The Shadow

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Shadow is a fictional character created by Walter B. Gibson in 1931 in a semimonthly series of pulp magazines. The first story was titled "The Living Shadow". The character is one of the most famous of the pulp heroes of the 1930s and 1940s -- made most famous through a popular radio series in which The Shadow was originally played by Orson Welles. The Shadow has also been featured in comic books, comic strips, television, and at least seven motion pictures. Still, The Shadow is most highly regarded for its radio years, in which pulp crime fiction received perhaps its most compelling broadcast interpretation.

Even after decades, the unmistakable introduction from The Shadow, intoned by announcer Frank Readick, has earned a place in the American idiom: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"

The haunting theme song, played on an organ, was "Le Rouet d'Omphale" (Omphale's Spinning Wheel) by Saint-Saens.

[edit] Background

The Shadow's birth as a furtive crime solver was practically an accident. Beginning July 31, 1930 [1], "The Shadow" was the name given to the narrator of Detective Stories (James LaCurto and, later, Frank Readick), a radio show whose plots were drawn from the pulp magazine of the same name. The magazine was published by Street and Smith, and the company aimed the radio program at boosting the magazine's circulation. However, listeners found the announcer far more compelling than the stories -- and began asking newsstands for copies of The Shadow Magazine, though it did not exist.

Recognizing the demand and responding promptly, Street and Smith commissioned Walter B. Gibson to begin writing stories of The Shadow. Using the house pen name Maxwell Grant, Gibson wrote a reported 282 out of 325 Shadow books over twenty years: a novel-length story twice a month (1st and 15th). He initially fashioned the character as a man of villainous elements who used them to battle crime, clad in black and working predominantly after dark, burglarizing in the name of justice, and terrifying criminals into vulnerability before he or someone gunned them down. The first book produced was The Living Shadow, published April 1, 1931.

The Shadow was a noirish anti-hero in every sense, likely inspired by mentalist Joseph Dunninger, a friend of Gibson's.

Because of the effort involved in getting out two stories every month, a number of guest writers were brought in to do occasional stories to lighten Gibson's work load. One of these was Lester Dent (who wrote the Doc Savage stories).

[edit] Character evolution

The character evolved over his lengthy fictional life. In print, he wore a slouch hat and a black, crimson-lined cloak with an upturned collar (while in later comic books and the movie, The Shadow wore a crimson scarf around the lower part of his face). He also skulked in the shadows using his skill at concealing himself -- at first. In due course, and in his most famous incarnation, The Shadow became an invisible man who supposedly learned "while traveling through East Asia ... the mysterious power to cloud men's minds, so they could not see him."

In part, that new incarnation was born of necessity; radio's time constraints made it difficult to describe The Shadow in hiding and nearly invisible. Some believe the Shadow was a hypnotist, as explicitly mentioned in at least a few radio episodes; others^{[citation needed]} contend that the Shadow could manipulate Qi. Because radio was not a visual medium, audiences found The Shadow's invisibility easy to accept.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Character universe

In print, The Shadow was born Kent Allard, a famed aviator. During World War I, Allard was both a flying ace and a spy who fought for the French, and known by the alias of The Black Eagle ("The Shadow's Shadow"), although later stories claim his alias was The Dark Eagle ("The Shadow Unmasks"). After the war, Allard sought a new challenge, and decided to wage war on criminals, rather that simply remain a pilot or return to the military (also revealed in "The Shadow Unmasks"). He faked a plane crash and Allard's death in the South American tropical jungles. He then returned to the United States, arriving in New York City and adopting numerous identities to cloak his return.

One of these was Lamont Cranston, "wealthy young man about town." In fact, Cranston was a separate character; Allard frequently disguised himself as Cranston and adopted his identity (see the stories "The Shadow Laughs" and "The Shadow Unmasks"). While Cranston traveled the world, Allard assumed his identity in New York. In their first meeting, with Allard/The Shadow in bed recovering from wounds, he threatens Cranston, saying that he has arranged to switch signatures on various documents and other means that will allow him to take over the Lamont Cranston identity entirely unless Cranston agrees to allow Allard to impersonate him when he is abroad. Cranston agrees. The two men sometimes meet in order to impersonate each other (see Crime over Miami). Apparently, the disguise worked well because Allard and Cranston bore something of a resemblance to each other (see "Dictator of Crime.")

His other disguises, utilized for undercover work, include businessman Henry Arnaud, elderly gentleman Isaac Twambley, and Fritz, a doddering old janitor who works at Police Headquarters in order to listen in on conversations.

