"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows..."
Comic books have always been a passion of mine as long-time readers of my blog will know. You'll also eventually know, due to me reviewing the Doctor Who episode "The Unicorn and the Wasp" in a few weeks, that I'm also a fan of Sherlock Holmes and detective stories in general. So something that blends the two of them seems like a no-brainer, right?
Enter the pulp magazine.
Obviously, being born in 1991, I wasn't around for the heyday of this format back in the 1930s and 40s (at least not until I get my TARDIS working). However, pulp magazines - that is, magazines that are printed on incredibly cheap "wood pulp" paper - are an art form that affects fiction even to this very day in the year 2021 (unless you're reading this later, in which case this statement is probably still very true).
The thing about pulp magazines was that, while they did do the usual superhero work with characters like The Avenger or Ka-Zar, that wasn't what they were most known for an definitely aren't what they are most remembered for. Sure, comic books are now very predominately a medium for superheroes, at least in North America. Back in the 30s and 40s, though? They could be anything.
You wanna have a polo player from New York City trapped in a batshit insane sci-fi world fighting whatever the hell comes to the writer's head? Boom! We got you.
You wanna have a Civil War soldier transported to Mars and becoming a warrior and hero? Boom. We got you.
You wanna have a World War I flying ace traveling around fighting everything from Nazis to aliens to demons? We got you.
You wanna have a detective who battles criminals, knowing all too well what evil lurks within their hearts? Well, that's the topic of this review, isn't it? The Shadow.
The Shadow is, as you'd expect, a pulp character. Originating in, interestingly enough, a radio show rather than a comic book. The Shadow had his own radio show starting in 1930, with the first comic starring the character coming out a year later in 1931. This means that The Shadow predates even Superman...not this is really a huge feat given that, again, there were plenty of characters in comic books well before superheroes took over and started throwing their weight around.
But just who is "The Shadow"? The answer to that question depends on which continuity you follow. Oh, yes! Continuity issues aren't just a problem now in the hellscape of massive company-wide crossover events we have in comics today, but even as far back as the 1930s, we had the joys of separate continuities. In the radio show, the Shadow is known as Lamont Cranston, a wealthy young man about town who operated under the cover of darkness. With the use of a pair of Colt .45 pistols, chemical compounds, trusted aides from across many professions and fields, and a healthy dollop of prestidigitation, Cranston waged a one-man war on crime as the Batma-I mean, the Shadow.
. . .yeah, Batman stole a lot of his shtick from The Shadow. I mean, a lot. Basically, the only original thing about Batman is his use of the bat motif, and I'm sure someone could even find something to contradict that.
So, basically, Green Arrow is trying to rip-off a guy who is already ripping off another guy.
Keep in mind, by the way, that the Shadow doesn't hold the same qualms about killing criminals that Batman and most other modern superheroes have. To put it in perspective for you, in this film, he casually hypnotizes a man into jumping out of a window and to his death.
Our hero, folks!
Regardless, that's just in the continuity of the radio show. In the comics, as envisioned originally by writer Walter B. Gibson, the man who would become The Shadow was a man by the name of Kent Allard. Allard was an aviator who had fought for France during World War I. Known as the Black Eagle, he eventually faked his death over Guatemala for reasons that are not quite clear and fell in with the "Xinca" tribe. Finding warfare to be a terrible business and balking at the idea of becoming a soldier of fortune, Allard decided to use his skills in order to battle crime, rooting out the evil in the hearts of men and destroying it.
. . .the way he went about this...was kind of by being a dick.
Specifically being a dick to Lamont Cranston, a wealthy socialite to whom Kent Allard bears a striking resemblance to.
. . .something else that Batman ripped off from him.
I'm not even kidding, early on, the Shadow essentially blackmails Cranston into allowing him to take his identity under the threat of killing him off and simply taking his place full time. I suppose it's nice that Allard gave him the option, but...damn, dude. What the hell?
If all of this weren't enough, there's technically a third continuity from another radio show in 1937...where the Shadow was just Lamont Cranston and everything about Kent Allard was brushed away as though it had never happened. This, by the way, isn't getting into other retellings of the character. Up to and including the modern versions of him.
No matter the continuity (and level of dickishness), the Shadow was one part detective, one part superhero, and all parts badass. In a hat and Inverness coat with an upturned collar, and a pair of .45s in hand, there didn't seem to be a criminal on Earth who could reap anything but bitter fruit with him on the case!
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| Walter B. Gibson |
So now, several paragraphs into it, we finally come to the movie. Well, the latest one to date as produced from a major film studio, anyway. There had been others done between 1931 and 1958, but this was the first big real crack at bringing the Shadow to the silver screen. On July 1, 1994, they gave it their best shot...let's have a look.
The film begins in Tibet, just after World War I. Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) has become a drug kingpin of great infamy and power under the name of Ying Ko, so much so that he's able to cow the almighty Lo Pan himself (James Hong) with his might. However, he is eventually kidnapped and brought before a great holy man known as the Tulku (Brady Tsurutani). When Cranston asks him just who it is he believes he's kidnapped, he is surprised when the Tulku calls him by his true name, rather than the epithet he has set himself up with.
