The Spider’s Web (1938)
Mexican Lobby Card
The fifth serial to come out of Columbia Pictures had criminologist (aka millionaire playboy) Richard Wentworth mask up as The Spider to fight the hooded crime lord, The Octopus. It was so easy to tell who the good guys and the villains were back then, wasn’t it? Mask or hood notwithstanding. This was the first sound serial adapted from a pulp magazine hero. Given the nature of the pulps, the character had to be toned down in the movie for the Production Code. The Spider’s web-outlined cape was pretty nifty to look at, and the serial was shot in Columbia’s Hollywood studio, using standing urban street sets, industrial plants, and office interiors across the Columbia lot (Wikipedia). Additional locations were around Southern California, with the addition of stock footage and miniatures. Columbia Pictures entered the sound-serial market later than Universal and Republic, starting its program in 1937 and relying on cost-efficient methods and schedules (ThePulp.Net). In the pulp magazine, The Spider killed criminals–a lot–and marked them with a red spider symbol to terrify the remaining living criminals. Compared to other pulp magazines like Doc Savage and The Shadow (my personal favorites), The Spider was vicious and the storylines more along the lines of mass impending doom that bordered into horror territory. The serial, of course, played nicer, but the already cliff-hanging thematic of the magazine fit well into that of the multi-chapter serial format for Columbia. One wonders why they never got around to doing a Doc Savage serial? Perhaps the cost would have been too much, as Doc and his team did travel a lot.
