This is the first ever live action (mostly) adaption of Superman, long one of my favorite characters–a 15 chapter serial (serialized films that were released in cinema matinée screenings over successive weeks) from Columbia pictures in 1948. It starred Kirk Alyn, Noel Neill, Tommy Bond, and Carol Forman. I’m going through it (and its sequel) chapter by chapter. Read here for where it all starts.
Hurled to Destruction (Chapter 13)
Directed by Spencer Bennett and Thomas Carr
Runtime: 16 minutes (I realize that in the version of this that I watched, after Chapter 1 they didn’t include the opening title sequence, so this might be slightly off.
Spoilers!
Super-feats: Superman super-smashes his way out of the mine to rescue Lois. Later, he flies to Jimmy’s car, lands on the roof, grabs a bad guy by the neck and then the wrist in his unbreakable grip. He then flies him to Perry White’s office via the window. Then he flies around to the file room to turn back into Clark.
Comments: The last cliffhanger was one of my favorites. Clark has spent so much time protecting his secret identity, how was he going to get out of a situation involving an exploding mine when he’s handcuffed to Lois Lane? But the solution wasn’t hard to guess—for sure Lois was going to get herself knocked out (how many times has that been?) so that Superman could do his thing.
And that’s pretty much what happened except that you’d be forgiven for thinking that Lois actually died when a bunch of rocks falls on her (don’t mock! That’s kind of happens in the 1978 movie), as the cave-in looks pretty severe. But of course, she’s fine. Lois and Jimmy are always fine, even with all the times they get knocked unconscious.
Still, with all of that, I appreciated the humorous moment, after she’s woken up and Clark has reattached the handcuffs, of Lois noticing that they’re now connected by the opposite arms. Clark responds to this by gaslighting her and telling her she’s just confused because of the head injury.
We’re here now in Chapter 13 of this serial, and it’s really obvious that these things are coming out on a weekly schedule. That means it’s been about three months since the serial began—you can see all sorts of things that indicate the filmmakers weren’t confident that the audience would remember the details of everything they’ve watched.
First of all, I’m pretty sure that the mine Superman rescues Lois from is exactly the same place that he rescued her from way back in Chapter 3, even though they’re not meant to be.
Then the following scene in the Daily Planet is almost completely full of recaps:
Clark: We got the story, but they got the mono chromite.
Lois: Which proves that the Spider Lady is trying to duplicate the Relativity Reducer Ray
Jimmy: Yeah, and Graham the guy who developed the ray, is her prisoner
Perry: Graham is an honourable scientists. He knows the Ray is more powerful than the atom bomb. He’ll never cooperate with her.
Clark: Unless the Spider Lady has some scheme in mind to force him
Previously that scheme involved just beating Graham up, which already led the honourable scientist to start working with the villainess. But in this episode, we seem to have forgotten all that, and he’s still acting all defiant again, so they have to use some sort of hypnosis on him instead (to be fair, maybe he was just pretending last time).
This all leads to the episode’s main focus, which is the Spider Lady’s gang trying to steal a critical component from the Relativity Reducer Ray, currently sitting at Metropolis University. A group of her men led by Anton (Jack Ingram) show up to steal it. That group includes two other guys which, I’ve mentioned last time, I’m pretty sure were captured by the police a few chapters earlier—Conrad (Charles King) and his partner (I’m not sure, maybe it’s Elton played by Rusty Westcoatt).
This is all another instance of how the serial is trusting that the audience isn’t really paying attention to the details. Either that, or the Spider Lady has a thing about employing identical twins.
Or maybe they’re just supposed to be different guys, even if it’s the same actors. Jimmy has definitely met them before, but he doesn’t recognize them at all.
Later, it’s Jimmy, out of all the good guys who winds up facing off with these guys, and for once he does a pretty good job in a fist fight with the baddies. He’s got a particular good moment where he kicks a car door into Anton’s body, and almost gets the better of him. (Later Perry White also gets some good punches in on Anton, so maybe Anton just isn’t that good of a fighter).
Of course, Jimmy eventually needs Superman’s help to save him. Superman obliges by flying on top of his car and reaching in from the roof and grabbing Anton by the neck. It’s pretty cool.
But then that leads to the episode’s dopiest moment, where Jimmy asks Superman to turn the guy over to the Daily Planet instead of the police, so they can question him first. Superman agrees, and Perry White decides to question him alone, which leads to the inevitable fight and cliffhanger. Pierre Watkin gets his most substantial role as Perry in this chapter, but it does not end well for him, as we leave the episode with Perry dangling off a ledge outside of his office.
Now I’ve wanted the serial to get Perry out of his office all along. Finally it’s happened. But not in the way I expected.
Seriously, if Anton gets away and I were the police I’d be pretty mad at all of these guys—Jimmy, Perry and Superman, for this incredible dereliction of duty. We’ll see.
Cliffhanger ending:
Perry White, in a fight in his office with the thug Anton, gets knocked out his window and ends up dangling for his life!
Why does the fugitive Hackett appear in public? Can even Superman counter all the moves of his clever enemies? Don’t fail to see “Superman at Bay,” Chapter 14 of “Superman” at this theatre next week!
Other thoughts:
• For the second time, the serial creates an animated hole in the wall when Superman smashes through the mine. It’s pretty goofy looking, but I can imagine why the filmmakers might have done this (and all the animated effects they use), if they felt like it was a choice of something like this or just not ever really showing any big super-powered moment.
• Perry assigns Clark and Jimmy the “exclusive story” of covering the whole Reducer Ray project by taking photographs of the university grounds and writing captions about them. Can you imagine the story? Here’s a picture of a building and a sidewalk and a courtyard? Man, the Daily Planet must have been hard up that day.
• But even funnier is the assignment Perry gives to Lois for the woman’s page. He tells her to “Dream up a new way to cook a roast or toss a salad together.” Clark teases her that he’ll give whatever she thinks of a try and she tells him to “Just name your poison.” They’re still giving each other a hard time but they seem to be more on equal footing now.
• The bad guys pretend to be from the Globe. This is not one of the newspapers seen in the montage back in Chapter 2. There are a lot of newspapers in Metropolis, it seems.
• The bad guys have a camera that shoots some sort of poison darts! They use it to get past the guards at the university. It’s not clear if they are just knocked out, or actually killed!
• This is the first episode in a while where Clark narrates to himself, “This looks like a job…for Superman!” I still don’t like it.
• In the narration from last episode, the question was asked if the Spider Lady is trying to take over the Daily Planet. It turns out the answer is “No, not as far as we can see,” as all that actually happens is that one of her men is taken there (foolishly) for questioning. Pretty misleading stuff there, narrator.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
