The Last Frontier (1932/Serial/Western/Roan Group)
Picture: C
Sound: C Extras: C Chapters: C+
The Roan Group joins VCI in releasing their own edition of
RKO’s dabbling in movie serials. Van
Buren, an animation company, produced the chapters for them in an interesting
test water project for them. To recap
further, RKO was a major studio, but early on, it experimented with the idea of
doing Saturday Morning Serial. The
result was the one-off Western The Last Frontier (1932) here in later
Commonwealth release prints. It runs
twelve chapters as follows:
1) The
Black Ghost Rides
2) The
Thundering Herd
3) The
Black Ghost Strikes
4) The
Fatal Shot
5) Clutching
Sands
6) The
Terror Trail
7) Doomed
8) Facing
Death
9) Thundering
Doom
10) The Life Line
11) Driving Danger
12) The Black Ghost’s Last Ride
Lon Chaney Jr. (credited at the time as Creighton Chaney)
is The Black Ghost, dawning his mask to break up land stealing terrorists. As a genre piece, it is historic and
interesting, but the cliffhangers are mixed and the program in general shows
its age. This was an early sound film,
let alone serial, so this would have been more impressive in its time and
Western fans will find this more appealing than most. Dorothy Gulliver is cowgirl Betty, enough of a match for Tom
Kirby (Chaney) outside of his masked antics.
Chaney is very young here and the acting is of the stage
variety, with the actors standing around more and being a bit louder in their
dialogue delivery, but there is just enough energy to keep this 70+ years old
chapterplay going. General Custer, Wild
Bill, Kit Carson and the usual stereotypical “Indians” are also included. If watched in the better spirit it was
intended, it is not bad and not as racist as it might have been. For serial and Western fans, it is a
must-see.
Like The VCI version, the 1.33 X 1 monochrome full frame
image shows its age and is lucky to be in the shape it is in. With Warner, the owners of RKO since they
acquired Turner Entertainment a few years ago just now getting to work on that
long-neglected catalog (though Turner did spend some serious money to save it,
that was not enough) now there’s, there is no guarantee that any materials from
this serial have survived in their vaults.
You can expect some variances throughout in quality even more than
usually exists in such serial sets, while the Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is just as
aged, with background noise throughout.
It is not as “hot” as many an untreated film soundtrack we have heard on
DVD, but it is limited.
In all this, the two versions are pretty much a dead heat
with each other, including being from later prints form a few decades
later. Extras are different, with Lou
Lembeck doing an introduction, a trailer to Troma’s Radiation March and
clip from Make Your Own Damn Movie in which the underrated director John
Badham talks about going out and shooting in any format you can get your hands
on. By comparison, VCI offered text
biographies of the two leads and director, plus trailers for four other serials
and a general VCI Serial releases trailer.
Neither are wildly vital and can both be found on releases from other
titles in the companies catalog. That
leaves price and cover art as your final deciding factors. The chapters run 220 minutes either way.
- Nicholas Sheffo