For the first half of The Shadow's run in the pulps, The Shadow's past and identity were ambiguous, supposedly a deliberate move on Walter Gibson's part. There were numerous hints throughout the early pulps, long before Gibson created The Shadow's Kent Allard identity, that The Shadow was hideously disfigured. In The Living Shadow, a thug claims to have seen The Shadow, and thought he saw "a piece of white that looked like a bandage" when he tried to see The Shadow's face. In "The Black Master" and "The Shadow's Shadow," the villains both managed to see The Shadow's true face, and they both remarked that The Shadow was a man of many faces with no face of his own. It was not until the August 1937 issue of The Shadow, "The Shadow Unmasks," that The Shadow's true identity of Kent Allard was revealed.

The Shadow had an entire network of agents who helped him in his fight against crime. These included:

• Harry Vincent, his most trusted associate whose life he saved when Vincent wanted to commit suicide in the first Shadow pulp;
• Moe Shrevnitz, a cab driver who doubled as his chauffeur;
• Margo Lane, a wealthy socialite;
• Clyde Burke, newspaper man;
• Burbank, a radio operator who maintained contact between The Shadow and his agents.
• Cliff Marsland, a wrongly-convicted ex-con who is able to infiltrate criminal gangs due to his crooked reputation
• Dr. Rupert Sayre, The Shadow's personal physician
• Jerich Druke, a giant, immensely-strong black man.
• Slade Farrow, who worked with The Shadow to rehabilitate criminals, and one of the few who knows The Shadow's true identity.
• Miles Crofton, who sometimes piloted The Shadow's autogyro
• Rutledge Mann, a stock-broker who would collect information
• Claude Fellows, the only agent of The Shadow to ever be killed in the pulps (he died in "Gangdom's Doom")
• Myra Reldon, a female operative who preceded Margo Lane. In stories set in Chinatown, she would adopt the alias of Ming Dwan.

Though initially wanted by the police, The Shadow also worked with them and through them, notably gleaning information from his many chats with Commissioners Ralph Weston and Wainright Barth at the Cobalt Club (unlike the movie, Barth and Cranston were not related in the pulps). Weston believed that Cranston was a rich playboy who dabbled in detective work. Another police contact was Detective Joe Cardona, who was active in many Shadow books, and a capable officer.

The Shadow also faced a wide variety of enemies, ranging from crime kingpins and mad scientists to international spies and super-villains, many of which were predecessors to the rogues galleries of numerous super-heroes. Among the Shadow's few recurring foes were Shiwan Khan, The Voodoo Master, The Prince of Evil, The Wasp, Diamond Bert Farwell (who appeared in the first Shadow pulp), and The Hand (a confederation of five criminal masterminds). Some of the numerous one-shot villains The Shadow fought included The Red Envoy, The Death Giver, Gray Fist, The Black Dragon, Silver Skull, Malmordo, The Red Blot, The Black Falcon, The Cobra, Zemba, Levautour, The Black Master, Five-face, and The Gray Ghost. The Shadow also battled collectives of criminals, such as The Silent Seven, The Brothers of Doom, and The Hydra. While The Shadow would often kill underlings and henchmen, it was common throughout the pulps for the main villains to be killed either by the police or by the story's proxy hero (usually a young man, occasionally a woman, who was victimized by the villain in some way, or merely caught in the middle of a scheme. In many pulps, the action would revolve around the proxy hero, with The Shadow himself operating in the background.)

The radio series limited the cast to The Shadow and Margo Lane (created specifically for the radio series), because it was believed that the abundance of male agents would make it difficult to distinguish between characters.^[1] The Allard backstory was also dropped for simplicity's sake. The Shadow was only Lamont Cranston, and he had no other aliases or disguises. Clyde Burke and Moe Shrevnitz (known only as "Shreevy" in the radio series) made occasional appearances, but were not agents of The Shadow. Shreevy was merely an acquaintance of Cranston and Lane.

[edit] Radio program

The Shadow was long believed to have debuted on radio as a program in its own right September 26, 1937, on the Mutual Broadcasting System. But the character actually premiered in September 1931, on CBS, as part of the hour-long The Blue Coal Radio Revue (named for the show's sponsor), featuring Frank Readick -- the "Shadow" announcer of Detective Stories -- as The Shadow, and playing Sundays at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The stories also appeared on Thursday nights for a month, when Love Story Drama (another Street and Smith creation) took the Thursday night slot -- but also featured occasional portrayals of The Shadow.

