Review

Reviewed Work(s): Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial by
Scott Higgins
Review by: TANYA GOLDMAN
Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 70, No. 2 (WINTER 2016), pp. 106-107
Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26413775

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 hope there is sensuality and pleasure as well” (quoted in Byg,
Landscapes of Resistance, 5). Look no further than Straub’s
comments about Huillet’s “incredible” production notes, let-
ters, and schedules, some of which he seemed to be reading
for the first time for the purpose of their publication in Écrits
(2012), a French-language omnibus of Huillet-Straub docu-
ments in which a sizeable number of entries in Writings ap-
peared: “All these letters, Danièle wrote them behind my
back, after we had done very precise work at the film loca-
tions ... she would do it all by herself. It was an act of kind-
ness to leave me alone; there’s no other way to say it” (376).
That’s about as far as Straub would go in terms of putting
his emotions on record, but one can indeed sense a tender-
ness that belies his (and possibly Huillet’s) otherwise robust
personalities. Comrades in life and at work, their perspec-
tives and bonds remain largely underappreciated and yet
completely unshaken: this is what the texts in both Straub
& Huillet and Writings attest to, a showcase of the filmmak-
ing practice as a true labor of love.
CLARENCE TSUI is a Hong Kong–based film critic, an occasional pro-
grammer, and a part-time lecturer in Journalism and Film Studies courses
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His work has been featured in,
among others, Hollywood Reporter, South China Morning Post, and East
European Film Bulletin.
BOOK DATA Ted Fendt, ed., Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet. Vienna:
Austrian Film Museum/SYNEMA, 2016. $29.50 paper. 224 pages; Jean-
Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Writings, translated and edited by Sally
Shafto with Katherine Pickard. New York: Sequence Press, 2016. $32.00
paper. 624 pages.
TANYA GOLDMAN
Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the
Sound Serial by Scott Higgins
Sound serials violate nearly every law of “good” screenwrit-
ing. Flush with hollow character types, causally ambiguous
chains of events, wooden dialogue, and logic-defying escapes
from certain doom, they constitute what many would deem
bad objects. For Scott Higgins, however, this much-
maligned form deserves its scholarly due, as both a blueprint
for more contemporary modes of action, gaming, and serial
storytelling and as a reliable, albeit marginal, studio-
era workhorse characterized by “a tradition of creative
ridiculousness, visual brio, and distinctively outlandish story-
telling” all its own (2).
By turning its attention to this overlooked genre, Matinee
Melodrama widens the scope of studio-era history that has
largely been dominated by feature films. Between 1930 and
1956, studios such as Universal, Columbia, and Republic
106 WIN T ER 201 6
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produced over two hundred sound serials, each composed of
twelve to fifteen chapters. With new installments released
every week, these “quick, dirty, and unabashedly formulaic”
(3) tales of intrigue populated the screens of local movie
houses for upwards of three months at a time, drawing in
primarily youth audiences eager to take in the next episode.
Closer attention to this mode’s formal structures, Higgins
argues, reveals a greater range of narrative variation than a
strict emphasis on the feature film might otherwise suggest
and even an unexpected level of “artistry in a neglected
form” (26).
Higgins characterizes the Hollywood sound serial as rep-
resenting both “a mode of storytelling and a kind of game”
operating at the “intersection of melodrama and play” (10).
It is these two overlapping frames that ground his primarily
formalist study. Melodrama here refers not to Sirkian
weepies, but rather, the combinatory logic of situational dra-
maturgy, whereby an emphasis on sensational moments
supplants causality and psychological complexity. Action and
suspense, above all else, are the serial’s structuring principles.
This type of situation-driven narrative architecture,
Higgins contends, opens serials uniquely to iterations of play.
“Proceed[ing] moment by moment, drawing one spatially
delimited challenge at a time,” he explains, serials mimic the
levels of a video game (19). Rife with chases, kinetic fight
sequences, and cliffhangers that challenge viewers to puzzle
over potential solutions for the hero’s survival, this “most in-
cessantly physical of all studio-era genres” cultivates a
uniquely active level of embodied audience engagement;
serials operate as “game manuals” whose formulaic processes
and hero-versus-villain structures can be easily replayed and
mimicked on the playground by the form’s primarily
juvenile audience (21, 20). While acknowledging that narra-
tive is more important to the sound serial than the video
game, Higgins notes that both forms revolve around a set of
“concrete playable rules” and possess the capability to “bend”
narrative elements to allow play to continue (19–20).
Higgins’s study is rooted in his detailed formal readings
of a cross-section of sound serials produced during the gen-
re’s peak in the late 1930s and 1940s. Here, readers are intro-
duced to tales featuring characters that are either instantly
recognizable (Batman, Dick Tracy, the Lone Ranger) or
mostly forgotten (Captain Midnight, Mandrake the Magi-
cian, Tiger Woman). Higgins identifies the primary narra-
tive rules in each case, demonstrating how individual
episodes more or less adhere to a rigid five-act structure in
which action rises and falls like clockwork. Each fifteen- to
twenty-minute chapter opens and closes with a burst of
action culminating in the requisite cliffhanger. While the
action within individual episodes may move at a fever pitch,
it often does little to advance the series’ overall narrative arc.
