The years after Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman were weird for lovers of big-budget adventures. Burton’s film was a massive blockbuster, and studios wanted to to capitalize on its popularity. Oddly, their solution wasn’t to go after mainstream comic book IP - we didn’t get any other big DC heroes, just more Batman, and Marvel’s output was regulated to schlock like the Dolph Lundgren Punisher and no-budget takes on Fantastic Four and Captain America. Comic book movies, when they popped up, tended to be adapted from more independent fare, like The Crow, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tank Girl and The Mask (which we’ll get to in a few weeks).
Instead, studios decided that what audiences really wanted was more of the stylized aesthetic of Burton’s world, and they reached back to property from the 1940s and 1950s. There were very few out-and-out superheroes, but a lot of stories of lantern-jawed coppers beating tommy gun-toting mobsters. We got Dick Tracy, which popped off the screen in vivid colors. Future MCU director Joe Johnston gave us the underrated The Rocketeer. Billy Zane slammed evil in The Phantom. Some were hits. Some were disappointments. Many felt like throwbacks to a simpler, admittedly sillier, brand of filmmaking, where good and evil were played broadly and the films walked a fine line between kiddie fare and grown-up adventure. It might seem strange that movies of the late ‘80s and early ‘’90s were turning to properties popular before World War II – but considering how much of our current reboot trend is focused on resurrecting IP from 40 years ago, it doesn’t seem that weird.
Turning to The Shadow for the next possible hit makes sense. The original radio show was immensely popular, with a great hook - a crime-fighter who could cloud villains’ minds. Lamont Cranston was a playboy rich guy who spent his night prowling the back alleys stopping evil doers; that’s not too far removed from the Batman template. On road trips, my grandfather used to stop at Cracker Barrel and pick up cassettes of the old Shadow serials; I loved the deep voice booming out the series’ catchphrase – “Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men? The Shadow knows..” – which then descended into a dark cackle.
I was almost 15 when The Shadow came out, and I recall wanting to see it in the theaters. Alas, no one would go with me and the film was such a notorious flop – it opened strong, just under The Lion King1, but left theaters quickly – that I never had the chance. The film’s mixed reviews ultimately deterred me. I’m not sure, but I think I would have liked it at that age. It’s weird and visually compelling in a way my kid mind would have appreciated, and at that age I don’t think I was really too concerned about acting, plot, nuance, tone and other things that make movies good.
Thirty years later – oof. It’s no hot take to say that The Shadow isn’t a good movie; it does, after all, have its own episode devoted to it on the How Did This Get Made podcast. But it’s an interesting failure, a time capsule that shows that studios didn’t know what to do with pulp properties in the 1990s, that the Alec Baldwin as movie star experiment was doomed to fail, and that properties that work perfectly in radio don’t always translate well to a visual medium. But there are some interesting bits that make it an “almost good” movie, which somehow makes it even more disappointing than if it were an abject failure.
Baldwin plays Lamont Cranston. By night, he clouds bad guys’ minds and stops crime throughout New York City, aided by an army of supporters wearing red rings – including cab driver Moe, played by Peter Boyle. By day, he…is rich? Unlike Bruce Wayne, who runs his own business, Cranston’s defining characteristics are that he dresses in suits and likes hanging out with the ladies. In the film’s prologue, taking place years earlier, he’s a long-haired, long-fingernailed warlord in Tibet, a despicable man until he’s given the powers of the Shadow and sent to New York to fight for justice for reasons. How he got there is not really explained except for one scene in which someone offhandedly mentions the years he spent in Tibet after the war, the same way someone might ask me if I have ever been to Fuddruckers.
Anyway, Lamont is hanging out in New York, stopping petty thieves and muggers. But things dial up a notch when Shiwan Kahn (John Lone), the last remaining descendant of Genghis Kahn, shows up aiming to finish what his ancestor started. He commands an army of Mongols, who walk around the city in warrior garb, and he commandeers the mind of a bomb maker played by Ian McKellen and an arms developer played by Tim Curry. Penelope Ann Miller shows up as Margo Lane, the only person who is resistant to The Shadow’s powers and can also read his mind, which is neat, but also completely unnecessary to the story. Jonathan Winters is the chief of police and Lamont’s uncle, but he really only exists to show up to crime scenes and sit at nightclubs with Lamont, tossing out exposition.
