The Shadow Knows, Knows Nada, Nada Nunca, Nada As Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Steps Up His Game-With Alex Baldwin’s “The Shadow” (1994) In Mind-A Film Review, Of Sorts

By Will Bradley  

The Shadow, starring Penelope Ann Miller, Alex Baldwin, John Lone, 1994

How the mighty have fallen. As the constant reader knows I have been on a tear the past year or so beginning with the expose of the legend around one Sherlock Holmes (where I locked horns with old man Seth Garth in an epic fourteen movie review struggle which between us left nothing much left of that silly so-called private detective and his boyfriend or whatever their relationship), or whatever his name really was since the London police files show Larry Lawrence on its books when he was arrested for transporting stolen goods and about thirty other similar charges and a couple more serious like conspiracy to murder which he and a few others did serious time for in Dartmoor, and his dear friend Doc Watson whose real name was Nigel something but don’t get hung up on names when dealing with legends since their various activities require such or their well-paid and padded press agents decided to spruce up their desperado names to appeal to the public’s fancy.

I won’t bore the reader with the litany of those whose reputations, over-inflated, bloated, undeserved or just plain false, lies so brazen that even a priest would be hard-pressed to give absolution, have been crushed and they are now ready for the trash barrel of history. I have taken my righteous campaign going back as far as Robin Hood and his press agent’s coverup of his nefarious doings when he came into some dough. This Robin Hood, for the record real name Robert Locklear or Lockwood the manse records are messy and show both spellings, for example, who was nothing but a gouging rack-renter once his patron King Richard, aka the Lion-Hearted, gave him plenty of acreage for services rendered and he became as oppressive a landlord in his lofty manor as any country squire. Forgot about those yeomen bandits who helped him with his armed robberies of rich and poor alike, whoever dared show their faces in and around Sherwood Forest up in the north of England. Shamed that Lady Marian, real name Holly, by what today would be called “pimping” her to the various courtesan when he found a younger woman, Ophelia.   

(I have refused thus far to take on the “big boys and girls,” the ancient Greeks and Romans, the cranky and crazed gods and goddesses for the simple reason that tracing the records is a bear of a job but I do have a lightweight line on Andromeda and Perseus which I am following concerning his alleged fight against the sea serpents to free her which looks like it was a put -up job worked out so he could “gain her favors,” ancient talk for hitting the sheets or however they covered themselves in their pursuit of lust, if they did, did cover themselves)

Here is the exciting news though and should help me a lot moving up the food chain in this crazy quilt pattern and cutthroat profession which I am only now beginning to navigate with some confidence. A recent UCal survey, poll, conducted in association with the well-known Harrison Foundation has shown a decrease in the belief in various legendary figures of late. The survey was simplicity itself with a broad cross section of the population represented, rich, poor, various genders, races a good mix from what I have seen so far in the preliminary report,  as the interviewee was asked about his or her belief in some figure, then told to read my or somebody else’s documented research and asked whether they were more likely, less likely or the same to believe in the legend. Almost across the board the ratings for these bums with nothing but high priced press agents and shills touting their deeds went down, especially a guy named Don Juan who legend was made of whole cloth by some pent up in a convent by a rich man’s hormonally-charged daughter and Captain Blood exposed as one of the worse of the worse Middle Passage slave trade transporters (and reportedly the person British painter Turner was thinking of when he painted his masterful “Slave.”) 

Naturally in any human endeavor there are failures, failures when people still believe despite all the evidence to the contrary in the validity of something. That was the case with one Johnny Cielo whose legend has kept me up many a night trying to figure out why with all the documentation that I have amassed his ratings actually “spiked” in this latest polling (I should note maybe reflecting the season that belief in angels has also spiked during this period). Fellow writers had shaken their heads when I started this legend-slaying campaign although once I showed them the poll results they have since backed off since especially among the older writers who were knee-deep in backstabbing me for their own purposes, mainly to not fall down the food chain further in my wake. They still though look at me with funny glances around the water cooler when I bring up my troubles breaking the Cielo legend. My whole idea is to get people to think more reasonably to shed their misconceptions, to shed their alternate facts universe in these troubled times when clear heads and clear thinking are necessary. Hence the heavy push against the fake Cielo legend.

