I video-recorded the first Superman serial off American Movie Classics. Made in 1948 by Columbia, it took advantage of some spectacular Los Angeles-area locations but otherwise had an aura of cheapness about it (the directors were Spencer Bennet and someone named Carr), and the Superman, Kirk Alyn, was suitably hunky (he managed to look more like the comic-book figure than anyone since) but not much in the acting department. The women really took off with the acting honors — particularly Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane in the great Glenda Farrell tradition of hard-boiled women reporters on screen; and Carol Forman as the principal villainess, the Spider Lady (though the scenarists, who included George Plympton of the Flash Gordon serials a decade earlier at Universal, avoided the temptation of giving the Spider Lady a case of the hots for Superman) — Forman’s blonde hair throughout most of the film is revealed to be a wig in one episode (she’s “really” a brunette, which would have been more appropriate for a “Spider Lady” character), but aside from that she’s an excellent villainess, savoring all her bad lines and clearly enjoying herself in the role (the writers also avoid giving her a secret identity in the outside world, a frequent serial gimmick which this one is stronger for doing without).
This serial had a nicely designed opening showing the
destruction of the planet Krypton (I liked the triangle chairs in the
Kryptonese Council room, though the “destruction” itself was mostly
accomplished through stock footage — including one shot of a collapsing
building that looked like a Renaissance palace, a form of design one would
hardly expect to encounter on another planet) — elsewhere the art direction and
set decoration was pretty minimal. The biggest disappointment was in the
special effects (or lack of same); the Kryptonese spaceship that brings the
baby Superman to Earth converted from live-action to animation when it flew,
reverting to a solid object when it landed, and Superman did the same thing
himself whenever the script called for him to
fly — and though the transitions from Kirk Alyn to a cartoon and back again
were handled well enough, the effect still looked campy (one’s age would have
to have been in the low single digits to be fooled by it). — 10/30/94
•••••
I ran the first two episodes of the 1948 serial Superman, a Columbia presentation (though Warner Bros. now
owns the right because Warners absorbed DC Comics, holders of the Superman
character copyright, and with Columbia having made two Superman serials as well
as two Batman serials they apparently settled so Columbia would retain the DVD
rights to the Batman movies and Warners would get the Superman films — and they
put at the beginning of the disc a five-minute trailer for the 2006 film Superman
Returns, which was a flop) which I had seen
bits of on American Movie Classics one day in the 1990’s when they ran the
whole thing start-to-finish and I recorded it on VHS. The parts I remembered
especially liking were the cheesy but still surprisingly convincing effects of
Superman flying — which were done simply by turning him into an animated
cartoon while he was airborne and matting him into otherwise live action until
he landed and turned into actor Kirk Alyn (who was quirkily billed only as playing
Clark Kent; like Universal’s games with billing Boris Karloff as “?” in the
opening credits of Frankenstein
and Elsa Lanchester ditto in The Bride of Frankenstein, Columbia thought the serial would be more quirkily
appealing if they pretended that the title character was an actual being,
whether superhero or monster) — and the marvelous performances by the two women
in the leads, Noel Neill as Lois Lane (appealingly spunky in the best Joan
Blondell/Glenda Farrell tradition of movie newspaperwomen) and Carol Forman
wonderfully kinky as the principal villain(ess), the Spider Lady.
Last night
Charles and I watched the first two episodes, which didn’t get to the Spider
Lady’s intrigues but did give us
a clear and reasonably concise portrayal of Superman’s origin story. It begins
with the desperate plea of Superman’s father, Jor-El (Nelson Leigh) — real trivia buffs pride themselves on knowing all three of Superman’s names, including his Kryptonian one,
Kal-El — to the ruling council of the planet Krypton to fund his spaceship
project before Krypton is destroyed because its orbit has gone haywire and it’s
descending closer to the surface of its sun, which will explode it. Naturally
the Council scoffs at the idea and won’t give Jor-El the money or the authorization
— quite frankly, it sounds like a particularly desperate climate-change
scientist trying to convince a roomful of Republican politicians that global
warming is real — and since with his own money the only rocket Jor-El has been
able to build is a miniature prototype (that looks like he bought it at Flash
Gordon’s garage sale, by the way) just big enough for his recently born baby
Kal-El, he loads the little one into the little rocket and fires the thing at
Earth — where it, like Superman himself later on, turns into an animated
cartoon as it’s crossing the traverses of space between the doomed Krypton and
Earth.