Blue Coal had a long relationship with the Shadow, moving the radio series to NBC in October 1932 with Readick playing the character on Wednesday nights now. Two years later, NBC ran the stories on Mondays and Wednesdays, both at 6:30 p.m., with LaCurto taking occasional turns as the title character. Three years later came the beginning of the half-hour drama radio buffs have remembered so well, with the then-unknown Orson Welles as The Shadow, the show moving to Mutual, and the famous catch phrase now in full play accompanied by the strains of an excerpt from Opus 31 of the Camille Saint-Saëns classical composition, "Le Rouet d'Omphale".

Welles did not speak that signature line -- Readick did, using a water glass next to his mouth for the echo effect. But Welles did make a credible Shadow, two years before his notoriety as the mastermind of Mercury Theatre on the Air's production of War of the Worlds.

After Welles left the role for a career in the cinema, The Shadow was portrayed by such actors as Bill Johnstone, Bret Morrison (the longest tenure, with ten years in two separate runs), John Archer, and Steve Courtleigh as Lamont Cranston/The Shadow. The radio show also introduced female characters into the Shadow's realm, most notably Margot Lane (played by Agnes Moorehead among others) as Cranston's love interest and crime-solving partner (the character was eventually integrated into Gibson's pulp novels). Lane was described as Cranston's "friend and companion" in later episodes, although the exact nature of their relationship was left unclear. In the 1994 movie, Margot's name was spelled "Margo." However, early scripts of the radio show clearly show that the character's name was spelled "Margot".

Once The Shadow joined Mutual as a half-hour series, it did not leave Sunday evenings radio until December 26, 1954, outlasting the magazine that gave birth to it: The Shadow Magazine ended with the summer 1949 issue, although Gibson wrote three new "official" stories between 1963 and 1980. Gibson started off a short series of updated Shadow novels for Belmont with Return of the Shadow under his own name, followed by The Shadow Strikes, Beware Shadow, Cry Shadow, The Shadow's Revenge, Mark of The Shadow, Shadow Go Mad, Night of The Shadow, and Destination: Moon. The Shadow had mental powers in these books, to cloud men's minds so he effectively became invisible, to conquer pain, etc.

[edit] Comic books

The Shadow has been depicted in comic books several times:

• A comic strip by Vernon Greene in 1938.

• Street & Smith published their own comic line for a while and this included a Shadow Comic that lasted 101 issues between 1940-1948.

• The next comic was the short-lived comic put out by Archie Comics under their Mighty Comics line. At first, the Shadow depicted was loosely based on the radio version (but with blonde hair), but in the third issue was turned into a camp superhero by Jerry Siegel.

• The most acclaimed depiction was the 1970s Shadow comic written by Dennis O'Neil and initially drawn by Michael Wm. Kaluta (issues 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6), published by DC Comics. Of interest to pulp fans is issue 11, which guest-starred another pulp-fiction character The Avenger.

• The Shadow also appeared in the DC Comics' Batman #253, published in November 1973. In it, Batman teams up with an aging Shadow and reveals that the Shadow was his "greatest inspiration." A year later, in December 1974, Batman again teams up with the Shadow, and it is shown how the Shadow saved Bruce Wayne's life as a boy.

• In the late 1980s, another DC reincarnation was created by Howard Chaykin, Andy Helfer, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Kyle Baker, in a miniseries and sequel ongoing series. This version brought The Shadow to modern day New York. While initially successful, this version was not popular with "Shadow" traditionalists, because it depicted The Shadow using Uzi submachine guns and rocket launchers, as well as featuring a strong strain of black comedy throughout. It was canceled after an issue in which the Shadow's head was transplanted onto a robot body.

• In 1988 O'Neil and Kaluta (with inker Russ Heath) returned to the Shadow with the Marvel Graphic Novel "Hitler's Astrologer" set in 1941.

• From 1989 to 1992, DC published a new series, The Shadow Strikes, by Gerard Jones and Eduardo Barreto. This series was set in the 1930s, and returned The Shadow to his pulp origins. The series featured The Shadow's first team-up with Doc Savage, another popular pulp hero. The stories in this series often led The Shadow into encounters with well-known celebrities of the 1930s, such as Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, union organizer John L. Lewis, and Chicago gangsters Frank Nitti and Jake Guzik.

