Customer Reviews

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Enjoyable movie with good performances by all the actors, especially Ron Ely. Working with a very limited budget, they did an excellent job. It's a shame the sequel mentioned at the end of the film was never made. I recall this being out in theaters when I was a kid, but for some reason never got around to seeing it until an adult. But watching it, you see the numerous similarities between this and the Indiana Jones flicks. I'm sure Spielberg got the main idea from this movie. It's a shame the film isn't more well known and gets the credit it deserves. Some people seem to have a problem with the "campiness" of this film, however I think that's what makes the film.

By the way, I noticed some dealers on Amazon are selling this DVD (new) starting at double the price (one even for $60!!), for what you can get for a fraction of that price directly on the Warner Archives DVD online store, as well as many other WB oldies that were never previously released on DVD. So avoid the ripoff artists charging at least double the price and get it directly from the source. Hopefully Amazon will offer them soon on here at the same or lower price.

This film is very good, but has one critical flaw-the campiness! I realize it made Mystery Science Theater 3000, and that is the best compliment that a bad film can have.

I say that this film is good for several reasons. First, the story is faithful to the original story. Compare that to the fast and loose "Superman" and "Batman" movies, which were good films, but ran roughshod over the origin stories.

Secondly, and with the one exception of Monk, this film is perfectly cast. Going by the book descriptions, the actors look like the characters they play: Ham looks like Ham, Renny is uncannily like Renny, and Habeas Corpus looks like a pig, although with smaller ears. By the way, Habeas wasn't in the first novel, and they left out Ham's pet monkey Chemistry, thank goodness!

To his credit, Michael Miller plays the part that he was cast to play quite well, and he is great and charming actor. However, he was miscast as a character, and that was the main problem. Especially, since Monk is one of the main characters in the book. Other members of the brain trust come and go, but Doc, Ham and Monk are the Holy Trinity of the 181 super-sagas. I think the produces didn't want to have two muscle-bound characters, and fat people always seem to be jolly. The fat man/thin man interplay with Ham and Monk works for the film, but it isn't quite right for what should be done.

The hardware is also superbly done. Basically Doc Savage is a Depression James Bond, and it was a tread to see the retro-technology that would have been used by a genius in the 1930's. The answering machine says it all.

So now to the John Phillip Sousa music. It works with me, since Doc Savage isn't a hero, but he is the first-the prototype-Superhero. He is even prior to Superman, who was really a rip-off of Doc Savage. Sorry Mr. Seinfeld! The music adds patriotic majesty and "oomph" to what Doc Savage is all about. Keep in mind, this was made in 1975, a year before the Bicentennial, when we has a spike of patriotism, just like after the 9/11 attacks. It is no shame to love your country!

The campiness is not as bad as it seems. The wild success of the Adam West "Batman," is the reason why this film was done in that vein. You had everyone wanting to be a part of "Batman." Just look at the guest villains, such as Caesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, and the weird cameos when they were scaling the walls with the bat ropes. I think the studio wanted to try to reproduce the feel of "Batman," but it didn't work. And it looks quite lame with 20/20 hindsight.

Sadly, this is all we Savagites have to tide us over. There were rumors of Arnold Schwartzeneggar as Doc Savage. His body is right, but the accent is all wrong. A pre-accident Christopher Reeve would be ideal, and there is always hope that we can clone Orson Welles, but other than that, I don't know of anyone who could play Doc, except Nicholas Cage. Just Kidding!

All in all, this movie isn't as bad as it first seems, and the floating snakes are downright creepy. At least they freaked me out as a four year old kid when I saw this in a drive in. But I date myself!

This is Producer George Pal's (the George Lucas of the 1950s) last film. He spent the rest of his life working on the Paramount lot trying to put together a few final productions. Pal had some great source material with Doc Savage. Bantam reprinted nearly all of the Doc Savage novels from the pulp era, and Doc became something of a cult hero on campuses in the 1960s. But Pal made the mistake (possibly at the studio's urging) to go campy with this production. Campiness has not worked when working with a hallowed hero like Doc. A few years later Dino DeLaurentiis camped up Flash Gordon with similar disappointing results. It's too bad no one else has tried to make a Doc Savage movie. For now, this is all Doc Savage fans have. Despite the John Phillip Souza marches and the tongue-in- cheek patriotism, there's a few things to like about this film. Ron Ely makes a decent Doc Savage. The casting of his "Fantastic Five" assistants is really good. And the plot stays pretty close to that of the first book in the series. It's a shame that one of the pulp era's most popular creations was treated so shabbily. But it's only been recently that Hollywood has treated super heroes with respect. If Pal had treated it more like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" instead of "Batman" this might have been memorable. Maybe one day someone will remake Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze the way it should be made. Until then, this video is probably only for die-hard Doc fans. END

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, while awkwardly out of time and a general source of embarrassment to most lifelong fans of Lester Dent's archetypal pulp-literature hero, is nevertheless an oddly entertaining and likable film.

Viewed without prejudice, it succeeds on the level of classic action-adventure marred only by an unfortunate overdose of comedy relief courtesy of Monk, the Lost Stooge. The "real" chemical wizard was, like Doyle's Prof. Challenger, a tough anthropoidal brawler whose trademark shenanigans contrasted his brutish appearance. Not a pallid Curly with muttonchops.

The rest of the supporting cast play their respective print counterparts convincingly. And as Doc, the Supreme Adventurer, Ron Ely is as close to the mark as anyone could possibly be.

Having watched this movie more than 30 times over the years, I no longer refer to it as a guilty pleasure. Just a pleasure.