The rocket lands in a farm owned by Eben and Martha Kent (Ed Cassidy and
Virginia Carroll) and the two adopt the little boy and name him Clark. (A
little-known factoid about the Superman mythos is that Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe
Shuster, ripped a lot of his character off the pulp novels featuring Doc Savage
— Doc’s real first name was Clark and he was known as the “Man of Bronze” whereas
Superman was the “Man of Steel,” and Doc’s creator, Lester Dent, named him
“Clark” after superstar actor Clark Gable.) They also discover he has
super-powers, though they use that aspect of their foster child mainly to pull
huge farm equipment without needing oxen or tractors (later DC Comics did a
spinoff called Superboy, which
was supposedly the superhero adventures of Superman when he was still a boy,
though rather than set the Superboy
comics in a discernibly past time they made the clothes, the cars and
everything else look identical to what they were in the Superman books), and when he’s grown up Superman goes out in
a dorky suit and glasses that were considered nerdy even then (Siegel and Shuster got the idea of Clark Kent
wearing glasses from Harold Lloyd even though one wouldn’t expect Superman to
need them — and Lloyd didn’t either: the “glasses” he wore were just empty
frames) and saves a train from derailing by using his super-strength to bend a
badly bent rail back into shape. (This was a quite famous story in the original
Superman spread in Action Comics
#1.)
The first episode is called “Superman Comes to Earth” and the second is
“Depths of the Earth,” which is where the Spider Lady has her hideout — though
we don’t know that yet: we’ve just got to Clark Kent bluffing his way into a
job as reporter at the Daily Planet
(famously the narration of the later TV show called him “mild-mannered
reporter,” which as someone who’s been a journalist as long as I have seems
like a contradiction in terms!) and setting up the famous Clark Kent/Lois
Lane/Superman love triangle which Siegel and Shuster almost certainly ripped
off from The Scarlet Pimpernel
(the effete guy who loves the unapproachable girl whose affections turn only to
the dashing hero — only the effete guy is the dashing hero in disguise). It’s a neat serial and it shows off
major-studio production values (or at least the “B” department of a major
studio’s production values) even though the directors are Spencer Gordon Bennet
and Thomas Carr (both, especially Bennet, were old serial hands) and the script
was written by the usual committee: George H. Plympton (another old serial
hand) and Joseph F. Poland for “adaptation” and Arthur “Reefer Madness” Hoerl,
Lewis Clay and Royal K. Cole for “screenplay.” The first two episodes were a
quite workmanlike telling of Superman’s origins (that cool multi-triangular
chair the ruler of Krypton sits in looks so good I want one!) but I’m waiting
impatiently to see the Spider Lady standing in her own web (just ropes, but so
what?) and imperiously barking out orders to her criminal minions. — 10/24/12
•••••
Charles and I watched episodes three and four of the 1948 Superman serial, the first time Superman was ever filmed in
live action — his only previous movie appearances had been a set of 17 cartoons
by the Fleischer Brothers in 1939-1941 — though even here, with Columbia’s
serial budget lacking the money for truly convincing special effects,
live-action Superman Kirk Alyn (the first actor to play the role — it wasn’t George Reeves, though he made a 1951 Superman “B”
before starting the eight-year run of the Superman TV series) turns into an animated cartoon every time
the script (by a five-person committee of old hands, including serial veteran
George Plympton and Reefer Madness
author Arthur Hoerl) obliges him to fly. (The miniature rocket ship that
brought him from his dying home planet, Krypton, to Earth also became a cartoon
as it journeyed through space.) The first two episodes were a nicely done but
rather dutiful presentation of the Superman origin story: as Krypton is about
to fall into its sun and explode, scientist Jor-El (Nelson Leigh — quite good
even if he’s far from the sort of name to conjure with Marlon Brando was when
he played this part in the 1970’s Superman that kicked off the series with Christopher Reeve!) tries to get the
Council that runs Krypton to agree to his plan to have the entire Kryptonian
population evacuated to Earth, which has a similar atmosphere but so much less
