Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

As co-creator of Doc Savage, author Lester Dent retained the radio, film, and television rights to the character as part of his contract with Street & Smith Publications, publishers of the Doc Savage pulp magazine. Although Dent succeeded in launching a short-lived radio program, he was never able to interest Hollywood in a Doc Savage film. Upon Dent's death in 1959, his widow, Norma Dent, acquired the radio, film, and television rights to Doc Savage.

The production team of Mark Goodson and Bill Todman announced the intention to produce a Doc Savage film to cash in on the popularity of the re-issued pulp novels by Bantam Books and the James Bond craze sweeping the movies. The film would be based on the July 1934 pulp novel The Thousand-Headed Man, with Chuck Connors as Doc, for a 1966 release. Unfortunately, the producers and Condé Nast Publications, the new copyright owner of the Doc Savage brand, failed to secure the film rights from the estate of Lester Dent. By the time the legal issues had been resolved, the production team and cast had moved on to do the offbeat western Ride Beyond Vengeance.

Only the one-shot comic book movie tie-in published by Gold Key, with cover artwork by James Bama, remains to mark this aborted film undertaking.

"I've always enjoyed browsing in book-stores," George Pal said later. "I kept noticing these stacks of Doc Savage paperbacks; every time I would come back to the store this stack would get smaller and smaller. When I found out more about this fantastic character I realized what a wonderful film this could make."[1] In August 1971 George Pal announced he had secured the film and television rights to 181 Doc Savage novels from Norma Dent. Pal wanted to start production on a Doc Savage film by the end of the year.[2] He said getting the rights involved "long and difficult negotiating."[3]

Prior to filming Pal said "In the last six years the Doc Savage Bantam books, the reprints alone, have sold 11,400,000 copies. It's an awful lot of copies! Somebody buys them. I figure my audience are the people who read those books, plus I think we can create enough excitement about Doc Savage to attract the people who don't know about him. I'm sure we can get most of the kids, most of the science fiction fans, and most of the nostalgia buffs who remember Doc Savage."[4]

Pal wanted to make "several Doc Savage pictures. After the first one is successful, we'll make another one, and then we'll sell the series to television. By that time, every network will fight for it. At least, that's my conviction."[4]

Pal originally contacted Steve Reeves for the role of Doc Savage but when filming was about to begin a Hollywood writers strike put the film on hold, and Reeves and the original director were replaced.[5]

In January 1974 Pal announced that Michael Anderson would direct the movie for Warner Bros. The first movie would be Man of Bronze and the second film in the series - which had already been written - was Archenemy of Evil.[3]

"With luck I will produce all 181 movies," said Pal. "The pictures will be pure escapism. But they will be well done because we take great pride in the rebirth of Doc Savage."[3]

Pal said when they started they considered making The Man of Bronze, the first Doc Savage book but then decided to come up with their own story, Doc Savage The Arch Enemy of Evil. "We were going to make the best Doc Savage movie we could, the best story we could ever think of" and they combined several stories.[4]

However Pal says "When we finished the screenplay we discovered something: we don’t know who Doc Savage is! Who were his parents? Why is he so wealthy? How did all this happen? And it was all there in The Man of Bronze." So they went back and wrote another screenplay based on Man of Bronze. It was decided that Arch Enemy would be the sequel.[4]

Pal and Joe Morhaim wrote the screenplay based on The Man of Bronze, the first Doc Savage adventure, with additional story elements from other Doc Savage adventures, such as the November 1938 novel The Green Death and the January 1935 novel The Mystic Mullah. The villainous Captain Seas, played by Paul Wexler, was based on the flamboyant and brutal Captain Flamingo — unrelated to the Canadian television character of that name — from the February 1936 pulp novel Mystery Under the Sea.

