“Up! Up! And AWAY!”

Yeah, I’m sure you’re all shocked. After watching James Gunn’s Superman I decided it was high time that the big blue boy scout got the same treatment as a certain pointy eared co-worker of his.

So yes, we’re going to be looking at every live action Superman movie while we wait for Matt Reeves to finish the script for The Batman 2 roughly around the time of the heat death of the universe (I am not bitter, I am passionate.)

Let’s begin at the beginning. It’s 1948, a mere decade after Superman’s debut in Action Comics and the character is already a bona fide cultural icon with a radio series, newspaper strips, some of the greatest cartoon shorts ever made and a metric shit ton of merchandise. But, weirdly, despite kicking off the entire superhero genre (asterisk asterisk) Superman was actually pretty late to the party when it came to being adapted into live action.

Batman and Captain America both made it to the big screen before him, and even Captain Marvel had a serial in 1941, a mere two years after his debut (which is a bit like The Monkees being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before The Beatles). The reason for this was that National Publications (as DC was called at the time) were extremely protective of the property and wanted full control of the script. The rights being tied up with the Fleischer series also complicated matters, with the result being that work only began on the serial in 1947.

I was wary going into this, as neither of the two Batman serials were exactly a fun time. So I was astonished at just how much I ended up enjoying Superman 1948. It’s definitely a 1940s serial and as such has most of the weaknesses inherent in the format. But in terms of dialogue, pacing, direction and acting it’s leaps ahead of both The Batman and Batman and Robin.

The serial begins with the first ever live action depiction of the planet Krypton.

It’s no spectacular crystal planet but it’s nonetheless an interesting take, a rugged, rocky world rich in alien minerals.

One of the things that really surprised me was just how much of Superman’s lore is already established even at this early point in his history. Jor-El and Lara (named!), Ma and Pa Kent, Metropolis, the Daily Planet, Perry White, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are all present and perfectly recognisable to a modern Superman fan. This is probably a result of National keeping such a tight control on the property, the other superhero serials of the period tended to deviate pretty sharply from their source material. But it’s also a reflection of just how strong these original concepts were, and how timeless they’ve proven.

Anyway, Jor-El has discovered that Krypton is going to be pulled into the sun and tries to convince the Kryptonian leaders to evacuate the planet. After a FIVE MINUTE scene where they bicker back and forth and tell him that if he’s smart enough to figure out that Krypton is doomed he should be smart enough to figure out how to save it if he’s not crazy or lying (which he probably is), Jor-El realises that the planet is terminally stupid and shit’s gotta be how it’s gotta be. He puts his infant son in a rocket ship and blasts him off to Earth where…fuck it, we don’t have time.

That page is going to save me so much goddamned work. So, the baby is raised by Ma and Pa Kent and as he grows starts to exhibit incredible strength. This culminates in a scene where young Clark Kent rescues his father from a twister and then drives him home.

“Son, I’m mighty disappointed. By rescuing me from that twister you risked revealing your true iden…hahaha, I’m just kidding. Can you imagine? Thanks Clark.”

Clark grows to manhood and his parents finally reveal to him the truth about his origin. After his parents both die offscreen (seriously, it’s scene, parents dead, next scene) young Clark Kent heads to Metropolis to seek his fortune.

So this Kirk Alyn, who holds the distinction of being the first actor to play Superman in live action. And…he’s kinda great? I wasn’t expecting much given that he’s almost never in the conversation when greatest screen Supermen are discussed but I think he should be. For starters, he clearly stamped the role hard in terms of look and mannerisms (one thing that I realised watching this movie, the Clark Kent disguise is FAR more plausible in an era where everyone wears hats). His Clark is a surprisingly sophisticated performance. When he’s around Perry White and Lois Lane he’s slightly bumbling and “aw shucks” but when he’s shaking down mobsters for leads he’s a real newshound; serious, canny and steely. And his Superman made me realise what the most important thing about any Superman performance is: Superman has to seem like he enjoys being Superman. And Alyn fucking nails that. Whether he’s flying out a window, blowing out a fire or man-handling gangsters, he has the same infectious joy of an eight year old playing Superman. He loves his life. He loves that he gets to do this. He gets to fly around the city like a big blue rocket helping people and that is awesome.

