Superman Chapter 1 – Superman Comes to Earth (1948) – Blue Towel Productions

The very first live action (mostly) adaption of Superman, long one of my favorite characters, was a 15 chapter serial (a multi-episode film shown often during cinema matinées over successive weeks) from Columbia Pictures in 1948. It starred Kirk Alyn, Noel Neill, Tommy Bond, and Carol Foreman.

I’ve been interested in watching this old serial (and its sequel which came out in 1950) for some time—interested enough to actually buy them on Apple TV and to make a start, but not to finish.  But now…it’s time

Superman Comes to Earth (Chapter 1)

Directed by Spencer Bennett and Thomas Carr
Runtime:  21 minutes

Spoilers!

Super-feats:  Small child Clark Kent pulls a heavy cart full of hay, young boy Clark uses X-Ray vision to find a lost watch in a haystack, teen Clark Kent handily deals with a live electrical wire and anchors a car to a tree to prevent it from being pulled away in a tornado.  He might also be running at super-speed but that’s not clear. At the end, he uses his super-vision to see the broken train rail, and of course changes his clothes into Superman, presumably at super-speed, but the movie ends before we get much more.  Eben Kent also makes reference to his son’s super-sensitive hearing, but that isn’t depicted.

Super-Lore introduced (in the context of these serials, I’m not warranting this is true for the character overall):  We meet Krypton and Superman’s parents Jor-El and Lara, and see it destroyed.  Jor-El’s hope had been to build a fleet of spaceships to facilitate an evacuation, but the council (that’s all it is called) refuses to listen.  There is no reference to Krypton’s red sun, the name of its capital city, or even the name of Jor-El and Lara’s infant.

We also meet the Kents, Eben and…well, Mrs. Kent isn’t given a first name.  They adopt Clark and raise him on their farm, keeping him out of the public eye as much as possible.  Clark is inspired by them to use his powers for the betterment of others, to get a job that will keep him close to world events, so he will know about them quickly.  Eben Kent inspires the name “Superman.”  Mrs. Kent makes Superman’s costume out of his baby blankets, and Clark decides to keep his identity a secret. After the Kents pass away, Clark leaves to go to the city, following their last wishes.

We then meet Lois Lane, ace reporter for the Daily Planet, and Jimmy Olsen, who seems to be a newspaper photographer, although is later described as a cub reporter.

When Clark sees the imminent train disaster, we get the familiar phrase, “This looks like a job for Superman!”  In the closing narration, Metropolis is named (and briefly seen) for the first time. 

Comments: And here is all of our hero’s essential backstory, brought to live-action for the first time. The story starts on Krypton, which is described as “a rugged planet laced with jagged mountain chains rich in strange minerals unknown on earth,”  full super-men and -women.  There is comic book precedent for this, I believe.  Though we never see any of the Kryptonians using anything like super-powers, but it’s implied that the great abilities we later see in Superman are simply what it was like on Krypton.  So earth’s atmosphere and yellow sun don’t so much give Superman powers as much as they just sustain them.  

An uncredited Nelson Leigh plays Jor-El with all the earnestness he can muster, while Luana Walters (also uncredited) doesn’t have any lines at all as Lara.  The biggest scene on Krypton (about the first half of the episode) focuses on Jor-El’s argument with the planet’s leading council, as he tries to convince them that Krypton is being drawn closer to its sun and would one day explode.  Predictably, they are unwilling to listen to the scientist’s arguments and even laugh him out of the room, literally.

The explosion of Krypton is where the serial first switches over to animation, something we’ll see happen a lot whenever Superman’s feats were too difficult for the production to realize.

Aside from that conceit (which one must just accept if you are going to watch this thing) it’s pretty good.

We then switch over to the rocket landing on earth where baby Superman is found by “Eben Kent” and his unnamed wife (played, again uncredited, by Edward Cassidy and Virginia Carroll) and decide to raise him as their own.  We get a few glimpses of young boy Clark using his super-strength and X-Ray vision (to find a watch his mother has lost in a haystack) before the big action set piece of teen Clark (Mason Alan Dinehart, who, you guessed it, is uncredited) saving his dad from a tornado.  

(Did you catch that? Clark saves his adopted father from a tornado!  What would this guy have thought if he could look through some multiversal telescope and see what how Henry Cavill’s Clark handles Kevin Costner’s encounter with a tornado?)

Then we get young man Clark (now played by series star Kirk Alyn, who, strangely is also uncredited—see below) having that critical talk with his foster parents about how he must use his powers for good, “in the interest of truth, tolerance and justice.”  They talk about how he must leave the farm and go where he can do the most good with his abilities, how he will adopt another guise when he does so and how he will find a job that allows him to be close to the action.  

This is all classic Superman lore, but annoyingly, Clark is already dressed and made up exactly as he appears for most of the serial—he’s got the business suit, the tie, the glasses, even though he obviously doesn’t have vision problems and he’s apparently coming up with the double identity right at that moment.  I would have loved this scene a lot more if he was just dressed in farm clothes, the same as his parents.  But that sort of naturalism for the character was still a long way off (and is occasionally still strangely elusive in some adaptions).

