Serial Saturday: The Lost City (1935)

 I'm all for watching movies in the context of their times. I can watch something like the 1943 Batman serial and not lose my head when the narrator refers to "shifty-eyed Japs" since I'm aware that the serial was made a year or so after Pearl Harbor and we were at war with the Japanese. I'm perfectly willing to take the Looney Tunes cartoons at face value and am no more offended by Speedy Gonzales than I am Pepe Le Pew.Watching Peter Lorre or Warner Oland play Mr. Moto or Charlie Chan doesn't fill me with malignant hatred. After all, movies are not made in a vacuum. They are reflections of current events, trends, attitudes, and thoughts. But every so often, there comes along a movie so outrageous that even I can't reconcile it to anything other than pure out and out racial hatred. The Lost City, a 1935 serial from Sherman Krellberg, is one such unfortunate piece of celluloid history.

The Lost City opens with the coming apocalypse by bad weather. More specifically, stock footage of really bad storms ravaging the world opens the serial. Electrical Engineer Bruce Gordon (Kane Richmond) discovers that the source of the storms is in Darkest Africa, so he gathers four greedy scientist friends and one of the more annoying sidekicks in movie history (Eddie Fetherstone) and off they go. They eventually find The Lost City. Yes, that's the name of it. Not The Lost City of...just The Lost City. Even the denizens there call it that. The Lost City is ruled by power mad Zolok (William "Stage" Boyd), who wants to rule the world. Or destroy the world. Or do something. We're actually not quite sure what. Zolok is holding scientist Dr. Manyus and his daughter hostage. Manyus (Josef Swickard) looks to be about 108, so naturally daughter Natcha (Claudia Dell) is 20-something. Because of course she is. Creepy old scientists in serials always had 20-something daughters.

Manyus has a machine that turns short black men who scream like little girls into giant muscle bound black men who hoot and grunt. I'm sorry to say that I'm not making that up. These black giants will figure into Zolok's plan for the world, whenever he figures out exactly what that is. Manyus, for his part, protests this evil doing since his machine is meant for the good of mankind. How a machine that turns short black men that scream like little girls into giant black man who grunt is for the good of mankind, I don't know. You will find there are many things in this serial I can't explain.

The heroes escape with Manyus and his daughter around chapter 3. The serial then goes into an absolute exercise in pointlessness. The greedy friends who you thought might figure into something are all dead by chapter four, having done absolutely nothing to advance the story in the slightest. Our heroes wander aimlessly around the jungle (which looks more like the park around the corner from me than an actual jungle, but whatever). They meet various people who want to use Manyus' machine for their own purposes: an arab named Ben Ali (who doesn't even have the short black guys to start with) and an alarmingly flat chested Queen Rama who wears an outfit obviously designed for someone with a sexier build. Point in fact, all the men in the serial have larger chests than the women and all the women wear outfits designed for people with better builds.

For you prudish people who think the above comment was out of line, trust me. By the time you get to Queen Rama in this thing, you too will be thinking these thoughts.

Zolok sends particularly incompetent henchman Appolyn (Jerry Frank) after our heroes. Also chasing them are weird little Gorzo (Billy Bletcher) and huge, indestructible grunting black henchman Hugo (Sam Baker).

It all comes to a bizarre end where our heroes are recaptured, returned to the Lost City, escape again, and Zolok stumbles around drunkenly for ten minutes before blowing himself up.

A little over ten years ago, The Lost City was the center of an internet controversy. A so-called magazine writer, wanting to cash in on the upcoming movie version of The Producers, wanted to do an article linking producer Sherman Krellberg and the fictional Max Bialystock. This writer posted his proposed idea on a movie serial message board, which led to a huge fight with the owner of said board. Said owner not only ranted about the evils of The Lost City, he basically declared any conversation about the serial verboten unless it was in agreement with his stance. Following that, a number of serial fans, probably just to be contrary, decided that The Lost City not only wasn't racist, it was a great serial! Now, while this particular board owner is wrong about a great many things, even I have to say he wasn't 100% wrong about The Lost City.

For one thing, it is racist. Outrageously racist. You may be tempted to dismiss it as a product of it's time and say that the natives aren't any different than what you would find in your standard Tarzan movie of the time. But that's a fallacy. If there's one scene in the entire 12 chapters that hammers home the racial attitude of the serial, it comes up in chapter 8. Our heroes come across a tribe of Spider People. One of the Spider People approaches Manyus to "cure him of his blackness". God help me, Manyus has a serum that is able to turn black people into white people. After Manyus does this--I mean actually turning a black person into a white person--he is heartily congratulated by the hero! It is a scene that when it was over I actually said out loud "I did not just see that". Oh, but I had!

Even if you squeeze your eyes shut, cover your ears, and go "La la la--I don't see no racism here!", the serial is still awful. The above mentioned scene goes on for what feels like forever. The pacing in the entire serial is awful. The pacing can best be described as lethargy meets apathy with a cure for insomnia tossed in. Nothing--and I mean nothing--of consequence happens in this serial. You can literally remove chapters 3-11 and not miss a beat. Then again, you can also remove chapters 1, 2, and 12 at the same time and not miss a beat. One chapter starts with the entire last half of the previous chapter! Then there's the dialogue. Somebody actually got paid to write "That sounds like a white woman's scream!"

Come to it, the only thing worse than the dialogue and pace is the acting. Kane Richmond is usually pretty good in these things, but even he looks like he bored with the whole affair. Everyone else is that much worse. The scene where Kane proposes to the heroine at the end? Her immortal response is "Why--umm--yes, Bruce".

Some of you may have gotten the crazy idea that this might be fun to watch after all--a so bad it's good affair. No, just no. If you try, you'll wonder why you spent four hours of your life watching this instead of doing something more fun like doing laundry or clipping your toenails. It's a rotten, hateful serial that's just plain bad all around. It isn't fun, it isn't funny, it isn't even remotely entertaining. Is it the absolute worst serial ever? Maybe not. There are a couple that are more boring and lacking the "what the hell was that?" moments that this one does on occassion manage. Problem is, it isn't worth suffering the whole thing for those few moments.