THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 14, 1994 TAG: 9407140032
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: BY BILL RUEHLMANN, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines
THE SHADOW nose. No, not knows - nose. The nose that belongs to Lamont Cranston, a.k.a. ``The Shadow'' in the movie of the same title, grows appreciably when the playboy private citizen transforms into the two-gun crimefighter. Because while Lamont Cranston looks like smirky Alec Baldwin, The Shadow looks as he always did, like Basil Rathbone in a burnoose.
Pinocchio from Hell.
It's a clue to the problem with the new Universal film and mass-market paperback based upon it, which want everything both ways. The style of material implies ``The Shadow'' (Ivy, 216 pp., $5.99) is a thriller straight out of the pulps of the '30s. But the substance of David Koepp's screenplay and James Luceno's novel says we're much too hip for that; make it a sexy spoof straight out of double-entendre TV of the '90s.
Too bad. In avoiding a choice, the merchandisers have in effect made a bad one. What we have here is James Bond on a laughing jag, Batman in a slouch hat, not the authentic wild angel of Depression newsstands and airwaves.
The weed of crime, The Shadow was wont to inform us, bears bitter fruit; now, impoverished by innuendo, it bears fruity bits.
Cranston: ``Psychically, I'm very well endowed.''
Margot Lane (slyly): ``I'll bet you are.''
In an interview for Parade magazine, Baldwin said: ``I wanted to do a movie for children, and that's why I did `The Shadow.' No adult situations, no adult language, no sexuality, and very, very little violence.''
Guess again.
When today's films revisit innocence, they invariably muck about with it. So properties like ``Dick Tracy,'' the versions of ``Batman'' and now ``The Shadow'' and this become at once too worldly for kids, too dumb for grown-ups. Cranston's emerging from a bed with two women in it isn't sexual? Executing an old man center stage isn't violent? Smarmy byplay between Margo and slack-jawed minion Tim Curry isn't adult?
Certainly no one could accuse the language of maturity.
When The Shadow first confronts arch-enemy Shiwan Khan, a sort of Fu Manchu after hormone shots, he inquires of the villain: ``So what brings you to the Big Apple?''
And when the atom bomb-wielding Khan expresses contempt for the West, Cranston is quick to respond: ``That's the U.S. of A. you're talking about, pal!''
Killer retort. The budget for the film was a reported $45 million. Who says crime does not pay?
OK, The Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. (Also, in deference to the times, women and the morally challenged.) But, nowadays, who knows The Shadow?
It all started with a radio show. Street & Smith, nonpareil publishers of newsstand pulps, surfed the wave of the future in 1930 by sponsoring a program called ``Detective Story Hour,'' which employed stories taken directly from current issues of Detective Story Magazine. The sepulchral host for the program introduced himself as The Shadow.
After the broadcast, nobody remembered Detective Story Magazine. But they couldn't forget The Shadow, and raised a clamor for the publication that featured him. It didn't take Street & Smith long to supply one.
Editor Frank Blackwell tapped young Walter B. Gibson, a prolific newspaper freelancer who specialized in exposing scams and ghostwriting for professional magicians like Blackstone and Houdini. As ``Maxwell Grant'' (an alias cobbled from the names of two magic dealers), he would pound out 60,000-word Shadow novels on a portable typewriter at a peak rate of two a month for years.
``By 1940,'' Gibson noted in his 1979 introduction to the definitive ``Shadow Scrapbook,'' ``The Shadow was more than a household word; it had become a household commodity. People would buy the magazine on a Friday and bring it home to read over the weekend while the kids were going to the Saturday movies to see Victor Jory in a Shadow serial and other members of the family were listening to `The Shadow' radio program on Sunday afternoon. All that was needed was a Shadow comic to capture its share of the juvenile market that had sprung up as an offshoot of the `hero pulps.' ''
The Shadow comic duly arrived, and The Shadow comic strip; the Shadow Big Little Books; the Shadow hat, cape and mask; the Shadow Game, disguise kit, holster set, stationery. . .
Which brings us to at least one inevitable link-up with the present. In the wake of the new feature film, Leisure Concepts is providing a massive campaign, in company with over 50 tie-in merchandise licensees, to educate the public about The Shadow.
Who knows what evil lurks. . .
The thing is, Gibson played it straight. He may have done it with overwrought prose from a superheated Smith-Corona, but the writer supplied the best thrills and chills he knew how, without winking at his audience, and so did the radio show. In the new book and film, plot takes a back seat to showmanship and taste takes a holiday.
Even the climax, a shootout in a hall of mirrors, borrows heavily from ``The Lady from Shanghai,'' a film by Orson Welles, most noted voice of the network nemesis.
The Shadow nose.
I smell something, too.
In 1948, when Shadow Magazine brought back a six-year-old story called ``Jade Dragon,'' the editors began their explanation with this sentence:
``Nostalgia is the key theme of the age.''
In 1994, we have another term for the winnowing creative impetus that has already brought back ``The Flintstones,'' ``Maverick'' and ``Wyatt Earp'' this summer, with promises of impending wide-screen treatments of ``The Saint,'' ``The Little Rascals'' and ``The Phantom,'' among others, soon. Nostalgia has a measure of affection in it. But nostalgia is not the key theme of our age.
Recycling is. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Penelope Ann Miller stars as Margo Lane with Alec Baldwin as Lamont
Cranston in ``The Shadow.''
by CNB