gravity that all Kryptonians who relocate to Earth will have super-powers. (An
alternate version of the Superman mythos in which the evacuation actually happened and Earth was suddenly
inundated with super-Kryptonians, some of them good, some of them not so good
and some of them downright evil, some of them no doubt protective of the native
human population and some of them regarding us with the same cool contempt Mitt
Romney regarded the people who lost their jobs as the result of Bain Capital’s
financial machinations, would probably make at least as compelling a story as
the Superman mythos as it
stands.) The baby spaceship carrying the baby Kryptonian Kal-El (Superman’s real birth name, as opposed to his adoptive Earth name
“Clark Kent”) crash-lands on the Kents’ farm, they raise him on their own, and
they realize that both he and the blanket he was wrapped in are alien and
super-powerful.
The serial really gets under way in Episode Three, “The Reducer
Ray,” which unlike most electronic super-gadgets serial episodes got named for
is not an invention of the
villains, but a U.S. government research projects the baddies, led by the
Spider Lady (Carol Forman), are out to steal. Of course the government knows
this and calls in Superman to protect the gizmo. Contrary to what you might
think from its name, it’s not a
machine that shrinks things but something that blows things up — we see it at
work at a test target, a concrete blockhouse created especially for the Reducer
Ray to destroy — while the baddies try to fire a neutralizing ray at it, only
Superman blocks the bad guys’ rays with his body and thereby allows the good
guys’ rays to demolish their target. The Spider Lady has her lair inside a
series of caves — though Charles joked about how all the caves in this movie,
including the one from which Superman rescued a bunch of coal miners trapped in
a cave-in (where was Superman when those miners in West Virginia needed him?),
are awfully well lit — and she issues her orders to her henchmen wearing a
surprisingly frilly domino mask (though she takes it off early on because they
all know who she is anyway) and standing in front of a web. Well, it’s actually
a series of ropes strung together to look like a web, but in the story it’s electrically charged, and anyone the
Spider Lady wants to eliminate is stood up in front of it, forced to dance
around nervously by the charge on the metal floor under it, and then the
current pushes them against the web and electrocutes them, following which a
trap door below it conveniently opens to dispose of the body.
The third and
fourth episodes (the fourth is called “Man of Steel”) also introduce us to
Kryptonite, the fragments of the planet Krypton that escaped when the planet
itself blew up, headed for earth, settled in the asteroid belt and occasionally
one falls to Earth as a meteor. Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
admitted they invented Kryptonite because they had made Superman so “super” that plotting him was getting boring and
they realized they had to make him vulnerable to something, and later writers for the Superman comics created a
whole rainbow of Kryptonites in addition to the basic green variety that can
incapacitate or, if he’s exposed to it long enough, actually kill Superman. Of
course this is a black-and-white movie and only by reference to the comics
would you know that the Kryptonite meteor is supposed to be green! Superman, in
his Clark Kent identity, first gets exposed to Kryptonite in the office of Dr.
Leeds (Forrest Taylor), whose crooked assistant sells his secrets to the Spider
Lady (she tries to palm off $1 on him and then, when he protests, she
dispatches him with her electric web — and she tries to give Lois Lane, played
by Noel Neill — the only person in this movie who repeated their role on the
George Reeves TV show — the same treatment at the end of episode four in the
first really exciting cliffhanger this serial has had!); he collapses so
totally that Leeds at first thinks he’s dead, only he recovers when Leeds
replaces the lead lid on the box containing the meteor. (In the comics lead was
a total shield to the effects of Kryptonite, but in the film Clark Kent gets a
bit queasy even before the lead
box top is removed — I thought that was a plotting glitch but Charles suggested
that the top might not have been a complete seal, thereby allowing some of the
bad Kryptonite energy to escape.)
