Weekend Cinema Listomania (Special Behind the Mask Edition)

DVD Event of the Week: Is it Perils of the New Land, Flicker Alley's box set of early silent American exploitation films including the groundbreaking 1913 Traffic in Souls? Is it HBO's box set of their gritty Baltimore-set policier The Wire: The Complete Fifth Season? Is it Universal's disc of Leatherheads, the George Clooney/Renée Zellwegger screwball period football comedy?

All worthy, to be sure, but if you'll pardon me, instead I'm going to wax rhapsodic about something from earlier in the year that I didn't get a chance to write about at the time -- the Restored Serials double disc set of the incredible 1940 chapter-play The Green Archer, written and directed by the great James W. Horne.

Horne was a veteran of early silent films and serials who in the late 20s wound up at the Hal Roach studios, where he directed mostly comedies, including what's widely regarded as Laurel and Hardy's masterpiece, the great Way Out West , in 1937. In 1938, he was enticed over to Columbia, which was starting its own serial unit, and he directed The Spider's Web, which turned out to be the most popular cliffhanger of the year. He continued to make serials for Columbia until his death in 1942, but because of his commercial success he was pretty much left to his own devices. As a result, most of Horne's chapterplays are hilariously tongue in cheek. He'd play everything more or less straight for a few chapters (apparently to con the exhibitors) and then veer off into total silliness -- encouraging his actors to deliver the most melodramatic hambone line readings imaginable, or staging fight scenes where the hero is beset by six or seven bad guys and beats the crap out them anyway. The Green Archer is pretty much his masterpiece in this regard. The lead villain, played by the witty James Craven, finds himself saddled with an utterly incompetent gang of henchmen who continually screw up even his simplest instructions, and he spends most of the ostensibly serious film doing fuming slow burn comedic takes a la Edgar Kennedy; my favorite comes when he interrupts his bumbling accomplices engrossed in a game of tiddleywinks when they should be out shooting the good guys or something equally evil.

Here's a clip that should give you an idea of the wonderfully nuttiness of the thing. (Note the incredibly cheesy painted cardboard flats in the castle hallways).