The Shadow Strikes (1937)

Most familiar to us from old time radio and a rather uneven Alec Baldwin film, 'the Shadow' is a child of the pulps and gets sufficiently pulpy treatment here. Independently wealthy "armature criminologist" Lamont Cranston is here played by one time silent star Rod La Rocque, who just a few years after making this film would retire from acting to become a real estate broker. Cranston is helped by your standard type devoted butler as he goes about being "The Scourge of the Underworld". Two seemingly unrelated criminal plots Cranston is working against of course end up connected, though its kind of confusing how every things suppose to fit together.

Early in the film 'The Shadow' foils the attempts of two crooks to rob from an office safe, he doesn't leave the premises fast enough however and is stumbled upon by a cop. Having already apparently ditched his minimal disguise (comprised of a down turned hat and a cape the he must awkwardly hold Dracula like to cover his face), Cranston just ad-hocs a claim to being the lawyer whose safe was almost busted, and ends up just kind of running with this cover for most of the rest of the movie. This seems short sighted on Cranstons part because he's passing himself off with this false identity all over town and that would surely present difficulties down the road for when he's working on other cases, not to mention isn't he suppose to be a 'well known playboy', you'd think someone would recognize him (or at least be aware that he doesn't look like the established lawyer he's pretending to be, good thing the real guys on vacation).

Anyway notable about this film is how bad the writing and acting (with the exception of La Rocque) is. The movie was produced by a company called Grand National Pictures, an outfit so small that I wasn't even familiar with them. The acting is on par with your weaker community theater groups, the dialogue far worse then that in the Dick Tracy, and Bulldog Drummond series. Man who works with the real attorney:"Jeeze this is exciting maybe he's a criminal or something?" Underworld boss after being told that a robbery he commissioned has been foiled by The Shadow: "I'd just like to know who he is?" Also the reporters say a lot of really inappropriate stuff within hearing distance of a bereaved family: "A murder, just what we needed" (spoken enthusiastically). This awkward badness though is part of what makes this movie enjoyable, so it washes out with a grade C.