Savage doctor

Another of the spotlights that TCM did some months back was movie adaptations of pulp literature. One of the movies they showed that I had never heard of -- and somewhat surprisingly, I'd never heard of the book series either, which had some 180 books in it -- was Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Since it sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it, and finally got around to watching it recently.

Savage, played here by Ron Ely, was a 1930s superhero in the MacGyver or Thunderbirds mold, in the sense that he didn't have the sort of superhuman powers that other superheroes had. We first see him at some sort of fortress in the high arctic, where he's engaging in meditation before being summoned back to New York. Unfortunately, his forced return to his New York headquarters is due to bad news: his father died suddenly in the little-known Latin American country of Hidalgo. Worse, when he has a conference with his associates to talk about this, somebody tries to shoot him through the window but misses only because of the special glass Savage has installed that screws up the refraction and makes things appear where they aren't.

Doc and his men chase after the sniper, who eventually falls to his death. OK, so they won't get any information by interrogting him, but they are able to discover that the sniper is of some native tribe and has a tribal tattoo on his death. It looks like the sort of thing that may have come from one of the indigenous peoples of Hidalgo, so Doc and his team decide they'll head down to Hidalgo to claim Dad's body and figure out for themselves just how implausible the official word on the elder Savage's death is.

Once down in Hidalgo, they're welcomed by the official authorities in a way that make it seem like they want Savage to have a nice time, but where it's clear that they've obviously got a lot to hide. The unofficial authority is Captain Seas (Paul Wexler), who lives on a superyacht, the Seven Seas and travels the world doing mobile business of some sort. Captain Seas invites Savage and his men aboard for dinner, although it's clear that some sort of danger is going to await them even though they know they're going to have to take Seas up on his offer anyway. There's danger on land anyway, in the form of the "green death", a humorously badly animated glowing green snake-like creature that has a venomous bite.

Further investigation reveals that Doc's father received some land grants in the jungle, and that somebody else wants this land, probably because there are vital resources that can be extracted from the land. The deeds to that land have mysteriously gone missing, so Savage and his men set out for the jungle, leading to the ultimate showdown between them and Captain Seas' forces of evil.

It's fairly easy to see why Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze was a box-office disaster. It's played like the old Batman TV series of a decade earlier, which apparently goes against the spirit of the original books. Those were supposedly earnest rather than campy, sort of what you might expect if Thunderbirds had been live action: an extremely wealthy person using his wealth to fight injustices that governments couldn't right. Instead, we get campy, which is fun at times for how bad it is, but not what fans might have wanted. (As I understand it, the books were still in print at the time.) It doesn't help that Ron Ely isn't much of an actor.

So sit back and watch Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze to have a little bit of fun, but beware that you're not getting a particularly good movie.