MICHAEL H. PRICE: Spy Smasher Smashes Spies
In a bygone age of self-defeating fair-play isolationism, comparatively few outposts of the U.S. entertainment industry saw fit to take issue with the congealing Axis powers. Timely Comics’ Captain America books tackled a larger agenda of wish-fulfillment Nazi-busting in 1941 at a time when popular sentiment and much of the mass communications media, stateside, were still holding out for an anti-inflammatory approach. Just two years earlier, the lower-berth Hollywood producers Ben Judell and Sigmund Neufeld had run afoul of their industry’s attempts to repress a film called Hitler – Beast of Berlin, starting with a Production Code Administration complaint that the very title might pose an affront. It is always an awkward choice, even in the realm of heroic fiction, between pre-emptive action and a wait-and-watch attitude.
And between this difficult patch for the Judell–Neufeld movie and the ferocious début of Captain America, the Third Reich began insinuating such self-glorifying motion pictures as Campaign in Poland and Victory in the West into American theaters with impunity if not necessarily articulate English intertitles. Said the show-biz tradepaper Variety, bucking the mollifying influence of the Production Code: “Instead of making Americans frightened of the terrible power of the Reich’s Army, [Victory in the West] inflames them.”
The Captain America stories may have been thusly inflamed, but likelier Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the talents responsible, were springing from an intuitive sense of developments more appalling than any ostentatious display of aggression. (Superman had tackled fictional-allegory aggressors and, then, squared off against Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin as early as 1940 – though far outside his own formal continuity, in an isolated gimmick story for Look magazine.)
As emphatic a stand belonged to the comics series known as Spy Smasher, from Fawcett Publications. The property’s retooling as a movie serial began taking shape in 1941 at Republic Pictures – which recently had adapted Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, with a tone markedly grimmer than that of the funnybooks – and a shooting script was completed shortly before the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. It was with a newfound sense of propagandistic ferocity that the Spy Smasher serial went into production on Dec. 22. The attraction began arriving in weekly big-screen installments on April 4, 1942.
The movie version takes some savvy liberties with the source, providing the lead character – Alan Armstrong, alias Spy Smasher – with an entirely civilian twin named Jack, and thus obliging star player Kane Richmond to handle essentially three roles. A recurring villain called the Mask was literally un-masked for the screen, allowing Hans Schumm a richer opportunity for characterization.
Johanna Draper-Carlson picks up on what was bugging me about this PR piece from Marvel about 
