S.O.S. Tidal Wave (1939)

User Rating:

5.1/10   

Director:

John H. Auer

Writers:

Gordon Kahn (writer)
Maxwell Shane (writer)
(more)

Release Date:

2 June 1939 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Sci-Fi

Tagline:

The March Of Crime! Televised on a coast-to-coast hook-up by an underworld lord whose weapons are the latest wonders of science.

Plot Keywords:

Television

Cast

Ralph Byrd	...	Jeff Shannon
George Barbier	...	Uncle Dan Carter
Kay Sutton	...	Laurel Shannon
Frank Jenks	...	Peaches Jackson
Marc Lawrence	...	Melvin Sutter
Dorothy Lee	...	Mable
Oscar O'Shea	...	Mike Halloran
Mickey Kuhn	...	Buddy Shannon
Ferris Taylor	...	Clifford Farrow
Don 'Red' Barry	...	Curley Parsons, the bomber
Raymond Bailey	...	Roy Nixon
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Hooper Atchley	...	(uncredited)
Roy Barcroft	...	(uncredited)
Lynton Brent	...	New York Teletype Operator (uncredited)
Thomas Carr	...	(uncredited)
Richard Cramer	...	(uncredited)
Roy Darmour	...	(uncredited)
John Dilson	...	Appleby (uncredited)
Harrison Greene	...	(uncredited)
Lloyd Ingraham	...	(uncredited)
I. Stanford Jolley	...	(uncredited)
Rex Lease	...	Ambulance Attendant (uncredited)
George Montgomery	...	(uncredited)
Landers Stevens	...	(uncredited)
Ben Taggart	...	(uncredited)
Forrest Taylor	...	(uncredited)
George Turner	...	(uncredited)
Minerva Urecal	...	(uncredited)
Elizabeth Valentine	...	(uncredited)
Crane Whitley	...	(uncredited)
Robert J. Wilke	...	Man in TV Studio (uncredited)

Directed by
John H. Auer

Writing credits (in alphabetical order)
Gordon Kahn		writer
Maxwell Shane		writer
James Webb		story

Produced by
Armand Schaefer	....	associate producer

Original Music by
Cy Feuer		(uncredited)

Cinematography by
Jack A. Marta

Film Editing by
Ernest J. Nims

Art Direction by
John Victor Mackay

Music Department
Cy Feuer	....	conductor
William Lava	....	composer: stock music (uncredited)
Joseph Nussbaum	....	composer: stock music (uncredited)
Paul Sawtell	....	composer: stock music (uncredited)

Production Companies

• Republic Pictures (I)

Distributors

• Republic Pictures (I) (1939) (USA) (theatrical)
• Hollywood Television Service (1952) (USA) (TV) (edited version)

Runtime:

62 min | USA:53 min (edited version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Republic Pictures (I)

Trivia:

Includes a large amount of stock footage from Deluge (1933).

Movie Connections:

Features Deluge (1933)

A truly bad film, absurdly bad...saw it on TV about 50 years ago.

I remember this as an amazingly bad film, for years after seeing it, late one night in my preteen years. One of the absurdities about it, was that it was about television, some six years before commercial TV was actually seen by most of the public. The so-called TV cameras were film newsreel cameras with big magazines for film. They could have left them off to "fake" a TV camera, but they didn't. The TV screens looked nothing like actual TV. The movie showed "live" coverage coming from these film cameras.Much of it the film was stock footage from "Deluge", a big 1933," King Kong era" film about a tidal wave (tsunami) wrecking ships & flooding Manhattan. This "End of the world theme" survived with only the Manhattan footage, then crudely re-edited, and mixed with a little new material, with a new cast, about crooks and TV as a news reporting medium.It looked like the new stuff was shot in about 2 days! The result, I'd say, was the worst late 30's movie ever made.. Later, 20 to 25 years, people like Ed Wood, Ray Steckler, & Vic Savage made some "nearly as bad" films,("Plan 9" etc.)but that was "semi-intentional".I wrote the scenario, (there was no screenplay!) at age 20 for "The Creeping Terror" directed by Vic Savage.He, Ed Wood, Steckler and others were more or less playing "AT" movie making, as a kind of life style thing!I think "SOS Tidal Wave" was more genuinely bad... because the makers were probably more professional,truly trying to weave a story out of loose ends, assuming people were too dumb to notice the cameras shooting "new-fangled" TV ,were movie news cameras. The real "dumbies" were the professionals who threw this mess together, so off handedly...Or so it seemed to me, as a kid, 50 years ago.