One of my favorite strange avenues of cinema is the longform cul-de-sac of the classic movie serials. I love the old chapter plays and get a kick out of digging into even the most obscure examples. Often, they can be bizarre in ways that even the most unhinged low budget Hollywood offering can only imagine.
Recently I got my hands on a decent copy of Columbia’s The Green Archer (1940) so Beth and I started watching it about a week ago. I was impressed that it is based on an Edgar Wallace novel because I’m a fan of his work and the later krimi films made from his novels in Germany. We were anticipating a twisty murder mystery with all the usual serial action grafted onto 15 chapters of fast paced crazy. What we got was a level of madness that is stunning! We knew we were in for oddness when the opening information scroll of the first chapter reads like we are watching either a sequel to another story or we were somehow joining this adventure in the middle. We had to compare notes at points to be sure we understood where some characters were and why they were doing things. We were not always successful.
We limited ourselves to one chapter a night at most and found ourselves incredibly amused but certainly not for the reasons that we expected. It turns out that The Green Archer is one of the most completely crazy examples of the serial form that I have yet seen. There's the usual bad guy when a couple of dozen henchman carrying out a dastardly plan that seems a little silly at times. In fact, we have repeatedly lost track of what his plan evil plan might actually be. At one point in a particular episode this bad guy decides to fake having his castle’s antiques stolen to collect on the insurance. This random attempt to fool the insurance company that the serial’s hero works for comes out of nowhere, leads in a big flat circle and winds up nowhere at the end of two chapters. That is a good example of what makes this serial fascinating and something Beth and I look forward to every time we sit down for an episode. What unexpected action will be the engine of this portion of the story?
Another strange element is that the head bad guy is so comical in his reactions to his henchman's constant failures that, at times, The Green Archer plays like a comedy. Because it's a Columbia product there's a part of me that keeps waiting for the Three Stooges to wander on set to start slapping each other or attempting to fix the plumbing. An early episode actually spent the entire 15 plus minutes with the bad guys battling themselves after having stupidly divided into two separate groups over anger with yet another failure. This is incredibly entertaining but I suspect has little to nothing to do with the Edgar Wallace novel it is supposedly based upon. Often, I see the lead actor playing the hero Victor Jory with a look on his face that seems to indicate that he knows that this entire scenario is insane and is just enjoying the ride.
I don’t know if I can fully recommend this serial and it is definitely not the best pace for a new viewer to try out the form. But if you have seen a few of the more sane examples of the classic serials The Green Archer can be an amusing sideroad that might give you some wide-eyed chuckles.
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