Speaking of the flying, if you’ve heard anything about this serial it’s probably the flying scenes and that’s because they look like this:

Originally, it was planned that the flying scenes would be done with wires. These scenes were shot (which apparently was torture for poor Kirk Alyn) and looked so bad that the director fired the effects team and had all the flying scenes redone in hand drawn animation. Are they convincing? Absolutely not. Are they probably the most mocked aspect of this whole production. You bet your ass they are. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. I fucking adore the flying scenes. Not just because they’re gorgeously animated, not just because it looks like Kirk Alyn is momentarily turning into the actual comic-book Superman. I love them because they show an absolute refusal to compromise. Producer Sam Katzman understood that kids did not want to see a nerfed Superman. They wanted to see a Superman who flies around, not a Superman who shows up in a doorway after a shot of a crowd looking up and pointing at the sky. He gave his audience what they wanted and didn’t care if he looked silly doing it and I respect the hell out of him for that.

Anyway, while waiting for a train to take him to Metropolis, Clark learns that the track is damaged and that there’s a locomotive barrelling towards disaster. On the train, we get our first look at the second most important Superman character.

So this is Noel Neill (Jesus, even her name is perfect for comics) as our first live action Lois Lane. And, like Alyn, she pretty quickly shot to the top of my list of great Loises (Loisi?). Neill not only played Lois in this serial and its sequel, she was even invited back a decade later to reprise the role opposite George Reeves on television. She also cameoed in the 1978 Superman, the eighties Superboy series and Superman Returns. Neill’s Lois is a lot younger than most Loisi (Neill was still in her twenties) and she comes across as less “star reporter” and more “gutsy young cub with everything to prove”. There’s even a little subtle (possibly unintentional) feminist commentary with Lois constantly having to prove herself to Perry White, who constantly threatens to banish her to the “women’s pages”. She does frequently get bound and gagged by the bad guys only to be carried away in Superman’s manly, manly arms, but no more than Jimmy Olsen so it’s fine. She’s presented as tough, fearless, canny, perfectly willing to dick over a colleague to get a scoop but willing to take the blame for her mistakes. In short, everything Lois Lane should be. And her office rivalry with Clark is just great. Unlike the Batman serials which just jogged in place, there is actually character development from episode to episode. Lois and Clark start out as rivals with Lois actually getting him falsely arrested at one point just so she can get a head start on a story, but by the final episode they’re bantering and working together as a team.

Superman’s first public appearance comes after when he’s waiting for a train and learns from the signal man that one of the tracks has been bent and that the next train will surely derail. He changes into the costume for the first time and bends the track back into place, saving everyone on the train. Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen happent to be on the train and are all “golly, what a story!” but don’t meet Clark properly until later on. Walking into the Daily Planet, Clark is able to convince Perry White to let him cover a mine disaster and get an interview with some trapped miners. This was a really common trope in old movies, reporters trying to get interviews with trapped miners. I have no goddamned idea why. What do they think the miners are going to say?

“Ow?” “Help me?” “Thank you for your interest but my oxygen is limited so kindly FUCK OFF?”

Anyway, Clark gets the scoop, rescues Lois from a cave-in as Superman and then beats her and Olsen back to Metropolis which leads to honestly one of my favourite “Clark meets Lois” scenes. After she spends a few minutes bad mouthing the “rat” who scooped her he reveals himself from behind a paper, tips his hat to her in a gentlemanly manner and introduces himself as “the rat”.

But that’s only the beginning of our story. Metropolis in the forties, much like her sister city Gotham, is plagued by the scourge of White Guys in Fedoras. These malefactors are led by a sinister and brilliant mastermind known only as The Spider Lady.

Not to be confused with your mother who was asked to chaperone the school Halloween dance at short notice.

So yeah, Superman’s first supervillain in live action was a woman, which is cool. It would be a whole lot cooler if she didn’t suck but you can’t have everything. I don’t want to place too much blame here on actor Carol Foreman, a veteran serial performer who, unusually for a woman, played almost exclusively villainous roles. She even starred with Kirk Alyn in another serial based on a DC property, Blackhawk. She was much better in that so it’s my guess that there was a time issue. Her scenes feel very much like she’s trying to remember her lines and hit her mark and hasn’t been given enough time to rehearse the scene. The mask also limits her signature icy stare, one of her chief assets as an actor, which is probably why it only appears in early episodes before being nixed.

If Kate Mulgrew had been born a few decades earlier, she would have eaten this part alive.

The Spider Lady is a reworked version of the Red Widow from the Superman radio show, which was a much bigger influence on the serial than the actual comic book. Oh, and all her henchmen are called The Spider Lady Men, which sounds less like a criminal gang and more like a Vegas drag revue.

Anyway, the Spider Lady plans to steal something called the Reducer Ray. This is not, as you might assume, a device that shrinks people. It “reduces” in the sense of “reducing something to radioactive ash”. It’s basically a heat ray, stated onscreen to be more powerful than an atom bomb. Although, given this particular franchise’s history with the US Government’s nuclear programme I would have assumed they would have given that whole topic a wide berth. If you don’t know, in 1944 National was going to publish a story about Lex Luthor building a weird science fiction device called an “atom bomb” and the US government asked them to hold off on publishing that until, oh, let’s say 1946? Thaaaanks.

