him kindness but not pity when she’s pulled by circumstances into his revenge plot.

Veronica Lake plays Ellen, and though she’s supposed to be over the moon to marry Preston’s cop Michael Crane, the screen sizzles when she’s with Raven.  The chemistry was so apparent to Paramount that it put Lake and Ladd together in three more films after Gun, including Ladd’s first top billed role in The Glass Key (1942). 

Based on Graham Greene’s 1936 novel, the plot revolves around Raven’s thirst for revenge when Willard Gates pays him for a hit with marked money and tries to have him executed.  The man behind the money is the real villain, as he’s selling chemical compounds to Japan to make bombs that will be used against the United States in the ongoing war.

Ellen, a magician and singer in Gates’ nightclub, is pulled into the plot when a senator asks her to spy on Gates and find the man at the top in the name of national security.  When Gates sees Ellen and Raven together on a train, he believes they are working together when their meeting was pure chance.

When Ellen is in danger, her boyfriend Michael is ineffectual, but Raven comes to the rescue.  She then becomes his hostage, and they spend a night in an abandoned railroad car.  Despite his affection for a stray cat, he strangles it to keep its meowing from giving away their position to the searching cops, and Ellen gets the message—he likes her, but everyone is ultimately expendable to his revenge mission.

Even so, the heat radiates off them both.  

She convinces him to put finding the truth about the chemical compound and doing his duty to the country above his revenge, but in the end he gets both, though he dies in the effort.

Ellen goes off to marry her upstanding-but-lackluster boyfriend, but I can’t help thinking she’ll soon tire of darning his socks and cooking his dinner.

An early film noir, and a great film for fans of Lake, Ladd, or Graham Greene.

If you love poor Robert Preston, you’re better off catching him with Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck in 1939’s Union Pacific.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Val Lewton’s birthday, so we had to bring back our review on the film that he is most often associated with. This originally ran on the site on August 24, 2020.

The Lewton Bus is also known as the Cat Scare. You may also know it as the Jump Scare. It’s that moment in so many horror movies where tension is raised and built and then, when it seems like the heroine is about to be attacked, a cat will hiss or the brakes of a bus will loudly intrude into your senses. It’s the sound and fury of tension being released. It is pretty much everything horror has that takes the anxiety of the outside world and releases it.

Speaking of tension, Cat People is a movie packed with it. For 1942, it’s an incredibly prurient film. Serbian-born fashion illustrator Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is so convinced that she’s descended from werecats that she holds back the passion that her husband and marriage demands, pushing him into the arms of another woman.

It’s the first movie that producer Val Lewton — just leaving his deal with producer David Selznick — would make for RKO pictures. While these movies were modestly budgeted, Lewton was able to assemble a team to make the films that he wanted to make. With director Jacques Tourneur, writer DeWitt Bodeen, screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen and editor Mark Robson — the creator of the aforementioned Lewis Bus — he would go on to make deeply personal tales hidden in the guise of the B picture.

The studio had come up with the title and told Lewton to make a movie of it. He told Bodeen that he was unhappy with the title already and “”if you want to get out now, I won’t hold it against you.” But the writer dug into the history of cats within horror and worked to make a movie less about vampires and monsters, more about psychological terror and the unseen. Yet Lewton also told his team, “if you’re going to have horror, the audience must be able to identify with the characters in order to be frightened.”

Irena is first glimpsed sketching the panthers in a New York City zoo. There, she meets and falls for Oliver Reed (Kent Smith). Over tea, she explains to him how she is descended from a village that turned to witchcraft and devil-worship after being enslaved by the Mameluks. While King John would drive the Mameluks out, when he learned that villagers had gone wild, he had them killed. Yet only the wisest and most evil of them escaped. Oliver laughs it off, but Irena believes this legend.

Despite the fact that cats hiss in her presence and just her touch kills a bird, Oliver marries Irena. But soon, the fact that she will not consummate their marriage — that passion would awaken the beast within — he’s pushed into the arms of Alice Moore (Jane Randolph). This is where the Lewton jump scares come from in the film, as Irena continues to stalk Alice through the streets and, even more famously, the claustrophobic pool of the Royal Palms Hotel.

Despite costing $135,000, Cat People made $1 million back in rentals, leading to RKO asking for a sequel. We’ll get to The Curse of the Cat People later this week, a side story in a way that is superior to this film. The Seventh Victim would also bring back Tom Conway’s Dr. Judd character — despite him being seemingly killed in this movie — as he tries to help another woman who seeks the embrace of death.

