Junior G-Men, though the seventh overall Little Tough Guys film, was their first film serial – and it was successful. (Just how do they measure the success of what is essentially pre-show time filler? These things are like the trailers and lame trivia quizzes theaters show nowadays.) Anyway, one year later Universal released the Guys’ second serial (and their tenth film), Sea Raiders.
Now, the production of these serials was pretty much independent of the regular run of feature length Little Tough Guy films. Universal’s serial department was a separate arm, with separate creative crews. They simply employed the popular, ever-rotating Little Tough Guys troupe as their stars, maintaining their regular personas (names are never consistent, and continuity?! Ha!), and advertizing the result as a Little Tough Guys film for the name recognition.
And so we get another wartime serial with the lads, this time focusing on ship sabotage, just as concerned the actual U.S. in 1941. In the absence of the FBI’s advice, Sea Raiders takes on a much more generic propagandistic tone, simply declaring that foreign espionage = bad.
Overall, there is a significant lack of focus to this effort, a much worse serial than Junior G-Men. This is the result of some extremely muddied plotting, mostly. In Junior G-Men, the first chapter served to establish clear cut heroes and villains, and give them each clear motives that could be exploited for adventure endlessly, without convolution. Sea Raiders has a much iffier team of villainous saboteurs, with endlessly shifting schemes. The Little Tough Guys themselves have similar motivational problems, only battling the baddies at their leisure in the midst of a non-starting deportation plotline. Their foes aren’t only the villains, though, but also the police, or even their own adult allies – eh, it comes and goes, always shifting and never clear. It doesn’t help that the baddies are successful spies, half the cast convinced they’re good and working for them. Many feature narratives benefit from such cleverness, but I am convinced it is the pits for a serial.
Many more problems to get off my chest before we plunge into plot synopses. The “Little Tough Guys” are starting to grate on me mightily, with their persistent Joisey slang and loud, nasal voices screeched to the rafters. Hell, every actor in Sea Raiders is content to merely shriek. Add to that pronunciation such as “bruddah,” “hoid,” “wid,” “coppah,” “faggedaboutit,” and you’ve got 1-dimensional characters with practically no redeeming characteristics. Somehow it’s all about context, and the “Little Tough Guys” aren’t nearly as appealing as Junior G-Men made ‘em – I cannot account for the precise difference, but trust me.
The aural torment doesn’t stop with the dialogue. The soundtrack is rancid too, a random and repetitious playlist of butchered classical music, mostly Rossini (but also verifiably Dukas). It is quite disconcerting to hear, every 8 minutes, that same “Thieving Magpie” piece most associated with droogs raping and rampaging in A Clockwork Orange. And serialists Ford Beebe and John Rawlins are no Kubricks, they aren’t.
It’s not all horrible. The stunt work is at a high level, and most decidedly the. Consider, all serial write-ups list the stuntmen in the same breath as the nominal actors. Let’s give ‘em their due: Bud Geary, Eddie Parker, Tom Steele, Bud Wolfe, Duke York. Given the maritime setting now employed, there is a lot of potential, used wisely. If only there was something for these impressive gags to be hanged onto…
CHAPTER ONE: THE RAIDER STRIKES
This story’s gonna be a beast to get a handle on. Most basically, there is a “Sea Raider” out at sea raiding – specifically, using mined torpedoes to sink munitions ships on a daily basis. (Sea Raiders has a hell of a body count – all in stock footage.) The villains, as far as I can best gauge, are Carl Tonjes (Reed Hadley) and Captain Elliot Carlton (Edward Keane) – but it’s no help that at least two other captains both look just like Carlton, have very similar names, yet are good guys…maybe. (The cast suffers from the occasional B-movie problem that everyone looks exactly the same – “Little Tough Guys” excepted, naturally, as I can finally tell those guys apart. This even applies to the females! It’s as though casting directors had a type.)