Like the Batman serials, Superman does a lot of narrative jogging in place but it does a far better job of making it feel like the story is advancing. There’s a bit of political intrigue with the Lady Spider Men jockeying for position and undermining each other.

In another sideplot Kryptonite is introduced and we even see Clark revealing his secret identity to the scientist who discovered it in order to get help in combating its effects. In an era where secret identities were absolutely sacrosanct, that was honestly kinda shocking to see. And there’s also lots of fun stuff with Lois and Clark constantly trying to one up each other to get the next scoop, with the aforementioned Lois framing Clark for stealing her car and getting him locked up in jail. It’s great!

I won’t lie and say it never drags, but I found this serial genuinely entertaining, and not just in a historical curio kind of way. It captures the essential appeal of Superman very well, and I’m honestly so excited to see where we’re going next.

***

The Man of Tomorrow

Kirk Alyn walked so those who came after him could soar. A surprisingly great, and criminally over-looked Kal-El.

Ace Reporter of the Daily Planet

Noel Neill is a delight as Lois Lane, sassy, ambitious, a little petty, and with zero tolerance for anyone’s bullshit. My favourite exchange:

PERRY WHITE:  I need an article of the women’s page. Dream up a new way to cook a roast, or toss a salad together.

LOIS: How thrilling.

CLARK: Cook up something good, Lois. I’ll go for it.

LOIS: (smiling sweetly) Anytime, Mr. Kent. (steely glare) Just name your poison.

A Great Metropolitan Newspaper

Pierre Watkin’s Perry White seems to have taken the whole idea of a “crusading newspaper quite literally, as his Daily Planet is less a distinguished paper of record and more a freelance law enforcement agency, sending reporters out to get leads and shut down whole criminal enterprises without all that tiresome “involving the police”. He’s a great Perry, sarcastic, curmudgeonly and yet clearly willing to take a bullet for any of his reporters. Even his belittling of Lois comes across less like sexism and more challenging her to prove the world wrong, a challenge she gleefully accepts. As for Jimmy Olsen, he’s played by Tommy Bond as a well meaning, slightly dim, “ah shucks ain’t that just like a dame?” kinda character. You might ask why they cast a middle aged man as such a young character. To which I reply: “my guys, he’s only 22”.

The forties were rough, man.

Kindly Couple

So here’s a neat little bit of trivia, Jonathan Kent, one of the most important characters in the Superman mythos, was only named that in 1950. Prior to that, the Kents actually cycled through several different names before settling on Johnathan and Martha. Here, they are named as Martha and…Eben. Eben Kent.

Yeah, I see why they changed that.

Another story element that is newer than you might think is Superman’s parents surviving to see his career as Superman which only became a staple after the late eighties. Anyway, while we don’t see that much of Martha and Eben in this film, the essentials are there. Two good people found a baby and raised him as their own, and the love they showed him changed the world.

Desperate Scientists

If Superman is the “Man of Tomorrow” then Krypton is the world of tomorrow.

Originally envisioned as a scientific wonderland as seen through the lens of turn-of-the century progressive* utopianism Krypton often becomes a stand in for the cultural anxieties and hopes of the era in every new iteration. So what is 1948 Krypton a stand in for? Well if I had to guess, the scene of Jor-El trying to convince a room of bored bureaucrats that their world is teetering on the edge of destruction is meant to evoke…

Too basic? Fine, it’s a metaphor for the inauguration of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade. You don’t even know what was going on in 1948! Don’t you judge me!

Our Nefarious Villains

More like the Spider Lamey.

Fuck you, I’m tired.

“With powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men!”

This Superman is, by necessity, a bit underpowered compared to later versions, and even seems to be struggling at times when fighting ordinary gangsters (not even Superman is a match for dodgy forties fight choreography). At other times he’s shown as being strong enough to stop a moving car or bend a steel girder. He also uses invulnerability, modest super-speed, super-breath, super-hearing, X-Ray vision and “super sight”, where Superman is able to read the impressions on a broken records and reconstruct it.

FINAL SCORE OUT OF TEN:

NEXT UPDATE: 02 October 2025.

NEXT TIME: You lie, title. You lie.

* Note that “progressive” in the early twentieth century referred to a vast constellation of modernist and anti-traditionalist movements and not (as it does today) as a synonym for left-wing politics. Some of the things these progressive advocated we would still recognise as left-wing, some we really, really, really would not.