• In issue 11 of The Shadow Strikes, the Shadow even teams up with a radio announcer named Grover Mills -- a character based on the young Orson Welles -- who has been impersonating The Shadow on the radio. (The character's name is taken from Grover's Mill, New Jersey -- the name of the town where the Martians land in Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.)

• Dark Horse Comics published two mini-series based on The Shadow character: "In the Coils of Leviathan" (spanning 4 books) published in 1993 and collected with a new Kaluta Cover in October, 1994, and "Hell's Heat Wave" (spanning 3 books) published in 1995. These series were written by Joel Goss and Michael Wm Kaluta and drawn by Gary Gianni, covers by Kaluta on "... Coils..." and Gianni on "... Heat Wave". A stand-alone collection of Shadow Short Comic Book Stories was published in 1994 as "The Shadow and the Mysterious Three", again written by Joel Goss and Michael Wm Kaluta with Stan (Manoukian) and Vince (Roucher) taking over the drawing chores over Kaluta's layouts. Stan and Vince, best known for their French Album Comic Series " Vortex", also did the cover. A two-issue adaptation of the 1994 movie, The Shadow, was adapted from the script by Goss and Kaluta and drawn by Kaluta from cover to cover. Dark Horse also published another team-up between The Shadow and Doc Savage in 1995, Covers by Dave Stevens.

[edit] Films

The character has been adapted for film numerous times.

[edit] The Shadow Strikes (1937) & International Crime (1938)

The movie The Shadow Strikes was released in 1937, starring Rod Larocque in the title role. Larocque returned the following year in International Crime, although in this version "The Shadow" was merely a radio gimmick. Both were released by Grand National Pictures.

[edit] The Shadow (1940)

A serial produced by Columbia Studios starring Victor Jory premiered in 1940. The Black Tiger is a criminal mastermind who is sabotaging rail lines and factories across America, and Lamont Cranston must become his shadowy alter ego to uncover the fiend and halt his schemes.

[edit] The Shadow Returns (1946)

Low-budget motion picture studio Monogram produced a trio of films in 1946 starring Kane Richmond: The Shadow Returns, Behind the Mask and The Missing Lady. Richmond's Shadow, in fact, wore a black face-mask similar to the type worn by the serial hero The Masked Marvel.

[edit] The Invisible Avenger (1958)

Starring Richard Derr as The Shadow, the plot centers upon Lamont Cranston investigating the murder of a New Orleans bandleader. The film is notable as the second directorial effort of James Wong Howe, considered one of the greatest American cinematographers in film history.

[edit] The Shadow (1994)

Main article: The Shadow (1994 film)

In 1994, the Shadow was recast once again in a big-budget feature film, The Shadow, starring Alec Baldwin as Lamont Cranston/The Shadow and Penelope Ann Miller as Margo Lane. This time, Cranston was written as a disaffected veteran of World War I who drifted through Asia and ultimately became a brutal warlord and opium smuggler, until he was kidnapped by a Tibetan order of monks and brought to their monastery. A tulku, their leader, recognizing the power of harnessing Cranston's inner darkness, reformed and trained him to use that darkness against evil rather than for it. Cranston then learned how to confuse and control the minds of others, particularly how to become invisible except for his shadow. His nemesis in the film was an evil warlord and fellow telepath named Shiwan Khan, the last descendant of Genghis Khan, played by John Lone. Shiwan Khan is characterized by his witty remarks made toward the Shadow, such the odd conversation concerning a tie from Brooks Brothers and his response to being called a barbarian, "Thank you. We both are." Their struggle eventually ended when Cranston threw a mirror shard into Khan's head; surgery saved his life, but it removed a small but critical piece of the front lobe of his brain, and thus the source of his telepathic powers. Though the storyline provided a certain logic to the old radio hit's suggestion that Cranston learned his dark art in East Asia, the film was a box office bomb that never came close to launching the new franchise planned for it.

[edit] New Shadow Movie

On December 11, 2006, the website SuperHero Hype reported that director Sam Raimi and Michael Uslan will co-produce a new Shadow film for Columbia Pictures. Siavash Farahani will write the screenplay. Raimi tried (and failed) to gain the rights in the late 1980s, which resulted in his now-famous 1990 feature film, Darkman.

[edit] TV Series

Two attempts were made to make a television series based on the character. The first in 1954 was called, obviously, The Shadow, starring Tom Helmore as Lamont Cranston. The second attempt in 1958 starring Richard Derr was called The Invisible Avenger, which compiled the first two unaired episodes and was released theatrically instead. This film was then re-released in 1962 as Bourbon Street Shadows, with additional footage meant to appeal to "adult" audiences.

