Jack Armstrong
Entry updated 14 February 2025. Tagged: Film.
US Serial Film (1947). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Wallace Fox. Story treatment George H Plympton. Screenplay by Lewis Clay, Royal Cole, Arthur Hoerl, and Leslie Swabacker. Cast includes Joe Brown, Jr, John Hart, Jack Ingram, Claire James, Rosemary La Planche, Charles Middleton (uncredited), Wheeler Oakman, Eddie Parker, Hugh Prosser, and Pierre Watkin. 15 episodes totalling 440 minutes. Black and white.
This serial was based on the long-running Radio series Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy (1933-1951) and featured the same four main characters: Jack Armstrong, an adventurous high school student (Hart, though visibly an adult), his friend Billy Fairfield (Brown), Billy's sister Betty Fairfield (La Planche), and their uncle Jim Fairfield (Watkin). A Scientist employed by Jim Fairfield's company, Vic Hardy (Prosser), is kidnapped by Dr Jason Grood (Middleton) and forced to work on his project to use his "Aeroglobe" to deploy a Death Ray in the upper atmosphere and thus take over the world. Armstrong and his cohorts locate and travel to Grood's headquarters on a remote Island where Hardy is being held, and engage in various conflicts – usually extended fistfights or gun battles, in the typical manner of serials – with Grood's and his associate Professor Zorn's (Oakman) henchmen, which also involve the island's natives, some sympathetic like Princess Alura (James) and others who believe that Zorn's broadcast voice is that of an island god and obey his instructions to oppose Armstrong.
The incidents of greatest sf interest are two flights into space, one to show Hardy Grood's plans and the other to actually launch the death ray, now termed the "Cosmic Annihilator"; but the second mission is unsuccessful because Armstrong contrives to secretly replace Hardy and sabotages the Aeroglobe before escaping with a parachute. The passengers on both flights don flimsy spacesuits with face masks, perhaps introduced as a way for Armstrong to carry out his deception, which apparently qualifies this undistinguished serial as the first American Spacesuit Film. [GW]
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