He speaks of Cranston's dark heart, and how he's always struggled against it and lost every time. The Tulku says that he is going to be redeemed, whether he likes it or not. Taking a dagger to defend himself, Cranston finds the weapon to be not only animated, but incredibly hostile and with a Frank Welker voice providing a shrieking bloodlust to it. Phurba, as it is called, is returned to the Tulku's hand.
Cranston asks if he's in Hell.
The Tulku coyly replies, "Not yet."
Here, the film hits upon one of its weak points...a wall of text explaining Cranston's training under the Tulku, rather than actually showing us it. They could have very easily gone the Batman 1989 route and had Cranston already active as the Shadow and showed us his origins through flashbacks...or taken the Batman Begins route and actually showed us the training.
Instead...we get this. Not exactly a high point.
The wall of text basically helps to explain the powers that the Shadow has in the film - clouding the minds of other men, even to the point of being able to turn himself invisible...save for his own Shadow. Depending on the continuity, the Shadow has some psychic or otherwise supernatural abilities such as this...so I can see why they added it in for this movie. What I don't understand is why they went through all the trouble of setting up the Tulku and the set of his temple as well as the model of it (which is pretty good by the standards of the time)…for only one scene, and then forget about it all.
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| "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Fellas, they said this was auditions for Doctor Strange!" |
This is a shame because, right after this, we get what is probably one of the most badass introductions of a character that has ever been put to film. I'm not even kidding, I absolutely love this scene. Three gangsters terrorize and prepare to throw into a river one Dr. Roy Tam (Sab Shimino) when Alec Baldwin gives a hell of a good cackling laugh that seems to be coming everywhere at once. He taunts them to the point where the boss, Duke, starts going full Rambo on everything in sight. Just when he thinks he's won the day...someone unseen starts to beat the snot out of him while his two thugs watch, stunned.
The Shadow terrorizes a confession out of the man, and the two goons look on in terror as the shadow of a man in a fedora seems to bleed onto the wall behind them. Then, we see him. The Shadow, standing straight and tall...and looking upon them with a very intense gaze from a not-Alec Baldwin face. More on that later.
This intro is perfect and, in my mind, completely fits the character to a tee. Whatever else you can say about this movie, they got it perfect...it's just a shame they put it about eight minutes in instead of right at the beginning, especially when the previous eight minutes was ultimately unnecessary.
Regardless, Roy Tam is induced into the Shadow's organization of agents "like dozens of others all over the world". These include the likes of cab driver Moe Shrevnitz (the late, great Peter Boyle), the Shadow's chauffeur. At the Cobalt Club, we get introduced to Cranston's uncle Wainwright (the late, great Jonathan Winters) and Margot Lane (Penelope Ann Miller), a woman who has a wellspring of untapped psychic potential, who round out the supporting cast.
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| The romance between Lamont and Margot is surprisingly subtle. |
We are also, following a scene of bad CGI, introduced to the villain of the piece - Shiwan Khan (John Lone) - who arrives in New York in a way that tells me he's a big fan of Vampire: The Masquerade and then hypnotizes Neelix from Voyager to kill himself. His plan? To join forces with Farley Claymore (Tim Curry) to use the research of Margot's absent-minded father Reinhardt (Ian McKellen) to create...an atomic bomb.
The big twist? Khan has all of the same mental manipulation tricks taught by the Tulku, who he then murdered with the knife from the opening. Now, the Shadow has three days to stop Khan before he releases a destructive power upon the world about a decade early...
This film does the noir feel of New York City astoundingly well, which shouldn't be too surprising given that the director is Russell Mulcahy - the same director as Highlander. The writer, David Koepp, has a pretty high pedigree as well, who wrote the screenplays to Jurassic Park and would later write the first of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films as well as the first Mission Impossible film. Koepp focused highly on the line of "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows." when writing the script, deciding that the reason why the Shadow knew was the important part. Hence, we have the origin story about him being a drug kingpin in Tibet.
. . .a point that kind of just hopes to scoot by unnoticed, when you consider that a millionaire playboy from America wouldn't have too much reason to be in Tibet to begin with in the 30s.
Regardless, the idea is very neat, even if I think it's a little overcomplicated. Honestly, a man who was so driven by the horrific visions of what happened in World War I and committing himself to fighting crime as a result worked a lot better in all honesty. No offense to Koepp, from what I've read he was (and I presume, still is) a fan of the radio show (I imagine the latter, seeing as Kent Allard doesn't even get a mention in this film).
Alec Baldwin does pretty well as Lamont. I'd say he does well as both the Shadow and Lamont, but he manages to pull off that rare thing that Batman actors try and fail to do where they are both Batman and Bruce Wayne. Except, in this instance, there is really no difference. Lamont isn't a mask that the Shadow wears to operate in the daylight or vice-versa like with Batman, he is entirely one being and pretty much every action he takes over the course of the film reflects that.
