Drums of Fu Manchu premiered in the spring of 1940. The creepy chapter play featured a race of bald-headed, fanged slaves known as “Dacoits” who had been lobotomized into doing the bidding of the immortal and insidious Doctor Fu Manchu. Fu Manchu hopes to conquer Asia and subsequently the world but needs specific artifacts from the tomb of Genghis Khan to achieve his goal.
In Los Angeles, California, he convenes a meeting of the S-Far, an international conspiracy group that helps him draw up his plans. When archeologist Dr. James Parker is killed so Fu Manchu can obtain rare scrolls in his possession, his son Allan joins forces with Sir Denis Nayland Smith of the British Foreign Office to avenge his father’s death.
The sixteen frightful-looking “Dacoits” who contributed many of the thrills to Drums of Fu Manchu were a product of the makeup artists Bob Mark’s wizardry. The normal-looking people became grotesque monsters in Mark’s hands.
Rubber caps entirely covered their hair, giving them the impression of baldness. These caps, which could be worn only once, were specially manufactured at the cost of five dollars each. They were fitted tightly over the “Dacoit’s” heads, and heavy, theatrical grease paint was applied over them. The scars, which represented the incisions where Dr. Fu Manchu had removed the frontal lobes of their brain, were made of a special rubber composition and were held in place by rubber cement. The makeup of Fu Manchu himself, an elaboration of the “Dacoit’s” makeup, took exactly 2.5 hours each day to apply.
The fifteen-part Fu Manchu series was directed by William Witney. He considered Fu Manchu to be his finest work.
Daredevils of the Red Circle was a twelve-part serial that included a cape-wearing villain. The suspenseful, spin-tingling, mystery film told the tale of diabolical mastermind Harry Crowel, a.k.a. Prisoner 39013. Crowel escapes from prison and, aided by a seemingly endless supply of henchmen, sets out to destroy all holdings of industrialist Horace Granville, the man who put in him prison. One target is an amusement park, home of three Daredevils of the Red Circle who perform death-defying stunts.
When head Daredevil Gene’s kid brother is killed in Crowel’s attack, the three heroes swear to capture Prisoner 39013. Unbeknownst to them, he is holding the real Granville captive and, with a near perfect disguise, has taken his place. A mysterious cloaked figure known as the Red Circle aids the daredevil in their crusade.
Shot in five weeks on a budget of $1,500 an episode, Daredevils of the Red Circle, directed by William Witney, who was one of Republic Picture’ best directors, consistently appears on lists of all-time greatest serials. Audiences referred to the serial as the “greatest thrill show on earth!”
Moviegoers throughout the 1930s and 1940s enjoyed film adventures, from heroes on exotic animals to those in spacecrafts. Such was the case with The Purple Monster Strikes, the original Republic Martian invader serial.
The Purple Monster was actually not a monster at all, nor was he purple. The villainous character was in reality a Caucasian, Martian space soldier. He was part of the advance guard preparing a vast invasion of earth, dressed in a blue, tight-fitting outfit, trimmed with scaly gold metallic material, and wearing a matching gilded hood. Among the Purple Monster’s alien abilities was the power to become a transparent phantom and enter the body of another, controlling his actions, thereby donning the ultimate disguise.
The Purple Monster Strikes was the first post-war serial of 1945. Republic was prohibited from using the term “rocket ship” when referring to the spacecraft the Purple Monster used in the film. Universal Studio had a copyright on the word which was used quite extensively in their serial Flash Gordon.
Bat Men of Africa (a.k.a. Darkest Africa), directed by Joseph Kane, was the first fifteen-episode serial produced by Republic Pictures. World famous big game hunter and lion tamer Clyde Beatty starred in the chapter play portraying an adventurer on safari in East Africa. While in the Dark Continent, he meets and befriends a loincloth-wearing boy and his pet ape.
The boy reveals that he has escaped from the lost city of Joba, King Solomon’s sacred city of the Golden Bat, but that his sister, Valerie, remains there. Clyde agrees to help his new friend rescue Valerie and treks through the dangerous Valley of Lost Souls to get to her. Meanwhile, a pair of unscrupulous treasure hunters notices a green diamond the young boy is wearing, and they decide to follow the trip to plunder the city of Joba.
Among the cliffhangers in the picture are volcanic eruptions, a patrol of Bat-men type creatures attacking the trio from the air, a landslide, and a fall down a mineshaft. At a cost of $119,343, Bat Men of Africa was the most expensive Republic serial of 1936.