Kirk Alyn’s performance in this scene (oddly
he was unbilled in the original credits and “SUPERMAN” got all-caps billing as
playing himself — Alyn wasn’t even billed as playing Clark Kent, as the
imdb.com page on this movie reported) is the one high point in his acting so
far; he really manages to convince us how perplexing he finds the experience of
being sick for the first time in his (Earth) life. One imdb.com contributor
claimed the 1948 Superman was
considered the best-ever movie serial — which it isn’t; though this is at least
partly due to the relative nature of the characters themselves, the 1943 Batman, also from Columbia, is worlds better (Batman, a
normal human being who willed
himself to be a superhero but was still vulnerable to the things that stun,
injure and kill normal mortal humans, is simply a more compelling character
than the too-good-to-be-true Superman; and Lewis Wilson, who played him in the
1943 serial, caught the vulnerability better than any actor who’s played him
since), and so is the remarkable 1934 serial The Return of Chandu, with Bela Lugosi cast as an heroic, romantic figure
and playing him superbly (as well as a script that focuses more on suspense
than action). Still, it’s a not-bad movie for Superman to make his live-action
debut in, and it’s powered by the performances of the two female leads, with
Lois Lane, forced to drive out to a story with Clark Kent, ditches him by
pretending their car’s tire is flat (Glenda Farrell would have been proud of
her!), and the Spider Lady, though not the epitome of femme fatale deliciousness one might have expected, is still a
lot of fun, especially in Carol Forman’s no-nonsense, businesslike acting of
her. — 10/25/12
•••••
I ran the next episodes in sequence of the 1948 Superman serial, “A Job for Superman!” and “Superman in
Danger!” The serial has settled into a pretty comfortable groove by now — it’s
repetitive, but that was true of virtually all serials; there were only so many
ways you could set up action porn then or now — in which virtually all the cliffhangers involve Lois Lane since
Superman himself was so hard to kill. The writing committee was obviously not
ready to have Superman get confronted by the Spider Lady and her minions with
the Kryptonite, so they’ve had Lois Lane nearly electrocuted on the Spider
Lady’s web machine (and the beginning of Chapter Five — in which the Spider
Lady herself turns off the infernal device because she doesn’t want Lois Lane
to die quite yet, for reasons the writing committee didn’t make all that clear,
which provoked Charles to make his comment about the James Bond movies and the
persistence of Bond’s villains to use such grotesque and elaborate means to
kill him when they could easily just shoot him while they have the chance —
instead they give him the chance to escape and/or his colleagues to raid the
place and rescue him — though at least in the movie Sherlock Holmes
and the Secret Weapon the device of the
super-criminal using an elaborate means to kill the super-hero instead of just
shooting him was a conscious trick on Holmes’ part, playing on Moriarty’s ego
to get him to use a device, draining all the blood from Holmes’ body, that
gives Lestrade and the Scotland Yard force time to rescue Holmes) and at the
end of episode six they have Lois’s car, out of control and with her
incapacitated, literally headed
off the edge of a cliff.
