A Maynard Whoop-Up In Twelve Chapters
Mascot On Mystery Mountain (1934) With Maynard
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| The Rattler Strikes --- And He Could Be Anybody in Mystery Mountain! |
More Ken Maynard and other cowboys at Greenbriar Archive: Back In The Saddle Again, Teams On The Ups and Down, and John Wayne Learns His Trade.
posted by John McElwee at 5:00 AM
11 Comments:
An old girlfriend of mine's mother went to see a Ken Maynard film which boasted an appearance in person of Ken after the show. After the show only Tarzan showed up. The mother told me the disappointment was monumental among the boys.
Richard M. Roberts points out the very good actor that was Ken Maynard:
John, Ken Maynard "no actor"? I must respectfully disagree, for a cowboy star with the off-screen reputation that makes Wallace Beery sound positively loveable and sweet, in a business where the camera does not lie, and well-known bastards like Frank Fay and Al Jolson are always shown less-than-charming no matter how heart-rendering they try to be, Ken Maynard never shows one scintilla of that crankiness in the frame, he is as likable and easygoing a camera presence as one could ever want to see. It was real-life gentleman brother Kermit Maynard who played cowboy henchmen and movie meanies for much of his later career, but not Ken, even in his sad later roles in such drive-in “classics” like BIGFOOT(1970), Ken still exhibits that same air of likable and honorable, it really is amazing especially if one knows his life circumstances by then, living in his trailer drinking his monthly fan-annuity from Gene Autry, buying cheap western-gear and selling it to gullible fans claiming it was from his pictures. A friend of mine who worked on Maynard’s last film, the still-unreleased MARSHAL OF WINDY HOLLOW, summed up the character of one of his childhood idols he had waited a lifetime to meet with one short phrase, “mean old man”.
And Ken also had the innate ability to make work even the silliest and weirdest plotlines of many of his pictures, even the ones he wrote himself. Ken’s self-scripted westerns seem to like adding horror and science-fiction elements into his stories, and Ken also seemed to like disguises. He has to prove himself an aged song and dance man in HONOR OF THE RANGE (1933) when finding himself onstage with a bevy of chorus girls and an audience, so Ken gives us an old soft-shoe, and does a pretty-good job. In the truly-surreal SMOKING GUNS (1934), accused and wanted criminal Ken decides to return to his hometown to clear himself of his charges by pretending to be the now-dead lawman Walter Miller who was hunting Ken down in South America before he was chomped by a crocodile. So Ken removes the lousy blonde wig he was wearing, and goes home pretending to be Walter where he even fools Walter’s former fiancé into the deception…….and we go along with it (though Carl Laemmle didn’t, he fired Ken from Universal after that film, sending him over to Mascot to do MYSTERY MOUNTAIN).
So whatever Ken’s actual faults, it never showed on the screen, and one still must almost admire the survivalist instincts the man had, considering his film career basically ended in 1944, save those last few late-in-life returns, and his irascibility lessened not one whit as he aged, he continued to hold on, lived in some ways as he wanted to live, and even pickled in alcohol and conning and conniving the cash to keep going, Ken managed to outlive his kindly and tee-totaling younger brother Kermit by several years, which must say something about orneriness as a lifespan-lengthener, there’s hope for us yet.
RICHARD M ROBERTS
At least some Greenbriar regulars must have "Tickets to Paradise", a nifty 1991 coffee table book about old movie houses. Page 104 has one man's memories of The Higginsville in Missouri, highlighting a 40s Saturday Matinee visit by a genuine cowboy star ("Tex", the writer uncertainly recollects) and his horse. The horse was an obvious ringer and the star himself was a lot fatter than he'd just appeared onscreen. But it was memorable.
Well, I ordered this plus the Blu-ray of WHISPERING SHADOW with Bela Lugosi as I only have the poor, out of focus, poor sound dirt cheap Alpha Video version of that.
Look forward to a print I can actually hear and see.
As I understand it, Nat Levine didn't want to use Maynard after this, and so promoted the young singer Gene Autry, along with Smiley Burnette, who both appeared in chapters 6 and 7 of Mystery Mountain to headline his next project; The Phantom Empire. Besides being a wacky scientifiction western, The Phantom Empire was the start of the singing cowboy genre. Even though it was Maynard who had introduced singing into westerns earlier. Autry was already an acknowledged singer on the radio, and he was not as hot headed as Maynard. And once he stepped up to be the host of Radio Ranch, Autry's career took off. Throughout the 1930s Autry would rival Shirley Temple as the top nationwide movie box office money maker. Part of the appeal of this type of movie for the low budget production companies was that it was cheaper to pad out a film's running time by just putting the hero up against a fence with a guitar and have him sing a song now and then instead of staging gun fights or shoot outs. Curiously the big studios could never figure out the formula for making this type of film.
Nat Lavine's serials and his work at Mascot are really good. And have great imagination to them. Once Mascot and others were absorbed into what became Republic Pictures, a lot of Lavine's creativeness appeared to be reined in by the studio bosses. Looking forward to seeing a clean print of this serial, and enjoying a chapter or two now and then over a number of weeks.
Nat Levine had had enough with Ken Maynard, who had been very difficult during the shooting of MYSTERY MOUNTAIN, causing budget and schedule overruns on the serial, a big no-no as far as Levine was concerned, and it was really stupid on Maynard's part, because after being fired from Universal for SMOKING GUNS, his two Mascot films were some of the best pictures he had made in some time and were big hits that would have revived his career had he stayed at Mascot. THE PHANTOM EMPIRE was planned as the next Maynard serial, and would have cemented his career revival, and if he would have stayed at Mascot, he could have perhaps continued on as a Republic star when Herbert Yates absorbed Nat Levine's company into his operation.
I think Autry would have become a star whether Maynard had been fired or not, he was a popular radio performer, and Levine knew talent when he saw it, but Maynard's departure just hurried his slide along that much quicker, and though he ended up at Columbia after leaving Mascot, it was the beginning of the real downward curve of Maynard's career, as he aged, drank more, and headed towards cheaper and cheaper westerns.
RICHARD M ROBERTS
THE PHANTOM EMPIRE,when I saw a digest of it serialized on TV as a kid, absolutely blew me away. It's probably my all time favorite cliffhanger. I love the plot: Keep Autry from singing! Supposedly it was dreamed up while under nitrous oxide in a dentist's chair. Whatever. It is loads of fun. My friends and I rode around on our bikes as the masked riders.
A local friend told me of how his father took him to a nearby National Guard Armory circa 1933 to see Ken Maynard and Tarzan. The place was packed, he said, and Ken made his entrance into the 'arena' atop his steed. Before making one trip around the perimeters of the performing area, Maynard was clotheslined by a pipe attached to the ceiling, knocking him to the concrete floor. He picked himself up and started to hit Tarzan. Crew folks restrained him, taking him out of the public's eye, then came announcement the show was over.
A youngster's hero image dashed.
To the punch card reference: These were once issued to children going in for Chapter One of a new serial. If you came back each week and got the card punched, there was free admission for a final installment. Think of that dime you saved!
That's the same system as the SCENE™ program at Cineplex Odeon theaters here in Canada (you get a SCENE card, swipe it every time you pay for a movie, and once you accumulate a certain amount of points, you get a free movie.)
How in the world did he ever get away with calling the horse Tarzan???.... considering Burroughs would sell rights to various companies, some simultaneously, can't see that he'd let that slide...
I understand that Burroughs was the one who suggested that Maynard name his horse Tarzan.
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