It’s all one Case : How Serpico, Doc Savage and Thor got it together in 1973 by Ian Baker

I warn you, this post is going to come off like an episode of James Burke’s BBC/PBS series “Connections” from the late 1970s. 

I’ve built up quite a collection of those gritty cop films from the late 1960s and early 1970’s, filmed on location on the streets of New York, which at that time was regarded as quite a dangerous city. In many of the films of that era you find an almost documentary style of filmmaking. Perhaps it is the grainy film stock, or the frequent use of hand-held cameras, but I find these films reflect a reality not found in current day fare. 

 I confess there may also be an element of nostalgia, as on-location films of the 1970s take me back to my first comics & pulp paperback-hunting visits to New York in 1977 and 1978, and brings to mind the thrill of walking those same streets before I was even in my twenties. [There is no experience to compete with walking in New York]. 

Anyway, in 1973 (which you may have concluded is the pivotal year around which this blog revolves) Paramount Pictures released the Sidney Lumet-directed, Al Pacino-starring, movie Serpico, relating the true story of honest cop Frank Serpico who had exposed extensive corruption within the NYPD. Six years earlier, in 1967, the real Frank Serpico first reported credible evidence of widespread systematic police corruption in the NYPD. 

If you haven’t seen the film, it showcases a stand-out performance by Al Pacino, and is miles better than the obscure and short-lived TV series of the same name starring David Birney that BBC showed in truncated form over an 8-week period in early 1977. 

I was watching the blu-ray of Serpico (1973) recently and noticed that there are a number of key scenes that take place in Frank Serpico’s apartment, always with a backdrop of his bookshelf. Perhaps I have become so attuned to Zoom and WebEx meetings these days that my eagle eye immediately spotted a copy of the Bantam paperback reprint of Doc Savage pulp Murder Melody (Bantam #15) sitting on Frank Serpico’s apartment book shelf. At around the 50 min to 56 min mark Murder Melody is visible over the shoulder of his girlfriend, amidst a colourful jumble of other well worn paperback books. 

The art of set dressing is not one of random choice. You may not realize it, but every time you watch a film or TV show, everything you see in each frame is informing your opinion of a character. Even the tiniest, seemingly insignificant details are agonized over before cameras start rolling. From the coffee mug holding pens on a character’s desk to the bathmat outside their shower, nothing is an afterthought, nothing is inconsequential. This type of thought, care, and design is all thanks to set decorators. 

 

Art Director Leslie Bloom was the set-dresser; Thomas H Wright was credited as Set Decorator. Leslie was later Oscar-nominated twice for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration for The Cotton Club (1984) and Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987), which along with Taxi Driver(1976) and Manhattan(1979) were part of a long-line of New York based film productions on which she provided art direction duties. 

 

The choice of placing a Doc Savage story on the bookshelf - Doc being a New York-based noble incorruptible hero - was not random choice. It was placed there to underline the subtext of Frank Serpico’s own incorruptibility and willingness to put himself on the line, as presented in the film. 

Filmed during the summer of 1972, the Murder Melody paperback in question was the 50 cent original published 5 years earlier in January 1967 . The date of that publishing coincides only a few months prior to Frank Serpico’s original exposure of NYPD police corruption and demonstrates the research that went into selecting that particular book for the film set. 

[Aside: My own original copy of Murder Melody was purchased from a second-hand shop in Portsmouth for 5p sometime in the first half of 1975. The accompanying photo shows my actual copy with its 3/6d sticker from that year. I sold that copy for £3 at Forbidden Planet in Denmark St, London in 1989. 

By sheer serendipity, since starting to write this article, I picked up a replacement copy of Murder Melody in a bookshop in Saugerties, NY earlier this week for $2.] 

Anyway…back to the movie Serpico. Whether the real Frank Serpico was a Doc Savage fan is open to conjecture. This 2019 interview with poet and Bantam Doc Savage fan R.M. Engelhardt recounts a chance encounter with the real Frank Serpico in Nelson’s bookstore in downtown Albany, NY, which suggests that Frank may have had an interest in the mighty Doc.

