Filmgoers who recall Noah Beery, Jr., as only a grizzled wrangler in countless Western dramas may find it difficult to think of him as the hero of a 1935 tropical thriller, The Call of the Savage. Yet what about the most unlikely rescuer of fair damsels ever to trod a south-sea island, the matchless Bela Lugosi? Aside from film buffs and viewers of the late late show, only those of older years remember Bela as Chandu the Magician. He encountered Dr. Chandler, counter-conjurer, for the first time in Fox's 1932 feature adaptation of the old radio mystery, with Edmund Lowe playing the title role. Two years later Lugosi was Chandler, alias Chandu, in a serial sequel for Principal.

     The title (what else but The Return of Chandu?) also was used for one of two features compiled from the collected chapters. The other was called Chandu on the Magic Island.

     For those who wonder in what kind of situation Bela Lugosi found himself as a serial good guy, let us say that his assignment was to protect an Egyptian princess from the forces of black magic. This involved, as a beginning, snatching a poisoned cup from her fingers just as she raised it to her lips, then eluding the disappointed poisoners by vanishing magically. From there on the audience followed a running battle between Chandu and a band of nasty necromancers headed by Lucien Prival. During a stopover on a tropical island these scoundrels went so far as to begin sacrificial rites, with the princess the honored victim. Bela, who probably was inclined to cheer them on from force of habit, stepped in at the climactic moment to break up the fun. It was just about the last time Bela Lugosi did anything nice in a motion picture.

     In his first serial work he was more in character. Mascot's The Whispering Shadow (1933) found him playing very likely the nastiest red herring one could imagine, Professor Strang, proprietor of a waxworks inspired by the Grand Guignol. After his deviation as Chandu, Bela returned to stride as Victor Poten, mad inventor in Victory's Shadow of Chinatown (1936). Herman Brix brought Lugosi's wild schemes to an end in fifteen chapters. In 1937 Lugosi was another mad inventor, Boroff by name, in S O S Coast Guard. This time hero Ralph Byrd was too much for him.

     Bela gave it one last try in The Phantom Creeps (1939). And as Doctor Alex Zorka, a scientist with designs on ruling the world, he had a lot going for him. First was a giant robot, somewhat more menacing than Houdini's Automaton. Zorka developed it as a prototype of what be expected would be an army of mechanical warriors if he could swing the right deal. Most of the time the robot stood idle behind a panel in the scientist's home. But when Bela pressed the button on the control box strapped to his wrist and the panel slid open, juveniles in darkened theaters across the land bit down hard on their Milk Duds and twisted their Tootsie Rolls into misshapen masses.

Alex Zorka, nevertheless, was too versatile a mad inventor to rely solely upon a robot. He had a G-man in a state of suspended animation by the end of Chapter 1. Shortly before that, one of his highly explosive mechanical spiders went off in midair, causing a plane crash in which Zorka's wife was an unintended victim. Zorka, at the crash scene, but concealing his identity, was forced as a physician to choke back his emotion and pronounce his wife dead during a wild hubbub--in the midst of which the heroine, a nosy reporter, shook off a restraining policeman with the cry, "Leave go of me!"

     Dr. Zorka also had defensive armor: if the police or a band of Nazilike agents became annoying, he pressed another button on his wrist and faded to invisibility. This power also helped him several times to recover his most prized secret, a chunk of a meteorite he had found in Africa. With it he could fashion an arsenal of powerful hand bombs and a potent ray gun--just as potent as the one Boris Karloff had devised in Universal's 1936 feature The Invisible Ray, which had co-starred Lugosi. The similarity in weaponry is not surprising. Part of the African sequence from The Invisible Ray (showing the discovery of a meteorite) was used in The Phantom Creeps to reveal how Lugosi discovered the hidden source of his power.

Borrowing was common in chapter-play making. To keep costs low, the serial units appropriated everything at hand, from sets and costumes to stock shots and background music. Thus The Phantom Creeps profited from the mysterioso theme of the Frankenstein films, as well as from some striking shots of a streamliner roaring past the snow-covered terrain used in every Universal serial of the day calling for a train chase--whether or not the snow was appropriate. Also drawn upon were the tricks in simulating invisibility acquired by the studio's special-effects department in the concurrent cycle of Invisible Man pictures; the dockside, airport, and rural locales utilized in countless thrillers; and chase music that was not new when heard in Flash Gordon. The contribution of The Phantom Creeps to later serials may have been an auto chase in which a 1939 black Nash pursued an ancient touring car. The appearance of a vintage vehicle in a chase was a sure sign that sooner or later it would go over a cliff and burn. New cars didn't match those in crashes in the stock-film library, and stock shots were meant to last many years.

     But all this is not helping Bela Lugosi conquer the world. To tell the truth, he doesn't quite make it. For each of his weapons a defense is devised by the film's good scientist, Dr. Mallory, described by Zorka as a "genius second only to me." The frustrations mount. Mallory brews an antidote for suspended animation in Chapter 3 and later catches the terrible tinkerer with his invisibility down by means of an antidematerialization ray.

     When his precious robot is blasted into a pile of nuts and bolts, Zorka takes to the skies, determined to bring the world to its knees with the hand bombs he begins dropping in key areas. Like a child with the ultimate toy, he sits in the rear cockpit of an open plane, letting go his explosives while his man Monk pilots the craft in full chauffeur's regalia and dark glasses. Then the inevitable pursuit planes surround him, as they did King Kong. Announcing, "I'll take them all with me!" Zorka prepares to destroy most of North America by detonating all his lethal hardware. Only Monk's lack of receptivity to the idea saves the situation. The two airborne threats to humanity scuffle and plummet into the ocean, ending Dr. Alex Zorka's career as a world-beater and Bela Lugosi's as a serial villain.

Excerpted from The Serials: Suspense and Drama by Installment,
© 1971, 1977 by Raymond William Stedman