Ladd Mag

It’s one of the oddities of pop culture that Alan Ladd had his own comic book, dedicated to all his wacky adventures. The conceit was that, despite a life consisting mainly of shooting movies and playing golf, Ladd was constantly getting into scrapes. In the first instalment he’s one his way from studio to links when he’s crowbarred unconscious and abducted to a castle located for mysterious reasons on a south sea island.

The castle has a drawbridge, we’re told, and we’re told in the next panel that Laddie has been mistaken for a lapidary (jewel cutter) named Trowbridge. I love it when you can see the wheels trundling in a harried hack’s head.

Laddie — lapidary — easy mistake to make.

What I like about this story especially, apart from, well, EVERYTHING, is the beginning. Laddie comes to on a yacht. It’s just like that bit in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN where Grant Richards Williams gets zapped by atomic fog. It has me imagining a storyline where Laddie starts shrinking. He was never the tallest of leading men — the movie title TALL IN THE SADDLE was a hollow mockery. As the icon dwindles, the studio resort to standing his co-stars in ever deeper ditches. Finally, they’re at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with Laddie at the top, trying not to be carried off in a stiff Arizona breeze.

Ladd’s adventures seem to be dumb, pulpy stuff, but fast-paced. The drawings are OK — Laddie usually looks like himself, the supporting cast look like real people too, though nobody I know. And there’s a constant amusement value whenever anyone says “Mr. Ladd,” reminding one of the absurdity of the whole enterprise.

Now read on… and if you laugh every time someone says “Ladd”, you will have a very good time.

It reminds me of one of the few good bits in COFFEE AND CIGARETTES when RZA and the GZA meet Bill Murray and keep calling him “Bill Murray,” as in, “Are you OK, Bill Murray?”

Which other classic era movie stars would we like to see starring in their own comic book? Apart from Allen Jenkins, obviously.

Beards Over Nice

Music: since the Gaumont-Pathé Archive’s copy of BARRABAS has no music, I’ve been playing different stuff to accompany it. Morricone’s more psychedelic thriller scores work surprisingly well, but this time I played some of Edgard Varèse’s electronic musique concrète which was also amazingly effective. In both cases the paranoid modernity of Feuillade’s world emerged from behind the facade of 1919 trappings.

BARRABAS takes to the air in its seventh episode, reminding me of the arresting passage at the start of the first Fantomas book in which it is solemnly predicted that one day aeroplanes will be used for terroristic purposes. in this serial, however, the evil Strelitz uses them mainly for hopping about from Paris to Marseilles to Nice.

Chap 7. saw our heroes pretty consistently thwarting Strelitz in a variety of ways. The pattern is reversed this time. They think they’ve got the drop on him in Marseilles, and are even on the point of stealing from him the documentary evidence he’s using to blackmail lawyer Varèse. But they stupidly let both mastercriminal and compromat slip through their fingers.

Also in Marseilles, both Raoul the noble journalist and the dastardly Strelitz learn of a former shipping company man who may be able to confirm whether Varese’s dad drowning at sea or survived, possibly to become the guillotined false-Rougier, which would obviously be a disgrace to Varèse’s name, a blot on his escutcheon, if escutcheon is the word I want.

Because he has a plane, Strelitz is able to get to the retired shipping agent first. Mind you, it’s not much of a plane. Its bodywork owes more to the perambulator or babycart in design than to any aerodynamic vessel. Its tail is connected to the cockpit by mere struts — the whole middle of the vehicle just seems to go away. I wouldn’t get in that thing even on the ground, it looks apt to collapse jaggedly into scrap.

Bernard the shipping agent turns out to have a beard almost as nice as Strelitz’s. He’s able to explain that Varese père did indeed perish at sea — he has documents showing that the man’s wallet was stolen, which explains why Strelitz has the unused steamship ticket. Obviously, poor Bernard must be gotten out of the way.

But first, Strelitz treats him to a ride on his little plane. The pilot does all sorts of risky manoeuvres like flying under a bridge, while Strelitz uses the time to fetch a henchman. Fantastic stunts and landscapes and aerial photography. By the time the flustered Bernard is returned to earth, his abductors are ready to take him for another kind of ride…

TO BE CONTINUED

Block off in a Knock-Off

ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS is a Hong Kong James Bond knock-off. Decades before NO TIME TO DIE gave us, very briefly, a female 007, this one stars Lily Ho as a deadly kung-fu doll, and Fanny Fan as a kind of distaff Blofeld. Both women already have Bond girl double entendre names, which I imagine saved somebody some effort somewhere.

The above scene is hilarious and should be watched. FF is chairing an evil mastercriminal board meeting which seems pretty much like some building society PowerPoint presentation until she decides to chastise an underling whose been pilfering funds.

And here are some pictures that don’t move about and bleed:

LH detrousers an opponent in a hair salon brawl. I’m not sure if that’s a legit martial arts move.

Q demonstrates a lethal gadget while Jesus looks on approvingly.

Directed by Wei Lo, of FIST OF FURY fame, ANGEL is livelier than most of the European bond knock-offs I watched a while back. And it does what I’d assumed the French and Italians would have done but didn’t, it slightly amps up the nudity and violence (Miss Ho briefly exposes her tiny bottom, crimson grue flows when people get shot.). If you can’t offer Connery or even Lazenby, that seems like a sensible way to keep the fans from feeling cheated.