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MAN
WHO COULD READ MINDS
By Bruce
Dettman
One year during the late
1950s my parents and I paid a visit to my mother’s cousin Maxine who lived
in Bishop, California (my brother, seven years my senior, was allowed to
stay home to feed my dog, gorge himself on Bireley’s orange soda and
burgers from the local fast food stand, and play marathon games of poker
with his pals—God, I was jealous!). My mother and this particular
cousin had not seen each other in years, not since they had been girls
in Galena, Illinois—where, for the record, Ulysses S. Grant had once
worked as a clerk in a hardware store—and they were looking forward to
the reunion. Problem was, they were not girls any longer and apparently
had little in common. My mother liked stylish clothes, bourbon and I
Love Lucy. Maxine liked her children and ironing. It was not a good
mix. As I recall we stayed three of an intended five day trip, made some
lame and transparent excuse and headed home. For some reason, however,
my father wasn’t up for a long drive that particular day. He wanted to
play some golf and I wanted to swim and my mother, prone to heat
strokes, wanted to get out of the sun so we stopped for the night at the
Hacienda Hotel in Bakersfield. This was one of a small chain of large,
Spanish styled hotels in California. They were rather lavish for their
day and we were all suitably impressed. My father got in his eighteen
holes, my mother was able to relax and not have to cook and not only did
I spent a long day at the pool but at one point actor James Whitmore,
the first celebrity I had ever seen (I knew him best from fighting the
giant ants in the sci-fi classic Them), came out of his room long
enough to do a couple of laps and then vanish. I wanted an autograph, of
course, but who carries a pen and piece of paper in a pool? By the time
I had jumped out and begun my search for one he was gone. I was pretty
upset.
That night, as was the
custom of the time when kids went out with their parents, I was forced
into putting on my bow tie, sports jacket and slacks (which I knew made
me look like the world’s biggest dork) and accompanied them to the hotel
restaurant. While my father sampled several martins (I was allowed to
eat his onions) and my mother her single grasshopper, I sucked a Roy
Rogers through a red straw (I hated when these drinks were called
Shirley Temples) and undoubtedly wished I had my homemade Superman
suit on beneath my dress clothes. Unfortunately, over the years my
mother had learned to check my suit case for this so I was out of luck.
It was just me and that damn bow tie.
There was a small floor
show scheduled that evening, two acts for the patrons to enjoy while
they were wolfing down their dinners, an ice skating bit and a
mentalist. For the first, a large board was removed in the front of the
room which exposed a rectangular sheet of ice. A pretty woman in a short
skirt and man emerged from behind some drapes wearing ice skates and for
fifteen minutes or so did some routines, spinning and twisting about,
none of which particularly interested me save for the fact that the
woman was rather pretty and wore a skimpy red bathing suit. Then it was
over and time for the mentalist which I thought could be sort of cool
since I had never seen one in person, only on Ed Sullivan. First,
however, there was a problem. Somehow the staff forgot to put the plank
back over the ice. Timing being everything in life, a woman, who had
obviously had a few too many champagne cocktails, suddenly emerged from
a back table, strode over to the ice, and apparently thinking it to be a
small dance floor stepped, with her generous high heels, upon it. I
recall seeing her upended almost if in slow motion, an image of a
billowing, parachute-like skirt blocking out most of the small five man
orchestra, and then the sight of her crashing, rear end first, onto the
cold surface. The only thing hurt in all of this was her pride but
audible gasps filled the room, gasps and, I have to admit, my laughter.
There was just too much
of a Three Stooges look in this episode for me to control myself. Oh, my
parents did their best to put a halt to my non- stop guffaws and when
coming up from air I even noted a few pretty intimidating dirty looks
from the adults at other tables, but the fact is that I simply couldn’t
stop myself. The scene of this dingy woman trying to dance on a floor
of ice was just too much for me.
Eventually the victim in
question was helped back to her seat, the crowd settled down and the
mind reader/mentalist, whatever, approached the front of the room. I
don’t recall much about him except that he was in a tuxedo and wore a
turban like Sabu in the movies. I also recall that his assistant was a
tall willowy redhead in who wore mesh stockings. But that’s all I recall
because I still couldn’t stop laughing. Now I didn’t fear my father but
I sure respected him—as I did most adults—and under normal circumstances
I would have somehow put a lid on my giggles even if it had meant
shoving napkins down my throat, but this time not fear, obedience or
threats had the slightest effect on me. No matter how hard I tried the
image of the big woman landing on her keaster would not go away—and
neither would my loud, near hysterical laughter.
Then I heard the
mentalist. He was looking our way with a gaze that would have
intimidated Dracula and was speaking directly to my father.
“Sir,” would you mind
doing something about this boy here. I am trying to do my act.”
The next thing I knew my
father had grabbed my arm and taken me out in the lobby.
“That does it, Buster,”
he said. “Here’s the room key. If you’re lucky we’ll bring you back some
dinner.”
So I missed the
mentalist and had to settle for a tepid hot dog for dinner and an
episode of The Perry Como Show. I didn’t mind all that much and
eventually my father dropped the disappointed/aggravated routine and had
a good laugh over the whole business. Even my mother finally broke down
and giggled.
Point is I never did
catch up with a real mentalist or mind reading act and had to make do
with impressions of these characters on TV shows, one such example being
the second year Superman episode The Man Who Could Read Minds.
For a change this
episode, directed by Terry Carr and written by Roy Hamilton, begins on
location with the police headed by Inspector Henderson (an exasperated
Robert Shayne), on stakeout in one of the city’s residential
neighborhoods. A thief known as The Phantom Burglar (Richard Karlan) has
been operating in the area for sometime and so far Metropolis’ finest
have been unable to catch him, a fact that The Daily Planet has
mentioned too many times for the Inspector’s tastes.
Later,
Lois and Jimmy (Noel Neil and Jack Larson) spot the Phantom leaving the
site of yet another burglary. The impetuous cub reporter tangles with
him with the usual results when he tangles with someone in the series.
He gets his clock cleaned. A car chase follows and it could have been
curtains for the entire Daily Planet staff, Editor White (John Hamilton)
included, but Clark sees what’s going on and Superman is not far behind.
There is, by the way, an absolutely terrific shot of Reeves standing
before some boulders just before he takes to the sky. The Man of Steel
never looked better. It is odd, however, that following his successful
efforts to save his friends (“You seem to make a career out of helping
us,” a grateful White comments) he is unable to spot the Phantom’s car
from the air.
A
discarded item leads the intrepid reporters to a local club, the Tip Top
Café, where a mentalist named the Swami Amada (Lawrence Dobkin) appears
nightly. The routine, which includes his assistant, the lovely Lora (Veola
Vonn), revolves around the blindfolded mind reader pretending to see
items certain members of the audience have selected for Lora to holdup.
Hip to the routine, Kent explains that using a hidden microphone,
certain phrases are used to tip off the mentalist who then pretends to
identify the objects. What he doesn’t note is that Lora secretly gets
the impression of the house keys that a particular couple offers up for
identification. Real keys are then made from these wax impressions which
gives their partner in crime, the so-called Phantom (actually a criminal
named Monk) access to the soon to be robbed homes.
When
Lois and Jimmy make the connection between the break-in and the
victimized couple they had earlier viewed at the nightclub they decide
to return to the club and offer themselves up as potential victims. Note
that while other paying customers of the club drink and smoke, Lois and
Jimmy just have ice water which I’m sure doesn’t please the management
but perhaps there’s a heavy cover charge. In any event, Jimmy, with the
help of a phony mustache and sideburns, pretends to be a rich south of
the border visitor, Don Alvarez Ortega, with Lois along a his guest (for
once
Noel
Neill gets out of her Lois Lane duds and sports a more chic strapless
outfit) and a hotel key dangled as bait. After the show the reporters
race to the hotel where they plan to surprise and arrest the crooks but
the tables are turned and the hunters soon become the hunted. No worries
though. Clark, who has heard from a copy boy of their disguises, puts
two and two together and shows up (as always) in the nick of time.
This
is an enjoyable episode, solid and well directed, with good performances
by all and a satisfying if somewhat transparent plot. Jack Larson gets
to do some comedic bits which he has said to have enjoyed and even has a
few moments on the dance floor. Noel looks great and there’s a pleasing
supporting cast led by the versatile Lawrence Dobkin who had a long and
successful career as a radio then film and TV actor and later as a
respected director.
If it lacks the sort of
hard edge and suspense-laden drama that characterized the crime shows of
the first season, it at least avoids the juvenile trappings and
buffoonery of the villains which would later, and regrettably, become a
staple of the series.
May 2009
THE STOLEN COSTUME
By Bruce Dettman
Whatever
their faults—and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that they had their
share—my late parents were generous with my brother and I, and not just
in the weekly allowances we received (provided the lawns were mowed, the
cars washed, the trash burned, the garage cleaned, etc.), or the gifts
we were given at Christmas and on our birthdays, but in the time they
spent with us. My father, although not a professional carpenter, knew
his way around a woodshop and often spent his precious Saturdays
building things for us. In particular I recall him creating a wonderful
shield with the drawing of a fire-breathing dragon on it when I was
going through a brief knight in shining armor period (I think
this lasted about two weeks before Zorro took over). To his credit—and
to my mother’s as well—they went the extra mile for their kids. This
even included my dad escorting me to the monthly Cub Scout meetings at
the local elementary school which I know he loathed and which forced him
to give up his beloved beginning-of-the-weekend martinis and a chance to
stay up late on the couch watching old movies (hopefully with his two
favorite female movie stars Ava Gardner and Maureen O’Hara).