[edit] Influence

• Some argue that The Shadow birthed much of the concept we have come to know as the modern superhero; such characters as Batman and The Green Hornet reference Lamont Cranston's alter ego. Both characters operated mostly by night, and the Green Hornet in particular operated outside the law, insinuating himself into criminal plots in order to put an end to the activities of master criminals. But whereas The Shadow carried a real gun, the Green Hornet carried only a lightweight pistol that fired non-lethal gas and, later (on a short-lived television version) a retractable electronic ultrasonic "sting" used mostly to cut through thick barriers. While Batman briefly carried a pistol in his first few years, he quickly abandoned the use of firearms altogether; his creators are alleged to have feared that giving the character a side arm would make him resemble the Shadow too greatly; many comic historians consider it more likely to have been the desire on the part of the publisher to tone down the violence used by the character in his early adventures.^{[citation needed]}

• The Shadow later inspired another radio hit, The Whistler, whose protagonist likewise knew "many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak," and whose calling card -- a short, almost macabre whistle -- was at least as familiar as The Shadow's famous opening line. Interestingly, former Shadow Bill Johnstone once portrayed the Whistler.

• In 1981, The Shadow became one of the acknowledged influences for V, the title character in V for Vendetta.^{[citation needed]}

• Science fiction writer Philip José Farmer depicted the Shadow as part of his Wold Newton family of interrelated fictional characters.

• In the Sin City novella "Family Values" a crook says Dwight "thinks he's The Shadow" upon discovering his two .45 pistols.

• Batman: The Animated Series introduced a character called the Gray Ghost, in an episode called "Beware The Gray Ghost", who bore a striking resemblance to the Shadow. In the episode, Bruce Wayne is partly inspired by the Gray Ghost to form his own persona of the Batman. There was an issue of The Shadow pulp magazine titled "The Gray Ghost".

• The Disney cartoon character Darkwing Duck has many traits in common with the Shadow, such as a similar costume (wide-brimmed fedora, suit and cape), an overly dramatic entrance speech, and a secret identity by the name of Drake Mallard (perhaps a play on Kent Allard).

• The computer game "Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars" has a unit called "Shadow Team" dressed in black, with folding red wings, carrying two pistols and having stealth abilities.

• An analogue of The Shadow, the Green Hornet, and The Spider, also shows up in Warren Ellis' Planetary series as a member of Doc Brass' (Doc Savage) group of superheroes.

• In the video game Luminous Arc the character Mel, a young-looking Witch who has a soft spot for old comics, television shows and serials utters the line, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Master Mel knows! Hahahaha!"

• In Mad Magazine in the 1950s, The Shadow was spoofed as "The Shadow'" (the apostrophe because the name was short for "Lamont Shadowskeedeeboomboom"). In the story "Margo Pain" gets The Shadow' into predicaments--fights with gangsters, musical instruments (including a piano) dropped on him, etc. At the end of the story The Shadow' tricks Margo into going into an outhouse surrounded by dynamite--and, outside, he pushes the plunger down!

• Two regular criminal organizations in Marvel Comics, HYDRA and The Hand, share the same name as organizations fought by The Shadow.

[edit] See also

• List of The Shadow stories
• Condé Nast Publications - Owner of The Shadow intellectual property.

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] External links

• The Shadow Podcast
• The Shadow Knows A 2-hour online documentary from the Dial B for Burbank blog.
• ThePulp.Net's The Shadow page
• The Shadow in The Internet Archive's Old-Time Radio Collection
• OTR-Reviews.com -- Download over 200 The Shadow MP3 Episodes
• Old Time Radio Fans.com -- ten episodes of The Shadow radio show [.mp3]
• The Living Shadow by Maxwell Grant. Complete text of first Shadow story at archive.org
• TheShadowFan.com -- The #1 source for all Shadow related items
• The Shadow: Master of Darkness -- Information on The Shadow in pulps, radio, comics, movies, and memorabilia. Includes fan art, fan fiction, polls, tidbits, and more.
• The Shadow at the Internet Movie Database
• The Shadow in Review -- Reviews of the original Shadow stories, as well as "Two-Minute Mysteries", original short mysteries starring the Shadow
• The Shadow at the National Film and Sound Archivede:The Shadow

es:La Sombra fr:The Shadow he:הצל (ספרות) ru:The Shadow (журнал)