THE GREAT ALASKAN MYSTERY (1944 serial)

I finally figured out the crucial difference between Universal serials and Republic serials:

Universal serial characters change their clothes.

As noted elsewhere, Republic was notorious for keeping characters in the same outfits unless they changed clothes to match stock footage (not much of a problem when dealing with cowboys / superheroes /  military personnel).

While there’s plenty of that in Universal serials, they also dressed characters logically for the scenes they appear in, which for this serial means wearing suits and dresses when meeting business leaders in town, dungarees and plaid shirts when logging or mining, furs in the great frozen north, etc.

The Great Alaskan Mystery isn’t a fan favorite among serial buffs, but for the life of me I can’t fathom why.  It packs a good script (by George H. Plympton and Maurice Tombragel off a story by Jack Foley) with well constructed scenes, characters, and dialog; the performances are all good; while the direction by Lewis D. Collins and Ray Taylor is workman like it still delivers the groceries and occasionally offers some interesting staging; Harry Neumann and William A. Sickner’s cinematography is up to the task; and the editing team (Irving Birnbaum, Jack Dolan, Ace Herman, Alvin Todd, and Edgar Zane) tie in a lot of stuff very seamlessly.

It occupies an odd space stylistically, however, both looking towards the past and the future.

On the one hand it’s a throwback to old 1920s / early 30s serials, with a plot centered on spies’ attempts to steal a marvelous / deadly device from an inventor; on the other it looks and feels in many places like a dry run for filmed 1950s TV shows.

And it works, not exceptionally well, but not awful, either.  In terms of overall consistency, probably one of the better serials insofar as it stayed more polished and professional throughout than most other chapter plays.

The cast is good:
Milburn Stone, long before settling in as Doc on the TV series Gunsmoke, plays a credible action hero in the role of Jim Hudson, a Marine cashiered due to war injuries who now fights Axis spies and American fifth columns in Alaska.  He’s not the stoic, unflappable stereotypical hero of most B-movies and serials but is allowed to show irritation, frustration, and excitability in appropriate scenes; this alone gives The Great Alaskan Mystery a more grown up flavor than most serials of the era.

Ralph Morgan (older brother to Frank Morgan of The Wizard Of Oz) is Dr. Miller, the inventor who realizes the device he meant for benign purposes can easily be turned into a weapon.  The script really helps here as it gives Morgan a chance to demonstrate a depth of characterization uncommon in most chapter plays as he agonizes in remorse over the full realization of what he has done.

Marjorie Weaver plays his daughter, Ruth Miller, and I found her a delight, a spunky heroine willing to get involved in the action.  She’s more appealing than most actresses cast in these sort of roles and it’s a pity nobody thought to build a serial around her.

Martin Kosleck was a German refugee who hated Adolf Hitler and took particular delight in playing Nazi villains who get it in the neck.  His Dr Hauss is a spy pretending to help the heroes but working against them with the aid of other baddies.  Despite the more far-fetched plot elements he remains a very credible and threatening villain.

Edgar Kennedy, who played in literally hundreds of comedies, often as a foil to Laurel & Hardy, is the comic relief as Bosun Higgins, an Alan Hale Jr.-type character.  He’s not there just for the jokes and pratfalls, however, and takes an active part in the proceedings.  Fuzzy Knight, typically cast as a comic relief in countless Westerns, gets a totally straight role as a mine foreman; Samuel S. Hinds is an American businessman / fifth columnist in league with Dr Hass; and Anthony Warde is the chief henchman who frequently needs to deal with his less than competent underling, Ed Gargan.  The two come across more believably than the mindlessly murderous minions of too many Republic and Columbia serials and Gargan’s goofs are believably stupid, not cartoonish.

Finally, Jean Trent gets a small role as Hinds’ secretary; it’s never clear if she’s in on his scheme or not.  The very last scene of the serial has Kennedy blocking her escape and uttering a double entendre which causes Trent turn to the camera and wink in what was certainly intended as a sly all-in-good-fun joke in 1944 that lands creepy today.

While the script is good, the serial is oddly paced.  After introducing Prof Miller and his invention the Peratron and explaining why the Axis wants to get their hands on it, the characters set off by steamer for Alaska where Hudson’s father owns a mine that can produce the energy rich quartz needed to make the thing work. 

