The Shadow
This article is about the pulp fiction/comic book/radio/film hero. For other meanings, see shadow (disambiguation). |
"Who knows what evil lurks?"â€"The Shadow, as seen on the cover of the July 15, 1939 issue of The Shadow Magazine. The story noted on the cover, "Death From Nowhere," was one of the magazine stories adapted for the legendary radio drama. |
The Shadow is a
fictional crime fighter created by
Walter B. Gibson. The character is one of the most famous of the
pulp heroes of the 1930s and 1940s. Made even more famous through a popular
radio series, the Shadow has since been featured also in
comic books,
comic strips,
television, and at least seven
motion pictures. Regardless, the Shadow is best regarded for its radio years, in which pulp crime fiction received perhaps its most compelling broadcast interpretation.
Even after decades, the unmistakable introduction from
The Shadow has earned a place in the American
lexicon: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"
The Shadow's birth as a furtive crime solver was practically an accident: the character's name first belonged to the
announcer (
James LaCurto and, later,
Frank Readick) of
Detective Stories, a radio show whose plots were drawn from the pulp magazine of the same name. The magazine was published by
Street and Smith, and the company aimed the radio program at boosting the magazine's circulation. The problem was that listeners found the announcer far more compelling than the stories — and began asking newsstands for copies of
The Shadow Magazine, though it did not exist.
Recognising the demand and responding promptly, Street and Smith commissioned
Walter B. Gibson to begin writing stories of
The Shadow. Using the pen name
Maxwell Grant, Gibson wrote a reported 282 out of 325
Shadow books over twenty years: a novel-length story a month. He initially fashioned the character as a man of villainous elements who used them to battle crime, clad in black and working predominantly after dark, burglarising in the name of justice, and terrifying criminals into vulnerability before he or someone gunned them down. The Shadow was a
noirish antihero in every sense.
The character evolved over his lengthy fiction life. In print, he slouched elusively beneath hat, cape, and often, a black mask, anticipating another popular radio anti-hero,
The Green Hornet. He also skulked in the shadows by his skill at concealing himself — at first. In due course, and in his most famous incarnation, the Shadow became an invisible man who supposedly learned "while traveling in the
Orient ... the mysterious power to cloud men's minds, so they could not see him."
In part, that new incarnation was born of necessity; radio's time constraint made it difficult to describe the Shadow hiding and nearly invisible. Some believe the Shadow a
hypnotist, as was explicitly mentioned in at least a few radio episodes; others contend that the Shadow could manipulate
Qi. But considering radio was not a visual medium, the Shadow's invisibility was easy enough to accept.
In print, the Shadow was born Kent Allard, a famed aviator who crashed in the
South American tropical jungles and, after making a fortune in that region, returned to the United States, arriving in
New York City and adopting numerous identities to cloak his return.
One of these identities was Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town. In fact Cranston was a separate character whom Allard resembled (see the story
The Shadow Laughs). While Cranston travelled the world, Allard passed himself off as him in New York. They sometimes met in order to impersonate each other (see
Crime over Miami).
In fact the Shadow had an entire network of agents who helped him in his fight against crime. These included: Harry Vincent, his most trusted associate; Moe Shrevnitz, a cab driver who doubled as his chauffeur; and Burbank, a radio operator who maintained contact between the Shadow and his agents.
Those whose relationship with The Shadow came through radio alone had to wait until the August
1937 publication of
The Shadow Unmasks to learn the truth; in this novel, Cranston revealed his true identity as Kent Allard.
The Shadow was long believed to have debuted on radio as a program in its own right
26 September 1937, on the
Mutual Broadcasting System. But the character actually premiered in September
1931, on
CBS, as part of the hour-long
The Blue Coal Radio Revue (named for the show's sponsor), featuring Frank Readick — the "Shadow" announcer of
Detective Stories — as the Shadow, and playing Sundays at 5:30 p.m. Eastern standard time. The stories also appeared on Thursday nights for a month, when
Love Story Drama (another Street and Smith creation) took the Thursday night slot — but also featured occasional portrayals of the Shadow.
Blue Coal had a long relationship with the Shadow, moving the radio series to
NBC in October
1932 with Readick playing the character on Wednesday nights now. Two years later, NBC ran the stories on Mondays and Wednesdays, both at 6:30 p.m., with LaCurto taking occasional turns as the title character. Three years later came the beginning of the half-hour drama radio buffs have remembered so well, with the then-unknown
Orson Welles as the Shadow, the show moving to Mutual, and the famous catch phrase now in full play.
Welles did not speak that signature line — Readick did, using a water glass next to his mouth for the echo effect. But Welles did make a credible Shadow, two years before his notoriety as the mastermind of
Mercury Theatre on the Air's production of
War of the Worlds.
After Welles left the role for a career in the cinema, The Shadow was portrayed by such actors as
Bill Johnstone,
Bret Morrison (the longest tenure, with ten years in two separate runs),
John Archer, and
Steve Courtleigh as Lamont Cranston/The Shadow. The radio show also introduced female characters into the Shadow's realm, most notably Margot Lane (played by
Agnes Moorehead among others) as Cranston's love interest and crime-solving partner (the character was eventually integrated into Gibson's pulp novels). In the 1994 movie, Margot's name was spelled "Margo." However, early scripts of the radio show clearly show that the character's name was spelled "Margot".
