‘The Shadow’ and the Post-Batman Pulp Hero Boom of the 1990s
In 2000, X-Men kickstarted the comic book movie boom (aided heavily, I think, by the more adult-oriented success of Blade, two years earlier) that, for better or worse, is still going today. X-Men was followed by Spider-Man in 2002, then 2003 alone saw Daredevil, X2: X-Men United, and Hulk, and the ball has just kept on rolling from there. Those weren’t the first blockbuster superhero films, though, by any stretch of the imagination. After the serials of the 1940s and the 1966 Batman, based on the TV show, there had been Richard Donner’s Superman in 1978. That was a huge success, spawned a few sequels, and then came Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989.
That felt like the biggest movie ever made. It was certainly marketed like such. It was the event movie of that year and its huge success led to three big screen sequels throughout the 1990s. But it didn’t spawn a tidal wave of DC films, the way X-Men would for Marvel. In hindsight, the things that followed in Batman’s wake are truly fascinating, for a few different reasons. They’re not the result of a decision I could imagine any studio making today, where the instinct always seems to be “do that thing, and do it exactly” and even when they didn’t make money, studios never seemed deterred — although that part actually does sound pretty contemporary.
Batman was not followed by Aquaman or Wonder Woman or Blue Beetle, as would be the expectation today. Instead, it spawned a wave of big budget movies based on the pulp heroes that inspired Batman, or existed alongside him in his earliest form. We had movies like Dick Tracy, The Phantom, The Rocketeer, even The Mask of Zorro toward the end of the decade. That sounds like an impossible thing to try toexplain to someone who didn’t live through it. The notion that throughout the entirety of the ’90s, we had huge studio films based on pulp heroes, stars of newspapers and radio shows of the 1930s and ’40s, and each of these things were designed to be major blockbuster event movies.
In fact, they were marketed better than a good many big-budget superhero films of today. These pulp throwbacks had their own action figure lines, board games, novelizations, video games, you name it. Many of them were unsuccessful, but I was a kid who ate them up regardless. If asked to pick my favorite of the post-Batman wave of pulp hero movies, though, I would immediately pick the one that kind of has the reputation for being the worst of the bunch, and that’s Russel Mulcahy’s The Shadow.
Created by Walter Gibson, The Shadow first appeared in 1930 in the radio play Detective Story Hour and made his print appearance in the pulp novel The Living Shadow the following year. He predated the publication of Batman by nearly a decade and was a noted influence on the character. He was not a comic superhero, as many of the pulp throwback heroes of the ’90s weren’t. These characters had a very different style and sensibility than what we think of as the superheroes of today, and were much more specifically tied to a certain time period. Like Batman and Superman, The Shadow had starred in many serials and shorts prior to his big budget debut, beginning in the early ’30s and lasting all the way through the ’50s. The film rights had actually been bought in 1982, over a decade before the eventual 1994 movie was released. Evil Dead and eventual Spider-Man director Sam Raimi had pitched on the project, but his pitch was ignored, leading him to develop an original project heavily inspired by The Shadow, which became Darkman.
Out of all of these films, even if it is uneven at times and Alec Baldwin has a big goofy nose when he’s in the costume, I think The Shadow best adheres to its pulp roots. The production design is gorgeous and truly brings the 1930s aesthetic to life in a beautiful way. The Shadow himself, or rather his alias Lamont Cranston, is a far cry from the superheroes that would follow in his wake. He is not a good guy. Far from it, in fact. The movie opens with him after the first World War as a full-blown crime lord in Tibet. He’s saved from that life and given the opportunity to do the right thing, but that’s not like a character who made a mistake they’re trying to atone for, that was his life. And he is still that person inside. The movie plays with this in really interesting ways in a few moments, particularly when love interest Margo Lane starts to get close to him. She tells him she’s not afraid of him, to which Cranston bluntly replies, “But I am.” Even in The Shadow persona, he’s operating in much more of a gray area than most heroes. He’s kind of a dick. Maybe even more than kind of, when you consider the fact that all of the people whose lives he saves are forever in his debt and must answer his call at a moment’s notice.
