Strictly average movie

One of my all time favorites.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Doubly directed by Alan James and Ray Taylor this an excellent serial concerning the exploits of Dick Tracy. A master criminal called The Lame One runs The Spider Ring who engage in smuggling, espionage, murder and similar illegal activities and the valiant Tracy and his team go head to head with them. The Lame One has also captured Tracy's brother Gordon and with the evil doctor Moloch's skills ("a simple altering of certain glands"!) has turned Tracy into a pliable assistant for himself. The altered brother carries out most of The Lame One's schemes. Incident follows incident in some good locations until the breathless finish.Ralph Byrd is perfect as Dick Tracy, determined and dedicated to to his task. The identity of The Lame One is kept to the end. He hobbles about wearing a built up shoe and barks out orders from a desk. The mad Moloch is played by the creepy John Picorri (often stroking a black cat) and Carleton Young is effective as the changed Gordon Tracy, a streak of white hair on his head after his character changing operation, with an air of sadness about him that is poignant. Unfortunately the great Byron Foulger is only in it briefly as the gangster Korvitch.Smiley Burnette is one of Tracy's assistants Mike McGurk and is supposed to be the comic relief but who isn't at all funny. Also appearing in a couple of scenes are 'Oscar' and 'Elmer' who were a comic team at the time but they aren't funny either. Lee Van Atta as Junior gets more laughs. I. Stanford Jolley plays 'Roadside Thug' and 'G-Man' and 'Reporter' and 'Intern' to show his versatility.It has great model work by the Lydecker brothers including a wonderful flying wing that is used a lot. Indeed a lot of the scenes take place in the air. The fifteen packed episodes are a great start to the Dick Tracy serials.

After watching all 15 episodes I have to tell you that this Dick Tracy seems to have paved the way for some of today's action heroes taken from the classic comics. The plot line is simply put - silly (a big crime ring cooperates with foregin goverments, wants to blackmail their own government, brainwashes people...). There seem to be hundreds of things going on and not a single case is solved. Tracy comes in, gets in a fight, the evil scheme is spoiled (case closed), bad guys escape, Dick follows them and get's in terrible danger. End of episode, right before Dick is about to die a horrible death. The next episode opens with a long revision of the previous story and Dick escapes unharmed. Meets with friends and the new problem arises. They investigate for a few minutes and then the same story all over. All right, the effects were awesome for the time when this was made and the ideas for how the villains planed to take charge were probably highly original back then (but were copied ever sense), still, not a single episode seems to have any depth. It was just jumping from one quick and shallow attempt by the Lame one to do whatever it was he wanted to do (there never seemed to be a grand plan behind his actions) to another. All in all, if they wouldn't repeat those previous episode scenes at the beginning of each episode and if the episodes took some time to develop a story it might have been good. Now (especially after watching it at once) as one long Dick Tracy session, I was really disappointed by the shallowness, but pleasantly surprised by the great effects.

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.

Dick Tracy is on the hunt of a mysterious criminal known as the Lame One ( he has a bum foot, but I think the title describes the villian's general appearance ), leader of the mysterious Spider Gang. The Lame One along with his hunchbacked assistant kidnap Tracy's brother, alters his appearance, and goes out fighting him endlessly throughout this boredom. This serial moves incredibly slow ( mainly this isn't a Whitney/English chapterplay ), the acting outside of Ralph Byrd is dead wood, especially Smiley Burnette. Even when the master criminal is unmasked, the audience is forced to say, Who was this guy. Add a really dumb, sentimental ending, and well you get the pic. Don't judge the next three serials based on this one. In terms of serials, 4 out of 10.