But
of all the gifts I was bought or the things that were built for me in
that wonderful garage, the one thing that eclipsed all others was my
fourth grade Halloween costume, my Superman suit. I had wanted to ‘Trick
or Treat’ as Superman for years but in my backyard recreations of the
Man of Steel’s exploits I had been content, like most of my
contemporaries, with a towel tied around my neck. This just wouldn’t do
for Halloween, however, and yet I was not crazy about the Superman
costumes they sold in stores. The manufactures of these outfits just
hadn’t gotten the look right. What it looked like was a costume and I
wanted something more realistic, something as close to what George
Reeves wore as I could possibly get. It was obviously time for my father
to put down his martini shaker and his Time Magazine and for my mother
to hold off pasting stamps in her S&H Green Stamps booklets and help me
out on this thing.
And they did just that.
My mother went to J.C.
Penny’s and returned with some long underwear in my size. My father then
dyed them the proper shade of blue. This completed, he took them out to
his shop where he had made a stencil of Superman’s “S” emblem and traced
this on the fabric. For the Man of Steel’s trunks we used a red swimming
suit which when coupled with an old yellow belt of a neighbor’s was
perfect for around my waist. My boots were long red stockings which my
mother sewed leather soles on. Finally, she cut and sewed a red cape for
me and once again my father stenciled on the “S.” As soon as the paint
was dry I was set. Nothing in my mind had ever been so grand.
My wearing it, of
course, did not end at Halloween. That was just the beginning. From
that time on the suit was never far from me. In fact, it was usually
worn beneath my street clothes. On one occasion I tried to bring it to
school under my jeans and shirt but somehow Mrs. Tootle, my fourth grade
teacher, busted me and warned that I’d be in big trouble if I wore it to
class again. No matter. School might be out, but in addition to wearing
it when I was at a play I had it on beneath my sports coat and slacks
when my parents and I went out to dinner, to visit their friends or to
other events. I was even busted once by my brother, when I wore it to
relative’s wedding, mainly because I also put on my glasses to attend
and these were normally only for reading purposes. He peaked under my
shirt, laughed and just shook his head in that ‘God, my squirt of a kid
brother is such a little moron’ look that I had come to know so well but
at least he didn’t say a word to my mom or dad.
Eventually, of course, I
grew out of the suit, both physically and in terms of what I was doing
in my life. There was always a place in my heart and memory for Superman
but he was no longer the center of my existence as he had once been. The
years rolled by and the suit was at first relegated to a corner
of my close closet and eventually my mother retrieved it for dusting
purposes. What I wouldn’t give to have saved it for posterity.
The suit, not mine but
Superman’s, is of course the main focus of The Stolen Costume
from the first season of TAOS. Based on a script from the Superman radio
series with a television adaptation by Ben Peter Freeman and directed by
Lee Sholem, this is the story of a petty thief nicknamed T-Ball (Norman
Budd) who while pursued by the police breaks into Clark Kent’s apartment
and inadvertently stumbles upon the secret closet where the reporter
keeps his Superman duds when not wearing them. As it turns out, as part
of an insurance policy requirement at the Daily Planet, Clark has to
have a doctor’s physical and obviously cannot have
on
the suit at this time. Don’t ask me why a doctor wouldn’t find something
unusual about the reporter’s “super” body during the examination. In any
case, the wounded T-Ball takes the outfit to his two underworld pals
Connie (Veda Ann Borg) and Ace (Dan Seymour) before dying. Ace thinks
the costume is a phony but Connie believes it’s the real McCoy,
particularly after she tries unsuccessfully to cut and burn it. The
cigar chopping Ace is a bit slow on the uptake but when she explains to
him that everyone figures that Superman has a secret alter ego he buys
into her theory that at the moment he’s being “the other guy.” All they
now have to do is find out who the “other guy” is and blackmail him.
Meanwhile Kent has
returned home to discover that his irreplaceable suit is gone. Near
frantic he contacts a private detective pal named Candy (Frank Jenks)
but there’s a problem, a big one. The reporter wants his pal to help
find the suit but he can’t tell him what he’s supposed to be looking
for. From this point on most of the dialog between them sounds like an
Abbott and Costello routine:
“And they took
something. I want to find out who it was and get it back.”
“Get what back?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t, Candy!”
Poor Candy. It isn’t bad
enough that he’s been given an impossible job to do or that he’s nearly
blown up by a bomb rigged by the charming Connie and Ace, but then the
two get it into their noggins that he is actually the Man of Steel
despite Connie’s hardly brilliant observation that “He [Candy] don’t
look like Superman to me but I guess when he gets the costume on he
looks different.”
Kent
gets wind of this, realizes that Candy is in danger but can’t save the
day in his working duds so he races over to his apartment in his
reporter civvies, breaks down the door and knocks his friend cold before
he knows what’s going on.
Unruffled, Ace and
Connie still think they’re holding the winning hand and try to blackmail
Kent but he’s having nothing to do with it (“I don’t make deals. Save
your breath.”)
He does, however, have
to do something about them. But what exactly?
Here now we have what is
probably the most controversial moment in the history of TAOS,
how Superman deals with Connie and Ace, the only people in the world
(besides Ma Kent) who know his true identity. As he says, he hasn’t
figured out a permanent solution just as yet (regrettably the amnesia
formula from the final season’s The Big Forget hasn’t been
created yet) so, since he can’t allow them to run their mouths, he must
take temporary steps to silence them. His solution is to fly them to a
remote, snow-covered mountain top from which there is no escape but
which has a cabin for them to stay in. He warns them not to try and get
away and flies off promising to return soon with more supplies.
Of course Ace and Connie
want nothing to do with this place (Superman, they figure, is not going
to return despite his promises) and waste no time in trying to escape.
Back in Metropolis Superman had warned them to bring some warm clothing
in preparation for their trip but they don’t seem to have counted on
such severe conditions and certainly not the prospect of some mountain
climbing on a steep and snow-covered mountain. Connie in fact is
wearing high heel shoes, not exactly Sir Edmund Hillary gear. Ace climbs
down first and is successful for a moment but then it’s Connie’s turn
and that’s the ballgame. No screams though. Guess even producer Bob
Maxwell vetoed that.
As a kid I recall
finding this scene not only startling but slightly traumatic. It
certainly wasn’t what I expected and left me with an odd sort of uneasy
feeling, not because someone had died on the show—murders were common
during that first season—but because Superman was somewhat complicit in
their deaths. Even though Ace and Connie had discovered his secret
identity and were certainly crooks themselves did he have a right to
strand them on a mountaintop where escape was impossible? Wouldn’t he
have known they would have tried the impossible and died for their
efforts? What about innocent until proven guilty?
It’s a question the
Superman community has grappled with for years and which Freeman’s
script stays clear of addressing. What did Superman really think about
all of this? Did his ethical principles take a backseat for once as he
weighed the possibilities and made a decision based on what was better
in the long run for the world? Or did he truly think Ace and Connie
would wait for the TV dinners, sleeping bags and subscription to the
Book of The Month Club that he was going to bring them?
It’s hard to say—hard
then, hard now.
April 2009
SUPERMAN
WEEK
By Bruce Dettman
For a very short period in
my life I actually liked parades. This is when I was quite young and my
father would take me downtown on Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day to watch
the bands and the soldiers from World War II (and sometimes even World
War I) move by the small but exuberant hometown crowd. There were horses
and bands and lots of pretty girls and usually some toothy public
officials in convertibles waving stupidly at everyone. My father would
swing me up on what I thought then were the broadest shoulders in the
world and I would sit there until all the attractions had moved by us.
Then we would go across the street to a combination café and ice cream
parlor (which on the outside had a stenciled drawing of the little
Langendorf Girl biting into a piece of buttery bread) and he’d treat us
both to cones—he strawberry, me chocolate. Good memories.
A few years later,
however, my appreciation of parades turned a corner, a decidedly
unpleasant one.
During this period, when I
was ten or eleven, my mother’s father came to live with us following the
death of my grandmother. My grandmother was a lovely and wonderful lady
who both my brother and I loved dearly. Although she looked the way
grandmothers always seemed to look back then—matronly, I suppose you
would say—she was lively, very warm and always good fun. Professionally,
she had accompanied silent movies on the piano as a young woman, and one
of my best recollections of her was one afternoon when the two of sat
down on the piano bench and she played for me all the signature themes
for the westerns, serials and action films she had helped bring to life
on the big screen. When she died I was heartbroken. My grandfather,
however, was a different matter. When I got to know him better I
realized that not only was he a rather stingy and self-centered
individual, but that he had not really treated my grandmother very well
during their marriage (his idea of showing her a good time on her
birthday was to take her hunting). In addition, soon after his move into
our house he began to act rather peculiarly. At first he would just talk
to himself but this quickly escalated into a situation where he began
conversing with assorted imaginary friends, invited strange people into
his room, gave away his social security check to complete strangers on
the street and got up every night between two and three a.m., dressed
and tried to walk the 3000 mile trek back to Chicago. Each night there
was a loud confrontation in our house and I doubt if any of us got a
complete night’s rest for the three years he was with us. Nowadays, of
course, Alzheimer’s Disease would immediately be considered as the cause
for his eccentric behavior but back then people just saw their parents
or others getting old and pronounced them as being “senile,” a catchall
term for the mental changes that often accompanied the aging process. I
think one time my mother took him to our family doctor who pronounced
him physically fit for a man of age and that was that. Meanwhile the
James Thurber antics and behavior—funny when written by James Thurber
but not so amusing when you’re actually experiencing them—went on.