At the docks is Tom Adams (John McGuire), the lover and/or brother of Aggie (Mary Field), herself the standard older sister of lead “Tough Guy” Billy Halop – here playing another Billy, as usual, which is as lazy as it is convenient. (That Billy refers to Tom as his brother – excuse me, “bruddah” – is where the confusion arises, possibly out of misdirected script writing.) Tom is the inventor of a brand new torpedo boat, which the Sea Raiders wish to steal – both it and its blueprints, because the more MacGuffins, the better. Oddly, Tom helps them out of sheer stupidity, even while he occasionally realizes they’re stealing his torpedo boat. I hate this movie.
As for Billy and his gang of juveniles, now granted nautical variations on their standard monosyllabic monikers (Bilge, Butch, Swab, Lug), they are hounded mercilessly and purposelessly by harbor cop (or dock dick) Brack (William Hall), who may himself be a villain or may not be, depending on who’s writing that day and what threats are needed. Brack has threatened to deport the Little Tough Guys (to the desert!), and their main motivation now is to escape his watch and take a rowboat down to Mexico. This is odd. And this’ll be their intent for the first several chapters, until they’ve finally pieced together the need to battle the Sea Raiders, as per the serial’s title.
Oh, and with a cast of over a dozen (many of whom I’m not even bothering with), there is a similar over-large cast of ships. [Screaming in rage, angering neighbors.] Even the danged sets all look the same, so it took me again three damned chapters to work out the villains’ boat is the fishing barge The Pelican. Arrggh!
Whatever, anger subsists as The Dolphin is exploded by torpedoes, and its flaming hulk hurtles towards the Little Tough Guys, out on their dingy dinghy. Hooray, maybe they’ll die early!
CHAPTER TWO: FLAMING TORTURE
Or simply survive anyway, because we said so. I hate cheap serials.
Around now the Sea Raiders, whomever they all are, start stealing Tom’s torpedo boat piecemeal – Why must they do this, when they’ve been successfully torpedoing boats left and right anyway?! (There’d be no plot otherwise.) Meanwhile, the Little Tough Guys start their grand adventure of…collecting groceries. I am dead serious. They just keep on “lucking” into a deadly situation at the end of each reel. They’re damnably not proactive, though. I hate them. They go to their hideout, blah blah blah, comic mishaps, blah blah, steal lettuce heads from a naval warehouse (?), blah blah blah.
This warehouse randomly catches fire while Billy and Tony (Huntz Hall, second-in-command) are inside. This is due to the pure idiocy of someone I later realize is meant to be a villain. Again, because the universe of the movie serial is doggedly determined to kill its heroes, at least until offering up countless miraculous survivals. The first half of that now: warehouse collapse!
CHAPTER THREE: THE TRAGIC CRASH
Until it turns out they retcon what we just saw, and rather than the very visceral crushing of two preteens which leant me so much sudden delight, instead Billy axes his way out of the warehouse. And then Brack shoots a pistol at him, due to some brain aneurism I do not follow. Because dialogue insists he is a “good guy.” Uh?
The Sea Raiders know the kids saw their goon in the warehouse. This gives them a scant reason to wish the Little Tough Guys dead (I mean, apart from general annoyance, schaudenfreude). Because they think these boys will tell the police, or whatever. Of course, they’re doing no such thing, and it’s only the villains’ persistent attempts to murder children which cause children to start investigating the villains. And when they do, they still don’t call the cops (the Sea Raiders’ greatest fear of all!). Instead, they simply bungle their way over to The Pelican in broad daylight, then wonder why a sudden fistfight/shootout suddenly breaks out.
Now, Chapter Three ends in a motorboat chase – a damned good motorboat chase, I must say, which seems to have been wholly pilfered by Spielberg for the equivalent chase in The Last Crusade – and knowing the Indiana Jones films are just super-slick repackagings of old serials, that makes sense. Now, wouldn’t it be easy to script that chase in as the kids flee The Pelican? So the villains are chasing ‘em? Eh, it’s not what they do. Instead, the Little Tough Guys row (not motor) back to the docks, where the police chase the hell out of them. What the good goddamn hell for?! (Whatever good work the stuntmen achieve by twisting around ships and piers is destroyed by the fucking eleventh playing of “Thieving Magpie.”
Then suddenly a model motorboat carrying model boys (but not model citizens) crashes into a model dock. Ka-blammo!