It’s not much of a movie — it was made by producer Sam
Katzman and director Spencer Gordon Bennet the same year they made the second
(and decidedly inferior) Columbia Batman serial, Batman and Robin (though a second director, Thomas Carr, has a
co-credit on Superman) — and the
effect of Superman turning into an animated cartoon whenever the script obliges
him to fly was cool at first but is getting cheesier and cheesier with
repetition (and if the producers of the Superman TV series could have got a live-action George Reeves
to fly more or less convincingly on a 1950’s TV-series budget, surely
Columbia’s special-effects people could have done the same thing with Kirk
Alyn!) — but the show is still a lot of fun and well worth watching, though if
(as I suspect) Columbia (now Sony) and Warner Bros. had an argument over the
rights to the characters and settled by giving Warners the Superman serials’ DVD rights while letting Columbia keep the Batman ones, Columbia (all right, Sony) got by far the
better of the deal. Then again, that’s probably at least in part because Batman
is simply a much more interesting character, not only because he has a more
compelling backstory (a boy who decides to make his whole life about avenging
the murder of his parents by street criminals) but because he’s an ordinary
human being who willed himself to
be a superhero, not a being from another planet gifted with super-powers by the
difference in gravity between his solar system (later Superman comic books
explained the super-powers of Kryptonians on earth by saying its sun was a
giant red star instead of the comparatively puny yellow sun we Earthers got,
and that made Kryptonian gravity far heavier than Earth’s) and ours. Indeed,
Superman was so invulnerable that
character creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had to invent Kryptonite because without him having something that could kill him, plotting his stories was
getting dull because he could vanquish every potential enemy way too easily. — 10/27/12
•••••
I ran Charles and I episodes seven and eight in the Superman serial from 1948, “Into the Electric Furnace!” and
“Superman to the Rescue.” The cliffhangers from these aren’t much — “Into the
Electric Furnace!” ends with the gangsters, anxious to kidnap Clark Kent
because they know he knows Superman (though in obeisance to the conventions of
older superhero fiction they don’t
know Clark Kent is Superman),
grab Jimmy Olsen (Tommy Bond) by mistake and he ends up, unconscious, on his
way down a conveyer belt that will send him into a giant blast furnace (it
seems like an ordinary coke-fired one rather than an electric one, despite the
title), only at the start of the next chapter Superman arrives on the scene and
… walks to the wall and turns the blast-furnace’s switch off. Big deal — anybody could have done that! I was also disappointed when at the beginning of
the episode Superman keeps Lois Lane’s car from going off the cliff by …
grabbing its rear bumper and pulling it backwards. Frankly, I was hoping Lois’s
car would go off the cliff and
Superman would fly under it and catch it in mid-air, though as Charles pointed out
if they’d done it that way it would have been an animated flying Superman and an animated car.
There are some
potentially interesting characters here the writing committee (George H.
Plympton and Joseph F. Poland, “adaptation” — according to the opening credits
what they were actually “adapting” were the scripts from the Mutual network’s
radio serial of Superman — and Arthur “Reefer Madness” Hoerl, Lewis Clay and
Royal K. Cole, script) really didn’t develop, notably the character of Dr.
Hackett (Charles Quigley), who supposedly was a brilliant scientist who went
off the rails and became a crook, though we’re given utterly no indication of
what he was doing on either the
right or the wrong side of the law (frankly, the writers of the film Dick
Tracy Meets Gruesome got more pathos out of
a character like this even though, following the nomenclature conventions of Dick
Tracy creator Chester Gould, they saddled
him with the ridiculous character name “Dr. Lee Thal”); still, we feel for the
guy when he learns that the Spider Lady (Carol Forman, who’s impressing me less
this go-round with this serial than she did last time — of course the
femme fatale actress, Barbara Stanwyck, was
way too big a star for an
assignment like this, but couldn’t they have got Ann Savage from Detour instead?) had him broken out of prison only to keep
him captive in her underground cave hideout. (At the time the convention seemed
to be that all villains in
superhero stories had to have their hideouts in caves. It got especially trippy
in the 1943 Batman — still, along
with The Return of Chandu, one of
my two favorite serials of all time, when it turned out both hero and villain had their hideouts in caves!) —
10/28/12
•••••
As a cinematic nightcap, Charles
and I followed the Abbott and Costello Here Come the Co-Eds with the next two episodes in sequence in the 1948 Superman serial: “Irresistible Force!” (at least four of the
15 episode titles have exclamation points at the end) and “Between Two Fires” —
the latter title referring to the way Lois Lane is menaced by fires in two
cliffhangers in a row. With Superman virtually invincible (the movie’s writing
committee — George H. Plympton and Joseph F. Poland credited with “adaptation,”
probably because the credits claim the film has a basis not only in the Superman comic books but also the Superman radio show then aired on the Mutual network, while Reefer
Madness writer Arthur Hoerl shares credit
with Lewis Clay and Royal K. Cole for the actual script — did introduce Kryptonite, but so far they’ve done
precious little with it), the writers had to keep putting the people around
him, particularly Lois Lane, in danger so they could have the obligatory
cliffhangers (one of which was literally such — the one in which an unconscious Lois Lane was about to drive
her car off a cliff before Superman grabbed its rear bumper and stopped it; as
I noted earlier, I’d have rather seen her car go off the cliff and Superman
catch it in mid-air, but the relatively primitive effects of this serial, which
turned Superman into a cartoon every time the script obliged him to fly,
probably made that virtually impossible).
