Fridays in April 2025 | 25 Movies
While “pulp fiction” usually brings to mind hardboiled crime tales, the term actually refers to any type of story that appeared in magazines or novels that were cheaply produced on wood pulp paper from the 1890s to the 1950s. Crime and detective yarns were certainly common examples, but so were other genres, from fantasy and science fiction to adventures of all sorts. Fridays in April, TCM pays tribute to the field with 25 movies based on stories that were published in the pulps.
The first night, devoted to adventures, leads off with Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). The character of Tarzan had been created by prolific American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose “Tarzan of the Apes” was published in installments, starting in 1912, in the pulp magazine “The All-Story.” In 1914 it was published as a novel—so successful that Burroughs went on to write 23 more Tarzan stories. He later recounted that he had become a writer after reading countless pulp magazine stories that he found “rotten.” He said, “Although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.” After he came up with the idea for “Tarzan of the Apes,” he “wrote [it] evenings and holidays..., in longhand on the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper. I did not think it was a very good story and I doubted if it would sell. But [editor] Bob Davis saw its possibilities for magazine publication.”
For this first Tarzan picture of the sound era, which became a smash hit and instant classic, MGM originally cast Herman Brix in the title role. When he injured his shoulder on another film, Tarzan was recast with Johnny Weissmuller, a two-time Olympic swimming champion with barely any acting experience. (Brix, later known as Bruce Bennett, went on to play the character in a 12-chapter, 1935 serial entitled “The New Adventures of Tarzan.”) Weissmuller’s screen career was defined almost entirely by his 12 Tarzan films for MGM and RKO. He went on to play a similar character in 13 low-budget “Jungle Jim” movies for Columbia, but it is Tarzan for which he is far and away most remembered—even though Burroughs himself never cared for Weissmuller’s version of the character, which did away with the backstory of Tarzan having been the cultured son of an English lord and who was raised by apes after his parents were killed.
Lost Horizon (1937) is a thrilling adventure of a different sort. A group of Westerners flee war-torn China by plane, withstand a mysterious hijacking and endure a crash landing on a remote mountaintop, where to their astonishment they are rescued by a caravan of mountain dwellers and brought to the utopian Shangri-La—a warm, verdant canyon whose inhabitants age at a glacial pace. The film was based on a novel by British writer James Hilton, which was first published in 1933 and reached bestseller status in 1935 after Hilton’s follow-up, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” became a huge bestseller itself. In 1939 it was published again as the first mass-market paperback, with dozens of printings in the years to come.
The idea for this spellbinding tale sprang from Hilton’s unease about the state of Europe at the time, with its slow but steady drumbeat toward war. Drawing on his interest in Tibet and Eastern philosophies as well as memories of a trip to a Swiss mountain valley, he came up with Shangri-La, which in the Tibetan language translates phonetically as “secret mountain pass.” The novel immediately attracted director Frank Capra, who had been itching to move away from pure entertainments and incorporate greater social meaning into his pictures. Capra convinced Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn to buy the rights and commit the biggest budget the studio had ever allocated to a single project. Yet the film took so long to shoot and edit, only to then be subjected to years of unfortunate trims, which to this day have not been completely restored, that it’s something of a miracle it turned out to be so enthralling. Lost Horizon also features one of the defining roles for the dashing Ronald Colman, who plays the protagonist Robert Conway. Capra wrote that Colman essentially “played himself,” and according to Colman’s daughter Juliet, the character’s yearnings embodied Colman’s own idealistic search for beauty in real life. Colman even had a personal “Shangri-La” in the form of his beloved Santa Barbara ranch.
Pulp crime stories take center stage in the second night of programming, devoted to film noir, as well as the third night, devoted to “villains and detectives.” The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Murder, My Sweet (1944), films noir that also feature two of the most famous detectives of the hardboiled genre, kick things off. Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” introduced detective Sam Spade when it was serialized in the pulp magazine “Black Mask” in 1929, then was published as a novel in 1930. Warner Bros. acquired the screen rights and turned out a solid 1931 film version and a best-forgotten 1936 remake. Five years later, screenwriter John Huston chose it yet again as the basis for his first directorial effort, which turned out to be not only a great film but one of the most influential early examples of film noir.
