Brick Bradford [Impossible Voyages #25] – Blue Towel Productions

As mentioned previously, in “Impossible Voyages” I’m watching and writing about a run of new (to me) science fiction films to be watched over last year, which has extended to this year (2026). You can read the rationale and ground rules here. In the meantime, we are advancing from 1946 to 1947 with this movie, #25 in this series.

So with where we are up to with this series, in the midst of the 1940s, there are generally only a handful of options available for each entry. And many of of those, it turns out are old movie serials. 1947 was such a year, and as a result we’ve gone this time around with a 15 chapter serial from Columbia pictures, which turns out to share the directors and a whole lot of cast members with their 1948 serial, Superman, which I’m currently blogging my way through, starting over here (not as part of this “Impossible Voyages” run, or Brick Bradford would be ineligible for this post due to sharing the same directors).

Spoilers Ahead

Brick Bradford (1947)

Directed by Spencer Bennett and Thomas Carr

The Story:  Fearless adventurer Brick Bradford is tasked by the government with protecting brilliant scientist Dr. Tymack, whose “Interceptor Ray” is the target of enemy agents. With the help of his friends Sandy, Professor Salisbury and June (Salisbury’s daughter), Brick has to contend with a gang of criminals led by foreign agent Laydron. The action takes them to the moon (where they help to foment a rebellion against despotic rulers) and hundreds of years in the past (where they are nearly killed by unfriendly island natives) before returning to earth in the present. In the end, Brick and his friends are able to overcome both Laydron and one of Tymack’s assistants-turned-traitor to protect the scientist’s valuable inventions.

Starring: Kane Richmond as Brick Bradford, Rick Vallin as Sandy Sanderson, Linda Leighton as June, Pierre Watkin as Professor Salisbury and Charles Quigley as Laydron. John Merton is Professor Tymack, and Leonard Penn and Wheeler Oakman play Tymack’s assistants. Amongst Laydron’s gang are Jack Ingram, Fred Graham and Charles King. Carol Forman is Khana, the Queen of the Moon, and Noel Neill shows up as a native girl in the distant past.

Comments: I love the idea of action-adventure serials. As a kid growing up in the USA in the 70s and 80s, such things almost didn’t exist at all. On TV, almost every show (other than soap operas) were procedurals, following the same formula from episode to episode. The idea of a series which told a developing story that was almost unheard of (one exception was Star Blazers, but I somehow missed that the first time around). The place where you could find this sort of thing were in comic books–oh how I longed to this storytelling sensibility translated into cinema!

(Eventually of course TV did learn to do this, and in recent years the opposite is sometimes the problem–the lack of ability to crafty strong individual episodes. Anyway.)

So given all that, the idea of these old movie serials that would tell the story over multiple episodes with cliffhanger endings keeping you coming back for me sounded awesome.

In practice, however, almost all the serials I’ve watched have fallen into a some very common problems (admittedly, I’ve only seen about half a dozen), which is repetitious action, limited or no character development, illogical plots and terrible pacing. Brick Bradford, which the internet tells me is 257 minutes long all together (over four hours) suffers from all of these.

But it must be remembered, nobody involved with this thing ever intended it to be binged. And they probably didn’t imagine many adults paying attention to it at all. The purpose was to entertain kids, and at that I’d say it seems like it would have been pretty successful. If I’d been a ten year old boy watching this in the cinema, I think I’d have been entertained, and I would have been begging my parents to take me to the theatre the following week to see the next instalment.

(Incidentally, I realize as I write this that my dad was a 13 year old boy when this serial came out; I have no idea if this was the sort of thing he’d do with his Saturday afternoons when he was a kid. He’s passed away now; I wish I had asked him).

So none of this makes me like Brick Bradford any more than I would have otherwise, but it does make me more forgiving of it. And even with the general problems endemic to movie serials, this particular entry is not a disaster. Individual episodes generally did a good job telling rip-roaring action instalments, full of lots of punching and chases and some neat science fiction ideas, and building to reasonably effective cliffhangers. And the first episode really gets off with a bang, with Professor Tymack escaping some crooks by using one of his inventions to travel through the fifth dimension to the moon!

It’s only when you take all the episodes together that the poor story pacing really rears its head. After the moon stuff is over, the story then takes us on a time traveling adventure to centuries past. But in the last third of the serial, we spend our time just running around some cabins in the countryside chasing after a station-wagon full of inventions. It really feels like filmmakers have run out of steam or concentration or something–they really needed another crazy idea, on the same level of what we had earlier, to prop up the back end of the story. Or they should have made it about five chapters shorter. As it is, the climax of the whole adventure just amounts to more punching and shooting and chasing–the same things we’ve been watching for some time, except this time it sticks.