Pal kept the story a period tale. "We do it correctly, we don't hit it hard. We use much of the dialogue of Doc Savage, straight out of the books. It’s wonderful. A bit campy today, but it's wonderful. It's honest. It's the way they talked."[6] Pal did not want to set it in modern times because "You couldn't believe the Doc Savage code if somebody said it today. But coming from Ron Ely, and this proves what a great actor he is, you say: "I don't believe what he says, but I’m with him!" It shifts you back to a time when heroes were heroes and men were men. You can't help but be inspired by it."[6]

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze was fairly faithful to the novels and characters, which included such elements as:

• Doc's trilling (although it sounded like bells tinkling rather than a more lifelike trilling (such as a cat purring))
• Bickering between Monk and Ham
• Renny's signature expletive "Holy Cow!"
• Renny's love of slamming his fists through solidly constructed doors or door-panels.
• Monk's pet pig, Habeas Corpus
• Doc's Fortress of Solitude
• The penthouse headquarters on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building.
• The Crime College and Doc's brain surgery techniques to remove the criminal element from crooks he'd captured, making them incapable of committing further crimes.
• Doc's dramatic descent down a skyscraper elevator shaft
• Doc's daily two-hour exercise regime
• Doc standing on an automobile's running board in hot pursuit.
• Johnny's use of long, obscure words when simple words would suffice.
• Johnny's signature expletive "I'll be superamalgamated!"
• A plethora of retro gadgetry such as heat detector, globes of fire-fighting chemicals (extinguisher globes), phonograph-based recording machine, remote-controlled aircraft, a ray gun disguised as a cigarette lighter, lightweight bullet-proof vests, miniaturized SCUBA-type underwater breathing gear, and the Whizzer, a prototype helicopter—all his inventions and designs.

Other aspects of the Doc Savage mythos were modified for the movie. For example, the film takes place in 1936, but the original pulp novel was published in March 1933. Most Doc Savage chronologies place the events in The Man of Bronze in early 1931 prior to the official opening of the Empire State Building, the implicit location of Doc's 86th floor penthouse headquarters. The film does not mention that Doc's father, Professor Clark Savage Sr., was instrumental in raising his son from the cradle to become the supreme adventurer under the tutelage of a blue-ribbon group of distinguished scientists. The Seven Seas is actually the name of Doc Savage's private motor yacht in the pulp novels written by Lester Dent. Finally, Long Tom (Paul Gleason) mentions that Monk, Ham, Renny, Johnny, and he first met Doc Savage while fighting in the trenches during World War I and vowed to work together against evil-doers after the war. Finally, the opening titles used the same typography (pictured) used in the Bantam Books reprints of the Doc Savage pulp novels.

Pal admired Michael Anderson and had tried to make Logan's Run with the director (Anderson ended up making it with another producer). Anderson came on board Doc Savage. "I like his style," said Pal. "He’s a sensitive director. Working with him has been a joy and a pleasure. We went through the story very much in detail before finishing the script and pool lots of his ideas into it. "[6]

"It's very hard to put something dirty into Doc Savage, or for that matter, real violence," said Pal. "We'll have a certain amount of sex...but we don't want to get him rolling around in bed. We won’t have that. That's the only thing that makes a Bond picture GP rather than G, it’s when they go overboard with sex. I don’t think a little sex will offend. These are adventure movies. I want to be true to Doc Savage. He doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, he's the arch-enemy of evil. I think people are ready for a real hero."[6]

In January 1974 Pal said the actor who played Savage "must be an unknown. He must play the prototype hero. He has to be at least six foot one with blonde hair and bronze skin. Dent described him as having blue eyes with a glint of gold." Pal added "you'd be surprised at the number of big stars who have applied for a part."[3]

By the end of that month Ron Ely had been cast.[7][8] At the time Ely was best known for playing Tarzan on television; he says he had been typecast and was unable to find roles in the USA afterwards, so mostly worked in Europe.[9]

Ron Ely's involvement extended beyond starring in the lead role. The portrait of Professor Clark Savage Sr., in Doc Savage's penthouse headquarters is Ely wearing a vintage safari outfit and pith helmet, with a handlebar moustache. Paul Frees, provided the uncredited voiceover narration for the opening title sequence.

