I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Doubly directed by Alan James and Ray Taylor this an excellent serial concerning the exploits of Dick Tracy. A master criminal called The Lame One runs The Spider Ring who engage in smuggling, espionage, murder and similar illegal activities and the valiant Tracy and his team go head to head with them. The Lame One has also captured Tracy's brother Gordon and with the evil doctor Moloch's skills ("a simple altering of certain glands"!) has turned Tracy into a pliable assistant for himself. The altered brother carries out most of The Lame One's schemes. Incident follows incident in some good locations until the breathless finish.Ralph Byrd is perfect as Dick Tracy, determined and dedicated to to his task. The identity of The Lame One is kept to the end. He hobbles about wearing a built up shoe and barks out orders from a desk. The mad Moloch is played by the creepy John Picorri (often stroking a black cat) and Carleton Young is effective as the changed Gordon Tracy, a streak of white hair on his head after his character changing operation, with an air of sadness about him that is poignant. Unfortunately the great Byron Foulger is only in it briefly as the gangster Korvitch.Smiley Burnette is one of Tracy's assistants Mike McGurk and is supposed to be the comic relief but who isn't at all funny. Also appearing in a couple of scenes are 'Oscar' and 'Elmer' who were a comic team at the time but they aren't funny either. Lee Van Atta as Junior gets more laughs. I. Stanford Jolley plays 'Roadside Thug' and 'G-Man' and 'Reporter' and 'Intern' to show his versatility.It has great model work by the Lydecker brothers including a wonderful flying wing that is used a lot. Indeed a lot of the scenes take place in the air. The fifteen packed episodes are a great start to the Dick Tracy serials.

DICK TRACY is a fast-paced and lengthy serial of the late 1930s, popular enough to inspire a bunch of sequels in which the slightly wooden Ralph Byrd would return to the role of the crime-fighting detective, fighting further villains. In this one he's up against a criminal mastermind called The Spider, who hypnotises Tracy's own brother and turns him against our hero. Each chapter is full of action, most of it vehicular, and involves car chases, train and plane interludes, ships and much more. Each episode ends with Tracy being apparently killed, in the best clichéd tradition.There's a wealth of action to bolster a flagging storyline that ends up getting repetitive, one of the constraints of this genre. Still, the central characters are fun and the film is a little better quality and higher budget than some from this era. The main problem with it is that the opening titles go on for too long and there's too much time spent recapping the previous episode, pointless really when your running time for each chapter is so short.

Ralph Byrd stalled forever his career by taking the role of Chester Gould's crime fighting hero. Byrd would play the role in three more serials, two hour long feature films (taking over when another actor proved unsatisfactory) and a TV series. Byrd could never really get away from Tracy and was type cast as the character even though he took a variety of other roles. Not to put too fine a point on it this, along with its three sequels, represent one of mystery films finest hours. In all of the films we have an excellent mix of crime, mystery and action. The film works as several different things all at the same time and all of them good. The plot of this serial has Tracy battling the Spider, aka The Lame one, who is bent on taking over the world. He's so bad that he is eliminating all the other criminals in town as well has kidnapping and twisting the brother of Tracy through vile means. Its heady stuff and a real joy to watch. It's a big story told on a large canvas with great special effects (The model work here, as with all Republic serials is as good as it gets). You really need to see this serial and its sequels since they all are a great deal of fun.

Republic Pictures were clearly hitting their stride in superior (and super) serial production with this quite sensational 15 chapter crime-terrorism drama made in 1936, released in early 1937. For any faults: too long as 12 chapters would do; the tedious antics of the infantile Smiley Burnette, there is a dozen truly astonishing and eerie/creepy moments that easily compensate. The first episode is so weird, and on a huge screen in a giant old theater full of screaming kids (or even adults) has several hair raising scenes where master evildoer The Lame One has maximum effect. The first chapter ending sees The fabulous Lydecker Brothers in full big budget special effects mode on a thrill set piece aboard the Golden Gate Bridge. The opening two chapters also features an astonishing triangular flying wing plane (looks like a cross between a stealth bomber and a flying sandwich) which for its day is a genuine masterpiece of inventive and graphic/realistically clever sci fi imagination. The recent film SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW owes a huge debt of imagination to this one flying apparatus alone. Republic clearly intended this serial to play to adults and it is not a G rated serial at all...given the menace, action and violence. It has three great villains one of whom is Gordon Tracy (Dick's brainwashed bro) who, after getting the treatment, sports a very fetching Bride Of Frankenstein hair stripe along with a mean scar. Another hideout menace is Moloch, a cat patting hunchback akin to a lost Uncle of Peter Lorre. Incredible action stunt sequences abound and very inventive use of miniatures and special effects..the chapter endings of 9 and 10 especially with a huge blazing Zeppelin and then a sheet of hull metal swinging from a repaired ship are very well thought out. Often the resolves cheat with Dick just getting up and running off, or rolling out of the way, but given the very high standard of the rest of all parts of this huge and complex production it was a major step forward for Republic at the time proving their willingness to make a serial for all ages that employed excellent craftsmen...especially the incredible Lydecker Brothers they inherited in their merger with Mascot Pictures. Remove them and the serial industry would have been all chases and fights. No wonder this serial was so successful it offered a big marker for two more Dick Tracy epics in 38 and 39. Excellent! Beware of dud dvds though, the one I saw was awful and bleached, in good quality this 15 chapter pre-noir horror serial must be a knockout.