--- title: 'The Phantom Empire (1935)' type: 'film' director: 'B. Reeves Eason' released: '1935-01-01' runtime_minutes: 245 genres: - 'Fantasy' - 'Science Fiction' countries: - 'United States' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/movies/the-phantom-empire-1935' review_count: 0 imdb: 'https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026867/' publisher: 'CinePixo' --- # The Phantom Empire (1935) 1935 · 245 min · Fantasy, Science Fiction · United States ## Synopsis The Phantom Empire is a 1935 American Western serial film directed by Otto Brower and B. Reeves Eason and starring Gene Autry, Frankie Darro, and Betsy King Ross. This 12-chapter Mascot Pictures serial combined the Western, musical and science-fiction genres. The duration of the first episode is 30 minutes, while that of the rest is about 20 minutes. The serial film is about a singing cowboy who stumbles upon an ancient subterranean civilization living beneath his own ranch that becomes corrupted by unscrupulous greedy speculators from the surface. In 1940, a 70-minute feature film edited from the serial was released under the titles Radio Ranch or Men with Steel Faces. This was Gene Autry's first starring role, playing himself as a singing cowboy. It is considered to be the first science-fiction Western. ## Credits - **Director:** [B. Reeves Eason](https://cinepixo.com/people/b-reeves-eason), [Otto Brower](https://cinepixo.com/people/otto-brower) - **Original Music Composer:** [Hugo Riesenfeld](https://cinepixo.com/people/hugo-riesenfeld) - **Producer:** [Nat Levine](https://cinepixo.com/people/nat-levine) - **Director of Photography:** [Ernest Miller](https://cinepixo.com/people/ernest-miller-2) ## Cast - [Wheeler Vivian Oakman](https://cinepixo.com/people/wheeler-vivian-oakman) - [Betsy King Ross](https://cinepixo.com/people/betsy-king-ross) - [Frankie Darro](https://cinepixo.com/people/frankie-darro) - [Gene Autry](https://cinepixo.com/people/gene-autry) - [Dorothy Christy](https://cinepixo.com/people/dorothy-christy) ## Criticism on CinePixo No reviews published yet. Source: https://cinepixo.com/movies/the-phantom-empire-1935 Film facts: Wikidata (Q7756830); synopsis from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Reviews, themes and notes are the work of this site's members.