Double Shadows: The Shadow - The Case of the Cotton Kimona (Charles F. Haas, 1954); Invisible Avenger (James Wong Howe, Ben Parker and John Sledge, 1958)

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows!"

Created in 1931 by jobbing pulp writer, crossword puzzle setter and magician (now that's a heck of an eclectic resume!) Walter Brown Gibson, the beak-nosed and behatted Shadow is a veritable legend of pulp noir detective stories and very much a proto superhero with his secret identity - actually secret identities, plural: this guy was presenting multiple personas decades before Steven Grant and Jake Lockley were even a gleam in Marc Spector's fractured mind's eye -  and instantly recognisable costume for tackling crime.  Initially merely an introductory voiceover for radio's Detective Story Hour, the mysterious Shadow was soon evolved into a character in his own right when Gibson was hired to flesh out this enigmatic raconteur of 'tec tales with a backstory and modus operandi all of his own.

Debuting on the 31st of July 1930 as the narrating character, the Shadow was initially voiced by James La Curto but soon the role was taken over by Frank Readick Junior whose vocal talents made the character a popular sensation - both men would alternate turns over the following couple of years.  Meanwhile in the world of pulp fiction, Gibson was cranking out stories at a rate of knots - beginning with the debut text story The Living Shadow on the 1st of April 1931, he would pen 282 Shadow tales over the following two decades.  These novellas - all written under the in-house pen name of 'Maxwell Grant', used by Gibson and other authors alike - would fill in the fictional background of the mysterious crime fighter known as the Shadow: his original and true identity as First World War pilot Kent Allard who, after faking his own death in a plane crash, returns to New York City to fight crime on the streets as a masked - well, scarfed - vigilante.  With a brace of alternative identities such as wealthy playboy Lamont Cranston, business maven Henry Arnaud and a learning disabled janitor named Fritz who mops up at NYPD HQ (handy for surreptitious information gathering) and with a cadre of collaborators and informants including socialite Margo Lane (huh, a dual-identity hero having a female sidekick / romantic interest with the surname 'Lane'?  That might just  catch on... indeed, Philip Jose Harmer's Wold Newton universe postulates Lois and Margo Lane as sisters), cabbie Moe 'Shrevvy' Shrevnitz and police Commissioner Ralph Weston at his disposal and clad in his iconic slouch hat and red-lined opera cloak over a dark double-breasted suit and armed with a pair of Colt .45 pistols and an array of stage magician's tricks and illusions to baffle and distract his prey: the criminal scum that the rain fails to wash from the city - he is the Shadow.

Who, of course, knows.

While the stories continued in the pulps, the character's radio days were entering a purple patch as the Shadow went from mere introductory narrator of tales to main character, with the gravelly tones of a young Orson Welles (Unicron himself, fellow philistines!) incarnating the role.  The programme began on the 26th of September 1937 with 'The Death House Rescue' and as well as Welles as Cranston / the Shadow (like many future adaptations into other media, Lamont Cranston became the character's real name, rather than one of many adopted identities) the show starred Bewitched's Endora Agnes Moorehead - who was followed by the more name-appropriate Margot Stevenson - as Margo(t) Lane; apparently it's spelled 'Margot' for the radio character, as if you can hear a silent 't' on an audio medium.  The radio series was in fact the origin and debut for Lane, who was swiftly incorporated into the pulp stories' continuum.  It was over the UHF airwaves that the Shadow gained "the power to cloud men's minds", learned from Yogi mystics in India, rendering himself effectively invisible to his enemies until about to strike - this being conveyed by the voice of Welles and subsequent Shadow players having an effect overlaid when he switched from Cranston to the Shadow.

After numerous big-screen attempts (including the awesomely-named Rod La Roque in 1937's The Shadow Strikes and the following year's sequel International Crime, Victor Jory - The Man Who Turned to Stone himself! - in the eponymously-titled 1940 Columbia Pictures chapter serial, and Spy Smasher Kane Richmond in a 1946 Monogram made trilogy), it was surely television's turn.   The Case of the Cotton Kimona is the better-known and more distinctive title for the more prosaic The Shadow, a 1954 pilot for a projected Shadow television series. Written by prolific radio Shadow scribe Peter Barry, whose most recent script for the wireless show aired mere months before the shooting of the pilot, we meet Lamont Cranston (British export Tom Helmore, a familiar face on U.S. screens both big and small in the '50s and '60s) who is here portrayed as a criminal psychologist on retainer to the NYPD, called in - along with his trusty confederate Margot (yes, with the 't') Lane (Paula Raymond, of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms [Eugene Lourie, 1953] and Blood of Dracula's Castle [Al Adamson, 1969]) - by Commissioner Weston (Frank M. Thomas) to investigate the mysterious murder of a young woman (Peggy Lobbin, who would go on to provide English dub voices for the original Ultraman)  who was shot in a kimono.  I mean, she was shot by an unknown assassin in the doorway of her apartment whilst wearing a kimono, which everyone insists on referring to as a 'kimona'.

