The Shadow of the Eagle (1932)

Simply Perfect

Powerful

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It's unfair to review a 1930s serial by today's entertainment standards; expectations were different and the formula is an alien one. That caveat out of the way, man, does "The Shadow Of The Eagle" stink.Craig McCoy (John Wayne) is a stunt pilot at a struggling carnival who gets $100 for a skywriting job just when carnival owner Nathan Gregory (Edward Hearn) finds himself $97 short of paying off a debt collector. McCoy is happy to keep his boss in business, but both soon find themselves under suspicion when McCoy's skywriting turns out to be a threat to a group of factory owners who used Gregory's stolen invention to build a fortune."You stand in the shadow of the Eagle," a voice in the darkness tells the owners shortly before one of them turns up dead.Seeing Wayne star in a serial gives you a chance to see the future star work his on-screen charisma in its fledgling form. Unfortunately there's not much to see here; not from Wayne, who does little more than work his smile between stunts; not from the film, which hits you with a succession of half-baked cliffhangers.I know I can't really complain about logic gaps, character inconsistencies, and tone shifts in a film designed to entertain eight-year-olds in an era long before Nintendo or "Game Of Thrones." But if the film is going to throw so much nonsense up in the air, the least it could do is make it move. "Shadow Of The Eagle" features long sections of wooden dialogue and endless cycles of captures and recaptures.A lot of the film is spent with various characters watching the Eagle's skywriting, as slow as skywriting tends to be."Why...it's a question mark!""Why...it means that Clark's been wiped out, and they're asking who's next!"Adding to the underbaked effect is the way director Ford Beebe cheats the cliffhangers between chapter. One chapter ends with a car blowing up, only to begin the next chapter by having it explained as a tire blowout.Wayne has a nice moment early on when he is confronted by an aggressive questioner ("I'll do the questioning..." "Well, you'll do your own answering, too.") There's also that stunt classicsoncall mentioned in another review, the plane buzzing McCoy as he runs across a field like Cary Grant. But such moments are thin on the ground and get thinner as the serial moves along and various supporting characters pop up and drop off without explanation."Shadow Of The Eagle" bears the marks of a project being made up as it went along by a no-budget studio. Unfortunately, while inspiration is free, talent is not. The result of working around that reality is terribly obvious with more than three hours to fill.

. . . of the director's cut for Erich Van Stroheim's GREED (which is the entire World Population alive Today), you'll swear that the 3 hours, 37 minutes of this "Mascot Serial" THE SHADOW OF THE EAGLE drags on for AT LEAST ten hours! SHADOW director Forde Beebe is so Hell-bent upon cramming every Bad Movie Cliché into SHADOW at least twice, you'll probably conclude that he's REALLY cousin Beebe Ford of THAT Ford Family. John Wayne drives home the SHADOW's message that corporate America is ALWAYS eager to short-change our heroic War Veterans (in this case, WWI pilot "Nate Gregory"). The Rich People Party gypped their winning team grunt soldiers who insured their ascendancy by triumphing in the War to End Lazy Southerners' Racist Slavery out of their full pensions. RPP President Hoover did worse, slaughtering a redacted number of WWI Vets seeking promised pensions, as well as their wives and kiddies ("Dead babies tell no tales," President Herb is said to have chuckled). Now the RPP's President-Elect Trump, who ducked service to America in Vietnam, plans to eliminate Veteran's Hospitals, throwing our current crop of Vets to the wolves. Who can save us? Now that John Wayne's gone over to the Dark Side, only the SHADOW knows.

Others have mentioned the old movie serials. The cover on my Alpha Video DVD claims that "The Shadow of the Eagle" is "The Complete Serial." But one part is missing in the early series, and it ends with episode 11 -- but not the end of the story. So, I have no idea how it comes out. "The Shadow of the Eagle" is an early John Wayne series. It was a stunt man's show, with lots of action and running about. The Duke's acting is OK and very good in places. We can't say that for most of the rest of the cast – especially not Dorothy Gulliver. She has several close-ups in which she has hammy glares at the camera. Was she still acting for silent films? The attempt to show sky-writing is pathetic. An airplane in the sky making 90-degree and 180-degree turns in just a few feet? It looked exactly like what it was – a toy model. I'm sure they could have done something to seem a little more real. By 1932, many people would have seen skywriting at daredevil shows, air shows, county fairs and other events held around the country. So, this probably would have looked just as hokey to audiences then, as it does today. Although the plot was interesting, with just enough intrigue to keep one watching – hoping to see the end, it soon reached the point of tedium. The action scenes were repeated car chases, repeated climbing up and down outside buildings, and repeated breaking into the same offices. John Wayne must have had a permanent concussion from this one – I think he got conked out at least once in each segment. The segments were of varied lengths. The shortest was less than 10 minutes and a couple early ones were half an hour or more. Each one ran the full credits at the beginning. But there was very little continuity between episodes. They tended to skip some details where the next episode would open somewhere off from where the previous one ended. This Mascot production clearly shows its poverty row origins. It has very poor writing, editing and other production values; and the film quality relegates this one to the dust bin.

The good guys never seem to catch a break. It added to the plot and my frustration. What a roller coaster of a movie. It was a good movie and keeps you on the edge of your seat rooting for the good guys to get one thing to go their way. Common John Wayne where, as the hero, he never gives up hope.Didn't realize that it was almost 3 hours till it got close to the end and I looked up at the clock.If you like b/w old movies, it's a good show to watch. I like John Wayne but have watched most of his older movies. It's a lot of fun to see a young John Wayne running around to save the day. If you don't like the older John Wayne movies, give some of is younger stuff a chance.