Steve Rigby
I was afraid that there would not be a review for this serial, as my practice is to write one myself is such turns out to be the case. This serial is, to put it plainly, bad. The lead, Frank Hardy (Frank Buck), who is supposedly some sort of wild animal tamer, spends 90% of his screen time talking with other characters, and less than 5% actually engaging in capturing said beasts, most of whom have escaped due to his own negligence. Also, the scenes of his 'taming' the tigers are quite hokey - he holds a long stick, you get a shot of the tiger roaring, he holds the stick, and magically the tiger goes back in his cage! Very few if any shots actually have him and the beast in the same frame. Secondly, the cliffhangers are anything but. What you get are supposedly probing questions through voice over at the end of each episode and a printed injunction to get the answers in next week's thrilling episode. That this tedium went on for fifteen episodes was semi-unbelievable. A lot of the time it appeared that bad guys were trying to rub out other bad guys rather than escape from the good guys, who often seemed quite clueless as to the nefarious intentions of the villains. The worst failure was that the head of the crime syndicate responsible for purloining rubber was talking urbanely with the 'hero' right up to the closing seconds of the last episode, in which it is left patently unclear whether he's even been arrested for his crimes. All-in-all, a pastiche of uninspired writing, minimal action and wooden acting resulting in a pointless use of one's time.