To learn more about the cliffhanger serials of
Tune in tomorrow for another exciting look at Cowboys, Creatures and Classics!
A dark figure weaves through a forest of imposing, leafless trees toward a weathered cabin in a clearing. An eerie mist blankets the ground, and a lone wolf howls in the distance. Inside the cabin, two men dressed in business suits and fedoras discuss plans to steal a counter atomic bomb device called the Cyclotrode. Their conversation is interrupted when the door of the structure is flung open and a madman wearing a skull mask and crimson robe enters. This is the Crimson Ghost, and the men deliberating over the robbery work for him.
The Crimson Ghost is determined to get his hands on the Cyclotrode. The Cyclotrode cannot only stop nuclear missiles, but it can also cripple transportation and communications. The Crimson Ghost wants the invention for his own nefarious plans, including selling the device to foreign powers.
Two people know of the Crimson Ghost’s dangerous ambitions, and they are criminologist Duncan Richards and Diana Farnsworth, secretary for the professor who created the Cyclotrode. The duo is determined to stop the villain and his henchmen from taking the contraption and destroying lives.
The duo match wits and fists with the miscreant and his aides in an attempt to keep the Cyclotrode from being used for mass destruction. Duncan and Diana were threatened with death by explosion, poison gas, deadly slave collars, and death rays.
The Crimson Ghost was one of Republic Pictures most popular cliffhanger serials. To learn more about the exciting cliffhanger films from the once thriving movie studio read Cowboys, Creatures, and Classics: The Story of Republic Pictures.
A New England schoolmarm living in Wyoming in 1879, falls in love with a cowboy who’s not only an expert roper and rider, but handy with a gun. The teacher is opposed to violence, and her relationship with the cowboy is put to the test when he insists on squaring off with a card sharp who’s accused him of being a cattle thief and a liar. This is not a storyline in a Harlequin paperback series, but of a novel hailed by newspapers from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Kansas City Star as one of the “best romances of the West in American literature.” The novel is the Virginian: A Horseman on the Plains by Owen Wister.
Published in 1902 by Macmillan Company of New York, the hero of the story is a Virginian who drifted out on the old Santa Fe trail when he was sixteen, and who, at twenty-seven, when the story opens, is a master of the cowboy arts. Wister’s Virginian has a grand sense of humor. The Yankee schoolteacher is a fine woman, but I wish she’d been a little more jovial; then maybe her cowboy wouldn’t have had to endure so many forlorn days. Wister captures their fragile romance with lines like “she would watch him with eyes that were fuller of love than of understanding” and “Ah, me. If marriage were as simple as love!”
Now I admit I’ve never been a fan of romance novels. The stories of beautiful people and how their love blossoms in unusual circumstances seem implausible to me. When is anyone ever taking a casual ride on the prairie dressed in a taffeta gown complete with a black velvet and lace bonnet and silk gloves? And then, on that ride meet a shirtless, Chris Hemsworth type searching for a wandering calf? I went on a horseback ride with a guy once, we were both dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. It was kind of fun until he ran out of quarters. But I digress.
Many of the most celebrated books in the western genre are romances. From Dorothy Johnson’s short story, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Louis L’Amour’s Conagher to Lauran Paine’s The Open Range Men and Max Evan’s The Hi-Lo Country, romance is a driving force in those westerns. Not only does the romantic element make the stories compelling, but, as it turns out, it’s also a key selling point.
A Publishers Weekly 2020 study showed that 72.6 million Americans read at least one romance a year. Thirty-two percent of those readers were men. Close to half of the romance books that sold were set on the American frontier. According to a 2021 study by Psychology Today, the common ingredient that explains the appeal of the western romance is the “dashingly handsome, rogue cowboy captivated by the female lead who ultimately reforms his ways.” The study also shows readers enjoy a romance story because it “simply gives them hope that they too could have that romantic love of which they dream.”
Whatever the reason, romance is big business, particularly in book publishing. Online magazine MarketWatch notes it’s a billion-dollar industry and western romances claim a respectable percentage of those earnings.
In addition to Owen Wister, contemporary western romance writers have authors James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte, and Zane Grey to thank for pioneering the genre. Since their work debuted in mercantile stores and bookshops across the country in the 1870s to the early 1900s, the field has undergone changes and evolved with the times. Western romance novels are no longer strictly written from the male perspective. The focus has shifted from the hero’s goals and wants to the heroine’s journey, motivations, and aspirations.
