10 - Infernal Devices: Wallace Fox’s Aeroglobe, Cosmic Beam Annihilator, and the Pit of Everlasting Fire

Summary

Movie theaters in 1947 offered audiences significant films by directors generally considered auteurs, filmmakers who exercised authority in a collaborative artistic enterprise with the intent of expressing a unique personal vision. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door, and Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux deal with the complexities of adult relationships and, while adding the lobby-card attraction of familial homicide, deliver the unique stylistic techniques and visual preoccupations of the director. For Hitchcock, distinctive camera angles create a nearly oppressive emotional atmosphere and sense of the audience as voyeur; Lang, relying upon his early Expressionism to explore film noir, uses light and shadow to illuminate his perception of an oppressive social order; and Chaplin contorts the audience’s notion of good and evil as the protagonist, a bigamist who routinely marries and murders his ancillary brides in Bluebeard-fashion, is just suave enough to seduce the audience as well. These are provocative motion pictures intended for a mature, reflective audience: big themes for big people.

Wallace Fox, whose 1947 film Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy appeared in a weekly series of short video bites of twenty minutes or so, had a different goal and audience for his films. In over eighty movies directed between 1927 and 1953, Fox characteristically delivered Westerns, mysteries, and tough-talking Bowery Boys vehicles with the rock ‘em sock ‘em content intended to keep viewers in their seats and cash flowing to the theaters and studios. Fox was adept at directing B-movies, films appreciably shorter than top-of-the bill A-releases, as well as serials, movies shown weekly at theaters in short chapters over an extended period. Tino Balio, in his study of the commercial aspects of film during the 1930s, notes that the audience for both B-movies and serials, also known as chapter plays, generally was the same: school-age kids seeking pulp magazine and comic strip thrills at their neighborhood theaters. “[T]he narrative traits of B films echoed not only the pulps but also movie serials,” Balio writes, “emphasizing thrills, pace, and low budgets over mood, coherence, and characterization. B’s and serials have similar action-oriented heroes, displaying fisticuffs, athleticism, and cheery youthfulness.