Eventually I began to dislike him intensely, particularly when I
couldn’t get him to stop feeding my dog pork bones, several of which
almost killed him. This business culminated for me one afternoon when my
mother had taken me shopping for some school clothes, a chore I was not
too pleased with in the first place. As it happened that day there was
some sort of minor parade going on downtown—I don’t recall what it was
all about since it wasn’t a major holiday of any sort—and my mother and
I stood for a second on a street corner watching the small bands and
local celebrities and finally a military group marching by in their
spotless uniforms. There was one member of this latter group, however,
who was neither spotless or in a uniform of any kind but rather who was
highly conspicuous in the bright green pajamas he had failed to remove
before leaving the house and who was also wearing a straw hat. It was
my grandfather. In the past he had come to believe that any parade with
military personnel involved should include him since he had been in the
First World War, but up to this moment someone in the family had always
managed to curb his desire to join in. This time, however, he came on
the event by himself and instantly got into the middle of the thing and
began marching.
My mother was horrified,
embarrassed, and completely unable to cope with the situation. Standing
frozen, all she could say was “Bruce, get your grandfather out of there
this instant.”
I tried to protest. I
wasn’t going to make a fool out of myself. As a child I was incredibly
shy and hated any interaction with crowds or audiences of any sort.
“Get him out of there!”
It wasn’t a request, not
even an order. It was a command I couldn’t ignore.
People were laughing and
pointing at my grandmother but he didn’t seem to notice.
I edged into the middle of
the road and took his wrist.
“Grandpa, this parade
isn’t for you.”
Over time he had come to
dislike me as much as I he and he quickly shook loose of my grip.
I tried again and that’s
when the tirade began. Just about every swear word and colorful epithet
imaginable was leveled in my direction. He refused to move and parade
gridlock began. I don’t even remember how long it went on before
someone officially connected with the parade came over and got him to go
over to my mother. I had been embarrassed before but nothing like this.
Since that episode I have
never been able to see a parade, whether in person or on TV, without
cringing.
It seems that Superman
didn’t really want much to do with parades either, even one dedicated
exclusively to him as a gesture of appreciation by the citizens of
Metropolis, in Superman Week. Written by Peggy Chantler and
directed by Harry Gerstad, this is a fairly benign tale with a bit of
crime thrown to spice things up just a bit.

The whole thing centers
around “Superman Week,” seven days built around scads of events designed
to thank the Man of Steel for all the good deeds he has done not only
for the local community but for the whole world. Lois (Noel Neill) mans
the phones receiving RSVPs (one would think a big operation like the
Daily Planet would have some clerical staff to handle this sort of thing
but Perry White wants his top female reporter to do it) from heads of
state wishing to acknowledge the many things Superman has done for them
in the past (saving some sacred elephants, a palace during an
earthquake, a burning temple, etc).
Meanwhile, a local
criminal kingpin named Si Horton (Herb Vigran), wishing to get rid of
Superman once and for all, receives a visit from Jimmy Olsen who has
masqueraded as a phone repairman to see what the notorious gangster
might have up his sleeve. Unfortunately, Jimmy is made to drink a truth
serum and subsequently reveals to Horton the fact that Superman is
vulnerable to Kryptonite, the only known piece being at the bottom of
the Metropolis Bay where he threw it at the conclusion of the second
year’s The Defeat of Superman.
Jimmy
later reveals his unintentional indiscretion to Clark who is
understandably upset by this. He has a plan, however, and quickly puts
it into action. He pretends to have retrieved the Kryptonite and allows
Horton to get his mitts on it. Impersonating a sculptor named Vanderglas
who has created a bust of Superman, Horton subsequently imbeds the piece
in the work of art and lures the Man of Steel into what he thinks is a
full-proof trap. Superman pretends to be effected by the phony
Kryptonite then rounds up both Horton and his assistant (Paul Burke).

This
mess having been cleaned up, Superman now has only one order of business
to take care of, one that very much interests the always suspicious Lois
since a TV show has been scheduled in which Superman is to be
interviewed by none other than Clark Kent. Jimmy and Lois sit down to
watch the show but are in for a disappointment as an off-screen Kent, in
a pre-recorded tape, asks his questions of Superman which he humbly and
graciously answers. Why no one else, a director or technician, is in the
studio or why Superman brings along the sculpture and puts Clark’s hat
and glasses on it—as if this would fool anyone—remains a mystery.
The show closes with
Superman riding in a parade and the citizens of Metropolis showering him
with confetti and adoration.
It’s
a harmless and remarkably budget conscious little episode with that
claustrophobic look that all the color episodes seem to have in common.
All the interiors and furniture look pretty much the same, almost
interchangeable, the music is highly forgettable and never adds to what
little dramatic tension there is, and the criminals seeming more dingy
than dangerous.
However, there are worse
and less painful ways to spend an afternoon than with this show, well,
like watching a parade for instance.
March 2009
THE
BOY WHO HATED SUPERMAN
by Bruce Dettman
When I was
in elementary school, fourth grade I think it was, a boy named Terry was
enrolled in our class for about half a year. Most of the kids in my
school came from middle class homes. No one was particularly rich, but
things seemed pretty good for nearly everyone. Most of us were sent to
school in nice clothing and no one appeared to want for the current toys
or comic books. Terry was a bit different though and not just in the
fact that his attire appeared somewhat older and was probably
hand-me-downs. For one thing, he was originally from back east, from New
York, I would later learn, and seemed to have a peculiar sort of accent,
sort of like the Bowery Boys whose old films I often caught on
television. For another he had a bit of an edge. He tried to come across
as tough and to intimidate some of the other kids and when this didn’t
work he was sullen, introspective and unapproachable. He was bigger than
me and I immediately summed him up as someone I didn’t want any trouble
with. In other words, I kept my distance from him. Then one day as I was
reading the latest issue of Green Lantern on one of the
playground benches he sat down beside me and we started to talk comics.
It really was the only thing we had in common—he didn’t play sports or
like westerns—but it was enough to create a kind of bond between us. One
day I even had him over to my house to check out my collection. I don’t
know what sort of domestic environment he came from, but I recall that
he seemed a bit ill at ease at first, particularly when my mother (who
often dressed like June Cleaver) came in with some refreshments. Still,
once we got into my two boxes of comics he relaxed and we had a pretty
good time. I think he came over a few times after this and then suddenly
he moved away without a word to anyone, even the school it seemed. One
day he was there and the next he was gone. No one knew exactly where or
cared one way or another except me. He was different in a lot of ways
but having a different sort of friend can sometimes be satisfying and I
had enjoyed our comic book afternoons.
Years went by, about
five of them. After grade and junior high school a lot of us who had
gone all through elementary school together scattered. There were eight
high schools in our district and many old friends ended up going to
different campuses. Often, despite living in the same town, we never saw
each other again.
One night in my freshman
year a couple of my friends and I went to the movies, I think to see a
double feature of The Angry Red Planet and Gigantis, The Fire
Monster. It was about ten o’clock when we got out (Note: we always
went to the movies on weekend nights and even walked home by
ourselves—this was before parents thought Jack the Ripper was lurking on
every corner) and as we walked through the lobby we realized that a
pretty large pack of kids was following us and making threatening
comments. Once outside they began to surround us but somehow my two
friends took to their heels and escaped while I found myself alone and
unable to get away. There must have been half a dozen of them, all
wearing knee-length sharkskin raincoats over dirty jeans, with socks and
pointed Italian shoes, their hair greased up into a style then referred
to as jelly rolls. At that point they began to taunt me, to poke
and prod me and to tell me in no uncertain terms what they were going to
do to me in just a couple of minutes. It was a pretty dicey moment. I
could see no way out, just angry faces and fists moving my way. Then I
realized one of these faces was familiar. It was Terry’s face, a bit
older but still his face. Our eyes met and I could tell that he
recognized me as well. He looked just as mean and intimidating as the
rest, however, and in a second I realized he wasn’t about to admit that
we had once been friends. I was trying to get ready to try and defend
myself as best as I could. I was pushed harder and I could feel my anger
increase along with my fear. Then suddenly I heard Terry’s voice.
“Let’s split. Too many
people around. This guy ain’t worth problems with the cops.”
They all stared at me,
gave me a few more pokes, called me some names then turned and as a
group jay-walked across the street. I thought maybe Terry would glance
over his shoulder at me but he didn’t. He just disappeared into the
darkness with all the others and that was that. I never saw him again
although years later, after college, I was told that he had been
murdered in a nearby park. Something about a drug deal gone wrong.
I thought of Terry when
I recently watched The Boy Who Hated Superman from Season Two.