Not that the serial’s depiction of the moon or time travel is particularly memorable, but the ideas are crazy fun, and both settings allow room for some extra characters to keep things lively. Carol Forman, aka the Spider-Lady from 1948’s Superman, is one of the main moon villains; I was quite disappointed when she disappeared out of the story so quickly. And in the past, Brick’s sidekick Sandy checks out a cute native girl who turns out to be played by Noel Neill of all people–the original Lois Lane from Superman. She turns out to be not as nice as she appears, though–she tries multiple times to kill Bradford, including by throwing a cigarette lighter onto a box of gunpowder that he’s just dug up.

As far as leading men go, Kane Richmond is fine as Brick Bradford. He certainly fits the type–handsome and capable of throwing a bunch, and even showing mild traces of personality from time to time. Compared to the other serials I’ve watched lately, I’d say he’s not as interesting as Kirk Alyn’s Superman, but way more interesting than Gene Autry as himself in The Phantom Empire. Slightly more fun is Rick Vallin as Brick’s offsider Sandy Sanderson (also the name of a minor SHIELD agent from one issue of Captain America from the early 80s). He gets to throw lots of punches as well, but almost contractually rarely gets to win without help, but he also gets to make jokes and quips all the time, whereas Brick has to keep to it serious.

The other people in Brick’s party don’t have that much going on. June is ostensibly Brick’s love interest, but that doesn’t really come into play until the last 45 seconds of the whole serial or so. She spends most of her time demanding to the boys that she be allowed to help. He father, Professor Salisbury, doesn’t fare any better–he occasionally gets to be an ornery old coot but with the crazy brilliant Dr. Tymack around, rarely gets to do any actually sciencing.

Speaking of Tymack, this guy looks exactly like a mad scientist, but actually is pretty normal and genuinely good-hearted throughout the story.

The invention everyone is after is his Interceptor Ray, a device that can be used to shot down enemy missiles, but which bad-intentioned people intend to repurpose as a death ray. But over the course of the serial we find that this guy has also invented an invisibility device (which works very similarly to the one seen in The Vanishing Shadow–basically you wear it around your neck and press a button), a door which accesses the fifth dimension, and a Time Top (a time travel machine). It seems to me that the Interceptor Ray is the least impressive thing the guy has spent his time creating.

As I’ve mentioned, a lot of the cast of this story is also in Superman. In fact, both serials have a gang of bad guys who are played by a lot of the same actors, so it almost looks like the same gang. Charles Quigley plays a main bad guy in both stories (he’s Laydron, the leader of the villains here, and in Superman he was the villainous Dr. Hackett). Laydron’s gang includes characters played by Jack Ingram and Charles King, who both were henchmen in Superman as well.

In addition to them, Pierre Watkin (Professor Salisbury) was Perry White in both Superman and its sequel serial. Leonard Penn, who plays Professor Tymacks’ duplicitous assistant Byrus, was a member of the Spider-Lady’s gang who worked in an electronics store, and the other less duplicitous assistant was played by Wheeler Oakman, who in Superman was Dr. Larkin, a chemical engineer that some criminals (including the one played by Charles King) beat up. You add Carol Forman and Noel Neill and the two directors to that list and you’ve got quite a lot of people involved in both projects.

Brick Bradford is based on a comic strip that I have never heard, but which ran in one form or another for fifty-four years. In addition to Brick, the comic strip is also the source for Sandy, June and her father, and the Time Top. All told the movie serial version of this story was not the hardest such film for me to get through out of the ones that I’ve watched (so far, that’s got to be The Phantom Empire). But I’ll be very happy to move onto something more reasonably-lengthed in the future. If I’m fortunate, 1947 is the last year that I cannot find another option. Here’s hoping!

Other thoughts:

• Charles Quigley’s character Laydron impersonates noted scientist Professor Tymack. Over in Superman, Charles Quigley’s character Dr. Hackett impersonated noted scientist Dr. Graham. Talk about typecasting!

• The native islander scenes, set in the past, definitely show their age. The natives are definitely treated like savages in all the most cliched ways–they try to burn Brick and Sandy alive, they mistakenly believe they are gods–the works.

• Brick Bradford was created by writer William Ritt and artist Clarence Gray. Both were living in Ohio and Ritt in particular was based out of Cleveland. Cleveland is also where Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster met and started working together, a partnership which eventually gave rise to Superman. I was also born in Cleveland. Seems like a hotbed of creativity, that city.