We then hear that his parents passed away, and Clark heads out to the big city and right into a crisis.  We cut to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen working on a story about a mining disaster as they rides on a train.  Clark shows up at the station to catch the train, finds out that a rail is damaged and there’s not time to warn the train, and, well you know what’s coming:  “This looks like a job for Superman!”

That’s where the first episode ends, asking the question if even Superman is fast enough to fix the rail and save the train.  We’re pretty sure that he is, but I won’t begrudge the “lightness” of the first cliffhanger—this episode had a lot to get through and it does so with incredible economy.  The fact that it had to tack on a fairly unimportant (to the plot) ending is a small weakness.

The nature of the story means that we don’t see a lot of Kirk Alyn as Superman in this particular episode, but what we do is fine.  I don’t think Kirk Alyn is anyone’s favorite Superman, but for the standards of the day he looks okay (better than, say, either of the actors who played Batman in the two serials featuring that character).  And he certainly makes a plausible-looking Clark Kent, although again there’s not a lot screentime to see how the character actually comes across alongside the other major players.

Speaking of those other major players, we do get a solid look at Noel Neill as Lois and Tommy Bond as Jimmy Olsen, and both are great.  I was particularly impressed by Neill’s Lois (a take I only vaguely remember from episodes of the George Reeve’s series that I saw as a kid). 

In her short time on screen she conveys Lois’ snark, drive and charm in a way that I thought was great.  Tommy Bond’s Jimmy is also good, more of a goofy caricature (with a crazy smile) than I remember from later presentations, but full of personality.

Bond, I later realized, was famous for playing Butch, the regular bully on the Our Gang shorts.

Weirdly, as I mentioned, amongst the uncredited actors in this serial is Kirk Alyn himself.  Apparently the early publicity was that they couldn’t find anyone to play Superman, so they hired the real Superman and Alyn was just playing Clark Kent. But as far as I can see, Alyn’s name doesn’t appear at all (the cast list just starts with “Superman”, followed by Noel Neill as Lois Lane). 

The practice with these serials, as best as I can determine, was to feature the same cast list for every episode (or possibly only in the first episode), so a lot of actors didn’t get credits, but missing out on the lead is surprising to me.  

Cliffhanger ending:  Superman races to fix a broken train rail before the train carrying Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen hits it and is wrecked.  

Can even Superman save this train from destruction?!  What will happen when to Clark Kent arrives in Metropolis? Don’t miss “Depths of the Earth,” the second exciting chapter of Superman, at this theatre next week!

Other Thoughts:

• The serial begins with a zoom in on a Superman comic book, which is a bit reminiscent to how Richard Donner’s film began 30 years later
• Krypton is at first described by the narrator as a tiny blue star that is billions of miles away from earth, that you only realized was a planet like our own when you spanned the billions of miles it was away from earth.  The narrator says it “revolved around the sun of its own solar system, while satellites like ringed-moons in turn revolved around it.”  So it was planet that looked like a star, which revolved around its own sun and had moons revolving around it that themselves had rings?  Wheels within wheels!

• In this speech, the narrator pronounces “solar” in a way that I’d consider weird:  “so-LAHR” (like Bert Lahr).  I don’t know, maybe that’s just the way they talked in 1948.
• We get a brief painting that depicts Krypton’s capital, a futuristic looking city typical of this period.  But when Krypton explodes, there are some shots (stock footage, I assume) showing various historically earth-style buildings collapsing.   Maybe this was in the capital’s “Old Quarter” or something.
• So I had a brief crazy thought–when Mrs. Kent gives Clark the special uniform made from his baby blankets, she says it’s a strange material that is resistant to fire and acid, and she hopes it will protect him always.  And so because also there was no mention of invulnerability amongst Clark’s powers, I wondered if the serial was trying to put forward an idea that it’s just Superman’s costume that’s invulnerable, and not the man himself?  But then I remembered that this Chapter already showed us young Clark not being killed by the electrified wire he saves his dad from, so I’m relieved to find I’m wrong. But then I’m wondering why they make such a big deal about the costume protecting him.

• Incidentally, I’ve read that this is the first media which names Mrs. Kent “Martha”, but I’ve watched this thing a few times and cant’ see any reference to Mrs. Kent’s name. 
• When Jimmy tries to get out of helping Lois with her story, he says, “I was going to take a picture of…” and Lois replies, “She’ll have to wait.”  No reference to who Lois was talking about, but this is a subtle reference to Jimmy’s girl-craziness that often came through in the comics, but that I don’t think we see at all in this serial. 
• The movie borrows a gimmick from the radio Superman series that was still popular…before Clark changes identities, he thinks to himself, “This looks like a job…for Superman,” dropping the register of his voice on the last couple of words.  It doesn’t work quite the same way in a visual medium as it did on radio.  There it helped serve as a cue that Superman was switching between personas, while here it just comes a bit out of nowhere, the only time we hear Superman’s internal thoughts.
• The station agent who is trying to telegraph up the line to stop the train is named Leeds, which is funny because that’s also the name of the museum professor who shows up in Chapter Three.