Not only was there a slight physical resemblance between he and Tyler
MacDuff, who portrays the title character Frankie in the show, but you
can clearly see that without the timely involvement of Jimmy Olsen (Jack
Larson) and the Man of Steel a similar violent fate could have befallen
him
George Blair directs
this time out from a script by David Chantler which obviously reflects
society’s then mounting concern with the growing juvenile delinquency
problem reflected in such films as The Blackboard Jungle.
Frankie has a chip on
his shoulder about as big as Metropolis. He can’t stand anyone except
for his uncle known as The Duke (the legendary Roy Barcroft),
a career criminal in the state pen who has brought up his nephew to
embrace all his anti-social and criminal beliefs. Frankie particularly
hates Superman—he doesn’t even want to hear his name mentioned—because
he believes his uncle’s imprisonment is a direct result of the Man of
Steel’s interference during a botched caper. Clark and Jimmy want to
help out Frankie, however, and when the surly youngster is up before a
judge in juvenile court Kent agrees to let him stay at his place. As it
happens, Jimmy is also temporarily bunking there since his mother is
away (apparently Jimmy can’t stay by himself—perhaps the aftermath
of
the problems he had in The Woman in Black) so it’s the three
bachelors under one roof. Actually, Frankie wants nothing to do with the
deal (“I don’t need any of that junk”) but agrees to be amenable to the
idea when he realizes that Kent has assembled some further damaging
evidence against his uncle which he wishes to get his hands on. To this
end, Frankie pretends to soften up for Clark, pretending that he might
just wish to check out a career as a reporter. At the same time he
attempts to indoctrinate Jimmy into the fast life which the cub reporter
pretends to go along with until Lois and Clark have had it with his new
insolent routine and call him on it. Eventually, in his dealings with
two other criminals whose help he needs to break the Duke out of jail,
Fixer (Leonard Penn) and Babe (Richard Reeves) Frankie ultimately learns
the truth that his uncle set him up and has no intention of taking him
to South America with him.
The
gang at the Daily Planet give Frankie (his first) birthday party, an act
which greatly moves him and he, now knowing that he has been betrayed by
The Duke, calls the Fixer and says to cancel his uncle’s scheduled
breakout but it is too late to change things. Kent overhears this
conversation while the lights are out, switches into his Superman duds
and puts the kibosh on the Duke’s plans (by placing a car over the
manhole the criminal was going to climb out of) then returns to the
shindig with no one the wiser. Frankie is a changed boy now. He feels so
great he doesn’t even hate Superman anymore; a fact which Clark explains
will make Superman very glad to hear.
This was one of those
so-called human interest tales that you watched as a kid hoping
for a bit more action but it never really comes save a slight
demonstration of super strength at the very end. I found it dull in my
youth and haven’t changed my mind much when I recently watched it.
George Blair’s direction simply lacks pizzazz and the story needs some
spicing up. I also wish Roy Barcroft, the greatest serial villain of all
time, had been given more to do.
I doubt if my old friend
Terry would have thought much of it either. He liked things tough and
mean and dangerous.
Up until his end at age
19.
February 2009
PERILS OF SUPERMAN
By Bruce
Dettman
I
was not quite old enough to enjoy serials, cliffhangers if you prefer,
on the big screen. By the time I was going to the movies in the mid to
late 1950s they were already pretty much a dead issue. Not only was the
studio system that had once fostered them as a part of the multi-layered
package theatres traditionally booked for their patrons (two full length
films, a cartoon or two, a newsreel and short feature) quickly eroding
to be replaced by independent production and performers, but television,
the new kid on the media block, was overnight taking up the slack in
terms of juvenile entertainment and adolescent thrills. Why go the
movies and spend that precious quarter when you had Zorro, Captain
Midnight, Roy Rogers and yes, even Superman in your very own living
room?
My
first contact with cliffhanger was one afternoon when my older brother
introduced me to the Buster Crabbe/Flash Gordon trilogy that one of the
local stations was airing. The Crabbe/Gordon trio of cliffhangers,
produced by Universal Films, was probably the most famous the genre ever
produced and I thrilled to the inner stellar exploits of Flash, the
planet Mongo’s stunningly evil ruler Ming the Merciless, Flash’s
girlfriend Dale Arden (though I readily confess to being more interested
in Ming’s evil daughter Aura), his scientific pal Dr. Zarkov and a host
of supportive players such as Thun the Lion Man and Prince Baron. I was
totally captivated not only by the bigger than life characters and
storylines but by the whole serial framework and couldn’t wait for the
next installment to be shown when I would learn how Flash had been able
to save himself from a giant octopus, fire breathing dragon or a
horn-headed gorilla. When the three serials were over I found myself
craving more cliffhangers but where to find them? Fortunately, early
television was an incredible repository of old material from earlier
days of Hollywood and as luck would have it one of the local San
Francisco kiddie show hosts, a guy called Fireman Frank (but who his
trio of puppets – Carl the Carrot, Dynamo Dudley and Happy
--sarcastically referred to as “Skinny In The Pit”), who had a four hour
live TV show on Saturday afternoons, began to showcase a serial
installment each week. Because of this I was able to view quite a few of
some of the very best cliffhangers, most, like The Mysterious Dr.
Satan, Zorro’s Fighting Legion and The Crimson Ghost produced
by Republic Studios.
Not
content simply to watch these wonderful cliffhangers, I also felt
compelled to duplicate as best as I could the action I had been
watching. To this end I created my own cliffhanger scenarios, each
performed twice just like in the movies, the first time where it seemed
I had been destroyed, the second showcasing how I had really survived my
brush with death. The wonderful thing about being a kid is that the
adult world, which at time can be just a few feet away, can so easily be
erased from your world, totally dismissed from your consideration. While
they might have glanced my way with curiosity, I don’t recall any of our
neighbors--who were usually within sight trimming the trees or watering
their lawns--ever commenting on my jumping twice over the top of our
backyard shed, bailing out of my father’s parked car or pretending that
our booth-like front porch area was actually a room closing in on me.
In short, I had a great time with serials, both watching them and then
emulating them in my own backyard versions.

I do
wonder, however, what George Reeves thought about the genre when he
elected to direct Episode 103 of The Adventures of Superman
titled The Perils of Superman, co-written by Robert Leslie
Bellem and producer Whitney Ellsworth as the next to last installment in
the series final season. After all, just before being cast as Superman,
Reeves had appeared in what many – myself included – believe to be one
of the worst serials ever produced, Columbia’s 1949 disaster
Adventures of Sir Galahad. Reeves charm and Reeves charm alone,
was the only thing that even remotely saved this bottom of the barrel
mess from being a 100% failure with its cardboard swords and impossibly
bad special effects courtesy of skinflint producer Sam Katzman. It
certainly wasn’t the best professional experience for the actor and
revisiting the cliffhanger formula probably didn’t provide him with his
best career memories. Nonetheless, The Perils of Superman emerges
as one of the best of the final season shows, thanks not only to the
entertaining concept, but Reeves’ deft and energized handling of the
spirited material.
The
storyline is a pretty simple one even by Superman standards. A crook
(Michael Fox) in a lead mask (looking quite a bit like the similarly
hooded villains from the second seasons The Man In The Lead Mask
although the design is a bit more shark-like) visits the Daily Planet
and calmly explains that the Man of Steel has ruined too many of his
enterprises in the past and that to get even he is going to strike back
at all his friends. The mask, he adds, is locked in place so even
Superman can’t discover the wearer’s identity (well, unless he pulls the
whole thing off, head included - I guess this didn’t occur to anyone).
To further confuse matters, he has engaged a whole group of lead-headed
men to walk around the streets of Metropolis, something the police can’t
seem to do anything about.
There
is some momentary consideration given by the Daly Planet staff to
hiding out until this whole threat business blows over but Editor Perry
White will have none of it and Jimmy and Lois agree. Clark, however, is
worried -- and not just because he seems to be wearing a new hat that is
too small for him -- but because he senses that these are no idle
threats
and
that these masked guys mean business. And mean business they do. The
rest of the show, the majority of it really, showcases the various
devices the bullet-headed characters have devised to get rid of Perry,
Clark, Lois and Jimmy, all of which hearken back to the glory days of
the movie cliffhanger. Lois is stretched out a railroad track awaiting
death from an on-coming train. Jimmy’s car breaks are marinated in acid,
a fact he discovers as he drives
down
a dangerous windy road. Perry is tied to a log in a lumber mill as a
huge twirling blade moves his way. And Clark is suspended over a vat of
acid and eventually dropped in
as
his captors gleefully watch. As soon as they are gone, however, Superman
emerges from the corrosive bath and heads out to save his three friends.
He manages to reach Perry and Lois in time but can’t quite get to Jimmy
who at the last second manages to bail out of his death trap of a car
before it shoots over a steep cliff. Jimmy is hanging from a convenient
branch when Superman pulls him to safety. But let’s face it, without
that branch Jimmy would have been toast.
The
criminals are captured (off screen) and the last scene has two of them
(Fox plus Steve Mitchell) conversing behind bars about why their scheme
failed. But even more troublesome to them is how Clark, who they both
saw lowered into the tub of acid, has managed to survive. They can’t
believe what they have seen and don’t even wish to think or talk about
it. It just couldn’t have happened.
