Swinging on the Riviera one day

[austin_dern]

The Perils Of Pauline Episode Nine, ``The Mummy Walks'', opens with the discovery that Warde and Pauline are not dead.

They're just very, very wet. One of the temple hangers-on overhears the two struggling in the raging yet constrained current, and gets Dr Hargrave, aborting the whole ``you desecrated our temple!'' ``did not!'' debate, and getting everyone to bring a ladder out. The experience of being dropped down the secret well and recovery is considered enough punishment for sacred temple desecration, and Our Heroes take the next plane bound from India to New York.

Dr Bashan and his minions take the same plane, too. It's kind of embarrassing when the heroes and villains have to book the same flight. Pauline even points out the villains are on-board, and Hargrave concludes they really can't do anything except watch them when they get to New York. They do arrive, accompanied by a navy ship shooting off its guns, in what is either a tribute to the long-distance, rapid travel by air (India to New York in only five days!), or else is an attempt by New York City to take Ellis Island by force.

Hargraves wants to get to the museum at once, but there's renovations in the museum. However, Dodge hears how Bashan has been stopped by immigration officials for lacking a passport, so, Our Heroes have time to get some dinner and then go to the museum. But Bashan works his way out of custody, and has his henchmen tie up the museum's actual guards. Our Heroes wander around the museum in the dark, with flashlights, and Dodge gets so spooked by all this creepy ancient Egyptian stuff that he falls in a tub of wet plaster, so he goes wandering around like a very stiff --- almost robotic-looking --- ghost as Bashan's henchmen start clonking heroes one at a time. By moving in a stiff manner and being all white he scares henchmen into thinking he's a guh-guh-guh-ghost, so, there's a lot of running around.

Dr Hargraves find the vase the disc is supposed to be in, but pulls out that there's possibly some explosives in the disc which would be very dangerous if it were at all likely that high explosives would remain one sharp jolt short of exploding after four thousand years of rotting in the heat. While the henchmen and heroes engage in that sort of sissy slap-fighting, Pauline runs downstairs, drops the vase, and sets off a very minor stage-style explosion that Pauline rolls onto in the least convincing cliffhanger yet. Seriously. I know they wouldn't want to really threaten a star or even a stagehand by having the explosion be too near her, but, she's not even on the same landing when the explosion, which would probably look good as a stage effect, happens. She'd actually be more threatened by roughhousing than rolling onto the remains of the explosion. Just not a good one, really.

Trivia: Japan's urban population rose from 38 percent of the nation in 1950 to 75 percent by 1975. Source: A Modern History of Japan, Andrew Gordon.

Currently Reading: Coronation Commentary, Geoffrey Dennis. OK, so, like, the English monarch is awesome because of stuff like the Queen-Empress's 1877 declaration that all Indians should have equal rights under the law, which you'd never see, say, an American President do for blacks in the South. Relentless praise like this is the stuff that makes republicans of people. Also there's wonderful footnotes and a hilarious last two chapters that amount to big ``whoops'' moments regarding the abdication, which Dennis spends dozens of pages explaining was not a Constitutional Crisis because everything was done without Parliament having to do much of anything and besides we have yet to figure out who it was exactly did the devious deeds depriving the people of their beloved Edward VIII, Eddie himself being apparently off the hook. I do like his suggestion that were the English to ever go Communist they'd probably keep the Monarchy around because they do that sort of thing; ``His Majesty's Soviet'' has got a weirdly credible ring to it. Also he has got a lovely like about how Victoria was the beloved mother of empires; George V the father of nations; Edward VII everyone's fun-loving uncle; Edward VIII, their lover. Well.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest that this was supposed to be 1934 Naval Review (http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-i/ca35-k.htm), which had huge coverage in the newsreels of the day, but wikipedia insists this serial was made in 1933.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

As best I was able to determine the serial isn't easily available online (although maybe someone's uploaded it since the TCM run; anyway, it's not on archive.org that I can find), sadly. The quality of the footage made me think that the naval footage was silent-era stock put back to use, which means it might have been any naval demonstration from the Great War on. I'm not alert enough to the differences in US Navy ships and stylings to tell any more clearly than that, though.

(It's conceivable that 1934 Naval Review footage was edited into the serial to replace something earlier, but that seems like more effort than would be used for the product even if it was shopped around the various booking networks for years after its first production. I don't know enough about the way the studio treated the serial to tell.)

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Naval Review would really be relevant to audiences even a few years afterward. If they editted that in, then I'd suppose it happened in the summer of '34. They'd have to make new prints afterward, so that seems unlikely, since it would have been showing in secondary markets by that time, if it was in release at all. One of those things.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, you know what probably makes sense? If they reused footage of whatever parades and attention and whatnot was lavished on Charles Lindbergh. I don't know for a fact that naval ships fired off their guns in salute to him, but I would be willing to bet they did, and that there would be abundantly available footage of it.