So Cissy from Springfield is slain at the scene (that would be some much more satisfying if her name were spelled 'Sissy', a la Spacek, but it isn't and so stands as proof that we live in an imperfect universe), though not of course by the Springfield Slasher; Mr Frederick Krueger wouldn't be plying his razor-gloved trade in that town for at least a decade.  Cranston and Lane, ever partners in crime, are soon investigating Cissy's death, with the hindering 'help' of newly-arrived in town Springfield detective Harris (Norman Shelly) who seems possessed of an obsessive interest with the murder of his home town girl.  The focus of Harris's harassment is Cissy's boyfriend Alex Bromm (William Smithers, another familiar face who I instantly recognised from episodes of Star Trek and Spider-Man), who repeatedly denies involvement in finalising his fiancee but Harris is absolutely driven and determined to pin the rap on him.  Almost suspiciously so.

Lamont and Margot (who he addresses, charmingly, as "Milady" at one point) aren't entirely convinced and follow up another lead - that of Cissy's impressively-named music teacher Professor Rollo Grimbauer (Alexander Scourby).  When an initial questioning proves fruitless, Cranston returns later that evening as the Shadow, his mind-clouding invisibility conveyed by a strobing key light and his disembodied echoing voice:

"You can't lie to me!  The Shadow knows!"

After Grimbauer is shot dead before giving up his information and Bromm is fit up by Harris for not only Cissy's murder but that of the clerk in the store where the weapon was purchased, Cranston figures out that the rogue detective was dangerously obsessed with the girl from Springfield and killed her when she knocked him back for the patsy Bromm.  Getting to Margot just in time after she comes to the same conclusion and is about to be capped by the killer cop, the Shadow makes a dramatically disarming entrance - "The fear of retribution in men's minds... I am justice!" - to disarm the disgraced detective and bring him in.

Helmore is a perfectly acceptable Cranston / The Shadow, even if he's a little long in the tooth - and moustache - for the part, and Raymond makes for an appropriately elegant and beautiful Margot despite getting relatively little to do. In all, it's certainly an interesting relic to watch, but not a great surprise that a regular series never resulted; whether that's due to an unprepossessing script or some ideas conveying better on print and audio than film is perhaps up for debate.

Four years later in 1958, Invisible Avenger came together (can you see the joins?) as a combination of two prospective pilots made as a second abortive attempt to get a Shadow television series off the ground.  This Frankenstein-ing together results in a 'film' with three directors: James Wong Howe (one of his few directorial credits, but an Oscar-winning cinematographer and pioneer of camera techniques whose resume includes everything from Tod Browning's Mark of the Vampire to John Frankenheimer's Seconds), Ben Parker (disappointingly not Spider-Man's uncle) and John Sledge, though only Wong Howe and Sledge receive an on-screen accreditation.

Also going by the alternate title of Bourbon Street Shadows, denoting the relatively exotic New Orleans setting, the film begins - and indeed end, the identical scenes bookend the piece quite nicely as well as giving the feeling of the eternal return or ewige wiederkunft; perhaps the Shadow has always been here and will be again - with a shot of crepuscular nighttime lamplit streets with a shadow moving along the wall.  Is this just a shadow or the Shadow ("What am I, but a shadow of a Shadow?" as the Drakh said to Londo Mollari)?  The question is answered by the echoing refrain of his trademark catchphrase, ensuring that we as well as he definitely know.

Way down in Louisiana, down in New Orleans we are introduced to Felicia Ramirez (Jeanne Naher) and her father Pablo (Dan Mullin) through jazz musician Tony Alcalde (Steve Dano) who is meeting them in the Famous Door jazz club.  Pablo's brother - apparently his identical twin brother, since when we see him later he's also played by Mullin, and for some reason sporting the same surely fake oddly-cropped beard as both characters - and Felicia's uncle Victor is, we are told, the rightful ruler of their Latin American home country whose role as El Presidente has been usurped by the Generailissimo (Magnificooo!) and these exiles on Bourbon Street are attempting to plot and action a popular uprising to restore the Ramirez family to their rightful status and supplant the military junta that has taken a stranglehold on Santa Cruz.  When Tony leaves the table to place a telephone tip-off to Lamont Cranston (Richard Derr, star of George Pal's classic When Worlds Collide) in New York, he has little time to convey many of these facts before being assassinated by villainous henchman Rocco (Leo Bruno).  Talk about your call being cut off.