It’s
really too bad that George hadn’t more opportunities to direct, both for
his own series and in the future on other projects which was supposedly
his intent. He displays a nice feel for the material and camera, creates
good pacing and installs energy into the show which had been sorely
lacking from many final season episodes.
Our
loss.
January
2009
THE
BIRTHDAY LETTER
My mother’s greatest
fear during the 1950s was strangely not an atomic bomb being dropped on
our modest suburban home, but rather the thought of my spilling Welch’s
Grape Juice on our beige wall-to-wall carpet. Even her immense terror of
snakes—which caused her to bolt near hysterically from the room when I
would gleefully point out shots of pythons and boa constrictors during
viewings of TV’s Sheena of the Jungle or Jungle Jim—paled
in comparison. I will never forget the expression of abject terror that
would wash tidal wave-like over her face when she spied me moving
through the kitchen with a bottle of Welch’s in my mitts. “Stay in that
kitchen, Bruce! She would scream out. “You just can’t get that stuff
out!!!”
To be fair she was also
afraid of polio, certainly no laughing matter. This dreadful disease had
been around for years but hit its high mark of destruction in the 1940s
and early 1950s. As scientists struggled to come up with a cure via
vaccine there were many rumors and postulations about the cause of the
disease, stagnant water and colds being related in the public’s mind to
the onslaught of the virus. Because of this, mothers everywhere were
intent on keeping their offspring dry, not always the easiest of tasks
as kids came in and out of the house, particularly in snow country.
Being raised in California I was not too affected by this business, but
my brother Bryan, seven years older and initially reared in the Midwest,
tells tales of my mother ripping off his sweaters and jackets umpteen
times a day as he went about the business of being a kid and playing
outdoors. Finally, of course, doctors Salk and Sabine came up with
cures, the first in the form of a series of much dreaded shots (I can
still see my old family doctor nodding at his nurse—who stood ominously
in back of me so I couldn’t see what she was up to—to prepare the
injection, and my father holding me steady while I tried to escape from
his clutches and the harpoon-like syringe coming my way) and later the
most welcomed sugar cubes.
Still, despite all the
publicity about polio and prevention in those days I only knew of one
kid who had contracted the disease. His name was Jerry and he showed up
one day when I was in second grade. The years have dulled most of my
memories of Jerry except that he had dark, rather greasy hair, always
wore short sleeve yellow shirts with brown suspenders, and, of course,
had braces on his legs.
It is one of the oddest
psychological quirks of the human species that because of ignorance,
discomfort or just plain unreasonable fear, the people who deserve the
most compassion and understanding from their fellow men often receive
the least. This is particularly true in the world of children where a
lack of experience in things, not to mention mainlining on many of the
biases and prejudices of their own parents, make them acutely vulnerable
to the irrational and prejudicial. Frankly, my friends and I didn’t
know what to do or think about poor Jerry with his braces and constant
struggle to maneuver himself around. He couldn’t play dodge ball, do the
things we did after school and besides he had a certain unpleasant
attitude. Our response therefore was to ignore him, to shut him out. It
is one of those things—some call them psychic canker sores—that still
cause discomfort when you chance to reflect upon them later in life.
Somehow they never quite go away. And probably shouldn’t.
So
when I watch the first season’s The Birthday Letter and watch Isa
Ashdown as Cathy Williams sitting alone at home talking to her only
friend, her doll, with those braces strapped to her legs, I always
reflect for a moment on Jerry and our horrific treatment of him. We
aren’t exactly told that Cathy has polio, only that she is crippled, but
it really doesn’t matter. I does strike me as odd now that her mother
(Virginia Carroll) leaves Cathy, a crippled child, all by herself, but I
guess ya gotta put food on the table somehow.
Cathy, however, is a
resilient and intelligent kid who gets fed up sitting around waiting for
her mother (no dad in the picture) so when she learns that a local
county fair is going to be held she writes Superman in care of the
Daily
Planet and asks that he take her there so she can enjoy the various
rides. Lois (Phyllis Coates) gets wind of this and with editor Perry
White’s (John Hamilton) support tries to set up a special party for
Cathy and to somehow get the word to Superman. Clark Kent, hearing this,
tells Lois not to worry. Superman has never let them down, he reminds
her.
Everything would have
probably proceeded hunky-dory except that a criminal named Cusak (Paul
Marion), involved in a counterfeit scheme, makes a phone call to one of
his confederates but dials the wrong number and gets Cathy instead. He
has just imparted some vital information to her regarding an upcoming
meeting when he is murdered in the phone booth. Innocent Cathy just
thinks it’s a wrong number and hangs up. Unknown to her, French
criminals Marcel Duval (Maurice Marsac) and Marie (Nan Boardman) need to
know what was relayed during the aborted phone call and when they manage
to find out that it was Cathy who took the call they set out to get the
information from her at any cost.
All
of this sets in play the unfortunate introduction of their brainless
associate Slugger played by John Doucette (why do otherwise intelligent
criminals so often have moronic assistants who ultimately destroy their
plans?). Doucette was a great face on early TV, one of my favorites of
that period, in fact. He was versatile and effective in nearly all his
roles. A great exception, however, was in this episode. I have no way of
knowing whether it was part of the original script by Dennis Copper or
the usually dependable director Lee Sholem, but the actor overdoes the
part of a punch drunk ex fighter to such a staggering extent that it
completely negates the pathos that could have been created
in
the concept of a brutal man gone wrong who is redeemed by a small child.
Instead we have one humungous slice of ham that you could barely fit
into a Jimmy Dean warehouse. Particularly painful is a scene where
Slugger, pretending to be Superman (the real one is later blamed for the
crime), kidnaps Cathy. It is one of the worst over-the-top performances
in all of TAOS, but again I suspect it wasn’t Doucette’s idea or fault.
Yet ironically, this show, for all the silliness of the Slugger
character, is also one of the most controversial when near its
conclusion a heartless Marcel and Marie remove the poor child’s braces
so she won’t be able to go for help. This moment, coupled with the
brutal murder of Cusak, was just the sort of stuff future
sponsor
Kellogg’s wanted nothing to do with and would soon be removed from the
show.
In the end the whole
crime angle is connected out to some stolen counterfeit bank plates
(kept at the Lambert Electric Engineering Company, if you’re interested)
which Superman retrieves from an acid bath after (again) almost giving
himself away as Kent:
“This is a job for
Superman…I mean I’ve got to find him!” he exclaims in a near panic as he
heads for an exit.
The
best part of the show for me is the conclusion when Superman—who finds
her in her apartment reading a Superman comic—flies Cathy over
Metropolis. He can’t cure her (as he does the blind girl Ann in the
later Around the World with Superman) but he takes her on the
equivalent of a rollercoaster and Farris Wheel of her very own. Whether
scripted or not, there is something particularly warm
and
spontaneous about these few minutes that never fails to get to me. The
child seems absolutely thrilled by the experience and concludes with
what always appears like an unrehearsed kiss on the Man of Steel’s cheek
with George Reeves nearly glowing in response. I have to admit that on a
few low days in my life I have watched this episode until the end and
then re-played those final two minutes several times.
Some fifty years later I
now wonder if my old school mate Jerry ever watched this episode wishing
Superman could have flown him through the skies.
December 2008
SHOT
IN THE DARK
Personal memory is a funny thing, not always
subject to what we may think of as the laws of the rational and/or
predictable. For instance, why is it that some people have the ability
to recall every baseball statistic on their favorite team or player yet
is unable to remember their own social security number? Why can one
person conjure up the most insignificant dates in their lives while
others are hardly able to recall their own birthdays? I score highest on
the memory scale when it comes to the movies and actors I watched
growing up as a boy in front of our first TV, a coconut-colored Packard
Bell with pretty awful reception. Somehow, with little or no effort, I
can usually pick out actors of a certain era sometimes identifying them
just from their backsides or their voices. This skill—if it can be
called that—is not intentional on my part. I never made a concentrated
effort to study these people. On the other hand, ask me if I remember
how to divide a fraction or what the capital of Missouri is and I’m
usually in big trouble. I’m also good at remembering the people I have
met in my life. Show me a classroom portrait of a particular year in
elementary school and I can pick out and name at least three quarters of
the kids whereas many of my contemporary buddies are lucky if they
remember a half dozen. I also know lots of people who can’t put faces on
more than two of their elementary teachers whereas I can see them all
clearly, Mrs. Moe (a wonderfully sweet old lady but feisty), Jones
(southern and shrill), Gates (an impatient Hispanic harridan), Tootle
(chucky, bespeckled, very patient), Elkington (my favorite, tall and
skinny and very encouraging) and Markowitz (big-boned, Germanic, very
creative but a harsh disciplinarian when crossed). For all of this,
however, I have always remained frustrated by my inability to recall a
certain relative, an aunt who died when I was quite young. She was my
father’s younger sister and was killed in a horrendous car crash. She
babysat me and I was apparently around her a lot up to the age three,
but I don’t have a shred of memory linked to her and photographs do not
help, only make this memory gap all the more frustrating. I can remember
every other family member from great-grandparents and great-uncles to
distant cousins but I can’t see my Aunt Shirley’s face or hear her
voice. For some reason this has always troubled me. I’m not certain why.