CHAPTER FOUR: THE RAIDER STRIKES AGAIN
CHAPTER FIVE: FLAMES OF FURY
Actually paying attention to the expository scrolling scrawl, I learn that now the cops suspect our heroic band of juvenile delinquents of stealing the torpedo boat (oh suuuuuure, they’re the international spies!). For this reason, the kids hide aboard The Astoria, but seeing as it’s a ship in Sea Raiders other than The Pelican, it is due for an imminent torpedoing…
As footage from the missing Chapter Four unspools, it seems the boys even managed themselves into a fistfight as they try to escape the craft. They do accomplish this task, even while knocking out various innocent bystanders on The Astoria. So those people perish horribly in the ensuing explosion, purely because our “heroes” made sure they would. Anger…rising! The sickening assessment Toby offers doesn’t quell my rage: “Those guys didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance.” Say what?!
Then the baddies near, so another damn boat chase ensues. Actually, just the same damn boat chase as before. Sigh!
The Little Tough Guys reassess whatever the plotline currently is back in their hideout incongruously beneath the docks. Apparently, there was a squealer in Chapter Four, who’s now been IDed and forgiven. It’s like I never even saw it!
Oh, and the boys pass on a note to Tom naming a goon – not the main baddies, though they are known to the Little Tough Guys now, ‘cause then this movie’d be over. Seven chapters early. God forbid that happen! So of course Tom takes this new knowledge to the main villains, not knowing them the main villains. And for inscrutable reasons, these Sea Raiders decide the time has prematurely come to violently explode The Pelican, and transfer their stock over to a secret evil island base – Okay, that sounds like fun!
And for whatever reason, the Little Tough Guys have returned to The Pelican, to attempt the same thing they attempted in Chapter Three – to search it for the precious, precious blueprints. It turns out the same way as before – in sudden fistfights. And as in Chapter Two, a lurking goon accidentally sets the entire explosive hold on fire with a cigar ember. No matter, the ensuing fire and explosion are what the Sea Raiders wanted anyway!
CHAPTER SIX: BLASTED FROM THE AIR
Okay, everyone calm down. Wanna know how out of control this “storyline” is? Here’s the first sentence of Chapter Six’s “story so far” summation, in all its teenaged awkwardness: “BILLY and TOBY suspect Captain Nelson of stealing Tom Adams’ torpedo boat, of which they are accused.” Huh?! Why can’t “Bad guys wanna kill children” suffice?
This time, it turns out the kids survived The Pelican’s explosion (by explosives) by escaping in the freshly fueled torpedo boat. They immediately start considering taking the thing on down to Mexico (are we still on this?!) when the Sea Raiders force them to remain in their own serial by opening fire on them. But in the next predictable boat chase, it’s no surprise a torpedo boat can outrun a row boat. That wasn’t very suspenseful.
Oh, and the cops chase the kids for a bit too. Because, or something.
What is going on now? There was a goon unconscious in the torpedo boat, which the cops retrieve. So he’s sent to the hospital, but Tonjes kills him before anything can come of this thread. Oh well, it ate up most of the reel.
Now the kids are back on the Sea Raiders’ next boat, post-Pelican, whatever this one is called. Again they’re seeking those same blueprints the scheme apparently hinges on, having forgotten about their recent lust for Mexico. And now there is a sudden seaplane in the sea, because this chapter is called “Blasted From the Air” and therefore must have an airplane-based cliffhanger. Indeed, Billy and Toby get chased out of this latest ship (which somehow doesn’t catch randomly on fire), fly off in the plane, and are suddenly shot down. I could’ve written this whole paragraph just by looking at the beginning title card!
And the plane crashes into the docks. I’m certain the survival explanation Chapter Seven dredges up will be consistent with that in the missing Chapter Four. That’ll be nice, though I can’t say I’m looking forward to the rest of this mess. Oh well, maybe that evil island will bring some semblance of comprehensibility to this abomination.
Related posts:
• No. 1 Little Tough Guy (1938)
• Nos. 2 - 15 (1938 - 1943)
• No. 7 Junior G-Men (1940) Chapters One - Three
Chapters Four - Eight
Chapters Nine - Twelve
• No. 10 Sea Raiders (1941) Chapters Seven - Twelve
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