How to Make a Movie about “The Shadow” with Zero Capes, No Spooky Powers, and a Lot of Screaming into Telephones
It’s 3:15 AM. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, the cold pizza on my desk is starting to look back at me, and I am currently watching a dapper man with a razor-thin mustache shouting at his female assistant while a bunch of guys in trench coats shoot at a bank vault, in a movie that claims to be about “The Shadow” but features exactly zero shadows.
Welcome, my friends, to the fast-talking, phone-slamming, and wonderfully low-budget world of Charles Lamont.
If you’ve never heard of International Crime, congratulations: you’ve never dug into the deepest, dustiest vaults of 1930s pulp adaptations. For the uninitiated, this film is based on the famous pulp-novel and radio hero The Shadow. But the filmmakers at Grand National Pictures had a very specific, highly confusing strategy:
- Buy the rights to a massive, spooky pop-culture icon who can cloud men’s minds and disappear into the darkness.
- Strip away his cape, his twin pistols, his spooky laugh, and his invisibility powers.
- Turn him into a dapper, slightly arrogant newspaper columnist who solves crimes by shouting at the police commissioner and typing really fast.
The result? International Crime (1938).
The “Plot” (If we can even call it that)
Lamont Cranston (played by Rod La Rocque) is a wealthy amateur sleuth, a daily newspaper columnist, and a popular radio host. He has a habit of solving high-profile crimes before the police can even get their boots on, which deeply annoys the local police commissioner.
Along with his incredibly sharp, fast-talking assistant Phoebe Lane (Astrid Allwyn), Cranston investigates a suspicious bank heist. What looks like a simple robbery turns out to be a massive, highly convoluted conspiracy involving international bonds, fake theater tickets, and a ring of foreign counterfeiters who want to crash the US financial market.
It is a classic 1930s “screwball mystery”—essentially, a movie where people shoot at each other for ten minutes, and then spend the remaining fifty minutes trading rapid-fire insults in wood-paneled offices.
Why You Need to Watch This Tonight
- The Great “Shadow” Scam: If you go into this expecting the dark, spooky, cloaked vigilante of the pulp novels, you are in for a hilarious shock. Rod La Rocque’s Lamont Cranston is a cheerful, dapper guy in a perfectly tailored three-piece suit who solves crimes with a typewriter and a telephone. He is basically the opposite of a silent creature of the night.
- The Mile-a-Minute Dialogue: The characters in this movie speak at an absolutely blistering speed. It feels like they are being paid by the word and have to finish the entire script before their lunch break. If you blink, you will miss three plot points and five dry wisecracks.
- Phoebe Lane is the Real Hero: Astrid Allwyn plays Phoebe (the equivalent of Margo Lane from the books), and she is easily the best part of the movie. She is cynical, highly competent, refuses to take Cranston’s arrogant nonsense, and spends the entire movie trying to scoop his column so she can get a raise.
- The Glorious Monogram-Era Budget: You can practically smell the cheap paint on the recycled office sets. Every car chase features the exact same two black sedans driving past the exact same generic Los Angeles street corner three times in a row.
The Verdict
Is it a masterpiece? No, it’s a standard, formulaic 1930s B-movie. But at a lightning-fast 64 minutes, it is incredibly charming and highly entertaining. It is a perfect, cozy late-night watch for when you want to turn off your brain and listen to dapper people from the Great Depression yell at each other in crisp, mid-Atlantic accents.
My Rating: 3 out of 5 frantic telephone calls to the city editor.
Wanna see a dapper radio detective tackle some global counterfeiters?
Grab a hot drink, put on your favorite trench coat, and search for this classic 1930s mystery on your favorite retro cinema platform. Because it has slipped into the public domain, you can watch Lamont Cranston tackle “international crime” completely free and legally.
[WATCH “THE SHADOW in INTERNATIONAL CRIME (1938)” ON YOUTUBE (Opens in a new window)]
