When Republic Pictures bought the film rights to Chester Gould's popular syndicated comic strip Dick Tracy in 1936, the Poverty Row studio denied the title character many of the attributes and associations that had made him a hit with newspaper readers young and old. Gone was Tracy's colorful coterie of professional allies (among them police partner Pat Patton), his fiancée Tess Trueheat, and -most disappointingly - his two-way Wrist Radio (a forerunner of the Apple Watch). Missing-in-action as well in Republic's 15-chapter Dick Tracy (1937) serial was Tracy's lineup of usual suspects, whose number had included (but was hardly limited to) Mumbles, Pruneface, Flattop, and Big Boy (patterned by Gould after Chicago mobster Al Capone). In the serial's first chapter, "The Spider Strikes," Ralph Byrd's resolutely unattached G-man (a promotion from his city detective job in the comic strip) goes toe-to-toe with The Spider Ring, a cabal of domestic terrorists led by the elusive Lame One, known to his fearful but obedient followers by his clubfooted gait and professional mercilessness. One thing the serial gives Tracy that he never had on paper is a brother, Gordon, a big city lawyer whom The Lame One kidnaps and transforms by mad science into an amoral automaton with a pathological hatred for Dick Tracy. Playing the postop Gordon Tracy is Carleton Young, whose limited film experience at the time ran to playing a dope dealer in Reefer Madness (1936). As he matured in his years and craft, Young became a member of John Ford's stock company, allowed to voice in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) the Fordian philosophy "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

By Richard Harland Smith