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Today fondly remembered by fans of vintage B-movies and serials,
Westerns and science fiction alike, Buster Crabbe actually never intended
to be an actor, nor was he trained as one or did he have his initial
successes in that field. Actually, he was a swimmer, and was quite
successful at two Olympics ... but then Hollywood called, and before long,
he had made iconic roles like Tarzan,
Buck Rogers and especially Flash Gordon his
own, he was (unofficially) crowned King of the Serials ... and he was steadily
gaining reputation as a screen-cowboy. But let's
start at the beginning: Buster Crabbe was born Clarence Linden Crabbe II
in Oakland California in 1908 (though his publicity bio listed 1907 as his
birthdate, a date that later found its way into many sources), however it
seems to have been his family's move to Hawaii at a very early age that
was the first decisive event in his life, because in Hawaii he would find
ideal conditions to train as a professional swimmer. Buster's training
would soon pay off, since in 1928, he won a bronze medal for the 1.500 m
freestyle in Amsterdam. 4 years later, in Los Angeles, he managed to top
that by winning gold for the 400 m freestyle ... and beating Johnny
Weissmuller's Olympic record in that discipline - and Johnny Weissmuller
is a name that will pop up more often in this biography ... From
1930 onwards, Buster made a bit of money on the side by appearing in small
parts in movies, and allegedly he also auditioned for the title role in Tarzan
the Ape Man (1932, directed by W.S.Van Dyke), which later went to
Johnny Weissmuller [Johnny
Weissmuller-bio - click here] - though that story is most probably a fabrication of
some publicity department as it rings a tad too far-fetched -, so it was only a
matter of time before Hollywood came knocking with a lead part, especially
since that other swim champion, Johnny Weissmuller, had just had his first
phenomenal success on the big screen - and yes, it was Tarzan
the Ape Man -, and according to typical Hollywood logic that
prevails even to this day, someone must have thought "if Buster Crabbe
can beat Weissmuller at swimming there is no reason why he wouldn't beat
him at the box office." - Truth to be told, Buster could never match
the movie-successes of Weissmuller, but it stands to reason as to who was
the better, more versatile actor (actually many critics nowadays favour
Crabbe over Weissmuller). Crabbe's first starring films were totally in
the Weissmuller-mode: His debut as a lead was the role of Kaspa
the Lion King in Paramount's
King of the Jungle (1933, H.Bruce Humberstone, Max Marcin), in
which he played a man who was raised by jungle animals but is captued by
white hunters and brought back to civilisation as a circus attraction -
essentially, Buster Crabbe was playing Tarzan
in all but name ... In his next film (a serial actually), he
was actually playing Tarzan
- including name.
The serial in question is 1933's Tarzan
the Fearless (Robert F.Hill), producer Sol Lesser's first attempt
at producing a Tarzan-film
to rival the much higher budgeted MGM-Tarzans
and cash in on their success (Lesser would later try again with Tarzan's
Revenge [1938, D.Ross Lederman] and eventually wind up producing
the Weissmuller-Tarzan-series
once it moved over to RKO). Unfortunately,
Tarzan the Fearless
the serial nowadays seems to be lost, and all that remains is a self
contained feature made up from the serial in the 1950's, so one can't
really say how good or bad the serial actually was, but judging from the
edited down feature, it seems to have been a cheap but energetic serial
that's high on action and excitement - and Buster Crabbe makes a convincing jungle man. As a whole, Tarzan
the Fearless was not a huge success, as its inherent cheapness stood no
comparison to the lavish sets and properties as well as the better cast of
Tarzan
the Ape Man, as it was released way too soon after the
Weissmuller-success ... so that was the end of Buster Crabbe's
screen-career as Tarzan
- for better or worse.
However, while Tarzan
the Fearless was not exactly the success it was supposed to be, it
did little to hurt Buster's career, as he went back to Paramount
- who had him under contract and had only leased him out to Sol Lesser -
to play supporting roles and sometimes leads in films of various genres,
including the sports/crime comedy Search for Beauty (1933,
Erle C.Kenton) - in which he plays a swimming champ (not too much of a
stretch) opposite Ida Lupino -, the W.C. Fields-comedy You're Telling Me!