David Koepp was admittedly a fan of Alec Baldwin and, when he was cast, tried to inject some of Baldwin's humor into the script. This works in some cases, such as when Margot relays a sexy dream she had in a clear attempt to seduce Lamont...and he responds by relaying a dream he had where he tore off his face and found Khan underneath. She proceeds to tell him that he has issues.
Another scene that doesn't work as well is when Khan reveals that he murdered the Tulku with his own knife...a knife that nearly killed him in the opening and you'd imagine he'd be considerably more cautious of than he is...and Baldwin plays Lamont as being nigh-emotionless and stoic, which...doesn't really work. While Lamont has a generally cool exterior throughout the film, he does have moments of high emotion at key points in the film, and you'd imagine that hearing of not only the death by the murder of his mentor would be one of them.
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| I don't have a joke here, this aesthetic is just so damn cool. |
There's also the un-Alec Baldwin face the Shadow has in many scenes. I have looked through the internet and even IMDb for a face, but there doesn't appear to be any other actor - credited or uncredited - playing the Shadow besides Alec Baldwin. A black eyes effect was done with black Mylar lenses in certain scenes when Lamont is hypnotizing someone or otherwise exerting his psychic powers, so it's entirely possible that it's simply a blending makeup job rather than CGI. If so, then my hats off to the makeup artists, because they did an amazing job at making Alec Baldwin look nothing like Alec Baldwin.
The reason this was done to make the Shadow look like he did in the comic depictions. I have to say, it's a damn near perfect 1:1 match. Speaking of the effects, all the filming was apparently done on sets and with the use of models and many practical effects. As a result, a lot of the effects look really good even today. Some of them have aged poorly, but those are largely the little bits of CGI and those can almost be forgiven given the era that they debuted in - that being the early 90's.
To complete the cast, Jonathan Winters sadly doesn't really do anything and isn't particularly funny...so I'm not really sure why they bothered, honestly. The same goes for Peter Boyle as Moe. They're both really good and talented actors...and don't really have anything to do, although Moe has a few funny lines at the very least.
Penelope Ann Miller does very well as Margot, playing the 30s femme fatale while also being able to be more than just a fixture to drive the plot...although she has a few of the more clunky, expositional lines. Also, at the risk of going there...she looks damn good in the various 30s-inspired dresses they put her in. She and Alec Baldwin have a decent amount of chemistry...although their "first date" in a Chinese restaurant has some awkwardness that I'm sure is meant to be them trying to work out one another through their psychic connection, one that Margot doesn't understand fully and that Lamont is actively afraid of.
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| "I am the Master...and you...will obey me!" |
That brings us to Khan, who is a pretty damn good villain. John Lane plays Khan as an admirer of the man that Lamont was during his time as a kingpin in Tibet, as well as being a brutal and sadistic warlord. He casually murders people simply for the sake of exerting his power, is incredibly confident and self-assured, and has the balls to proclaim himself the last descendant of Genghis Khan...which I'm pretty sure was hilariously inaccurate even for the 1930's.
John Lane gives a surprisingly restrained performance as Khan, never getting too deeply into self-parody like a Flash Gordon villain with over the top evil laughter and the like. He is a proud, haughty despot who seeks to enforce his will upon the world, conquering the entire world rather than just half of it as his ancestor had a few hundred years before. He is larger than life, and makes for an excellent dark mirror to Lamont - a living embodiment of what he could become if he ever used the powers taught to him by the Tulku for evil ends. For the medium, it works well.
There isn't a lot of depth to him, but then he doesn't need to be that deep.
There's also the overarching question of Lamont's character in the film, going back to Koepp's focus on that line: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" It's only just barely touched upon, and you can easily blink and miss it, but there's a question hovering over Lamont's head through the entire film: Are there acts so terrible that you can never truly be redeemed for them? After seeing some of the memories in his head, Margot seems to think that his past is his past and that it doesn't inform who he is now, but Lamont himself is unsure.
That probably would have been explored further in the franchise that we didn't get. The Shadow was intended to be the start of a franchise, opening on a budget of $40 million and only managing to gross about $48 million between the domestic and worldwide box office. It was a failure on the whole and the plans were scrapped. It's sad, really, because there's a lot of potential in here and there are plenty of superhero franchises that had wonky first movies and ended up being successes regardless.
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| So. Damn. COOL! |
As for the 1994 film, it's good. I can see where it can be a bit of an acquired taste, and I can see why audiences in 1994 might not have responded to it, but I saw it young and I still feel like it (mostly) holds up today. To give you an idea of just how obsessed I was with this movie when I was a kid - I dressed up as the Shadow for Halloween one year.
Yeah, you did a Spider-Man outfit? Cute. I knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men!
Nostalgia aside, it's an enjoyable film. To this day, it's still one of my favorites. It likely needed a few rewrites here and there (a few lines that just don't land and the entire opening being rather pointless in the grand scheme of things), but it had leads that worked the room well and has a great noir style to it all that was very fitting of its origins. Jerry Goldsmith doing a fantastic orchestral score for the film, hitting the necessary highs and lows of superherodom, is just icing on the cake for fun pulp adventure. And, in the end, that's what it's all about.
The Shadow is brought to us by Bregman/Baer Productions, Inc. and Universal Pictures.
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