Gordon of Ghost City Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Gordon of Ghost City Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 9, 2020

Ghost towns have a certain undeniable allure, as anyone who has ever spent time in one of them might agree. That said, it may be slightly comedic to think of a ghost city per the title of this serial Universal brought out in 1933 as opposed to a ghost town, but then again considering the Covid induced straits of several major metropolises, may that moniker will actually seem relevant to some. Gordon of Ghost City offers serial stalwart Buck Jones is on hand as Buck Gordon, who is tasked by a rancher named John Mulford (William Desmond) with tracking down a bunch of cattle rustlers. It turns out the bad guys are using a nearby ghost town — er, ghost city — as their (as it turns out not so) secret headquarters. As tends to be the case in virtually all of the Universal serial with Buck Jones, there’s a damsel in distress, in this case a pretty girl named Mary Gray (Madge Bellamy), who (in another frequent plot trope that shows up in some of the other Universal Jones serials) is trying to document her family’s ownership of a valuable gold mine.

Gordon of Ghost City is in some ways as absolutely formulaic as many of the other Universal serials featuring Jones (VCI has released several, including The Roaring West, The Phantom Rider and The Red Rider, as well as what looks like at the time of this review being published the upcoming release of the non-serial Riders of Death Valley), but it also has some of the strengths of the other Universal Jones serials, including good work from Jones himself. Jones is a kind of wry western hero, and he manages to toss off bon mots about as frequently as he sharpshoots, something that gives this entry a bit of comedic energy.

The serial also benefits from its supposedly spooky “ghost city” setting, where expectedly several of the cliffhangers take place. This is another “chapterized” outing where the escapes from various perils are almost insanely divorced from the setup cliffhangers provided at the ends of the previous episodes. A number of calamities involving stagecoaches tumbling over hills out of control might lead viewers to wonder if some kind of driver’s education course back in the Wild West might have been advisable.

There's no real attempt here to hide the villain behind all of the rustling (and later attempts to take over the Gray's mine). Rance Radigan (Warren Miller) is the foreman at the ranch run by Mary's elderly father Amos (Tom Ricketts), but he's a scheming sort and up to no good. The serial has a bevy of fun supporting performances, including Francis Ford as a "mystery man" at the ghost city. Some of the stunt work in this serial is especially well handled, and it sure looks like Jones did some of his own stunts, including a rather spectacular jump off of a horse and then crawl under a rapidly careening stagecoach in the serial's opening episode.

Gordon of Ghost City Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Gordon of Ghost City is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of VCI Entertainment and MVD Visual with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. I kind of jokingly mentioned in our The Phantom Rider Blu-ray review that I was giving that release an "attaboy" video score of 3.5 even if I may not have been entirely convinced it actually deserved it, due to the sometimes spotty history of Blu-ray releases from VCI. This presentation boasts several of the positives of The Phantom Rider, although perhaps with a few more deficits as well, so I'm pulling this back down to a more defensible 3.0 level. I didn't notice any of the odd encoding anomalies that have hobbled some previous VCI releases, but this has the same kind of sometimes odd looking grain levels that I mentioned when discussing The Phantom Rider. There's a "flip side" to that similarity, though, in that the at times kind of static looking grain field is visible against brighter skies, but doesn't really spike dramatically in the many optical effects like dissolves and wipes. Contrast is again a bit anemic, giving a slightly milky look to blacks and an overall gray tone to much of the proceedings. There is a fair amount of damage on display throughout the twelve chapters.

Gordon of Ghost City Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Gordon of Ghost City features an LPCM 2.0 Mono track that is very much in line with the audio presentations of the other Jones Universal serial releases VCI has put out. Everything is rather boxy and tinny sounding, and some of the effects, notably gunshots but also even galloping horses, don't offer a ton of depth. Dialogue is presented cleanly and clearly, though there's background hiss and occasional pops and cracks. This is another release of a Jones serial where even those who don't need subtitles may want to turn them on just to see how many different ways the same music is described at the beginning of each episode.

Gordon of Ghost City Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 3:12)

The inside of the keepcase insert contains an essay by Toby Roan along with a few stills (miniaturized).

Gordon of Ghost City Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Gordon of Ghost City is in some ways as routine as the other Universal serials starring Buck Jones, but it's also rather entertaining, with an unusually brisk sense of humor. Technical merits are on a par with other VCI releases of Jones serials, for those who are considering a purchase.