The Green Hornet, Episode 13: Doom of the Underworld

 "My job is finished..."

And so the serial ends... suddenly, within twenty minutes, but with finality. The Hornet rather efficiently foils the plot to blow up the offices of the Sentinel, and then foils the baddies entirely by using cunning to turn them against each other. It's all nicely done, incredibly cliched in the best possible way.

There is comedy, with Jenks and Axford, and Miss Case gets to finally meet her hero and, as we might expect, swoon over him. There is much banter at the end. And yet the end of the racket is unexpectedly brutal and violent, as movie serials can occasionally be.

This is, however, the end to a movie serial of the superior sort. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and shall be bavk for more before long.

The Green Hornet, Episode 7: Bridge of Disaster

 "Where will we go now?"

Yet again we have a similar variation of the racketerring plot we've had throughout, including truckers. There's more sabotaged brakes. There's more corporate intrigue.There's another murder, the kind of locked room mystery where there isn't much mystery. There's a cliffhanger that's par for the course as our heroes, in a truck, traverse a bridge that proceeds to fall into an abyss.

It's a sausage machine. This episode is yet another sausage. 

Thing is, though, yet again, that descibes pretty much all movie serials. And it's so much not the point. But, inyterestingly, it's usually the set pieces that make each episode stand out. But you can tellthis is a superior episode of va superior serial as this is not the case. This is all about intrigue and, unusually, there's relatively litte action- but it works.

That's a tribute not only to the script but the charismatic performance of Gordon Jones. 

Movie serials are... well, what they are. But the best ones, like this, fascinate.