Doc Savage: Man of Bronze (1975)

(1975 Warner Bros.) Director: Micheal Anderson Starring: Ron Ely

Never fear...Doc Savage is here.....

...whoop-de-doo.
Not necessarily the most flattering portrait of the Man of Bronze, 1975's film adaptation of the classic pulp hero created by Kenneth Robeson is a camp relic of a simpler time. For some reason beyond my understanding, this flick plays like some demented episode of The Love Boat for me....

Now...I'm a huge fan of the character. So much so that I've nearly completed a set of the 1970s Bantam paperbacks. But this George Pal-produced fiasco is....just too cute for it's own good. That would be the best way to put it. Sure, Ely makes a fine Doc, and the casting is dead-on (likeness-wise)..but the storyline, while very much like one of the pulp adventures, is chock full of awful camp humor. Imagine a bad parody of the '60s Batman television show, and you'll get an idea of what I'm talkin' about....


The Plot: We open on a very patriotic image of Doc (Ron Ely) riding a snowmobile to his Fortress of Solitude and then images of Doc in his skivvies meditating in the Arctic wastes....just to show us all that he's one tough sumbitch. He then receives a telepathic message that there's trouble in New York, because adding empathy to Doc's impressive list of attributes seemed to be a fairly easy way to cut back on the budget of this film. Exposition is such an over-rated storytelling device, anyways.....

We then cut to New York, 1936...we know this because of a big honkin' title card. Anytime a period-piece film has to rely on coming straight out and flat telling the audience that it's not set in the present is always a bad sign. After an failed assassination attempt on Doc by a South America native that resembles Peter Fonda in pancake makeup (a sequence remarkably similar to the opening of PUMAMAN, to beat all) Doc and his cronies are alerted to something fishy involving the death of his father and some land he's inherited south of the border. Doc makes use of some of his amazing vehicles (everything he owns seems to have his name...or should I say, merchandising logo, stenciled on it...something tells me they had bigger plans for this film than actually happened....possibly because it bombed in a big way), Doc and crew make the trek south , along the way running into the stereotypical Bond-villain type bad guy, Captain Seas. Seas has a hand in Savage's father's death, mainly because the land in South America contains a boiling lake of molten gold. Some of this second-rate Lex Luthor's henchmen are natives who have the amazing ability to make cartoon snakes appear in mid-air and attack their enemies. The special effects in this flick are no STAR WARS, that's for sure.

After being captured by Seas, Doc and his gang fight to stop Seas and take back the Savage family birthright. The fight sequence during the climax between Doc and Seas is hilarious, for they use several different fighting styles, starting out with sumo...for alot of unintentionally funny results. Each time they change a fighting style, a titles card is added to the screen describing what it is (see below).......



All in all, a good time waster. DOC SAVAGE: Man of Bronze suffers from it's over-abundant use of camp humor, which must have been viewed at the time of it's release in the mid-1970s as fairly childish to the majority of the general audience of the era. It's odd to think that had this film been released, say, a few years earlier in the late 1960s, during the heyday of Batmania and films like Barbarella, it woulda probably went over like gangbusters. Still highly recommended for Doc fans and sumo lovers everywhere.