The Shadow Strikes (1937)

shadow-strikes-1937The Shadow kinda sorta strikes in this low-budget detective dishwater. Blink and you’ll miss him. The Shadow is in this movie just slightly more than Burt Reynolds is in this movie. Another rich old guy with a shady family gets killed in his study while he revises his will. Even the cops are bored with this case, so Lamont Cranston steps in to solve it under the guise of NOT The Shadow, but the identity of a lawyer whose identity he’s stolen in order to get more close to the suspects. Cranston gets away with this mostly due to all of the other characters in the movie having a box of Nilla Wafers for brains. We’re talking Generic City. Hand this script to anyone in the old Hollywood writer’s bungalows over breakfast and they could have it neatly re-written as a Philo Vance or Bulldog Drummond mystery by lunch time. It’s only distinguishing mark is that it’s poorly made even by 1930s B-movie standards, with some confusing editing in its most pivotal moments and a climax so dumb that it even made my cat hiss at the screen. Recommended only to the deepest diggers of the pulp mines.