Truly Dreadful Film

That was an excellent one.

So much average

The acting in this movie is really good.

I just found this VHS double tape 30's matinée serial and thoroughly enjoyed viewing it. Great to see the pre-WW2 vintage cars, flying wing and clothes fashions of this fine show. It was well edited, shot, written and expertly acted. Great and interesting Dick Tracy casting with this beloved and loved comic-book character. Ralph Byrd surely makes the quintessential Tracy over all others. I always felt that in the later Dick Tracy serials, TV show, and Disney/Touchstone feature film could not hold a candle to this earliest '37 project. Republic Pictures is back and re-releasing their archive of films. The home studio of early John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and other matinée serials was in the present CBS Radford studio lot in Studio City, CA. The show still manages to hold-up in today's superheroes and was refreshing to see the stunt work and physical special effects and NO over used CGI.

Republic Pictures were clearly hitting their stride in superior (and super) serial production with this quite sensational 15 chapter crime-terrorism drama made in 1936, released in early 1937. For any faults: too long as 12 chapters would do; the tedious antics of the infantile Smiley Burnette, there is a dozen truly astonishing and eerie/creepy moments that easily compensate. The first episode is so weird, and on a huge screen in a giant old theater full of screaming kids (or even adults) has several hair raising scenes where master evildoer The Lame One has maximum effect. The first chapter ending sees The fabulous Lydecker Brothers in full big budget special effects mode on a thrill set piece aboard the Golden Gate Bridge. The opening two chapters also features an astonishing triangular flying wing plane (looks like a cross between a stealth bomber and a flying sandwich) which for its day is a genuine masterpiece of inventive and graphic/realistically clever sci fi imagination. The recent film SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW owes a huge debt of imagination to this one flying apparatus alone. Republic clearly intended this serial to play to adults and it is not a G rated serial at all...given the menace, action and violence. It has three great villains one of whom is Gordon Tracy (Dick's brainwashed bro) who, after getting the treatment, sports a very fetching Bride Of Frankenstein hair stripe along with a mean scar. Another hideout menace is Moloch, a cat patting hunchback akin to a lost Uncle of Peter Lorre. Incredible action stunt sequences abound and very inventive use of miniatures and special effects..the chapter endings of 9 and 10 especially with a huge blazing Zeppelin and then a sheet of hull metal swinging from a repaired ship are very well thought out. Often the resolves cheat with Dick just getting up and running off, or rolling out of the way, but given the very high standard of the rest of all parts of this huge and complex production it was a major step forward for Republic at the time proving their willingness to make a serial for all ages that employed excellent craftsmen...especially the incredible Lydecker Brothers they inherited in their merger with Mascot Pictures. Remove them and the serial industry would have been all chases and fights. No wonder this serial was so successful it offered a big marker for two more Dick Tracy epics in 38 and 39. Excellent! Beware of dud dvds though, the one I saw was awful and bleached, in good quality this 15 chapter pre-noir horror serial must be a knockout.

I've watched only 4-5 serials, so I don't have a lot to compare thisto, but so far it's easily the worst of the lot. The overlap fromchapter to chapter is too great (too much material repeated in thenew episode that was seen in the previous episode). The acting ispoor, especially Ralph Byrd (if he stood still for a moment, he'd beattacked by a woodpecker). The "comedy" of Smiley Burnett isnothing to smile about (he's even worse here than in the GeneAutry movies). The character with the most brains in this serial isactually the 12 year old kid, played by Lee Van Atta. And perhapsmost of all, has anybody seen Dick Tracy in this film? I must havemissed him, because no one in this movie even remotelyresembled the comic strip character. Low budget is not enough ofan excuse for low tech here. At least the director could have put awatch on Ralph Byrd's wrist, & pretended it was radio controlled.The two low budget jungle serials I watched with Phyllis Coates("Panther Girl of the Congo" & "Jungle Drums of Africa") were waybetter than this, & so was a low budget jungle serial with ClydeBeatty ("Lost Jungle"). Not that those were great serials, but theywere better than this one, so tells you something about Dick Tracy.If you'd like to watch a better crime serial, I recommend "The GreenArcher." That & the serial I'm in the middle of now, "CaptainMarvel," are far superior to Dick Tracy. I rate it 3/10.

This is one of the better serials I've seen...especially of the less glitzy pre-1940 productions. There are few (in fact only one I think) cliffhanger ending that doesn't ring true (the kind where we see the action...and then the resolve shows different actions happening in the next episode). That puts it up real high in my book on just that point.There isn't all that much care put to keeping the serial like the comic strip. Tracy became a g-man instead of a city police detective and gone are the maladjusted and malformed villains of his colorful rogues gallery. The Lame One, the villain of this chapterplay, doesn't compare to the grotesqueries of The Brow or Little Face.Ralph Byrd is excellent as Tracy...in fact he IS Dick Tracy. Forget Morgan Conway's forgettable appearances in Dick Tracy's Dilemma and Dick Tracy Vs. Cueball (a horrible film)...and especially forget the primary color extravaganza that Warren Beatty put out. Ralph Byrd does them both in...stolid, straight forward and eager for action.I would rate this serial right up there with other great chapterplays, like The Adventures of Captain Marvel, The Masked Marvel and the like.