Filming began 23 January 1974. Principal photography was done in southern California. Scenes involving the fictitious Eastern Cranmoor Building in New York City were filmed underneath the clock tower of the art deco Eastern Columbia Building in downtown Los Angeles.

Pal said "I have been on the set practically all the way through, in order to pick up on anything that he may have missed or reversed. He welcomed it. because in that way he used me as a sounding board. I wouldn't mind Michael to direct every picture of mine because we work so well together. I couldn't have directed this picture myself because it wouldn't have been right for the project. As a producer. you must keep an overview. "[6]

The film features a rare Cord Model 810 convertible coupe (license number NY 36 486–539) and a vintage Lockheed L-12A Electra aircraft, serial number 1203, original tail number NC16077, first registered to Continental Oil in 1936. The plane became famous as G-AFTL when flown by Sidney Cotton, who used it for spying on the Germans during World War Two. It was later owned by air-show pilot Art Scholl and flown in the 1976 two-part TV miniseries Amelia Earhart, the 1976 CBS-TV adventure series Spencer's Pilots, and the 1977 TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes.

Debate continues as to who was responsible for the camp content of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, the studio or George Pal and his production team. Among the many examples of over-the-top camp include Don Rubio Gorro (Bob Corso) rocking himself to sleep in an adult-sized baby crib, with Beautiful Dreamer as its musical cue, the animated twinkle in the eye of Doc Savage (Ron Ely) at the beginning of the film and later when Doc tells Mona (Pamela Hensley) that she was a brick. "La Cucaracha", played by a flute was used in an up-tempo musical cue, during the attempted escape of Captain Seas' henchmen from the Valley of the Vanished, and finally, an applause soundtrack was added following Doc's recitation of his personal code.

The film is also remembered for its theme song arranged by Frank De Vol, based on John Philip Sousa's The Thunderer. Sousa's music was intended to evoke a patriotic theme for Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and attempted to emulate the success that director George Roy Hill and composer Marvin Hamlisch had achieved when they used the ragtime music of Scott Joplin for the 1975 caper film The Sting. Both Sousa and Joplin were turn-of-the-century composers, and their music was not contemporaneous to the period that these 1930s nostalgia films were set. The credit acknowledging Sousa's score has the letters "USA" in his last name highlighted in red, white, and blue.

The soundtrack of George Pal's earlier film Houdini also made frequent use of The Thunderer.

Prior to the film's release, a film buyer called it "unsellable, horrible -supposedly a camp movie about this character called Doc Savage, Man of Bronze. Just terrible. Ron Ely is in it, and he doesn't even take off his clothes."[10]

Ely said "It looked ideal when they offered it to me, and the result was exactly the opposite. During the production, there was a change in studio heads; the new people didn't know how to sell it. I was stunned when I saw the finished product."[9]

The film received negative reviews. Variety noted that, "Execrable acting, dopey action sequences, and clumsy attempts at camp humor mark George Pal's Doc Savage as the kind of kiddie film that gives the G rating a bad name."[11]

The A.V. Club, looking back on the film in 2011, said the film "demonstrates none of the charm or thrills of Pal classics like The War of the Worlds (1953) or The Time Machine (1960). Savage is hampered by budget woes, weak acting, a sluggish script, and some painfully forced attempts at camp. It bombed at the box office, opening in June to be buried by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws..."[12]

Lester Dent's widow, Norma, said, "... I thought my heart would burst with pride. I saw the movie three times that day. I cried when I heard Ron Ely deliver the Doc Savage code - he said it as he meant every word of it. It was wonderful."[13]

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze received the 1974–1975 Golden Scroll for Best Fantasy Film from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films.