Cranston and his faithful telepathic 'Asian' servant - this adventure supplies him with his very own Kato, presumably in a nod to the character's abilities being taught by a 'Yogi priest' at the Temple of the Cobra, though at least Burt Kwouk was actually Asian and not a clearly Caucasian actor in makeup with a questionable accent - Jogendra (Mark Daniels, in his penultimate role; his final film would coincidentally be 1964's Felicia) try to make sense of Tony's dying clue about 'Tara'.  Could it be a hint about Scarlett O' Hara's plantation?  Or maybe a planet of lifelike androids once visited by Doctor Who*?  No, of course not.  It's a reference to the jazz club's proprietress Tara O' Neill (former child actress and star of Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Monster on the Campus and Tales of Frankenstein [on which...] Helen Westcott).  Taking a flight to the Big Easy, Cranston's arrival at New Orleans airport plays out very like Bond's in Jamaica in Dr No four years later - tracked by the villains and met by a treacherous fake driver, in this case Charlie (Sam Page).

Rocking up to the Famous Door, Cranston attempts to inveigle himself into the swinging scene by dropping some scat talk to Tara.  No you dirty buggers, not like that - we (sadly) don't get any coprophilia or Cleveland steamers here.  This does not impress Rocco, who - like Johnny - hates jazz (so much for Rocco's modern life.  No wait, that was a wallaby, not a hep cat) but Tara thinks that our man Lamont is "a good lookin' hunk o' man" but advises him to go back North and look for love in a cold climate.  Clearly a Nancy Mitford fan.  Rocco and his boss, a man known only as 'the Colonel' (Lee Edwards), make an attempt on Cranston via 'swatting' i.e.: hitting him with a car, but a psychic message from Jogendra allows him to dodge the rogue Dodge (it probably isn't, I don't know American cars) in the nick of time.

Adopting his Shadowy invisible persona, Cranston makes contact with Felicia and her father and together they discover that uncle Victor is in fact a traitorous turncoat working with the Generalissimo's regime and attempting to stifle the coup and arrest and deal with dissenters and dissidents in a deadly fashion.  With the Shadow's help the quisling is conquered and the story concludes with Pablo being hailed as the new El Presidente and vowing to restore justice and democracy as he returns to Santa Cruz with his daughter.  Bye Felicia!

A decent story and at just under an hour more room to breathe than the brief and brisk Case of the Cotton Kimona, Invisible Avenger is hampered by a weak link in the lead: Derr is acceptable if a bit workmanlike as Cranston but his Shadow fails to fully convince, the muffled echo placed on his voice making him sound like he's gargling the lines from the bottom of a well.  No Margo(t) either, so minus points there.  But there's some decent action and it's certainly decently directed, as one would expect with James Wong Howe calling at least some of the shots.  Shame that the only available copy is of such ropey quaility really. 

The Shadow would have another go at the silver screen in 1994 between other period superhero revivals The Rocketeer and The Phantom ("SLAM EVIL!" indeed) with another eponymous entry helmed by Russell Mulcahy of giant swine terror flick Razorback and duelling immortals fest Highlander; starring Alec Baldwin as Cranston (I do hope that there was a competent arms specialist on set) and Penelope Ann Miller as a newly-telepathic Margo - not a 't' to be seen here - Lane who team up to contend with the menacing Temujin descendant Shiwan Khan (John Lone, The Last Emperor himself; appropriate as 'Pu Yi' was something like the critics' reaction to the film on release) and his plot to detonate a slightly anachronistic nuclear bomb in New York City.  Penned by genre stalwart David Koepp, the '94 movie mixes elements of the original pulps such as the lead character's multiplicity of identities and the iconic design replete with wide-brimmed hat and scarf and beaked nose - Baldwin sporting a prosthetic conk to look the spitting image of the original illustrations with edgy and stylised '30s period dialogue.  Alas, once again it failed to result in any follow-ups.  A Shadow filmic franchise really seems - La Roque's duology and Richmond's trilogy aside - doomed to not happen.  As to why, who knows?

The Shadow knows.

(*Please don't come at me with comments like "Actually, I think you'll find the character is called 'The Doctor'".  I've been watching Doctor Who since I was three years old - that's over four decades now, and you don't even get that for murder - and he / she / they are called Doctor Who.  Deal with it.)