Saturday Action Matinee

Scouts to the Rescue (1939), Chapter 5: “Descending Doom”

The Preamble: My triumphant return! Because doggone it, you can’t put off the Boy Scouts forever. Though I would have been back to this serial even earlier if there were cookies involved. The Boy Scouts need to sell cookies. Or jerky. Something yummy.

The Resolution: A big ol’ waterfall — every river has one! — was just about to swallow the canoe containing Scout Leader Bruce, fellow Scout Ken, and Mary Scanlon, who were drifting downriver to see if Mary’s brother Skeets had drifted the same way. In a show of honesty, there’s no cheat to get out of the cliffhanger. The canoe goes over the falls with all three inside. It even breaks immediately on impact with the water! And how do the three escape? They simply swim to shore like nothing’s wrong. Now, I expect that kind of sturdy indestructibility from Boy Scouts, but Mary’s a girl, and that means she’s more tender and fragile and stuff, so I don’t know.

The Narrative: Boy, this one’s tough, mainly because everyone walks around in circles, and nothing much happens. To wit:

Bruce, Ken and Mary regroup on the shore, hoping that Skeets didn’t follow a similar path over the falls. (Though if he had, really, what harm could it have been?) Bruce, a Boy Scout through and through, says “Come on! Let’s make a fire and dry out!” but Mary puts the kibosh on a demo of his Mad Boy Scout Skillz to keep looking for Skeets… at random, really, over the mountainside.

Meanwhile, Hank Marvin and the other Scouts are out trying to track Skeets the dry way. Marvin pulls a Prince Humperdinck (”There was a mighty duel…”) and determines that, yes, Skeets was abducted by Indians. He sends the rest of the Scouts back and continues to track them on his own.

The counterfeiters in Ghost Town decide that, now that everybody and their Great Aunt Nellie has visited and escaped from their hideout, it’s time to relocate. They load up everything and everyone and drive off to a log cabin that one of their number has located.

Just after the counterfeiters pull out, Bruce and company discover that they’re near Ghost Town, too. (Because this mountain covers all of an acre and a half, and any point is a simple job from any other point.) They cautiously enter and look around, wary of straggling counterfeiters, which means that several minutes are eaten up with tiptoe tension that amounts to nothing. (Thrill as Bruce slowly investigates a noise which turns out to be a door banging in the wind, plus a stock-footage owl!)

Lets you think that everyone has forgotten what they meant to be doing, we do see Skeets dragged by the Indians into their tunnels, where plans are made for his ritual sacrifice. I guess that the original party of Indians that captured him must have split up or something (hey, it’s been three months — cut me some slack), because the Indians that Marvin is following march right into… Ghost Town! Boy, those counterfeiters were right about it being too well-known a hideout; I’ve seen Wal-Marts that didn’t get that kind of traffic. I have no idea what the Indians are looking for in the town, but their presence gives Bruce and company a chance to hide in closets and again engage in (cough) tension.

After the Indians leave and Marvin arrives in town, Bruce joins up with him and sends Mary and Ken back to the camp. Bruce is himself a first-rate Indian tracker, so it’s no problem for him to follow them right into their tunnels and to their main gathering cavern, where their leader is blabbering and gesticulating. (I should mention this here, though I don’t know it’s import, because it may become important later: we twice see the Indian party pass a bubbling pit right in their path, and once they even stop for a drink. Like I said, only time will tell what the significance is.)

The Indians are about to sacrifice Skeets in a flaming pit when Bruce knocks over a stone column and presto, the Indians all run out in a panic. (Flighty people, aren’t they?) Marvin throws a grenade, too, for good measure. The three of them try to escape in… an elevator. No, really, a wicker elevator cage which the Indians dangle conspicuously over the side of a cliff. It would be far too logical for them to try to escape the direction they came, naturally.

The Cliffhanger: You can’t get into a rope-hung elevator cage without someone trying to chop through the rope, can you? And that’s what happens here: as the three of them frantically (and comically) try to lower the elevator with the rope-and-pulley assembly, the Indians decide to hasten their descent by chopping through the rope. It’s a freefallapalooza!

(This is the last of three chapters which uses the word “Doom” in the title. The directors apologize for the redundancy in the titles. Those responsible have been sacked.)

Next Week: “Ghost Town Menace”