Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy (1937)

ACE G-MAN --- WAGING A ONE-MAN WAR ON CRIME!

Dick Tracy's foe for this serial is the crime boss and Masked Mystery Villain The Spider/The Lame One and his Spider Ring. In the process of various crimes, including using his Flying wing and sound weapon to destroy the Bay Bridge in San Francisco and stealing an experimental "Speed Plane", the Spider captures Dick Tracy's brother, Gordon. The Spider's minion, Dr. Moloch, performs a brain operation on Gordon Tracy to turn him evil, making him secretly part of the Spider Ring and so turning brother against brother.

Date of release
1937-02-20
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (10)
Runtime
4h 50m
Genres
Crime, Action, Comedy, Thriller
Director
Ray Taylor, Alan James
Collection
Dick Tracy Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy (1937) is a 15-chapter Republic movie serial starring Ralph Byrd based on the Dick Tracy comic strip by Chester Gould. It was directed by Alan James and Ray Taylor.

Production

Dick Tracy was budgeted at $112,334 although the final negative cost was $127,640 (a $15,306, or 13.6%, overspend). It was the most expensive Republic serial until S O S Coast Guard was released later in the year.

It was filmed between 30 November and 24 December 1936 under the working titles Adventures of Dick Tracy and The Spider Ring. The serial's production number was 420.

In this serial, Dick Tracy is a G-Man (FBI) in San Francisco rather than a Midwestern city police detective as in the comic strip. Most of the Dick Tracy supporting cast and rogues gallery were also dropped and new, original characters used instead (for instance the characters of Tracy's girlfriend Gwen Andrews and his detective partner Mike McGurk were stand-ins for Tess Trueheart and Pat Patton respectively).

There were three sequels to this serial: Dick Tracy Returns (1938), Dick Tracy's G-Men (1939), and Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc. (1941). They were all permitted by an interpretation of the original contract, which allowed a "series or serial". That meant that Dick Tracy's creator, Chester Gould, was only paid for the rights to produce this serial but not for any of the sequels.

George DeNormand as Dick Tracy (doubling Ralph Byrd)

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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