Thus, Higgins describes the form’s singular logic as a puz-
zling mix of “narrative compression and willful inefficiency,
of intense repetition and seemingly endless extension, and of
breakneck action without forward progress” (27).
Highlighting the sound serial’s links to play, Higgins shifts
his focus to the form’s common typologies. At the heart of the
serial is “the weenie” (55), a term silent serial queen Pearl
White is said to have coined to describe the physical object
that sets the plot in motion as heroes and villains match wits
for its possession. In their quest for this MacGuffin-like prize,
dueling characters often travel through worlds populated
by bizarre machines and intricately designed trap devices
whose processes are granted considerable screen time and,
ultimately, rarely advance the action. Following work on
silent gag films and the silent serial, Matinee Melodrama sheds
considerable light on this kind of filmic proceduralism as
enacting an operational aesthetic vaguely akin to children’s
games. It is a style that, in foregrounding how things work,
solicits audience pleasure.
Within a narrative architecture that, Higgins argues, is
structured by action-driven game play, the villain serves as
a “game master [who] by laying traps . . . transform[s] the
world into a space of physical challenge, focusing the serial’s
operational aesthetics into a contest for survival” (63). In each
episode, of course, this contest terminates in a cliffhanger de-
manded by the genre. Drawing from psychology, Higgins
likens such formulaic endings to a “problem space,” defined
as “a participatory structure that cues viewers to seek some
piece of withheld knowledge” (77). By denying closure, he
suggests, cliffhangers extend audience engagement beyond
the theater as viewers are left to mull over potential solutions
to the seemingly impossible predicament. In other words,
viewers mentally play with potential solutions during the
weekly gap between installments.
While the unusually tight production schedules and shoe-
string budgets may help to explain serials’ formulaic tenden-
cies, Higgins demonstrates that opportunities did exist for
bravura storytelling and inventiveness. “Serial artistry,” he
argues, “tends towards refinement rather than invention”
(120). Higgins takes up two extended case studies of serials
made at Republic that elevated the form. The first, Daredev-
ils of the Red Circle (John English and William Witney, 1939)
is exemplary for its virtuosic use of the studio’s talented
stunt team and its skillfully choreographed fight sequen-
ces that adeptly navigated the frame, circumventing the
need for additional camera setups; the second, The Perils of
Nyoka (William Witney, 1942), is notable for the stunning
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complexity of its narrative world and its “unusually ambi-
tious” camerawork (155). Brief attention is also given to the
resourcefulness of Universal’s editors, who had the creative
audacity to craft a complete chapter of the Great Alaskan
Mystery serial (Lewis D. Collins and Ray Taylor, 1944) by
appropriating and recutting footage lifted entirely from a
1933 feature.
Higgins ultimately contends that the influence of the
sound serial lives on today in James Bond, Indiana Jones, and
Jason Bourne, devoting the instructive final chapter of Mati-
nee Melodrama to teasing out the resonances of this forgotten
form in some of today’s most popular media franchises. In
studying an early iteration of moving image seriality, Hig-
gins’s study may thus serve as a useful jumping-off point for
future scholars. As a whole, Matinee Melodrama demon-
strates the value of mining even the most prosaic of cine-
matic forms, and how its largely obscured tracks still guide
and propel mass entertainment.
TANYA GOLDMAN is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York
University. Her research focuses on mid-twentieth-century nonfiction
and documentary film as both a political and cultural practice.
BOOK DATA: Scott Higgins, Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in
the Sound Serial. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.
$90.00 cloth. $27.95 paper. $27.95 e-book. 224 pages.
JONATHAN KIRSHNER
Better Living through Criticism: How to Think about
Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A. O. Scott
Movie criticism, indeed professional criticism of any kind, is
a precarious enterprise. Two existential, inescapable chal-
lenges haunt the endeavor. There is something—the word
must be confronted—parasitical about the entire business.
Artists pour blood, sweat, and tears into their craft, only to
have some critic wander by, and, with a few aspiring-to-
be-clever words written on deadline, share their (perhaps
career-defining) musings on the matter. Or as Lou Reed put
it, with reference to one of the greatest rock critics in the
business, “Could you imagine working for a year and you
get a B+ from some asshole in the Village Voice?”
There is also the vexing matter of taste. Art, after all, is
art—not science. There is no right or wrong, and limited op-
portunities to share and establish “objective criteria.” No one
can tell you what to like—what you like is what you like,
and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is, ironically,
wrong. Moreover, tastes change, and even the most re-
spected voices of authority can be gob-smackingly mistaken.
Lewis Mumford, reviewing the Chrysler Building for the
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y 107