A few Cielo details before I go on to my current task of busting up one Lamont Cranston and his shadow game. The genesis of my knowledge of the Cielo legend came from a fellow journalism graduate student who I knew at NYU and whom I had kept in touch with over the past few years. He had been down in Florida, down in the Keys, on an unrelated story which the parties had backed off on, didn’t show up to expose whenever they had to offer (something about CIA conduits to Cuba if I recall). He was sitting in the old Tanner Tavern trying to drown his sorrows and come up with some kind of story to earn his daily bread. While there an older guy, a drunk from the look of him, Billy something (here I really don’t remember the last name) came up and tried to cadge a drink from him.

My guy reluctantly bought him a whiskey, and a few more as the evening wore on, and as a result that loosened up Billy’s tongue about the old days in Key West. The days when Johnny Cielo roamed the space, roamed the skies by day and drank and whored by night. My guy had never heard of Johnny and so Billy spent the better part of an hour describing this and that about Johnny’s place in the early aviation pantheon which every serious aficionado knows about. (That part, the press agent bullshit part is at least true that the cultists know every detail about Johnny, especially in this part of Florida and the South in general)              

The rest of the story can be told by the researching I did after my fellow reporter told me the story since he knew I was looking for copy on these so-called legendary characters for my burgeoning by-line. The first tip of the Johnny iceberg was the claim that he has been the first guy to take human flight. This would seem to have been the straw that broke the camel back on the legend since I was able to retrieve a copy of his birth certificate from the Elmira clerk’s office showing one John Richard Cielo to have been born in 1910. The Wright boys did their magic at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The other kind of secondary piece of evidence for Johnny’s early days was that he gave Howard Hughes the idea for TWA and would have made millions if he had stayed with Hughes. The real deal Johnny was basically a low-rent flying mail postman who ran many operations to the ground before he had to hightail it out of the country with guys with guns breathing down his neck, and a reward on his head by some Chicago mobster who he tried to shake down.

That leaving the country is really where the Johnny legend is centered, that and his later so-called exploits before he fell into the sea. Yeah, his leaving for Barranca to run a mail operation down there is when all the bullshit got wings. See he was supposed to have talked movie icon drop-dead beautiful Rita Hayworth into leaving with him before she ran off with the Aga Khan after Johnny ran out of dough-and prospects. The reality. He had met a whore working some joy house in Hoboken named Sarah Lind, remember be wary of the truth of names in this stuff who did look like Rita and went with him figuring she was getting off cheap street with this good-looking guy (so-so, okay looks from the photos). A view of her photos taken later when Johnny’s money had run out and she had too from some men’s magazines, “girlie” magazines shows that her legs were nowhere as good as Rita’s and this tramp didn’t have a tenth of Rita’s style on her best days.     

I mentioned that Johnny later, in the late 1950s fell into the ocean, fell into the Gulf of Mexico. That location is important for the last really blasphemous part of the Johnny legend. That he was the guy flying arms and other supplies into Cuba for Fidel, Che and the hermanos and had fallen down into the Caribbean. All the flight manifests from Key West show Johnny flying a Piper Club, Jesus, a freaking tinplate Piper Club, taking well-heeled passengers to Naples down in Florida before he fell into the Gulf. To this day despite every denial by successive Cuban governments and every belief by those who want to see a romantic Amerciano helping the good guys that is the lynchpin of his legacy. That is the basis of the shrine, the heavy money-making shrine in the Keys which Johnny’s estate such as it was established to milk the whole thing for what it was worth. Yes, it will be tough to break that one if all the documentation has provided nothing but a spike in his legend. Damn.

But we must move on to the case of one Lamont Cranston, who claimed until his end at Bellevue where he spent the last twenty years of his life in the indigent ward that he was the so-called Shadow whose task was to rid New York City, also called Gotham, also called Metropolis, of crime and criminals. A one-man wrecking crew, ah, vigilante man. We will crack this one easily although I do feel some trepidation right now thinking that maybe one of the reasons for the durability of the Cielo legend is that he was an American and maybe there is as in a lot of things these days a sense of American exceptionalism, that all the modern recordable American legends have to be true. Baloney. (By the way I should point out that all these one-man or one-woman vigilante operations to rid New York City, Gotham, Metropolis of crime and criminals beyond questioning whatever nefarious motives they have is not borne out by the statistics. Per capita that town’s crime rate was no higher than say Roseville out in Kansas then, maybe now too with the epidemic of opioid addiction flooding the rural parts of the country.)