(1934, Erle C.Kenton) [W.C. Fields
bio - click here], and the sports comedy Hold 'em Yale (1934, Sidney
Lanfield).
And then there were several films he made on loan to
other studios, on loan to Monogram
he made the musical Sweetheart of Sigma Chi (1933, Edwin L.Marin),
for Mayfair the drama Badge of Honor and the adventure film
The Oil Raider (both 1934, Spencer Gordon Bennet), for RKO
the comedy We are Rich Again (1934, William A.Seiter), and for Majestic
the drama She had to Choose (1934, Ralph Ceder).
Much
more important for Buster's career though was a series of Westerns
adapted from stories by Zane Grey that Buster did for Paramount
around the same time,
first as a supporting actor (the first of these films, The Thundering
Herd, was actually released before his first film as a lead, King
of the Jungle), later as a lead. In the first three films of that
bunch, directed by Western great Henry Hathaway, The Thundering Herd,
Man of the Forest and To the Last Man (all 1933), Buster can
be seen supporting Western star Randolph Scott, but eventually, Buster had
a fall-out with director Henry Hathaway - the reasons of which are not
quite clear -, and frequently this is cited as the main reason Buster
Crabbe never managed to break into A-movies - which (at best) stands to
debate.
Truth is, with Hathaway gone from the Zane Grey series, Buster
Crabbe's career did not slow down, quite the contrary. True, during most
of 1934, he was loaned out to other, smaller studios (see above), but
eventually he returned to the Zane Grey series and gave support to Dean
Jagger in Wanderer of the Wasteland (1935, Otho Lovering) before
being promoted to the series' lead, in films including Nevada (1935,
Charles Barton), Drift Fence/Texas Desperadoes (1936, Otho
Lovering), Desert Gold - Buster plays an Indian Chieftain in this
one -, The Arizona Raiders, Arizona Mahoney (all three 1936,
James P.Hogan) and Forlorn River (1937, Charles Barton). Basically
the Zane Grey films were all well-made B-Westerns that gave Buster Crabbe
ample chance to prove himself as a versatile actor. Besides the
Zane Greys, Buster also played in a few comedies and musicals for Paramount,
mostly as a supporting actor, including Lady be Careful (1936,
Theodore Reed), Murder Goes College, Sophie Lang Goes West
(both 1936, Charles Reisner), Thrill of a Lifetime (1937, George
Archainbaud) - the only film in which Buster actually sings -, and the
Betty Grable-vehicle Million Dollar Legs (1939, Nick Grinde). On
top of that he also did supporting duty in some (crime) dramas like King
of Gamblers/Czar of the Slot Machines, the Anna May
Wong-starrer Daughter of Shanghai (both 1937, Robert Florey), Tip-off
Girls, Hunted Men, Illegal Traffic (all three 1938,
Louis King), and Unmarried (1939, Kurt Neumann).
For
reasons unknown though, Paramount
decided to not renew Buster Crabbe's contract in 1939, and all of a
sudden he found himself freelancing ... Not that this would have
mattered too much, because from 1936 onwards, Buster Crabbe found much
more fame in the serials he did away from Paramount
anyways ...
In 1936, Paramount
loaned Buster out to Universal,
to star in a serial based on a science
fiction comic by Alex Raymond: Flash
Gordon (1936, Frederick Stephani). The serial, produced on approximately thrice the
amount that Universal
usually spent on its serials, was a wild mix of special effects,
hands-on adventure and action aplenty that to this day is considered -
along with the maybe even more innovative Phantom
Empire - probably the most influential sci-fi serial there
was and many fans to this day consider it to be one of the best (sound)
serials ever. In it, Buster plays the archtype of the all-American hero
who throws himself head-first into danger and is able to resolve the
gravest of problems with his bare fists, not at all fazed by the fact that
he is on a strange planet and is usually outmanned by ray-gun carrying
guards or fire-breathing monsters.