That’s honestly one of my favorite things about The Shadow as a character. He doesn’t always act like a good guy, but even more than that, he doesn’t look or sound like one, either. His powers are supernatural. He famously “knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” he can see into the darkness of a person’s soul and know the worst thing they’ve done. He can turn invisible and literally blend into the shadows. He announces himself with an almost Freddy Krueger-esque cackle. Even the outfit doesn’t look like a hero’s costume, by any stretch. The combination of his piercing stare and billowing cape with his wide-brimmed hat and dual pistols make him look, if anything, like Mobster Dracula.
That’s simply a character I can’t help but love.
More than most other post-Batman pulp flicks, The Shadow truly feels like an old serial. Mulcahy and crew definitely embrace those sensibilities. There’s a fascinating tone, in that it’s dark but almost whimsical, with some performances that are understated and some that are completely over-the-top, like Tim Curry in possibly the most unhinged performance he’s ever given, and Ian McKellan taking the nutty professor trope to the extreme. Because the main character is already supernatural, the film asks us to accept psychic powers, the pre-invention of the nuclear bomb for a generic doomsday device, and a descendant of Genghis Khan with extrasensory abilities as the villain — all things that feel right at home in a serial of the ’30s or ’40s, because this is a silly plot and silly things should be expected to happen. In particular, a moment when The Shadow becomes trapped in a water tower, only to be saved at the last possible second by an out-of-the-blue psychic intervention from Margo Lane, feels like the distilled essence of those serials. It evokes them perfectly in its “How’s our hero going to get out of this one, lads?” energy.
In general, there’s something funny about Cranston’s relationship with Margo, especially in their first meeting, where he says that she “has abilities she’s completely unaware of,” just after she directly explained to him her psychic abilities that she is completely aware of. The fact that he keeps her at arm’s length only makes her that much more interesting, considering that she’s one of just a few characters in the movie with explicit supernatural powers. She’s a valuable asset and she knows it, but she’s rarely treated like one.
There’s definitely a bit of problematic POV with the villain, Shiwan Khan, being the last descendant of Ghengis Khan, eager to fulfill his ancestor’s goal of world domination. He’s a conqueror, but he’s also playing on an age-old stereotype of an Asian antagonist seeking to “overtake” the Western world. It feels much more of the time the movie is emulating than the time the movie was made. Having said that, John Lone is terrifically smarmy as Khan and, narratively, serves as a perfect opposing force to The Shadow. With the core of the movie in essence being the struggle between good and evil in a man’s heart, it makes sense for The Shadow to be drawn into confrontation with a man who is basically the exact person he used to be. The question that drives our hero is whether or not he still is that person. Or maybe more accurately, whether he can keep that person inside under control.
As a kid, I ate up everything related to this movie. I had the junior novelization and I had a bunch of the action figures. As an adult, I think it’s incredible that a pulp 1930s throwback even had that kind of marketing push. I never even questioned it back then, but I was certainly grateful for it. I loved the other movies too, particularly The Phantom, and definitely loved The Mask of Zorro (which is probably the best of the whole lot) when it hit closer to the end of the decade, but there was always something about The Shadow that stuck out to me and made me love that one the most.
It could have been those darker elements, the fact that he felt somewhere between a detective, a sorcerer, and a Universal Monster. Even today, acknowledging its flaws, I love the movie. I think it nailed the approach it was going for. The production design is off the charts. Its recreation of 1930s New York and general sense of style are absolutely gorgeous. I think the score by Jerry Goldsmith is truly the unsung hero of the film, sounding exactly like a big, orchestral update of an imagined theme to a classic radio play. There’s a lot to love and I love it dearly.
The Shadow remains my favorite of a group of films that represent such a specific time in the history of mainstream movies. It’s hard to imagine we’ll ever get something like this again, and that makes the fact that we got it at all feel that much more special. It says a lot about how much Batman wore its pulp inspirations on its sleeve that the instinct was to take those pre-superhero characters and give them the big budget treatment (which I’m sure was also aided by older studio execs recognizing The Shadow and The Phantom from their youth) and even though this film and most of those others weren’t successful, they still represent a daring, exciting time in Hollywood history that it’s hard not to miss. The Rocketeer and Dick Tracy have, over time, definitely found the widest audience of those early ’90s pulp hero films, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that The Shadow’s audience is still the smallest of that group. If any of these films are close to being outright forgotten, it’s this one. A lot of people don’t know that one of Batman’s (and Darkman’s) biggest inspirations had his own movie just a few years later, let alone how stylish, moody and simply outright fun it is.
But The Shadow knows. And so do I.