 

Frank Serpico's fictional New York residence in the movie is located at 5-7 Minetta Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The real-life Frank Serpico, however, lived at Perry & Greenwich, a few blocks away. Either way, the real or fictional Frank Serpico would have likely picked up the book at The Science Fiction bookshop at 52 8th Avenue in 1973 (now long since gone). 

There is another (even more tenuous link) link between Serpico and Doc Savage in that Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill established that both Frank Serpico and Doc Savage lived in the same shared universe, with the fictional Frank Serpico’s link to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LXG80s) as a proposed member of the previous American League in a visual cameo in LXG80s (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1980s ) As it was later revealed that LXG80s was an April Fools prank, the link is considered apocryphal by many. 

The Bantam paperback cover has a striking James Bama painting showing Doc standing resolute while armed men descend from the sky from cylindrical space ships. This got me pondering where did James Bama get his inspiration for the staging of the characters and the design of the spacecraft?  In James Bama’s commentary discussing the cover in his forward to the 50th anniversary of Doc Savage in the reprint of Murder Melody by Anthony Tollin’s Sanctum books from 2014, he gives very few clues as to the inspiration for the cover, other than he got model Steve Holland to pose with a toy gun that Bama had got from Woolworth’s. 

Bama writes that he had read the story completely (the first written by Kenneth Robeson “ghost” Laurence Donovan) before selecting the scene to be rendered in variations of a purple hue. The original pulp cover by Walter M. Baumhofer and Emery Clarke is rather uninspired, with men simply floating in the air. The Bama cover is much more dynamic, showing the villains descending from a missile-shaped flying craft, and was strangely familiar to me. 

A clue to Bama’s influence is found in an interview with nj.com from 2010. Bama said: “I would copy the Sunday funnies like 'Flash Gordon' and 'Tarzan' ...... ('Flash Gordon' artist) Alex Raymond was my biggest influence." . - James Bama interview: Drawn to the West. Posted Dec 17, 2010  

It then dawned on me that the cover holds an uncanny similarity to elements of the cover of Journey Into Mystery #83 (on sale June 5th 1962) - the first Thor story by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at Marvel. [Take a look at Kid’s blog over at https://kidr77.blogspot.com/2017/08/come-with-me-on-journey-into-mystery.html for a more thorough dissertation on the development of that cover.] 

Jack Kirby had also cited Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon as a major early influence on his artwork and design. Comparing Jack Kirby’s Journey Into Mystery #83 cover side by side with Murder Melody, the posing of the aliens jumping from a space ship seem very similar to the Gray Men leaping from a spaceship on the Bama cover. In addition, the spacecraft on both Bama’s and Kirby’s covers both bear very similar designs to those of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon stories. 

Whether it was a conscious layout swipe or not, we shall never know. We do know that James Bama was living in New York in 1967, and had done many illustrations for Men’s Adventure magazines in the 1960s for Martin Goodman, also owner of Marvel. Bama met Martin Goodman on several occasions.  I have yet been able to determine if James Bama knew or met Jack Kirby. 

The saga of the Murder Melody cover was not yet complete. Within a year of Serpico hitting the screens, James Bama’s cover of Murder Melody was picked as the basis for the UK Corgi Paperback version of Meteor Menace (a completely different Doc story) , to tie in with the release of the Ron Ely-starring Doc Savage movie. Artist Terence Gilbert was contracted to re-purpose the Bama cover to reflect elements of the Meteor Menace story, and bring Doc’s figure in line with Ron Ely - slightly less muscular, modified hairstyle and wearing the belt buckle with logo. You can see the results below. 

Gilbert is an exceptional artist in his own right, and would have been my first choice to continue the Doc Savage paperback covers for Bantam following the end of James Bama’s tenure. 

So there you have it: Doc Savage influenced the fictional Serpico (and possibly the real Serpico). Alex Raymond spaceship design influencing both Bama and Kirby. Kirby possibly influenced Bama, who in turn definitely influenced Terence Gilbert. 

It’s all one case.