I was thinking about this, about memory and things,
when I watched the second season’s Shot in The Dark because it
has been reported over and over again that child actor Billy Grey, who
appeared in this particular episode, has absolutely no memory of the
experience, a fact I find astounding. This might be personal bias on my
part, but while I could understand a juvenile performer of the period
with numerous credits under his or her belt eventually forgetting that
they had a days work on such early and mostly forgotten video
productions as Meet Corlis Archer, Cannonball or Steve
Donovan, U.S. Marshal, the notion that being featured on The
Adventures of Superman would not be indelibly stamped on the old
cerebellum is hard to fathom. I don’t know how old young Master Grey was
at this time—he looks to be in his early teens—nor how involved he was
at such a tender age in his well-publicized pharmaceutical pursuits that
he would freely own up to following his long stint on Father Knows
Best, but one still imagine that working on TAOS would be something
a bit memorable for him, comic book fan or not. In the show he is
featured only in the early scenes, admittedly never sharing a moment
with Superman, but he has lots of camera time with Clark and Jimmy. A
few years before this he had a large part in the classic sci-fi film,
The Day The Earth Stood Still and has been interviewed about it
numerous times. It is an experience he seems to recall with enthusiasm
and vividness even though he was much younger at the time. But not TAOS.
As I said, memory is an odd thing.

In
the show, directed by George Blair with a script by David Chantler, Gray
plays Alan, a youthful amateur photographer who one night, snapping
random pictures behind the Daily Planet Building, happens to take a
picture of a figure in the dark. The developed shot depicts nothing
short of Clark Kent turning into Superman (or perhaps vice versa).
Oddly, this doesn’t seem to impress Alan or his ditzy Aunt Harriet
(played by Gracie Allen clone Vera Marshe) as much as the fact that
during this same period Alan has also been the victim of an attempted
robbery tied to a man who wants the return of another photograph the boy
once took of him. Because of this the aunt and nephew seek out
Superman—who they now think to be Kent—to see if he can unravel the
mystery. The fact that in the process they have seemingly managed to
expose Superman’s other identity seems not to have made the slightest
impact on them. In what has to be one of the series’ most unbelievable
explanations, the reporter manages to convince everyone (except perhaps
Jimmy Olsen who seems to remain a bit skeptical) that the photo of him
turning into Superman is merely the result of a double exposure since
Alan took a number of pictures in the dark that same evening.

This
business dispensed with—at least for the time being—Clark and Jimmy set
off to find out what’s behind the strange man’s attempt to get back
Alan’s other picture which ultimately leads them to identify the
individual as Burt Burnside, a confidence man known by the underworld as
“The Tulip” (portrayed by our old friend John Eldridge whose mug shot is
situated right next to a photo of actor Hugh Beaumont who would appear
in the same seasons The Big Squeeze). In a subsequent
confrontation Burt takes the photo from Kent but Jimmy manages to snatch
it back and hightails for the Metropolis’ underground railway (34th
Street Station) and the Valley Express. Burt can’t catch Jimmy but he
can, with the help of his confederates, attempt to blow up the speeding
train. Kent gets wind of this, eventually ditches a very stubborn Lois,
and after a first season takeoff cancels the explosion leaving Jimmy to
stick the photo in an envelope and mail it.
Eventually
the whole thing falls into place. Burt faked his own death by killing
another man a few years before to collect a double indemnity insurance
claim but Alan’s picture proves that he is still alive and therefore the
photo must be destroyed. Subsequently the con man and his lackeys plan
to rob the postal truck carrying the photo but don’t count on the driver
being impersonated by Superman. The latter allows himself to be shot
numerous times (a rather violent scene that must have made the Kelloggs
folks wince) then trails the three men to the hideout where the two
henchmen are summarily dispatched. This leaves Burt to threaten exposing
Superman’s other identity (the sharp confidence man apparently ain’t
buyin’ the double negative story) but the Man of Steel, seeing the photo
in the crook’s safe (hey, I thought most safes of that period were made
of lead and we know Superman’s X-Ray vision can’t make a dent in lead),
destroys it with his heat vision. But that’s still not quite the end of
things. Henderson arrives just as Burt pulls out a hidden pistol
strapped to his leg and fires point blank at Clark. One absurd
explanation per episode is bad enough, but here we have two as Kent
explains that the bullet was deflected by a silver dollar. Even as a kid
I recall cringing at this one even if the policeman and cub reporter
seem to have no problem accepting it.
Although
he doesn’t have a great to do in this episode I must mention that John
Hamilton as crabby, thundering Perry White is wonderful as always. In
the opening sequence Kent and he accidentally collide in a Daily Planet
hallway with the following exchange:
Kent: “I had my hands full”
White: “And your head empty.”
It is odd, however, that White wouldn’t notice
something unique (not to mention formidable) when running into Kent’s
steel frame. But then Perry’s no lightweight himself.
In any case, aside from Alan not getting his photo
back everything is tied up nice and neat except for the fact that Burt
“The Tulip” really does know Superman’s other identity and he might
still do some talking when and if he ever gets out . But perhaps by that
time Burt won’t have much of a memory left.
For Superman’s sake, let’s hope so.
November 2008
SUPERMAN’S
WIFE
My first long distance love affair was with film
star Kim Novak. The movie was director Josh Logan’s Picnic which
co-starred William Holden. From the backseat of my family’s 1955 red and
white Buick Special I watched fascinated as Novak and Holden glided
around the dance floor to the lush strains of the romantically evocative
tune Moonglow. I was just six years old at the time, but
something staggeringly potent clicked in my adolescent head that night,
something that my parents in the front seat drinking coffee and munching
drive-in popcorn and Eskimo Pies would not have imagined possible. That
click was telling me that there was a profound difference between men
and women beyond the one wearing dresses and the other long pants. I
didn’t know yet exactly what this difference was except that it was
obviously pretty potent stuff and not something that would go away or
that I could readily dismiss. It was here to stay.
Not too long after this I dumped Kim for Elizabeth
Taylor when I was once again taken to that same outdoor theatre this
time to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In an early scene that
immediately grabbed my adolescent attention, Liz is pelted with ice
cream projectiles launched at her by a bunch of southern brats. She
hurries to her room and removes her soiled nylons and dress and stands
in all her glory in a white slip. Again, my parents, lapping up their
java and mustard-marinated dogs, paid absolutely no attention to my
intense fascination with what was happening on that big screen. After
all, I was just a dumb little kid. Well, maybe.
In any case, this was the start of my on-going love
affair with a whole bevy of film actresses, affairs that for a long time
preceded my real-life dealings with the fair sex. There were many of
these as the years went by, certainly too many to chronicle here, but
they were varied and often very different types, tough and soft, fragile
and robust, good and bad girls. I loved watching the old movies from the
30s and 40s that were shown on TV in late Sunday afternoons when my
father was off golfing or working in the garage and my mother was
otherwise occupied cooking or gabbing on the phone or pasting Blue Chip
Stamps in booklets with a mind to acquiring enough for a trip to Hawaii
(although the biggest thing I ever recall her buying was an imitation
cow stool that doubled as a telephone stand). I would pull the drapes,
load up on Hawaiian Punch and a stack of Oreos —the
latter which I would share evenly with my Dalmatian—and watch the likes
of my favorites…Gene Tierney, Ella Raines, Linda Darnell or Jane Greer
giving much needed support to heroes Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, George
Raft and John Payne. I just couldn’t get enough of this stuff.
Nighttime TV had its allure in this area as well.
Once again I would sit with my folks viewing certain shows and never let
on that the real attraction was not the shows themselves, the comedy or
the dramatic content but the featured actresses. I particularly liked
Barbara Britton from Mr. and Mrs. North (something about her
voice), Irish Mac Calla from Sheena of the Jungle (this one’s
pretty obvious) and my all time favorite, the spunky, effervescent Anne
Jeffreys as the “ghostess with the mostess” on Topper.
Also high on the list, however, was an actress
whose name I did not know at first. She only showed up on a semi-regular
basis on the comedy hit The Bob Cummings Show portraying Shirley,
one of photographer Bob’s regular models who he pursued every week but
never caught.
This, of course, was the era of the 50s blonde
bombshell personified by Marilyn Monroe (not exactly a new phenomenon
for Hollywood if you can manage to recall Jean Harlow, Betty Grable or
Alice Faye, but Marilyn and a host of tinted clones certainly put the
concept back on the map). Besides Ms. Monroe, there was Mamie Van Doran,
Diana Dors, Sherrie North and Jane Mansfield, to name just a few. Oddly,
even though it might have sounded strange at the time when the whole
world seemed enamored if not obsessed with Marilyn and company, I was
not all that impressed. Although there were a few exceptions, I normally
was not attracted to blondes, always preferring the darker, sultrier,
semi-exotic look in the ladies. Ava Gardner and Yvonne De Carlo also
come to mind.
I
did, however, make an exception and it was with this stunning person who
contributed so much to Bob Cummings’ on-going frustration. The actress’s
name, I would eventually learn, was Joi Lansing.