I realize I sound glib, but this is exactly how the film plays out. There are famous people who are present because they are famous, but the script by Walter P. Gibson and David Koepp (who should really know better) never creates actual characters. We’re told several times that Lamont wrestles with his darker impulses, but Baldwin plays him as too much of a straight arrow to give a hint of any internal conflict. Shiwan Kahn wants to take over the world because he’s the villain and that’s what villains do. Miller has a bit of a spark as Lamont’s love interest, but she’s seductive and playful against a character who has no hint of a libido or sense of play.
There is a fun moment where Margo tells Lamont about a provocative dream she had and he responds with “I dreamt I tore all the skin off my face and was someone else underneath” – funny not just because it’s a bleak counterpoint to her come-on, but because Baldwin sells it without any hint of torment. Baldwin is completely wrong for the role, with neither the gravitas to sell the heroism nor the nimbleness to play it as camp. It feels pitched at the same tone as one of his SNL skits; if you imagine this as a 30 Rock bonus episode about Jack Donaghy creating a vanity project for himself, it works slightly better, although I don’t know that anyone could pull off a line like “the weed of crime bears bitter fruit,” which works a lot better in radio or print. I like Baldwin a lot as a character actor and in comic roles, but there’s a reason his leading man phase petered out quickly.
The supporting cast understands the heightened tone the movie calls for slightly better, although Lone never tears into his character’s villainy enough to make Kahn memorable. But, as I said, I like Miller’s playfulness. McKellen’s role is minor, but this early in his film career he was already able to bring dignity and intelligence to even the smallest roles. I was always happy to see Boyle turn up in anything, and he seems born to play a cabbie named Moe. And Curry plays it to the rafters, particularly as his character is revealed to be a sniveling suck up to the villain in the film’s final act. It’s all surface level, but the supporting ensemble understands the tone of what they’re making and, to be fair, probably weren’t banking on The Shadow to further their movie star careers the way Baldwin might have been.
The script makes no sense, meandering into its story and getting through half-starts in the plot on the way. To its credit, it doesn’t shy away from the sillier elements of its IP the way other comic book movies of the ‘90s and early 2000s would have. It’s gloriously goofy, with its story of resurrected warlords, street-level armies of superhero supporters, and mind control. But the film is constantly skimming the surface of more interesting ideas, and without a compelling character at the center, it’s just a mess of plot points that would feel more at home in a Saturday morning cartoon, although its lack of impressive action sequences will likely bore any kids who stumble upon this. Again, I like the general idea of The Shadow as a character – and I’d be happy if someone else decided to try this again – but this film doesn’t seem to know what to do with the idea.
But it’s worth noting the film looks stupendous. I’m a sucker for these types of big, 1940-set films, with their cityscapes obviously just backgrounds on soundstages. The New York of this city, with its art-deco nightclubs, rain-swept bridges, and scuzzy back alleys is catnip for me, and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum – who created similar settings for The Phantom and The Rocketeer – gives us a world that looks ripped from old comic books. My favorite element is the network of pneumatic tubes that zip across the city to help the Shadow’s minions get their messages to Lamont. One scene follows a message as it hurtles across the buildings, and it’s a moment reminiscent of Sam Raimi (Raimi’s Darkman was inspired by The Shadow, and he’d been rumored to be redeveloping the property a few years ago; I’d be very curious to see him take a crack at this). If The Shadow is a movie that completely exists at the surface, at least some of those surface pleasures are actually pleasurable.
I don’t really know who The Shadow was made for – and, judging by its anemic box office, no one did. It’s too plodding and adult-oriented for kids, but too childish and silly for adult audiences. It pays lip surface to issues of duality and wrestling with inner darkness but never engages them. It’s faithful to the original IP, except played by an actor who treats it as cosplay. It’s not good enough to be a cult classic or bad enough to be a trainwreck people revisit. It’s just kind of there, a relic of Hollywood’s attempt to figure out superheroes in the 1990s. It’s a movie that’s been forgotten precisely because it’s so forgettable.
Previous Summer of ‘94 entries:
I considered doing THE LION KING for the Summer of 1994, given that it was the year’s biggest money-maker. But time didn’t quite allow me to squeeze it in and I’ll be honest that I don’t know if I have much to say about The Lion King. I like it; I dig the music and miss 2D animation. But I don’t know that I have anything new to add. Maybe I’ll circle back to it this winter in time for Mufasa.