Once
The Shadow joined Mutual as a half-hour series, it did not leave Sunday evenings radio until
December 26,
1954. It outlasted the magazine that gave birth to it:
The Shadow Magazine ended with the summer
1949 issue, although Gibson wrote three new "official" stories between
1963 and
1980.
Some argue that
The Shadow birthed much of the concept we have come to know as the modern
superhero; such characters as
Batman and
The Green Hornet reference Lamont Cranston's
alter ego. Both characters operated mostly by night, and the Green Hornet in particular operated outside the law, insinuating himself into criminal plots in order to put an end to the activities of master criminals. But whereas the Shadow carried a real gun, the Green Hornet carried only a lightweight pistol that fired non-lethal gas and, later (on a short-lived television version) a retractable electronic laser "sting" used mostly to cut through thick barriers. While Batman briefly carried a pistol in his first few years, he quickly abandoned the use of weapons altogether; his creators are said to have feared that giving the character a
side arm would make him resemble the Shadow too greatly.
The Shadow was probably at least an indirect inspiration for a later radio hit,
The Whistler, whose
protagonist likewise knew "many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak," and whose calling card — a short, almost macabre whistle — was at least as familiar as
The Shadow's famous opening line. Interestingly, former Shadow Bill Johnstone once portrayed the Whistler.
In
1981,
The Shadow became one of the acknowledged influences for V, the title character in
V for Vendetta.
The Shadow is a prominent member of the
Wold Newton family.
In the Sin City novella "Family Values" a crook says Dwight "thinks he's the shadow" upon discovering his 2 nickel plated machine pistols.
Comic Books
The Shadow has been depicted in comic books several times, beginning with the comic strip of
Vernon Greene in
1938. Street & Smith published their own comic line for awhile and this included a
Shadow Comic that lasted 101 issues between 1940-48.
The next comic was the short-lived comic put out by
Archie Comics under their
Mighty Comics line. At first, the Shadow depicted was loosely based on the radio version (but with blonde hair), but in the third issue was turned into a camp superhero by
Jerry Siegel.
The most acclaimed depiction was in the
1970s Shadow comic written by
Dennis O'Neil and
Mike Kaluta published by
DC Comics. Other noteworthy Shadow comics from DC were created by
Howard Chaykin,
Andy Helfer and
Kyle Baker, and
Gerard Jones and
Eduardo Barreto, but made some radical changes in the character to bring him into the modern age.
Dark Horse Comics published three mini-series based on the character, include an adaptation of the 1994 movie. It also published a two-part team-up between The Shadow and
Doc Savage, another well-known pulp hero. The Shadow has also been adapted into the
Wold Newton family. And, an analogue of the Shadow, Green Hornet, and The Spider, also shows up in
Warren Ellis'
Planetary series as a member of Doc Brass' (Doc Savage) group of superheroes.
Films
The character has been adapted for
film numerous times. The movie
The Shadow Strikes was released in 1937, starring
Rod Larocque in the title role. Larocque returned the following year in
International Crime, although in this version "The Shadow" was merely a radio gimmick. A
serial starring
Victor Jory and two short subjects starring
Kane Richmond were each made in the
1940s. Richmond's Shadow, in fact, wore a black face-mask similar to the type worn by the serial hero The Masked Marvel.
In
1994, the Shadow was recast once again in a big-budget feature film,
The Shadow, starring
Alec Baldwin as Lamont Cranston/The Shadow and
Penelope Ann Miller as Margo [
sic] Lane. This time, Cranston was written as a disaffected veteran of
World War I who drifted through
Asia and ultimately became a brutal
warlord and
opium smuggler, until he was kidnapped by a
Tibetan order of monks and brought to their
monastery. A
tulku, their leader, recognizing the power of harnessing Cranston's inner darkness, reformed and trained him to use that darkness against
evil rather than for it. Cranston then learned how to confuse and control the minds of others, particularly how to become invisible except for his shadow. His nemesis in the film was an evil warlord and fellow
telepath named Shiwan Khan, the last descendant of
Genghis Khan, played by
John Lone. Their struggle eventually ended when Cranston threw a mirror shard into Khan's head; surgery saved his life, but it removed the front lobe of his brain, and thus the source of his telepathic powers. Though the storyline provided a certain logic to the old radio hit's suggestion that Cranston learned his dark art in the Orient, the film was a
box office bomb that never came close to launching the new
franchise planned for it.
Games
As a commercial tie-in, however, the Shadow was the theme for a
1994 pinball machine released by
Midway (under the
Bally label) to moderate success. It was the first game designed by Brian Eddy (
Attack From Mars,
Medieval Madness), and features original music composed by
Dan Forden.
Radio
But to most fans of the concept and the character, only one Shadow knows — the one with the telephone-echo-like voice, snickering devilishly at each step of unmasking a criminal's mind and crimes, balancing between true love and duty, and knowing what evil lurked in the hearts of men every Sunday for a quarter of a century on the radio.
1939 radio episode of The Guiding Light*
List of The Shadow stories*
TheShadowFan.com — The #1 source for all Shadow related items
*
The Shadow: Master of Darkness — Information on The Shadow in pulps, radio, comics, movies, and memorabilia. Includes fan art, fan fiction, polls, tidbits, and more.
*
The Shadow in Review — Reviews of the original Shadow stories, as well as "Two-Minute Mysteries", original short mysteries starring the Shadow
*
Pulp fiction.net — The Shadow*
Botar's Old Time Radio - free Mp3 downloads of The Shadow Radio Shows 1930's and 40's