The gimmick in these two episodes was
that Professor Graham (veteran silent-screen star Herbert Rawlinson), inventor
of the Reducer Ray (from the name one expects it to shrink things, but in fact
it blows things up — given when this film was made I suspect the writers
expected the audience to see it as an application of atomic energy to a
battlefield weapon instead of a bomb) which the villains are after, comes from
Washington, D.C. to Metropolis to test the device at Metropolis University —
only the Spider Lady (Carol Forman), the principal villain, doffs her blonde
wig, reveals her real dark hair and impersonates Lois Lane, who’s scheduled to
meet Graham at the airport, interview him and take him to Metropolis
University. The Spider Lady snatches Graham and takes him to her underground
hideout (though, contradicting the earlier episodes, she does not blindfold him as she drives him there), where she forces
him to build a duplicate Reducer Ray — while she has her own renegade
scientist, Professor Hackett (Charles Quigley), disguise himself as Graham and
meet Lois (whose car was delayed by an “accident” staged by two of the Spider
Lady’s minions), then gain access to the original Reducer Ray at Metropolis
University so he can photograph it and then destroy it. Lois catches on to the
masquerade but, rather than wait until she can get out of the building to call
either Daily Planet editor Perry
White (Pierre Watkin) or the police, she uses the wall phone and Hackett and
his sidekick catch her, kidnap her and set the Reducer Ray to blow itself up,
setting the lab on fire and taking Lois out with it … though Superman is
already on his way there because Clark Kent has studied a clandestine photo
Jimmy Olsen (who’s also in the villains’ custody at the end of episode 10) took
of Hackett as Graham and somehow he’s been able just by looking at the picture
to see that the man in it is not Graham. (How? Is ultra-keen facial recognition
one of Superman’s powers as well as all the cool ones he had in the comics?)
The 1948 Superman serial is
actually pretty well done — though the contemporaneous Batman and
Robin from the same studio (Columbia),
producer (Sam Katzman), one of the directors (Spencer Gordon Bennet) and three
of the same writers (Plympton, Poland and Cole), is considerably better (and
the 1943 Batman from producer
Rudolph C. Flothow, director Lambert Hillyer and writers Victor McLeod, Leslie
Swabacker and Harry Fraser is one of the two best serials ever made), and as
I’ve noted before part of that is simply that Batman, an ordinary (and
vulnerable) human being who willed
himself to be a superhero and trained, both physically and intellectually, for
the job, is a much more interesting character than Superman, who got blessed
with his powers due to the gravitational difference between his home planet
Krypton and Earth and who was so difficult to write for that his creators,
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, had to invent Kryptonite just so he would be
vulnerable to something. I’m of
mixed feelings about the cartoon effect used to allow Superman to fly in this
film — at times I’m charmed by the effect and at other times it just look tacky
(especially when the cartoon Superman ducks into a building or behind a rock just so he can emerge as the live-action Kirk Alyn
moments later) — but I still haven’t decided whether I’d like this more or less
if they had “flown” Superman with the clumsy harnesses and wires they used with
George Reeves in the 1950’s TV show: one of the most wince-inducing moments in
the film Hollywoodland (in which
Ben Affleck played Reeves) is when one of the wires holding the harness breaks
and Reeves takes a bone-jarring fall to the studio floor. — 11/4/12
•••••
Eventually Charles and I had dessert and then watched a
couple more episodes in the 1948 Superman
serial, “Superman’s Dilemma” and “Blast in the Depths,” both of which centered
around a rare metal alloy, “mono-chromite,” supposedly invented by Professor