The shadowy tone of this film and the idea of a woman who is filled with animalistic passion — and the ability to become an animal — became a trope of its own in other films released in the wake of this movie. They include Cry of the Werewolf, Jungle Woman, The Soul of a Monster, Cult of the Cobra, The She-Creature, She-Wolf of London and more.

The driven Lewton would go on to make ten more movies for RKO in four years, including I Walked With a Zombie, Isle of the Dead and Ghost Ship. The dark tones of his films led to two of them — the Tourneur-directed The Seventh Victim and The Leopard Man — ending up on the list of the Church of Satan’s approved films. As for Tourneur, he would go on to create another landmark black and white horror epic, Night of the Demon (which also appears on the above list).

Cat People’s influenced every horror movie that would come after. Perhaps the most obvious devotee was Curtis Harrington, whose Night Tide takes the idea of a woman convinced she is from another world to the boardwalk carnival, and his TV movie The Cat Creature, a tribute that even features Kent Smith in its cast.

You can get this movie from the Criterion collection.

The Lewton Bus is also known as the Cat Scare. You may also know it as the Jump Scare. It’s that moment in so many horror movies where tension is raised and built and then, when it seems like the heroine is about to be attacked, a cat will hiss or the brakes of a bus will loudly intrude into your senses. It’s the sound and fury of tension being released. It is pretty much everything horror has that takes the anxiety of the outside world and releases it.

Speaking of tension, Cat People is a movie packed with it. For 1942, it’s an incredibly prurient film. Serbian-born fashion illustrator Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is so convinced that she’s descended from werecats that she holds back the passion that her husband and marriage demands, pushing him into the arms of another woman.

It’s the first movie that producer Val Lewton — just leaving his deal with producer David Selznick — would make for RKO pictures. While these movies were modestly budgeted, Lewton was able to assemble a team to make the films that he wanted to make. With director Jacques Tourneur, writer DeWitt Bodeen, screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen and editor Mark Robson — the creator of the aforementioned Lewis Bus — he would go on to make deeply personal tales hidden in the guise of the B picture.

The studio had come up with the title and told Lewton to make a movie of it. He told Bodeen that he was unhappy with the title already and “”if you want to get out now, I won’t hold it against you.” But the writer dug into the history of cats within horror and worked to make a movie less about vampires and monsters, more about psychological terror and the unseen. Yet Lewton also told his team, “if you’re going to have horror, the audience must be able to identify with the characters in order to be frightened.”

Irena is first glimpsed sketching the panthers in a New York City zoo. There, she meets and falls for Oliver Reed (Kent Smith). Over tea, she explains to him how she is descended from a village that turned to witchcraft and devil-worship after being enslaved by the Mameluks. While King John would drive the Mameluks out, when he learned that villagers had gone wild, he had them killed. Yet only the wisest and most evil of them escaped. Oliver laughs it off, but Irena believes this legend.

Despite the fact that cats hiss in her presence and just her touch kills a bird, Oliver marries Irena. But soon, the fact that she will not consummate their marriage — that passion would awaken the beast within — he’s pushed into the arms of Alice Moore (Jane Randolph). This is where the Lewton jump scares come from in the film, as Irena continues to stalk Alice through the streets and, even more famously, the claustrophobic pool of the Royal Palms Hotel.

Despite costing $135,000, Cat People made $1 million back in rentals, leading to RKO asking for a sequel. We’ll get to The Curse of the Cat People later this week, a side story in a way that is superior to this film. The Seventh Victim would also bring back Tom Conway’s Dr. Judd character — despite him being seemingly killed in this movie — as he tries to help another woman who seeks the embrace of death.

The shadowy tone of this film and the idea of a woman who is filled with animalistic passion — and the ability to become an animal — became a trope of its own in other films released in the wake of this movie. They include Cry of the Werewolf, Jungle Woman, The Soul of a Monster, Cult of the Cobra, The She-Creature, She-Wolf of London and more.

The driven Lewton would go on to make ten more movies for RKO in four years, including I Walked With a Zombie, Isle of the Dead and Ghost Ship. The dark tones of his films led to two of them — the Tourneur-directed The Seventh Victim and The Leopard Man — ending up on the list of the Church of Satan’s approved films. As for Tourneur, he would go on to create another landmark black and white horror epic, Night of the Demon (which also appears on the above list).

Cat People’s influenced every horror movie that would come after. Perhaps the most obvious devotee was Curtis Harrington, whose Night Tide takes the idea of a woman convinced she is from another world to the boardwalk carnival, and his TV movie The Cat Creature, a tribute that even features Kent Smith in its cast.

You can get this movie from the Criterion collection.