This is one that should come out on DVD. Great one liners and sight gags. Doc is the hero that every man should strive to be. Nothing gets him down, and the tougher things get the tougher he comes back at them. Armed with courage, determination, resources that would make Bruce Wayne proud and his band of loyal associates; he fights evil and wins the admiration of the dames. Plus it includes some of the cheeziest snake FX ever. Two thumbs up and half a glass of milk out your nose; watch it and appreciate that all movies do not have to be big budget blockbusters to be enjoyed and watched again and again.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. The characters were entertaining, the scenery beautiful, and the plot interesting. Comparing this movie with many of today's movies on the Cable, etc., it is far superior. Doc Savage's character is flawless; he is always "cool", and morally superior. His five sidekicks (six, including the pig) are amusing, and their individual personalities make for variety in the plot. There was supposed to be a sequel, and I am still trying to find it. There is only one Doc Savage (Ron Ely), and I would like to see the sequel very much.

Saw this movie when it came out with my dad. Loved it. Thank you Warner for finally releasing this film. Beware of the guys selling this film for such outrageous prices though. I am totally devoted to Amazon, and it is usually my go to place for rare and hard to find films. I found myself browsing the Turner Classic Movie Dvd Vault tonight. This film is available for $17.99 along with an incredible number of films never before released on dvd. I have been searching for the movie Angel Baby, with George Hamilton which I saw as a kid. Found it in the TCM archives among the films that have been recently released, or are coming to dvd, along with East Of Eden- with Jane Seymour, and the Kirk Douglas classic Ulysses. Shop around before paying such outrageous prices. I never thought that TCM would have better prices than Amazon but now I know.

When this movie came out I happened to be dating women with kids ranging from six to sixteen and taking the ladies and their kids to see this movie at a Saturday matinee was one of the best dating experiences I ever had.

Not only is Doc himself as ideal a role model today as he was more than thirty years ago - combining strength, intellect, compassion, humor and good table manners - but the team of his loyal friends demonstrate that every person has unique talents and skills without which the group as a whole could not function.

As clearly as the film gets that message across, though, it does so with grace and charm instead of banging one on the head with moral superiority. It's a fun film, first and foremost, and my grandchildren (and I!) enjoy it as much today as my former girlfriends' kids did long ago.

The 1930's was the heyday of Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, the Spider, the Green Hornet, Captain Midnight, Gene Autry, Flash Gordon, and eventually Superman and Batman. A great pantheon of pop culture heroes flourished in pulp magazines, comic strips, radio shows, and movie serials.

The 1960's gave us Adam West as Batman, Derek Flint, Maxwell Smart, 007, and many other hero spoofs(not to mention the theater then unfolding in the socio-political realms); the concept of the hero emerged from this period battered and shaken.

The early 1970's saw the emergence of a new type of rather angry anti-hero: Dirty Harry, Shaft, Billy Jack, Superfly, etc.

George Pal had accurately predicted the sci-fi craze of the 1950's, and so he produced the first picture of that cycle as well as producing the classic and best versions of `War of the Worlds' and `The Time Machine'. George Pal correctly understood that by the mid-1970's the collective unconscious of America was hungry for a return of the old school hero, 1930's style.

George Pal knew that to make an adventure of this sort with a hero like Doc Savage that you had to somehow acknowledge the absurdity of it all. Unfortunately, while Indiana Jones and the Rocketeer gave the audience the equivalent of a knowing wink, Doc Savage's director stopped just an inch short of having Doc Savage slip on a banana peel. This film, then, is an uneasy mix of authentic 1930's style pulp magazine adventure and ham-fisted attempts at camp.

The single worst thing in this film is the soundtrack, a creative but ultimately dreadful batch of John Phillip Sousa marches, including a custom Doc Savage lyric, which is especially loathsome. It is indeed fortunate that a good many parts of this film managed to escape this score.

Negatives aside, this film will be mildly enjoyable to fans of pulp magazines, old comics, radio and serial heroes, etc. Fans of Doc Savage should be mollified by the many elements of the source material which were faithfully realized, and that compared to more recent super-hero flicks, the writers took relatively few liberties. Overall, the cast is pretty good, and Ron Ely looks exactly like the vision of Doc Savage on the covers of the original pulps. I think he pulls off the role pretty well. And there are old style cars, airplanes, clothes, and fight scenes, so it's a pretty fun ride.

George Pal might have missed the mark here, but not by much. Just a year after this film came `Star Wars,' which was basically a retooling of the old Flash Gordon serials. In 1978 came `Superman, the Movie.' Two years after that came the 1st Indiana Jones flick, set smack dab in the 1930's, just like Doc Savage. All of these latter productions, however, benefited by taking their source material or inspiration just a little bit more seriously than Pal did.

But since `Doc Savage,' more1930's throwback films have flopped than succeeded, at least commercially: `The Legend of the Lone Ranger,' `The Phantom,' `The Rocketeer,' `The Shadow,' and `Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.' All of these were big budget affairs. For some reason, certain persons amongst us are irresistibly drawn to that long lost decade, when imagination populated the world with mythic heroes. Too bad these heroes usually remain one step beyond our reach.

There's a fine line between clever and stupid. In 1975, George Pal brought the first action hero -- Doc Savage of 1930s pulp magazine fame -- to the silver screen. The film sank without a trace at the box office, and it lives only due to Doc Savage fans, who groan their way through it, wondering at what might have been.

You'd have thought this would have shown that an action-adventure hero based in the 1930s would be box office poison, but only six years later, George Lucas began his Indiana Jones series. There's a fine line.....

DOC SAVAGE is suitable for all auiences. In our house it is a favorite of pre-school grandsons.