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Flash
Gordon the serial became a tremenduous success back in its days,
so it should come as no real surprise that before long two sequels
followed, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938, Ford L.Beebe, Robert
F.Hill) and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940, Ford L.Beebe,
Ray Taylor), and while both these serials of course essentially repeated
the formula of the first one and therefore lacked its inventiveness, they
were both more or less as exciting and as entertaining.
Away
from the Flash Gordon-franchise,
Universal
tried Buster out in two other serials as well: The first one was Red
Barry (1938, Ford L.Beebe, Alan James), an earthbound
crime-and-espionage story based on a comic strip by Will Gould that was
moderately successful but paled in comparison to Flash
Gordon. Universal
did much better a year later with Buck Rogers (1939, Ford L.Beebe,
Saul A.Goodkind), which was based on a story (and subsequent comic strip)
by Philip F.Nowlan (& comic strip artist David Calkins) about a man
who wakes up in the 25th century and has to deal head first with all kinds
of futuristic threats. Actually, Buck
Rogers had the look and feel of just another Flash Gordon-serial
to it, which was probably even intended, since Universal
had understandably no interest to kill its golden goose (and they were
right of course, Buck Rogers became another big success) ... and
just like the Flash Gordon-serials,
Buck Rogers is still entertaining and exciting to this day ...
Away
from serials, Universal
also put Buster in Call a Messenger (1939, Arthur Lubin), but
this film belonged more to the Dead
End Kids and the Little Tough Guys than to
Buster. Other than
that, Universal
knew surprisingly little to do with their serial superstar Buster
Crabbe, so eventually he found himself at Republic
playing a bad guy to Gene Autry's hero in Colorado Sunset (1939,
George Sherman) and at 20th
Century Fox playing a supporting role in the comedy Sailor's
Lady (1940, Allan Dwan). Still, in 1940, Buster Crabbe,
successful serial star, saw hismelf without a regular job, so he did what
many (me not included) nowadays call career suicide. He hooked up with the
then newly formed company PRC
[Click here to read an article on PRC],
to star in a series of their movies, mostly Westerns but also a few
adventure pics ...
PRC
was - much like Republic
or Monogram
back then - essentially a producer of cheap B-pics and series Westerns,
and they had just lost the star of their Billy
the Kid-series, veteran cowboy actor Bob Steele [Bob
Steele bio - click here], to Republic
(where he joined their Three
Mesquiteers series), so they desperately needed a replacement
- and who better to take than Buster Crabbe, who was on the market anyhow,
was fresh from the successful Flash Gordon-serials,
and at Paramount,
he had already proven himself as a competent cowboy hero. (PRC's
Billy
the Kid by the way was not portrayed as the authentic outlaw
he really was but as a range hero who is wrongly persecuted by the law
and is trying to prove his innocence.)
For the Billy
the Kid-series, Buster was paired with ex-Keystone Cop
and character actor Al St.John, who as Fuzzy
was a very prolific cowboy sidekick in PRC-Westerns,
having already supported Bob Steele in the Billy
the Kid-series while at the same time he also did sidekick
duties in the Lone
Rider series, supporting first George Houston, then Bob
Livingston. Among cowboy sidekicks, Al St.John was always among the
best, partly of course thanks to his training as silent slapstick comedian
and parts thankly to his ability to integrate his Fuzzy-persona
into the plot rather than interrupt the story every now and again for a
few routines - in films like Fuzzy
Settles Down (1944, Sam Newfield), he is even given an opportunity
to carry the plot as it is.. Plus, he and Buster had a certain instant chemistry that
made them a likeable duo and made their movies somehow transcend their
humble origins.
Late in 1943, Billy
the Kid was rechristened Billy
Carson, most probably to escape association with the authentic
outlaw of the Old West (they could have thought of that sooner), but other
than a name change, nothing much about the series changed, it was still
Buster and Al St.John as Fuzzy
riding the plains doing good, with pretty much the same team in
front and behind the camera responsible for the films - speaking of which:
All of Buster's Billy
the Kid and Billy
Carson were produced by Sigmund Neufeld and directed by PRC-house
director Sam Newfield (actually Neufeld's brother), all featured Al
St.John as his sidekick, and most of them had a very similar supporting
cast, though the supporting actors had different role-names in almost
every film, most prominently Charles King, who played the lead villain in
many of these films. Eventually, Buster Crabbe played Billy
the Kid/Billy
Carson in a total of 36 films, from Billy the Kid Wanted
(1941, Sam Newfield) to Outlaws of the Plains (1946, Sam Newfield),
and by and large the series was and still is ridiculed by critics for
their obvious cheapness and the often lazy and stagey directorial job by
Newfield, but as a lover of the cheap and cheesy, I can't but defend
Newfield: he had to work on a very tight budget and a very tight schedule,
plus the scripts he was given were not always particularly interesting.