World War I, Lamont Cranston’s war, I will use that name despite the fact that the only person with that name in the 1920s was on the NYPD police blotter for selling jewelry from a push-cart without a license on 7^th Avenue and subsequently for a “bait and switch” con on so-called magic decoder rings, was hard on a whole generation of European and American youth. The effects hit Lamont like a ton of bricks, maybe shell shock is what he had although that diagnosis was in its infant stages back then, made him a Class A junkie before long. But instead of heading to Paris in the 1920s, in the Jazz Age he headed to Tibet and gathered in a serious opium addiction and lustful carryings on with a fistful of concubines-all at one time when he was really high. Then the Lama, Jimmy Lama if I am not mistaken, Lama in any case, took up his case, made him see that he was made for better stuff, made to see the better angel of his nature.

This Lama, no it wasn’t Jimmy but Jerry, yeah, Jerry Lama spent a ton of time giving Lamont the skill set to go back to America, go back to so-called cesspool NYC and clean house, make it livable for average joes to survive. One of the skills he picked up was the ability to transform himself via a joke store nose to look differently when he was doing his whirling dervish Shadow shtick. That and a silly eerie laugh fit in the end more fit for Bellevue than the mean streets of NYC. Yeah, the Shadow knows alright.

I grant that for a while this Cranston caught the public’s imagination although strangely during his escapades the crime rate in Gotham spiked before they put him in a safe place. Mostly I attribute that positive spin to his hiring a press agent, the famous society columnist John Kerr, and his reputation soared for a bit. Then the wheels came off his express. See back in Tibet the word was that Lamont was some progeny of one Genghis Khan, yes that Genghis whose nomadic marauding Mogol hordes at least according to some revisionist historians brought some stability and modernization to Central Asia in his day. DNA testing has proven once Lamont’s body was exhumed at the request of his estate to see the truth of that matter showed he was descended originally in the 14^th century from a pig thief in England who was hanged, hanged high in those days when stealing livestock meant something, especially when the stolen object was of royal or noble ownership.

Yeah so Lamont played out the Genghis Khan gag, along with his brother Don, the bad guy in the loop who like his forebear wanted to rule the known world. A known world much larger to conquer these days than the steppes of Central Asia which was child’s play for those lustful Mongol hordes. This Don Khan, this brother, arrived in H.G. Wells time machine fashion via a coffin delivered to the natural history museum in that town. After Don arrived all hell broke loose since all he cared about were two things-world conquest and bringing brother Lamont in on the deal as his hatchet man, as his alter ego maybe since Don too had been trained by Jerry Lama. No wonder this so-called Lamont character wound up in a straight- jacket, maybe they should have used two to be safe.

Of course when you have a guy like John Kerr sprucing up your legend, taking liberties with the truth you have to have some society dame in the mix or these Mayfair swells won’t read the column or buy into the legend. The love affair aspect here is provided by one Lois Lane, no Margo Lane, whose father allegedly was the real father of the atom bomb. More on him in a minute. We know that Lamont had some kinky sex habits when he was high as a kite on cocaine, opium whatever he could find in Xanadu, in the late Kubla Khan’s opulent opium den where Sam Coleridge earlier had picked up his habit by the sunless seas. This so-called society girl, this so-called Margo, was some call girl he picked up in a joy house he frequented on 8^th Avenue when he was looking for a “flute player” just because she said she could read Lamont’s mind. Not the hardest task in the world when somebody is looking for a little off-kilter sex.

Here is where things get interesting. The legend anyway. Don, Don Khan in case you forgot his name, that erratic symbiotic brother was interested in this Margo too, and for the same reason in the end but mainly because she had a certain style which could work with the guy who claimed to be the father of the atomic bomb. This bomb is what Don needed to play out his hand. Margo got handed back and forth and in the end she went with Lamont since he was more her speed than the defeated maniac Don. Done in by the NYPD wrapping up his operations off the East River. Well folks that is the legend, the legend the Mayfair swells bought into to keep the “people with the pitchforks” from Riverside Drive and other high number precincts in the 1920s and 1930s. In the end though they trusted their local coppers who at least they could bribe rather than another one of John Kerr’s paste-up jobs. Still legends die hard, especially modern legends which can be traced as I have been doing of late. For now though another bum-of-the-month down.