Saturday Action Matinee

Scouts to the Rescue (1939), Chapter 2: “Avalanche of Doom”

Before I bring you up to speed, I need to point out a few problems with the screencrawl that jogs our memory on how things stood at the end of Chapter 1. According to the crawl, the map Skeets Scanlan had (which was indeed part of the letter that his father Pat Scanlan received from his brother) was one to a cache of counterfeit money and plates. Hey, wait a second! That’s information we haven’t received in the filmed narrative yet! Last we knew, the boys had found thousands of twenty dollar bills; that’s it. Also in the crawl, the high priest of the hidden cave-dwelling Incans is given: Lukolu. Because heaven knows, we couldn’t live without that information, simply calling him the “grand poo-bah” or something.

Now, where were we? Oh, yes; Bruce, HSIC (Head Scout In Charge) had dashed toward where Hal Marvin’s plane was plunging to earth. Just before the plane crashes, Bruce ducks behind a log — on the wrong side, actually, for it to shield him from the crash and explosion. But he gets up unscathed, as the plane crashed just far enough away for him to be unharmed. Not only that, but though the plane is now a fiery ball of tinder, Marvin was thrown clear in the crash, just far enough for, say, the actor to have said, “I’ll get this close, but not an inch closer!” As Marvin’s only semi-conscious, Bruce throws him over his shoulder to get him to safety. (Young Jackie Cooper is a husky lad, it’s true, but I strongly suspect stunt-doubling.)

The plane pursuing Marvin is gone, so he takes a moment to relax with all the Scouts, who egerly show him their treasure find. Alas, he informs them, it’s counterfeit. (Really?! I never would have suspected! Except for the fact that the screencrawl gave it away five minutes ago.) The engraved plates are even in the box with the fake bills. And when the Scouts point to Skeets Scanlan as the possessor of the map, Marvin starts putting two and two together — that the map, burned around the edges, came from Pat Scanlan’s back yard fire pit (now THERE’S a long-gone suburban fixture), because Pat’s the man he was coming to see anyway about Pat’s brother Denny, a notorious counterfeiter. Marvin uses the Scouts’ shortwave radio (these Scouts? They be prepared!) to call his partner, Billings, to drive to the ghost town and pick him up, along with Skeets, to go back to Martinsville. (Which raises the question, if Marvin’s partner is close enough that he can show up in the ghost town almost instantaneously, why was Marvin in such a rush to get to Martinsville that he had to fly? Ah, well…)

The pilot of the other plane (named Turk, by the way — and he was the black-suited man who had been prowling around Scanlan’s place last chapter) has had some engine trouble, and sets down where his compadres can pick him up to go into town (The mechanical trouble never amounts to anything. Dang it, I’m used to every avenue of danger being exploited in these things!) Meanwhile, the Scouts use the shortwave to talk to Bugs, the Scout with the broken leg, back in town, and tell him the whole story; Bugs immediately rushes to tell Scanlan and Skeets’ sister (ain’t caught her name yet, sorry) that Skeets is coming back with some G-Men who want to talk to him. And the whole conversation is heard by Rip, the teenaged hoodlum hired by Turk last episode (when we didn’t know Turk’s name) to keep an eye on Scanlan. Rip meets up with Turk just as he gets back into town, which means that Turk knows all about what Marvin found in the mountains long before Marvin, Billings and Skeets can make it out of the mountains.

Scanlan’s at the closed factory doing some repair work, so that’s where Turk and his crew meet him. It’s a tableau that’s almost alien to modern American life: The four gangsters are all dressed in suits and hats, an image we’ve inherited from the movies but which bears little resemblance to the uniform of grunts in organized crime today. Not only that, but Scanlan, who’s there banging on machinery, is also in a tightly-knotted tie and suit vest; his only concessions to manual labor are that he took off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeve. Is anyone the least bit nostalgic for an era in which grown-ups dressed like grown-ups?

They don’t have much time to bawl Scanlan out for holding out on the map, because Marvin’s car pulls up outside. Instead, the gangsters secrete themselves, and when Marvin comes in — fight! Marvin does very well against four armed thugs (or at least his stunt double does, a double so obvious that I would strongly suggest that a hat be added to the Marvin character’s wardrobe), and because this is a canned goods factory, racks and racks of cans get knocked around the room before Marvin finally gets knocked out. the bad guys decide to grab Scanlan — who, they say, is a better engraver than his brother ever was — and just for fun, they grab Skeets too. The shoot Billings, take the counterfeit plates out of the trunk of the G-Man’s car, and head for the hills. I would say that this encounter was a Big Fat Win for the bad guys. The only puzzling thing is that they decide to head out of town for the ghost town, to which I respond: Huh? Is there something else they need there, in addition to the counterfeit plates which are in their possession? Do they think it will be a good place to hide out, knowing that a good-sized Scout troop is camping and exploring up there?

Speaking of Scouts… this serial was supposed to be about them, wasn’t it? We’ve been checking in on them from time to time; Bruce has suggested they move their camp further up into the hills since the “treasure hunt” at the ghost town has come to an early end. All of this is done under the watchful eyes of the Incas, who communicate with their high priest via a system of tunnels’n'drums that the boys keep hearing, then dismissing as “the wind in the caves.” (Interesting bit of trivia: Instead of using or creating an Incan language for the actors to use, they all appear to be speaking their lines in English, and then their vocal tracks are run backwards to sound like a complex and unintelligible language.) From their vantage point up in the hills, Bruce can see the gangsters’ car speeding up the mountain road, and Marvin’s car pursuing them. The gangsters decide not to go right to the ghost town with Marvin on their tail, and instead take the fork in the road that leads further into the hill country, toward where the Scouts are setting up their new camp.

The Incas, too, notice the cars coming, and via drum signal, receive instructions to stop the men coming up. Which makes me wonder, exactly how much of this territory to the Incas now cover? They seem plenty familiar with the ghost town, and even though the road up which the two cars are speeding is graded and well-maintained, they obviously consider it their territory. So much so that they’ve built some (stock footage) log stockages higher in the mountains which can be released and cause landslides down onto the road. They do so, and Bruce sees the avalanche of doom (hey! catchy title!) bouncing down the mountain. He’s close enough to the road that he can tumble down the mountainside and flag down Marvin before he ends up right beneath the trees and logs — or is he? He gets there in time, but the side of the mountain seems to be coming down right on Marvin’s car…

Next Week: “Trapped by the Indians”