Graham (Herbert Rawlinson) and on a U.S. government list of restricted
chemicals so that if anyone tried to order it without government authorization,
the “proper authorities” were supposed to be notified. The Spider Lady’s thugs
are trying to obtain it from various dealers, including mining engineer Fred
Collier (Eddie Foster) — one wonders if the writing committee deliberately
named this character after the old term for a coal miner! — and in one of the
most preposterous turns of events in any serial (and serials in general weren’t exactly noted for credibility
in the writing) Jimmy Olsen decides to secrete himself in the container
supposedly shipping the mono-chromite to the baddies, but in the middle of the
truck ride he decides to get out for some air, the baddies spot him and drill
the mono-chromite container with bullets. That’s the cliffhanger at the end of
“Superman’s Dilemma” — the titular dilemma being that Lois Lane has had him, in
his Clark Kent identity, arrested for stealing her car and he’s in jail, so
does he stay in jail until his case gets called or does he use his super-powers
to break out? Both, as it turns out; at the start of “Blast in the Depths” he
bends the prison bars to escape in his super-suit, rescues Jimmy (he substitutes
himself for Jimmy in the
mono-chromite box and the bad guys’ bullets just bounce off him), then gets
back into his cell, bends the bars back into shape and reassumes his Clark Kent
drag before anybody notices he’s been gone. The Los Angeles Times recently published a rather snide item about the
latest plot twist in the Superman
comics — Clark Kent resigns from the Daily Planet to protest its loss of journalistic integrity —
ridiculing it by asking what was so great about the Daily Planet reporters when none of them was able to figure out that Clark Kent was
Superman even though the only thing he did to disguise himself was put on
glasses.
The 1948 Superman as a
whole is a pretty fun serial and the plotting isn’t as dementedly absurd as the
ones from Republic (and I can’t think so far of any of the cliffhangers in which the protagonists have
escaped simply by jumping — as I’ve noted here before, anyone who’d ever seen a
Republic serial could have figured out how to do a sequel to Thelma
and Louise: just before the car went over
the cliff, Thelma and Louise jumped out of it), and the effect by which
Superman turns into a cartoon every time he’s obliged by the script to fly is
charmingly cheesy and campy (though the way they manage the landings — the
cartoon Superman flies behind a building or a rock or into a cave, and emerges
on foot as the live-action actor Kirk Alyn, who played him but for some reason
did not get screen credit: the cast list says “SUPERMAN” in all-caps and centered before giving
the names of the actors playing the Earthling characters), but compared to the
1934 Return of Chandu or the 1943
Batman this one is pretty
ordinary — and even a piece of cheese like The Phantom Empire, with its bizarre genre clashes (a sci-fi Western!) and the comfortable but
decided un-superheroic Gene Autry as the “good” lead and a superb performance
by Dorothy Christy as Queen Tika that leaves Carol Forman’s estimable but
hardly screen-scorching Spider Lady here in the dust as far as serial
villainesses are concerned (I’m less impressed by Forman this time than I was
the first time I saw the 1948 Superman, or parts of it, on American Movie Classics; she’s good but sometimes
too petulant to be convincingly malevolent — at times she comes off more like a
diva model yelling at some poor
underling for smudging her makeup instead of a real hard-core meanie, and part
of me wishes they’d got Ann Savage for the part), has a quirky appeal the 1948 Superman is just too well-behaved to duplicate. — 11/5/12
•••••
Charles and I decided to run the last three episodes of the
1948 Superman serial, “Hurled to
Destruction,” “Superman at Bay,” and “The Payoff.” This time the intrigue
centered around the Spider Lady (Carol Forman) and her gang kidnapping Dr.