In addition to her obvious standout good looks (a
sensational figure and ravishing smile) there was just something highly
appealing about this woman, something that went beyond tape
measurements, gobs of makeup and her over the top sexuality. In short,
Joi was fun, effervescent, radiant and sparking and things really lit up
when she walked into a scene. I never missed an episode and when she was
not featured I was pretty letdown. I suspect I was not the only one in
the great TV audience that felt this way.
Imagine my surprise then, one nearly approaching
disbelief, when I sat watching Superman re-runs one afternoon and not
only came across an episode I had never seen before but one which
featured Joi!!!!! One thing I did know for certain was that whether
the show was good or bad really didn’t matter. Joi and Superman were
going to be in the together.
Could
life get any better than this?
Superman’s Wife, episode 100 of the series,
filmed in 1957 and directed by Lew Landers from a script by Robert
Leslie Bellem and producer Whitney Ellsworth, starts out with a bang. No
slow buildup here. In a police interrogation room Inspector Henderson
and Superman are giving the verbal assault to Duke Barlow (Wayne Heffey)
a suspect in a series of bank robberies but getting nowhere fast. They
suspect that Barlow is merely one small clog in the wheel of a crime
syndicate king pin with the moniker of Mr. X.
Enter
Sgt. Helen J. O’Hara portrayed by Joi. No sooner as she shaken hands
with the Man of Steel than he suddenly proposes to her. No ring, no
flowers. He doesn’t even go down on his knees to pop the question but
she accepts anyway. I guess you couldn’t blame her.
As a kid I don’t know if I thought the
nuptials—never actually depicted on the screen—were the real McCoy but I
probably bought the concept. I mean, who wouldn’t want to marry Joi? One
person, however, who is not very happy about this set-up is Lois (Noel
Neill) who doesn’t do a very good job of masking her true feelings,
something Editor White (John Hamilton) recognizes and tries to console
her about but Lois is having none of it. She is one miserable girl
reporter and doesn’t care if it shows.
Of course, the whole thing turns out to be a scam,
a plan set up by Superman, Henderson and O’Hara to trap Mr. X into
coming out in the open. Mr. X, by the way, emerges as none other than
actor John Eldridge who it may be recalled portrayed another criminal
mastermind Walter Canby in the first season’s Crime Wave.
Actually, since Mr. X’s real name is never revealed, I tend to think
that Mr. X is Canby, just released from prison. There is no evidence of
this, of course, but I like to think it all the same.

To further ensure that his scheme will work, Mr. X
also hatches a second backup scheme to lure Superman into a bathysphere
(at Pier 96) containing Lois, Jimmy and Perry White which is
subsequently lowered to the bottom of the harbor while across town
Sgt.O’Hara (now known to all as “Mrs. Superman”—which begs the question,
is Superman a legal immigrant, a registered U.S. citizen with the name
Superman on the official documents? —just curious) is tied to a soon to
be detonated bridge. Naturally, Superman would have no problem escaping
from the bathysphere, but in the process of crashing out of it Lois,
Jimmy and Perry would succumb to the ocean pressure. It’s a bad
situation all right until the Man of Steel realizes he can pull the
bathysphere to the surface using the cable attached to the top of the
roof (couldn’t he just fly three feet upwards and push the thing?). In
any case, despite a bit of water getting in, Jack Larson, who is
reported to have hated scenes where he was forced to endure getting wet,
must have hated this moment although it’s poor Perry, hat or not, who
gets the most soaked.

So
after saving his three friends Superman arrives just in time to rescue
Sgt. O’Hara, to watch as the bad guys, in typical later episode style,
knock themselves out (fifty years later and I still hate these scenes!)
and Mr. X is corralled.
The whole plan and bogus marriage is revealed and
Lois couldn’t be happier. Both ladies let it be known that they each
wouldn’t mind tying the knot for real with the Man of Steel and thy make
a stab at getting along.
Personally, I don’t—and didn’t then— think
that Superman was the marrying kind but if that was the case and he was
going to pick a partner, my money would have been on Joi.
In any case, there was still The Bob Cummings
Show to watch her on.
Yep, life sure was good back then.
And by the way, for the record, I ultimately
married a brunette.
October 2008
THE
DOG WHO KNEW SUPERMAN
The angriest I ever recall being as a kid was one
afternoon when I came home from grade school, rounded the corner onto
our neighborhood street and discovered two older boys who had cornered
my three-legged Dalmatian Rocky near a rose bush and were in the process
of viscously tossing rocks at him. I guess I was about ten at the time
and these characters were at least two years my senior—which in kid’s
terms can mean a big difference size-wise—and while normally this would
have been a major deterrent to my tangling with them, in this instance
it wasn’t even a factor. To be frank, I don’t even recall what I did or
the methods I used to dissuade these pint-sized thugs from getting the
hell away from my dog, but I have a hazy memory of screaming, flailing
fists and a few dirt clods rocketed in their direction. In any event,
for whatever reason, they scrammed. I think I would have taken on
Godzilla in defense of my dog.
I bring this up only because while Superman in the
person of George Reeves could occasionally work up some genuine extra
agitation when dealing with the likes of Lou Cranek (The Mind Machine),
Baby Face Stevens (Night of Terror), the sword wielding Colonel
Brand in The Evil Three or even the unnamed professor (Joe Mell)
in Crime Wave, I never read more anger on his face as when he
noted Hank (Ben Weldon) winding up to smack his dog friend Corky in the
2nd season’s THE DOG WHO KNEW SUPERMAN. If ever Krypton’s
number one son was on the verge of really losing his temper this was the
time and Hank certainly knew it.
Generally,
not many of the so-called human interest stories in the series
were my favorites, but even as a kid I liked this one. I suppose this
had to do with the dog theme since I am unabashed fan of canines and am
a sucker for movies, TV shows or books detailing their trials and
tribulations (how many handkerchiefs did I wear out watching Disney’s
Old Yeller or even more recently the film My Dog Skip?). In
any case, this episode resonated with me more than a lot of others
so-called soft shows and I have to admit that on watching it
recently I still experienced a few sharp tugs at my admittedly
desiccated heart strings.
The reason why this somewhat hokey script by David
Chantler (with directorial support from the veteran Tommy Carr) works is
a very simple one, George Reeve’ remarkable sincerity in handling the
material and the wonderful poignancy he brings to the dilemma of the
most powerful man in the world caring for a small dog. Sometimes in film
or TV you see a character who is supposed to be fond of a pet and at
best he or she can occasionally be glimpsed quickly patting the mutt on
the head, but it’s fairly obvious that Reeves really liked dogs and
Superman or not, is not above demonstrating this through a lot of
physical affection which comes across as very genuine and very touching.
This meeting of Superman and Corky materializes
purely by accident when driving along as Clark Kent in his spiffy
Nash-Healey he comes across a group of people trying to free the dog
from a well. The group includes the owner Joyce and her dog-hating hubby
the aforementioned Hank, an underworld character who seems by his own
cautious omission to have been responsible for the canine’s predicament.
Running off to change into his Superman duds, Clark accidentally drops
one of his driving gloves at the scene (question: why would Superman
need to wear gloves—I
guess Clark is more of a clothes horse than one would have thought given
his unchanging daily attire). Before taking off into the air, there is a
terrific shot of the Man of Steel standing against some large boulders
then he is up and a second later—in what must have stretched the show’s
weekly budget a bit—is seen crashing into the earth and burroughing
underground. It’s a pretty impressive shot. Of course he saves Corky who
thanks him with lots of dog kisses although his master Joyce (Dona
Drake), a Runyonesque gal with the manners of a pit bull, doesn’t so
much as acknowledge his intervention (note that in close-ups Reeves is
wet from his plunge into the well but when the camera depicts him in a
medium shot he is dry).
Corky
is a pretty smart mutt with a very talented nose. He stumbles across
Clark’s glove and memorizes the scent. At Hank and Joyce’s apartment
the former again tries to rid himself of the animal and when Joyce is
out of the room shoos Corky out the door so the dog heads to the Daily
Planet and his rescuer whose suit and glasses don’t fool him for a
second. Clark is initially very glad to greet the exuberant canine, a
fact which rather intrigues Jimmy and Lois, but it doesn’t take him long
to realize that the little dog is the only creature on the planet who
has successfully put together the fact that he and Superman are one and
the same, something he has to do something about. However, he doesn’t
reckon on the memory and gratitude of his new four-legged friend who
keeps showing up. Complicating matters is the fact that Hank, just a bit
behind
Corky
in the brain department, has also figured out the connection between the
glove and Superman and plans to track him down. His flunkey Louis (the
always terrific Billy Nelson) wants nothing to do with the Man of Steel,
however, and decides to diffuse the whole deal by taking Corky to the
pound. Naturally this does not sit well with Superman who saves the mutt
from being put down and in the process is indirectly responsible for
letting loose an entire truckload of unlicensed dogs who have also been
picked up by the city (this also lets all the kids watching the show
know that none of these dogs will come to harm—well, at least not
immediately). Eventually Hank gets his hands on Corky again and tries to
have the dog track down Superman but Corky warns the reporter with a
well-placed bark and this is where the earlier referenced scene occurs
where Superman has to restrain himself from playing fetch with Hank as
the ball.
Naturally, Superman can’t have the dog showing up
and threatening his secret identity so in what is surely one of the most
poignant scenes in all of TAOS has to confront his canine buddy in his
Daily Planet office and tell him not to come around any longer.
