Officer '444' (1926) User Reviews

So bad it's hilarious

[dottyh · 7/10 · 10 June 2007]

If one watches this serial while in the proper frame of mind, it is wonderful. I find several laugh-at-loud moments in virtually every chapter. I recommend it simply for the fun of seeing it as well as imagining a theater full of kids of 1926 who were probably bugeyed watching it.

Little of it makes much sense. There's almost zero continuity. Clichés abound. I've watched it a couple of times and still can't figure out what's going on half the time. But I'll probably watch it again. It is simply a classic example of many serials (and other movies) of the era.

Of course, we have the cliffhanger ending to chapters... some of which make sense and some don't in the succeeding chapter. Ben Wilson is a stalwart hero and Neva Gerber a sometimes spunky, sometimes helpless, sometimes foolish heroine. All the usual sidekicks abound--perhaps too many. We also see a number of Keystone-Kops-type autos racing through the streets.

One of my favorite scenes is in the "Dragon Cafe," the Frog's hangout. Every time we enter, a bevy of flappers and good-time Charlies are doing the Charlston. They barely cease long enough for the cops to chase someone through them, or the crooks to drag a kidnap victim in... then resume dancing again! So many movies of this era present the stooped-over, one-arm-swinging dark-clad hunchback villain. I can't count the number of films I've seen him in! I guess theater goers of that day got a big thrill (chill?) from seeing such a bad guy.

I now own about a hundred serials from the 20s to the 50s, and this is one of my favorites just because it is so... difficult to explain!

Hop off, Frog!

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 2 October 2004]

'Officer 444' is rather a bad serial. It contains several of the cliffhanger genre's worst clichés, without enough 'camp' value to redeem them, and with far fewer thrills and stunts than one expects in a serial.

The villain, as is often the case in these affairs, is an evil genius who hides his identity behind a melodramatic nickname: this time round, it's the Frog. To justify his amphibious monicker, the Frog contorts his body into Lon Chaney postures. This is a stupid idea, made stupider by the fact that the Frog's contortions don't seem to slow him down, and don't seem to make him conspicuous. We see him lurching down an alley, face averted from the camera, moving tortuously ... yet he has no difficulty crossing the entire city, undetected, in jig time.

While other villains would be happy to rob a bank, the Frog will settle for nothing less than global conquest. He has developed a secret formula that will enable him to do this, although precisely how the formula works is never explained: the formula is clearly just a McGuffin. The Frog's secret hideout is fronted by the surgery of Dr Blakely: another evil genius, who performs surgical experiments on victims whom he then dumps through a trap door into a dungeon. At the press of a button, the doctor's office magically transforms into a coveralls factory. The Frog has several hundred miscellaneous hunchbacks and henchgoons on his staff, some of whom have cute names like Snookey and Dago Frank.

The Frog's other henchman, I mean henchwoman, is a gal named the Vulture: not an evil genius but more the Mata Hari type. She doesn't actually look like a vulture, but she vamps quite a bit. Actress Ruth Royce gives much the best performance in the film in this role. This is one of those serials in which it's obvious that one of the ostensible good guys in the cast is really the head baddie in disguise.

The hero of this serial is Officer 444, a cop whose powers of detection would make Craig Kennedy and Sherlock Holmes weep with envy. Officer 444 has prodigious strength and agility, brilliant ratiocination, and he's a master of disguise. And he's probably nice to his mother.

This movie appears to have been filmed (by John Ford's older brother Francis) without a script. Several sequences make no sense whatever. At one point, Officer 444 follows the Frog through the streets to the entrance of his hideout. Cut to a new set-up, as the Frog enters his hideout ... only to discover Officer 444 sitting there waiting for him, wearing a disguise we've never seen before. Somehow our man 444 has got into the hideout AHEAD of the boss villain, eluding all the hundreds of assistant villains on the criminal payroll, and managing a costume change along the way!

We also get a scene in which the Vulture villainess and several dozen henchmen throw Officer 444 onto a railway track, where he lies unconscious while a choo-choo trundles towards him at a painfully slow pace. Just in time, along comes heroine Neva Gerber with several dozen gendarmes. The two women duke it out, and the cops fight the robbers ... but nobody bothers to help 444, who lies on the track while that train keeps a-comin'. Pancakes, anyone?

The most interesting thing about 'Officer 444' is an appearance by August Vollmer, a real-life criminologist (based in Berkeley, California) who single-handedly revolutionised American crime detection and penology. Vollmer shows up at one point to congratulate 444 and speak a few lengthy intertitles on behalf of law enforcement. In real life, Vollmer ended tragically. I'll rate this mess 2 points out of 10. If you want to see a thrilling serial, skip 'Officer 444' and get a video of 'Daredevils of the Red Circle'.