No sooner do we go aboard ship than we’re introduce to the villainous Captain Greeder (played by Harry Cording) who reveals he’s in cahoots with Dr. Hass.  Then we meet two Alaskan prospectors, one of whom promptly gets bumped off for no apparent reason other than to show Greeder doing something evil ( the second lasts a bit longer to get attacked by a polar bear two chapters later).

At that point -- still in chapter one – the ship hits an iceberg and sinks, splitting the survivors into two groups who need to make their separate ways across the ice floes.   Much of chapters two and three are built around extensive use of stock footage from a 1933 Universal / German co-production, S.O.S. Iceberg (which interestingly enough also supplied Inuit stock footage to Universal’s 1957 sci-fi movie The Deadly Mantis).  This is actually some of the most harrowing stuff ever put in a serial with the two group’s facing desperate odds against a harsh environment…

…but it also loses the main plot for about 1/6th of the serial.

There’s a couple of disjointed chapters until they finally reach the mine, much of it set in an Inuit village (referred to as Eskimo in the serial).  Jay Novello plays the chief of the Inuits and for once they’re not presented as primitive savages but a culture with their own values and concerns.  Greeder tricks them into helping the baddies, then inexplicably vanishes from the rest of the story.  There’s an attempted skyjacking / plane crash that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot other than to add a bit of action to an otherwise lackluster chapter (and cheats with its cliffhanger, the plane clearly crashing in flames in the previous chapter, landing safely in the next), then finally we get down to business in the rugged wilds of Alaska, played in this serial by Chatsworth.

Chatsworth.

Take all the time you need to process that.

Incongruous geography aside, here’s where the serial hunkers down and proves satisfying.

Prof Miller’s Peratron* is intended to transport matter along a beam of light, not like the transporters of Star Trek but more like the “light bridge” in Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe.  When they finally get the thing working full force, it proves to be an incredibly destructive weapon, reducing Prof Miller to a state of despair over what he wrought.

It also provides a moment of grimdark humor because when Prof Miller tests the Peratron at full strength, he unintentionally blows a hole in the wall of the cabin -- 

-- and unknowingly disintegrates three baddies creeping up outside to attack him!

Prof Miller frets over what his weapon might do, completely oblivious to the fact he wiped out three lives.

That’s a nice little plot twist and it adds depth and resonance to a story where one normally doesn’t expect to find it.

The other baddies see this happen and it makes them justifiably reluctant to go after the heroes head on, thus explaining a cat-and-mouse game that goes on until Dr Hass gets his hands on the device.  One would hope this would build to a satisfying climax, but as with many Universal serials the story starts losing steam and limps through the last few chapters.  The ending is okay, but not up to the opening chapters.

The cliffhangers are mostly satisfying, though as mentioned they do cheat on occasion.  In one chapter they get some Hitchcockian comedy-suspense out of repeatedly just missing setting off a high explosive booby trap, but when the explosives do go off it’s treated more like a Three Stooges pratfall than a serious attempt to kill anyone.  

Chapter recaps are handled with a single title card though in the second half of the serial various bad guys report to their boss on whatever trap they’ve left in place for the heroes, similar to the way the spies reported in Universal’s The Master Key a year later (also starring Milburn Stone).

Production values are high, stock footage scenes are interwoven seamlessly, performances and dialog are enjoyable for adults (as opposed to other serials more clearly aimed solely at the kiddee matinee market), and in the end The Great Alaska Mystery delivers a satisfying story.

But -- as I’ve often said before -- what Universal serials made up for in quality, they lacked in panache. Republic and pre-Sam Katzman Columbia serials might have been shockingly inexpensive and looked it, but they tended to be fast paced and filled with a devil-may-care approach to the material.

Intended for younger and / or less sophisticated audiences, they aimed at keeping their viewers’ attention by moving things along at a breathtaking rate, never pausing to really examine any elements in their stories.

Universal’s serials might have played primarily to juvenile and unsophisticated audiences, but by and large they weren’t stupid, they gave adults something to enjoy even if adults rarely saw their efforts.

The Great Alaskan Mystery is a fine example of what Universal could do when they set their minds to it.

But…Chatsworth?

Seriously…

Chatsworth?!?!?

© Buzz Dixon

*  When watching TV late at night I tend to turn the sound down low so as not to disturb Soon-ok as she sleeps and use the automatic close captioning to help follow the story.  The system consistently rendered “Peratron” as “Pokemon” and I gotta say heroes vs baddies for possession of the ultimate Pokemon card would make one helluva great serial.