Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407280038
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-12 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Long
Now, with the release of Universal's summer movie version of ``The Shadow,'' everybody knows - or they think they do.
They are wrong, said Gary Bryant, who is on the staff of the Learning Resources Center at New River Community College. He has mounted a display of Shadow memorabilia there.
``I've always been interested in science fiction and comic books and that sort of thing. I guess when I was in college I got to finding out more about the pulp magazines and the serials,'' he said.
His display includes promotional materials from the new movie and also paperback reprints of Shadow stories from the pulp magazine published from 1931 to 1949, a series of original Shadow novels by another paperback publisher, various series of comic books on the character, books about previous Shadow films and the radio series that ran from 1937 to 1954, and even a black cape and slouch hat like The Shadow wears.
One woman stopping by the display said her young son knew all about The Shadow, as do people in generations older than she is. She felt left out.
Bryant gets reactions from visitors such as ```I've heard of the character, I don't know too much about it.' They'll ask me questions about it.''
Marshall Fishwick, a professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech and a student of pop culture, said the concept has roots among other shadowy characters ranging from Dracula to Satan.
``Religion, politics and history are all converging to make The Shadow a popular figure,'' he said, citing the coming end of a century and those who predict dire events for it, growing unease with big government, and the cataclysmic wars and disasters in this century.
``It fits into the general notion about the cynicism ... a general feeling that there is something shadowy about Washington,'' Fishwick said. ``One of the best sellers in Japan today is a book called `How to Commit Suicide' ... So I would say that we're in for shadowy times.''
Bryant said most people familiar with The Shadow remember him from the radio show, which opened with an organ playing a haunting segment from Saint-Saens' ``Le Rouet d'Omphale'' and a disembodied voice, sounding like it was coming through a telephone, saying ``Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows,'' followed by a sinister laugh.
A narrator would then explain that ``The Shadow ... is in reality Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town. Several years ago in the Orient, Cranston learned a strange and mysterious secret - the power to cloud men's minds so they cannot see him. Cranston's friend and companion, the lovely Margo Lane, is the only person who knows to whom the voice of the invisible Shadow belongs.''
Orson Welles played The Shadow and Lamont Cranston for the program's first year, and Agnes Moorehead was the original Margo. Bill Johnstone succeeded Welles, portraying the Shadow from 1938 to 1943. The longest-running radio Shadow was Bret Morrison who, except for one season, remained in the role from 1944 until the show left the air in 1954.
About 700 shows were produced. About 200 of those are still around, about half of them available on LP records or audio tapes. Some are even still being broadcast on radio stations.
What most people do not know about The Shadow, Bryant said, is that he was not really Lamont Cranston at all and that his origins go back to 1930.
At that time, The Shadow was only the narrator of a show called "Detective Story Hour." James LaCurto and Frank Readick first voiced him. Street and Smith, publishers of Detective Story, used the program to publicize their magazine. The sinister-sounding narrator was even used on another program developed from a Street and Smith magazine, Love Story Hour.
But the gimmick of a know-it-all narrator called The Shadow proved more popular with listeners than the stories featuring various detectives. When they went to newsstands, instead of asking for Detective Story, they asked for The Shadow magazine.
Since none existed, Street and Smith decided to invent it. They hired a former police reporter and stage musician named Walter Gibson to flesh out the character and write four stories about him, to be published in four quarterly magazines.
When the first two issues sold out, the magazine went to monthly publication - and, within a year, to twice a month. Gibson, writing under the name Maxwell Grant, did 283 of the more than 300 Shadow novels that appeared in the magazine over the years.
That number still stands as a record of works by an author about a single character. Grant got so he could churn out a 60,000-word Shadow story in five days. He also did stories for some of the early Shadow comics.
In the early stories, Gibson made The Shadow a master of disguise with several identities. Lamont Cranston was only one of them, and not the real one at all. In fact, one of the novels makes clear, The Shadow simply uses Cranston's identity to hobnob with police and other influential people while the real Cranston is off on one of his many globe-trotting vacations.
Gibson finally revealed The Shadow's identity as that of Kent Allard, who had been a U.S. spy during World War I and later faked his own death in a plane crash in order to fight crime anonymously.
Blue Coal, sponsors of the radio show, did not want to give up the Shadow-as-narrator program but Street and Smith persuaded the company to try a series using The Shadow as the central character. Finally, Blue Coal gave in, and the rest is radio history.
The radio writers picked up the Cranston alter ego and did away with the others, invented Margo Lane (although Gibson did use her character in some of the later magazine novels) and came up with the invisibility gimmick. It differed in all those ways from the character that Gibson had developed, and that character kept going along on his own magazine path at the same time.
There have also been other Shadow movies, most based on the magazine version. Rod LaRocque starred in ``The Shadow Strikes'' (1938) and ``International Crime'' (1939). Kane Richmond appeared in three low-budget Shadow movies in 1946. Victor Jory played the character in a 1940 Columbia serial which kept cliffhanger fans coming back to the theater for 15 weeks. In 1958, the radio version made an appearance in ``The Invisible Avenger,'' consisting of a couple of pilot films for a TV series that never materialized. The movie also disappeared quickly.
In 1975, just out of college, Bryant attended a pop culture convention in New York and met Gibson and Jim Steranko, who was drawing The Shadow for a new comic book series. At one time, DC did a crossover comic featuring Batman meeting The Shadow.
The Shadow actually pre-dated all the better-known dual-identity superheroes including Batman and Superman. Bryant hopes the new movie and his display will help give The Shadow some of the credit he has had coming.
by CNB