But when he had a decent script to work with, like the horror-Western Wild
Horse Phantom (1944), he managed to make something interesting out
of it.
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Away from the Billy
the Kid/Billy
Carson-series, Buster made a few other pictures - all
non-Westerns - for PRC
as well, like the drama Queen of the Broadway (1942, Sam Newfield), the boxing film The Contender (1944, Sam Newfield),
and a trio of jungle pictures, Jungle
Man (1941, Harry L.Fraser), Jungle
Siren (1942, Sam Newfield) and Nabonga
(1944, Sam Newfield). Of these films, Nabonga
is not only the one with the silliest title but also the funniest: In it
Buster plays a jungle explorer who stumbles upon one of these White
Jungle Goddesses (Julie London) - who seemed to populate the jungles
in the 1930's and 40's in no short supply - and her violent pet gorilla
(Crash Corrigan - [Crash Corrigan
bio - click here]). All of this might not
sound very special - in fact there were hundreds of films in the 1930's
and 40's with more or less the same plot -, but somehow this film refuses
to take itself too seriously and gives Buster Crabbe a rare opportunity to
display his comic talent ... In 1946, Buster's association with
PRC came
to an end, allegedly because he was no longer content with the quality of
the Westerns he was in. That however did not slow PRC's
production of Westerns down, they just took Lash La Rue [Lash
La Rue bio - click here], a cowboy actor
they had just recently hired for a trio of Westerns starring Eddie Dean,
put him in a Western with sidekick Fuzzy
- Law of the Lash
(1947, Ray Taylor) - which came out only a few months after Outlaws of the Plains
- and when this film proved to be successful enough, out of the ashes of the Billy
the Kid/Billy
Carson-series, the Fuzzy
and Lash-series was born, a series that eventually outlived PRC
- which went bust in 1948.
Buster Crabbe meanwhile went back to
his old studio Paramount
- or rather its B-movie unit Pine-Thomas
- for his next film: Swamp Fire (1946, William H.Pine), a film that
was memorable inasmuch as it was the first to pit ex-swimming champion and
former Tarzan
Buster Crabbe (as the bad guy) against ex-swimming champion and
former Tarzan
Johnny Weissmuller (in one of his very rare films where he plays neither
Tarzan
nor Jungle Jim)
[Johnny Weissmuller-bio
- click here]. In the film, Weissmuller defeats Crabbe in the
end, but who beat whom concerning their acting is a whole other
matter.
After Swamp Fire, Buster threw in with Columbia
and producer Sam Katzman, a prolific (but not essentially quality-conscious) B-movie- and serial-producer in his own right. Buster's first
assignment for Katzman might have been one of his most unusual roles: In Last
of the Redmen (atrocious British title Last of the Redskins,
1947, George Sherman), another adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's Last
of the Mohicans, he played Magua, the treacherous Huron - now in my book, it's always a bit weird (not to say racist) to cast blond
actors as Indians ... but then again, these were different times back then
and maybe I'm just too spoiled by today's political correctness. It
has to be noted though that Crabbe does a pretty decent job as Magua, a
much more memorable one than Rick Vallin playing Uncas. The movie as a
whole though is one of the lesser adaptations of the novel and pretty much
forgettable. After Last
of the Redmen, Katzman put Buster Crabbe to better use though,
remembering his past successes in serials and giving him three more to
star in: The Sea Hound (1947, W.B Eason, Mack V.Wright) and Pirates
of the High Seas (1950, Spencer Gordon Bennet, Thomas Carr) were
modern-day high sea adventures, while King of the Congo/The
Mighty Thunda (1952, Spencer Gordon Bennet, Wallace Grissell) saw
Crabbe back in loincloth, doing another Tarzan-imitation.
