The Lost Jungle: Cliffhanger Action and Hollywood Serials of the 1930s and 1940s by Guy Barefoot (review)

Abstract

In this edifying and long overdue analysis of the Hollywood sound serial, Guy Barefoot reclaims an enormously popular and ubiquitous film form from its marginalization in traditional histories of Hollywood in the Depression and World War II years. The Lost Jungle goes beyond a base interventionism of rediscovery and reminds one more broadly of the limited view film history continues to grapple with in terms of distribution, reception, and film form in an era defined by, but certainly not limited to, the singular feature film and the operations of the Big Five. Barefoot outlines roughly seven “arguments, assumptions and assertions” that he finds “ either incomplete, uncertain, incorrect,” or in need of further clarification (179). That these false premises concern not only specific questions of the audience demographics, generic traditions, and economics of the Hollywood film serial in the silent and sound periods, but also the broader historical assumption that “cinema-going has entailed going to see a film,” is telling (183; emphasis added). Across seven chapters (including an introduction and conclusion), Barefoot deftly incorporates historical analysis, reception study, and close readings of film form to broadly underscore the contemporary understanding of film serials on the part of producers, exhibitors, and audiences, all the while crystallizing the formal specificity of the serials produced by Republic (and its precursor Mascot), Columbia, and Universal Pictures. While confirming that the film serial “emerged out of popular literature and theatre” by way of unpacking the Frank Merriwell multimedia universe and the legacy of stage melodramas such as Blue Jeans, Barefoot nonetheless asserts that the particular seriality of the Hollywood sound serial “differs starkly from the serials discussed in other accounts” (12). Quite unlike the serial narrative found in television or the Victorian novel, the film serial is fundamentally defined by an emphasis on cliffhanger chapter endings that leave protagonists in seemingly inescapable danger. Thus, while the serial form in its totality tends toward an emphasis on “differences, changes, complexities, and [a] polysemic nature,” the Hollywood film serial came to be subsumed under “an increasingly narrow and rigid definition” (35). Barefoot quotes from a 1952 screenwriting manual to affirm that the film serial plot hinges on the “weenie”—that is,