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Government Agents vs Phantom Legion
USA 1951
produced by Franklin Adreon (associate) for Republic
directed by Fred C. Brannon
starring Walter Reed, Mary Ellen Kay, Dick Curtis, John Pickard, Fred Coby, Pierce Lyden, George Meeker, John Pillips, Mauritz Hugo, Edmund Cobb, Eddie Dew, George Lloyd, Dale Van Sickel, Tom Steele, Arthur Space, Norval Mitchell, Frank Meredith
written by Ronald Davidson, music by Stanley Wilson, special effects by Theodore Lydecker, Howard Lydecker
serial
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Several trucks carrying material for the country's security and defense
are hi-jacked - and the hijackers are of course helped by the fact that
the trucks are sent across the country completely unguarded - and their
content is smuggled out of the country to arm a (nameless) foreign power.
Now the freighters who are doing these government jobs who are united in
the trucking association of course start to panic before long, but instead
of asking the police or even the gouvernment for help, they rely on one
Hal Duncan (Walter Reed), a trucker with a past in the army and secret
service. He is quick to come to the conclusion that the baddie has to be
one of the association, but simply has not the means (and probably also
not the intellectual capacity to figure out who), so he and his one
partner, trucker Sam (John Pickard) just set up trap after trap for the
baddie, but besides the fact they aren't even able to capture his two main
henchman (Dick Curtis, Fred Coby), Hal is always way too quick to relay
his respective traps to the association, and on the rare occasion of
trying to keep it a secret, he makes a blunder out fo it some other way.
So this all leads to endless car chases (with Hal's car going over some
cliffs every other episode), fistfights, shootouts and all the usual stuff
before Hal finally manages to get a hold of the villains secret
headquarters, and even though he knows he's tracked down, the baddie
decides to stay put rather than make a run for it (which he could easily
do because Hal doesn't really have the police or anyone cordon off the
area), and utlimately, when burning incrimating documents, he sets his
office on fire, which gives Hal a lead on him ... and surely enough, he
was one of the trucking association ... Mary Ellen Kay plays "the
secretary" and Hal's main squeeze, but she really doesn't have much
to do. Government Agents vs Phantom Legion is one of
these Republic serials that readily shows what has gone wrong with
the genre in later years: Not only is the plot formulaic, the cliffhangers
are also repetitive (or how often can you pull the stunt of seeing the
hero's car over the cliff only to see him leap out of it in the nick of
time at the beginning of the next episode before it gets boring?), and the
story definitely lacks scope - while this is supposed to concern the
security of the country as a whole, no more than one agent and his
sidekick seem to be responsible for the operations, and they're not doing
their job all that well seeing the villain has no more than two main
henchmen). On top of that, quite a few of the action scenes seem to be
pulled from earlier movies, causing some quite silly explanations why
vintage cars are used in these scenes. Now all that said, the thing is
competently enough directed and everything, it's just so horribly routine
in narrative approach that it fails to elicit much excitement, which a
good serial quite simply should.
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