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The Green Hornet
USA 1940
produced by Henry MacRae (associate) for Universal
directed by Ford Beebe, Ray Taylor
starring Gordon Jones, Wade Boteler, Keye Luke, Anne Nagel, Phillip Trent, Cy Kendall, Stanley Andrews, Selmer Jackson, Joseph Crehan, Walter McGrail, Gene Rizzi, John Kelly, Eddie Dunn, Edward Earle, Ben Taggart, Clyde Dilson, Jerry Marlowe, Frederick Vogeding
screenplay by George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey, Morrison Wood, Lyonel Margolies, based on the radio serial by Fran Striker
serial Green Hornet, Green Hornet (serials)
review by Mike Haberfelner
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The city is overrun by racketeers - and the newspaper The Daily
Sentinel could be on the forefront exposing the crooks ... if it wasn't
for the paper's playboy publisher Britt Reid (Gordon Jones), whom it takes
an aweful long time to convince and take his job as publisher seriously.
But Reid isn't really the slob he might appear to be, at night he turns
into masked superhero Green Hornet, and with the help of his Korean
manservant Kato (Keye Luke) he takes out the gangs pretty much fighting
fire with fire and posing as a mastercriminal himself to transmit he's
meaning business. This doesn't sit well with the authorities who soon see
the Green Hornet as a bigger threat than even the racketeers, and as a
result The Daily Sentinel even offers a reward on catching the Green
Hornet, with Reid's right-hand-men Axford (Wade Boteler) and Jenks
(Phillip Trent) being more than eager to get their hands on him while only
Reid's secretary Leonore (Anne Nagel) actually thinks he's doing more good
than evil - which the Hornet eventually honours by saving her live then
the Daily Sentinel building is almost blown to Kingdom Come. Before that
though, he takes apart one racketeering ring after the next, and
eventually gets a trail on Monroe (Cy Kendall), the man behind it all -
and ultimately lures him into a trap where he's shot dead by his own men
... Sure, there's plenty of action in The Green Hornet,
including some cleverly used and exciting stock footage, and the thing is
well-paced, too ... but as a serial it somehow fails to hold the
audience's interest over the whole course. Basically, it's not so much the
classic serial where tension builds over the whole thing and the narrative
is structured to only give away a bit each episode, instead it's more of a
crime-of-the-week thing (much like classic TV shows), so apart from the
first and last episode, naturally, there's little narrative build-up and
the episodes are pretty much interchangeable with one another, to a point
where missing one or several episodes won't really hurt your ability to
follow the thing as a whole. That said, the whole thing (or episodes of
it) is not at all unenjoyable ... but at the same time too routine to make
someone utterly enthusiastic ...
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review © by Mike Haberfelner
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Robots and rats,
demons and potholes, cuddly toys and shopping mall Santas,
love and death and everything in between,
Tales to Chill Your Bones to is all of that.
Tales to Chill Your Bones to -
a collection of short stories and mini-plays ranging from the horrific to the darkly humourous,
from the post-apocalyptic to the weirdly romantic,
tales that will give you a chill and maybe a chuckle,
all thought up by the twisted mind of screenwriter and film reviewer Michael Haberfelner.
Tales to Chill Your Bones to
the new anthology by Michael Haberfelner
Out now from Amazon!!! |
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