Hammett, who had once worked as a Pinkerton detective and whose first name was actually Samuel, said he created Sam Spade as an “idealized” detective. As personified by Humphrey Bogart’s star-making performance, Hammett’s creation did much to change the perception of movie detectives going forward: as a little unsavory, cynical, not fully on the side of the law. With sharp dialogue that comes almost entirely from Hammett’s pen, The Maltese Falcon is a joy to experience, as unforgettable characters played by Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook Jr. spar, scheme, lie, outwit and double-cross one another. For all involved, as well as generations of audiences, it is truly the stuff that dreams are made of.
Murder, My Sweet was adapted from Raymond Chandler’s 1940 pulp novel “Farewell, My Lovely,” the second to feature detective Philip Marlowe (after 1939’s The Big Sleep). RKO had already adapted the novel into a 1942 B film, The Falcon Takes Over, but very quickly they mounted this new, darker and brilliant 1944 version, directed by Edward Dmytryk and shot by Harry J. Wild in quintessential noir style. Dick Powell’s performance as Marlowe was a revelation. The star had been trying to break free of musicals for years and badly wanted this role—and a new screen image. Dmytryk wasn’t so sure. “The idea of the man who had sung ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ playing a tough private eye was beyond our imaginations,” he recalled. But in the end, the studio took a chance on Powell, though for safety they changed the title from Farewell, My Lovely because polls showed it sounded to audiences like another musical. Powell proved himself perfect as the jaded, hardboiled gumshoe, delivering brilliantly sarcastic dialogue with confidence, such as: “She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who’d take a drink if she had to knock you down to get the bottle.” Raymond Chandler later declared Dick Powell to be his favorite screen Marlowe.
In a lighter vein are topnotch entries in two of the many film series of the era that centered on detectives and sleuths. The Saint in New York (1938) was the first of eight RKO films based on the Saint, a nickname for the urbane thief and amateur detective Simon Templar. British-Chinese writer Leslie Charteris created the character in 1928, but it was the 15th Saint novel, “The Saint in New York,” that would become the big breakout (and is still considered the finest entry). After an abbreviated version of the story appeared in a 1934 issue of “The American Magazine,” the full-length novel was published the next year and became a sensation, so popular that RKO chose it as the first of their film series. Louis Hayward gave the Robin Hood-like character the dashing free-spiritedness it called for, but was replaced in the next film by George Sanders. (Hayward did return to the role 15 years later, in the 1953 Hammer production The Saint’s Return.)
Warner Bros., meanwhile, had by this time just wrapped up its own six-film series centered on Perry Mason, the lawyer/sleuth creation of writer Erle Stanley Gardner. The first of the six, The Case of the Howling Dog (1934) remains arguably the best Perry Mason feature film to date. Gardner started writing stories for the pulps in 1921; 12 years later he penned the first of over 80 eventual Perry Mason novels. “The Case of the Howling Dog” was his fourth such story and was serialized in “Liberty Magazine” in early 1934 before being released in novel form that June. The film version opened in late September, with the rascally Warren William as the upright but occasionally unethical Mason. Alan Crosland, a major director of the silent era now helming programmers, kept the camera moving and the pace fast despite the script’s talkiness, resulting in a neat, atmospheric mystery with some welcome ambiguity—especially in the character played by Mary Astor, who for a while seems like a precursor to Astor’s duplicitous Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon.
The fourth and final night of this series is devoted to sci-fi and fantasy, including one of the most seminal of all science fiction films, The Thing from Another World (1951). It’s the tale of scientists at a research station in the Arctic who find a flying saucer and alien frozen in the ice, only for the alien to thaw out and become a lethal, shape-shifting terror. The film’s blend of sci-fi and horror was revelatory—and an influence on countless movies to come, from Little Shop of Horrors (1960) to Alien (1979) to sci-fi films of today. The script was drawn from a short story entitled “Who Goes There?” written by John W. Campbell under the pen name Don A. Stuart and published in a 1938 issue of “Astounding Science-Fiction” magazine. In 1948, the story was reprinted in a collection of Campbell’s work entitled “Seven Tales of Science Fiction.” The film is credited to director Christian Nyby and producer Howard Hawks, but it is commonly believed that Hawks was the driving force behind the storytelling; Nyby had edited several of Hawks’s films and was his protégé. Either way, the tension that the film creates is relentless and unforgettable.
For a full list of films, see the programming schedule.