The fancy but picturesque character study in The Virginian is just one of the reasons it ranks as one of the best western romance novels. That, and Wister’s talent for writing crisp dialogue which makes it hard to resist rooting for his lead characters to live happily ever after. “I don’t think I like you,” the schoolmarm says to the Virginian. “That’s all square enough,” he replies. “You’re going to love me before we get through.”
That’s the goal for all western romance authors, that we love what they’ve written before we get through with their stories.
Throughout history teachers have been at the forefront of all civilizations, educating and inspiring the next generation and keeping societies moving forward. Frontier Teachers captures that pioneering, resilient, and enduring spirit of teachers that lives on today.
Tears streamed down twelve-year-old Bethenia Owens’s face as she watched her teacher pack his belongings into a faded, leather saddlebag and slip his coat on over his shoulder. She was heartbroken that the gracious man who introduced her to the alphabet and arithmetic would be leaving to teach school at a far-off location. Bethenia’s brothers and sister gathered around him, hugging his legs and hanging onto his hands. Mr. Beaufort had boarded with the Owens family during the three-month summer school term in 1852, and everyone had grown quite attached to him, especially Bethenia.
Mr. Beaufort smiled sweetly at Bethenia as she wiped her face dry with the back of her dirty hand. Streaks of grim lined her thin features and continued on into her hairline. Her long, brown locks protruded haphazardly out of the pigtails behind each ear. The dainty ribbons that once held her hair in place were untied and dangling down the back of her soiled, well-worn gingham dress.
Bethenia would remember this day for the rest of her life and her first teacher Mr. Beaufort. It was his kindness and dedication to education that inspired her to want to be a teacher.
Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.
Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.
Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of their earnings for their benefit during their declining years so that they will not become a burden on society.
Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect their worth, intention, integrity, and honesty.
The teacher who performs their labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in their pay, providing the Board of Education approves.
Walk into any saloon in the mid-1800s and chances were good a thick cloud of cigarette smoke stood between patrons and the bar. Smoking was prevalent in the Old West. It’s hard to imagine a cowboy on the trail without a cigarette in his hand or a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth.
The effects of tobacco have been a topic of discussion among physicians since 1888 when Doctor Robert Koch, the leading authority on infectious diseases at the time, argued that the spitting of chewing tobacco was leading to a spread of tuberculosis.
A quartet of doctors from Dartmouth and Harvard weighed in on the subject of cigarette smoking in 1889. According to the October 4, 1889, edition of the Monroe Daily Independent physicians studying the proliferation of smoking in locations such as San Francisco, California and Denver, Colorado determined that “tobacco should be used moderately, if used at all.” The four doctors involved in the study concluded that laborers and artisans could smoke all they want without injury, but that “brain-workers” exposed themselves to the risk of nervous collapse if they indulged in more than one cigarette a day. The reasoning was that the life of a “brain-worker” tended to be sedentary and therefore their internal organs were not as strong as those who earned a living working with their hands. Laborers were sturdy individuals whose heart could withstand the strain.
The physicians all agreed that the habit of smoking tobacco was a very pernicious one if indulged in by boys. “A complication of nervous disorders is produced by excessive tobacco smoking and boys ought not to smoke,” the doctors concluded in their findings. “Many boys started smoking when they were eleven or twelve years old. They began by picking up their father’s half-smoked cigar or by stealing his tobacco. When these boys come to be seventeen or eighteen years of age they are thin, pale-faced, short and their vitality is seriously impaired.”
In 1905, Doctor Sara B. Chase spoke to the issue of women smokers. “Tobacco in any shape has no good qualities at all in it for women. I found that women not only smoke, but chew tobacco. Many of the women that smoke today are teachers. The most injurious form of smoking is cigarettes. It is the most injurious because tobacco is put right into the mouth and the nicotine poison in the tobacco is absorbed that way through the paper.”
The physician’s study concluded with the following warning, “A man would be a great deal better off if he would let tobacco alone. I know he would have more money because it is an expensive habit. Exactly how much nicotine is needed to poison a man is not known. A man who is a heavy smoker would probably require much more nicotine to poison him than a man who doesn’t smoke at all or one of nervous temperament.”
The results of numerous other studies would be posted in newspapers throughout the Old West from 1888 to 1912, but it didn’t stop a cowboy from rolling his own cigarette in corn shucks and smoking.
