by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was a recent
archive.org download from Monogram in 1945 called The Shadow Returns, yet another of the surprisingly few and
short-lived attempts to turn the legendary crime-fighter of pulp fiction and
radio into a movie attraction. There’d been a few Shadow shorts from Universal
in the early 1930’s, two films from Grand National in the late 1930’s (a bore
called The Shadow Strikes that all too faithfully adapted one of the original Shadow novels by
Walter Gibson, a.k.a. “Maxwell Grant,” and a quite charming screwball
mystery/comedy that abandoned the character of the Shadow and turned him,
played by former silent-screen heartthrob Rod LaRocque, and his on-screen
partner Astrid Allwyn into a Nick-and-Nora-ish wisecracking detective couple,
and turned the Shadow’s radio show into a late 1930’s version of America’s
Most Wanted) and then Monogram decided
to take a run at the character in the mid-1940’s, putting the Shadow in the
same less-than-capable hands in which they’d entrusted Charlie Chan — director
Phil Rosen and screenwriter George Callahan — and making a series of movies
that, if this one is any indication, made the Monogram Chans look like thriller
masterpieces by comparison.
Though the credits indicate (or at least hint) that
George Callahan thought up this story by himself without any reference to
something Gibson/“Grant” had published in the pulps, it does have the air of a Gibson story: too many suspects,
too few motives, and a complicated curlicue of incidents highlighted by a
frankly ridiculous method of murder. The opening shows a corpse being exhumed
and some vaguely shiny things being found in a tin box inside the coffin, only
one of the exhumers, Yomans (Emmett Vogan), gets away with all but one of the
items. The cops think they’re precious jewels but Lamont Cranston, a.k.a. the
Shadow (Kane Richmond, who had done some nice serials over at competing
third-tier studio Republic but on those at least he’d had capable action
directors), managed to palm one and discover what it really was: a key
ingredient in a new sort of plastic whose manufacturer concealed the formula in
a research notebook by writing well-known formulae but making a deliberate
mistake in each one — the idea was that if you collected each of the wrong
ingredients you’d have all the stuff you needed to make the super-plastic. The
people involved in this project start propelling themselves off balconies, but
it turns out — in one of the most preposterous murder methods any fiction writer has asked us to believe — they were
really murdered by an expert bullwhipper, who was able to grab them by the
ankle with his whip and pull them off the balcony and towards the ground to
their death, while anyone watching would simply assume the person had taken a
header off the balcony, either accidentally or suicidally.
The Shadow
Returns is the sort of movie that
starts out as a whodunit and ends up as a whocareswhodunit; there’s only one
action scene (a fight in a warehouse owned by one of the baddies, a guy named
“Frobay” — through much of the movie I kept thinking they were saying
“Probate”), and even that is bumbled so it’s as boring as the rest of the film.
There are some good aspects to The Shadow Returns — some nicely atmospheric and Gothic
cinematography by the uneven William Sickner (he was like the little girl with
the curl — in some of Gale Storm’s films he lit her so sloppily it looked like
she had a moustache, but here he’s very, very good, especially when the script
calls for Gothic atmosphere; some scenes here are darker and more visually
scary than many sequences in Monogram’s horror films with Lugosi and
Carradine!) — but it’s all wrapped up in a surprisingly dull movie with way too much so-called “comic relief” and a lot of
Nick-and-Nora wanna-be bantering between Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane (Barbara
Read) that was a good deal less amusing than George Callahan thought it was. At one point Margo complained to Cranston, as he tried to explain the villains’ plot to her, “This doesn’t make any sense” — and I joked, “Of course it doesn’t! It’s a George Callahan script!”