Graham (Herbert Rawlinson) to force him to complete their duplicate version of
Graham’s Relativity Reducer Ray machine. At the end of episode 12 the crooks
had got the key ingredient, mono-chromite (the hyphenated spelling is used in
the film itself), which with the usual indifference of serial writers to
continuity was described in episode 12 as an alloy invented by Dr. Graham, but
in episode 14 is an ore (i.e., a naturally occurring metal that can be mined
and smelted out of rock), but they need Graham’s knowledge to complete the device
— so Dr. Hackett (Charles Quigley), the renegade scientist the Spider Lady
broke out of jail to help her in her experiments, figures out a way to put
Graham under mind control so he will do their bidding. Just how he did this is a mystery both to the Spider Lady
herself and to the audience — we’ve seen the first Dick Tracy serial for Republic and some of the other Republic
productions in which the ways the villains put some of the subsidiary good guys
under mind control were described in excruciating detail, but the writers on
this one couldn’t have cared less, and their ambiguity actually turns out to
work against the bad guys when the Spider Lady rather arbitrarily fires the
reducer ray at the jail cell in which the recaptured Dr. Hackett and Anton (Jack
Ingram), a member of her gang from the get-go, are being held and kills both of
them (and comes close to killing Lois Lane as well).
This serial features some
of the famous catch lines later used in the 1950’s Superman TV series with George Reeves, including the cry of
“Up, up and away!” as Superman takes off and the much ridiculed “This looks
like a job for … Superman!,” with
the voice quickly dropping from the reedy, nerdy tenor with which Kirk Alyn
(and Reeves after him) spoke as Clark Kent to a deep, authoritative basso when he was Superman. (Since the serial is built in
part from a Superman radio show
broadcast on the Mutual network, it’s obvious this schtick was designed to let radio listeners know that Clark
Kent had taken off his mild-mannered reporter drag and assumed his Superman
identity.) But it used them surprisingly sparingly, though it’s noteworthy for
some well-staged fight scenes (rivaling the famous ones in Republic serials
with their crack team of stunt doubles), a cliffhanger featuring Perry White
hanging off the ledge of the window in his office in the Daily Planet building (well, the writers were obviously tired of
getting their cliffhangers from putting Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen in jeopardy …
) and a spectacular climax in which Graham, now back in control of himself (for
reasons that remain as mysterious as the techniques which put him under the
Spider Lady’s control in the first place), turns the Reducer Ray on the Spider
Lady; the force of its energy drives her into her lethally charged web of metal
ropes, she is electrocuted and she literally explodes and leaves behind a hole
in her back wall.
Overall this is one of the better serials, though there’s
little you can do with Superman as a character (there’s one cliffhanger in which
he and Lois are handcuffed together outside a mine the baddies are about to
blow up; he has to wait for her to become unconscious so he can open the
handcuffs with his super-powers, fly off, foil the villains’ plot and return to
her and re-handcuff them before she comes to; when she does come to she briefly realizes that the handcuffs are
now on the opposite arms from where they were before, but Clark Kent assures
her that she got that wrong, and through much of this serial the writers got
their situations from having Clark Kent need to figure out a way to slip away
from the main action so he can doff the reporter drag and emerge as Superman) —
for reasons that got a little muddled towards the end, even the villains’ use
of Kryptonite against him causes him no more than a mild, transitory bit of
queasiness — and the writers also made much less than their colleagues at DC
Comics of the irony of the Superman-Lois Lane-Clark Kent love triangle (Clark
loves Lois, but Lois thinks Clark’s a wimp and has eyes only for Superman, not
knowing that Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same — a gimmick the Superman creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, obviously ripped off from The Scarlet Pimpernel and its
author, Baroness Orczy), but it’s still a fun show, the effects are reasonably
good for the budget and the time (though turning Superman into a cartoon
whenever he has to fly is either somewhat credible or outrageously campy,
depending on your mood), there are relatively few of the outrageous cheats
Republic used in its cliffhangers
and the overall movie is fun and a decent if not spectacular debut for Superman
as a live-action character. — 11/6/12