By and large though, these serials lacked the enthusiasm, the
inventiveness, and also the budget of Buster's 1930's serials, they seemed
like tired (if sometimes weirdly charming) rehashs of better times, and
seeing these serials, it should come as hardly a surprise that the format
of the serial did not survive the 1950's (if for an entirely different
reason - television). Besides his serial work at Columbia,
Buster also made a guest appearance in a film of the Jungle Jim
series (also produced by Katzman), where he - in the film Captive Girl
(1950, William Berke) - once again played a villain to Johnny
Weissmuller's hero, while in 1948, back at Paramount/Pine-Thomas,
he had a supporting role in Caged Fury (1948, William Berke), a
film about a psycho lion tamer.
By and large though, with the
1950's and the introduction of television, the B-movie as it once was and
serial came to an end, and like many other actors, Buster, who had been so
prolific in the 1930's and 40's, found himself no longer in demand
concerning feature films. But Buster did what he had to do: He turned to
television and embraced the new medium, first doing guest appearances in a
number of anthology shows like the Kraft
Television Theatre or Star Tonight, and from
1955 to 1957, he had his own TV-show, Captain Gallant of the Foreign
Legion, in which he played the titular character supported by former
Western sidekick Fuzzy Knight (not to be confused with Fuzzy
Al St. John) and his own son Cullen 'Cuffy' Crabbe. The title of
the series pretty much explains it all, it was a series about Captain
Gallant (Buster) of the French Foreign Legion and his adventures in North
Africa, concerning the typical mix of gangsters, espionage and natvie
uprisings.
After
the series had come to an end, Buster could only rarely be seen in films throughout the
remainder of the 1950's and the 1960's, and exclusively in Westerns, including
The
Lawless Eighties (1957, Joseph Kane), Badman's Country (1958, Fred
F. Sears) - in which he played Wyatt Earp, in a film where Earp, Pat
Garrett, Bufallo Bill and Bat Masterson go after Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid ... I mean really -, Gunfighters of Abilene (1960, Edward
L. Cahn), The Bounty Killer (1965, Spencer Gordon Bennet) and Arizona
Raiders (1965, William Witney [William
Witney bio - click here]).
By and large though, at this time Buster
had retired from the film business and was now running a company selling Buster
Crabbe Swimming Pools (no doubt using his former fame as a swimmer as
a sales pitch). He also promoted exercise equipment during that time and
became a successful stockbroker. In his later years, Buster
even returned to acting for a few films and television shows: He had a
guest role in the TV-series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in
1979, playing one Brigadier Gordon as hommage to his portrayals as Flash Gordon
in the episode Planet
of the Slave Girls.
The same year, he had a cameo in Swim Team (1979, James Polakof), a comedy
about - you guessed it - a swim team ... which is a millieu where Buster
would fit right in.
Alien Dead from 1980 was one of
schlock-meister Fred Olen Ray's earliest films as a director, and the
film, a cheapo shot for around 12.000 Dollars about a meteor falling to
earth and turning Yankee townsfolks into zombies, sets the tone for things
to come later in Olen Ray's career. Still, in a trashy way, this one, like many later Olen Ray-films,
is kind of fun. Buster plays a rather useless Sheriff in this one ... In
1982, Buster made his last movie, The Comeback Trail (1982, Harry
Hurwitz), in which he plays a B-Western star from yesteryear (not too much
of a stretch) who is hired by two no-good producers who want to see him
die doing increasingly dangerous stunts and collect the insurance money -
but in the end he survives all of their stunts and turns the tables on
them. Buster died in 1983 from a heart attack, still busy
promoting the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. The Comeback Trail,
a rather unfunny comedy, thus turned out to be his last film, and it was
not much of a fitting farewell movie for the once popular serial- and
B-movie-star. However, only very few people remember that film, while a
great many remember Buster as Flash Gordon,
Tarzan,
Buck Rogers, or simply as the King of Serials ...
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