Most
actors, I’m pretty certain, couldn’t pull this off, but Reeves’ grieving
eyes at having to say good-bye to the one creature on the Earth who not
only knows his secret but who loves him with no strings attached is real
and heartfelt and believably touching.
“Why Clark, you look like you’ve lost your best
friend,” says Lois after Corky has glanced one last time and left the
room.
“Maybe I have Lois. Maybe I have,” Clark responds
staring straight ahead.
Pass the Kleenex, please.
February 2008
THE
BULLY OF DRY GULCH
Dale Robertson, star of the popular 1950s TV
western series Tales of Wells Fargo, visited my hometown sometime
in the latter part of that decade to appear at the opening of a Purity
Market. He did not emerge atop his familiar chestnut video steed with
hands wrapped tightly around his six-guns, but rather in the backseat of
a splashy Ford convertible with arms happily looped around two Marilyn
Monroe clones who sat snuggly on each side of him. The sight was a bit
unexpected and incongruous but I didn’t care. None of us did. This was
an honest to goodness TV cowboy and the street was lined for blocks with
kids out to see one of their small screen sagebrush heroes. At this
point I’m fairly certain I didn’t think life could get any better than
this. I even got an autograph picture out of the deal.
Like most of my generation, I had been hooked on
the western ever since I could recall. My family moved west from
Illinois in 1953 and on that long automobile trek my parents bought me
my first cowboy boots in Salt Lake City and that same historic day I saw
my first big screen oater when we took in the classic production SHANE.
From that moment on I ate, drank, slept and daydreamed the west. Not
only was I super-glued to the television watching my favorite western
shows (Laramie, Gunsmoke, Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne and about fifty
others)—as well as catching hundreds of old B western movies regularly
aired on the TV—but the moment I got home from school I strapped on my
gunslinger holster and pistols and slipped on my Stetson. Even now, if I
think on it, I can still feel the slight tugging weight of my Fanner 50
(made by Mattel) hanging from my right hip and recall the thousand hours
I stood in front of the mirror perfecting my fast draw. I was also lucky
because my father, a history buff, would go out of his way on vacations
to take me to spots like Tombstone, Deadwood and Dodge City.
The Wild West then not only provided an exciting
entertainment centerpiece for my generation, but beyond this we felt a
sort of historical kinship to it. After all, the American west was
really not all that removed from the mid-Twentieth century—not much over
fifty years—and with many grandparents from that era still alive we
acknowledged an association that no kid today could possibly fathom. My
own suburban tract home, for instance, had been built over the site of
an old Spanish ranchero and digging in the backyard I was thrilled to
find an old spur and on another occasion part of a rusted revolver, both
of which hung from my bedroom wall for years. Our attachments to the old
west were many, something that ran deeper than just Saturday matinees
and plastic cap guns. We might not have been able to articulate it but
we sensed it anyway. We were kids of the west.
No wonder the thought of Superman in a western
setting was an interesting concept. If only the results would have been
more satisfying.
The Bully of Dry Gulch from 1955, has
Jimmy and Lois out of town set on covering a big rodeo (certainly an odd
assignment for big city crime reporter Lane) when their car breaks down
and they find themselves stranded in the town of Dry Gulch, a community
that with the exception of a few modern inventions such as phones and
cars seems to have not advanced much since its wild west heydays*.
Making the best of things, Lois and Jimmy swap their city duds for some
western attire with Jimmy selecting one of the goofiest “tinhorn”
outfits one could imagine. Problem comes when they run afoul of the
local bully Gunner Flinch (Myron Healy) and his two abused lackeys Pedro
(Martin Garralaga) and Sagebrush (the wonderful old character actor
Raymond Hatton) who tells Jimmy he has until nightfall to get out oft
town or else. Despite all the threats of gunplay against his life, Jimmy
doesn’t seem as nervous as you’d think he’d be and has enough of an
appetite to frequent the Silver Dollar Café (burger and coffee are 40
cents).
Lois
finally finds a phone and calls Clark for help but he dismisses the
whole thing as a joke until she mentions that Gunner has been “making
goo-goo eyes” at her. Threatening to drill Jimmy full of lead is one
thing, getting fresh with Lois is quite another and before you can say
green-eyed monster he’s flying as Superman towards Dry Gulch. Most of
the confrontation in the script by David Chantler comes between Clark
and Gunner with Superman only making token appearances. Clark outwits
the mean-spirited gunman in cards at one point employing his X-ray
vision (“maybe it was a hot deck”) and later exposes Gunner for the
fraud he is (his reputation is based on phony gunfights he’s concocted
with Sagebrush and Pedro).
Like most of the later shows, this one limply
directed by George Blair, the problems are numerous, the first being
that the villains pose no real serious threat and can’t be taken
seriously, a decided flaw in a show about a super hero who needs
legitimate adversaries to showcase his own powers and strengths. From
the very first, even as a kid,
I
didn’t think much of Gunner as an authentic bad guy, certainly nothing
like the nasty villains appearing regularly on real TV westerns.
Secondly, George Reeves lacks obvious energy and doesn’t seem
particularly engrossed by the action around him. The thing is simply
played too broadly with nary a hint of legitimate mayhem. To be honest,
the whole episode could have been sorted out without the need for
Superman. Surely Lois could have handled Gunner with no problem.
Incidentally, if you listen closely to the
graveyard scene I believe you’ll hear the faint strains of Mussorgsky’s
classical piece “Pictures at an Exhibition.” How this ended up here I
haven’t a clue.
* For the record, the idea of
combining the modern world with older sagebrush trappings was hardly a
new one. Many B westerns, although set in (then) contemporary times had
their heroes, people like Tom Mix and Ken Maynard, Gene Autry and Roy
Rogers, taking care of business with their horses and six-shooters.
Rogers’ own popular TV series would also utilize this fusion of
elements.
January 2008
JET
ACE
By Bruce Dettman
I sometimes think that my brother wriggled out of
the womb already loving airplanes. As a boy, his bedroom walls were
always covered with framed photographs of every sort of airborne craft
although he favored fighter planes. We had several family friends who
worked for companies like Lockheed and Boeing in addition to knowing a
few pilots who had survived World War II, and someone was always
bringing him new pictures of planes to add to his collection. In
addition, he constructed models of various bombers, pursuit planes and
fighters, many of which he hung from the ceiling. My favorites were the
ones he had cleverly designed with shards of cotton he had painted
bright red which belched from the front of the fighters to simulate gun
fire and flames. On vacations and weekends my father would take him to
air shows, airports and air museums and once, at the opening of the news
Oakland International Airport, he was thrilled to meet and talk to Frank
Tallman and Paul Mantz, two of the 20th century’s most famous
aviators (both of whom later worked as stunt pilots in the movies and
died in aviation mishaps). How jealous he was some thirty years later
when I chanced to pull up a bar stool in a nearly deserted San Francisco
tavern and Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier and
one of my brother’s great heroes, walked in and sat two bar stools down
from me. I don’t think my brother’s recovered from this yet.
Chris
White in the second season Jet Ace is a stunt pilot too. He is
also Perry White’s nephew (the son of his sister from Kate from Drums
of Death perhaps) although it would be an understatement to say
there isn’t much of a family resemblance. White the younger is played by
veteran B actor Lane Bradford, a ubiquitous presence in dozens and
dozens films and TV shows, usually in westerns and for the most part
cast as a villain (a rare exception to this was his appearance in the
Republic serial Zombies of the Stratosphere where he played one
of the invading space aliens). Bradford’s craggy, almost granite like
features and receding hairline made him a perfect bad guy and it’s a bit
jarring to see him in the role of Perry’s aviator nephew. Bradford, by
the way, was also the son of John Merton, another familiar face in scads
of B features and was also seen briefly in TAOS’s The Man in the Lead
Mask episode as the flame thrower wielding plastic surgeon.
The
story here is that Bradford is testing out a new airplane and has
invited, as guests not reporters, Uncle Perry, Jimmy, Lois and Clark to
watch the trial (when Lois spots Clark staring upwards she snaps “You
don’t think you can see him through the ceiling, do you Clark?”). Not
invited, but who shows up anyway, is Steve Martin (no, not that
Steve Martin and not Raymond Burr’s reporter character from Godzilla
either) an unctuous, unethical (and, as we soon discover even more
nefarious) newsman from the Daily Planet’s rival organ The Blade
(played with oily glibness by the always enjoyable Larry Blake). Blake
accuses the military of giving preferential treatment to the Planet
staff, but there are more problems than this to deal with when Chris’s
plane begins to give him serious problems and he eventually passes out
as he plunges to the earth. Something has to be done and
fast
but Clark can’t handle the pressure (“I can’t stand it. I have to get
out of here”) and bolts near hysterically from the room only to
transform into Superman who flies to Chris’ aid and rights the ship.
Chris is understandably shaken and is convinced to go up to Perry’s
cabin for a few days to recover where he can relax and work on his
report of flying the new plane (Perry throws in the added incentive of
the gift of a shotgun for hunting purposes although the weapon Chris is
later seen with looks nothing like a shotgun to yours truly, more like a
Mauser though I am no gun authority). Unbeknownst to everyone, our
sleazy friend Mr. Martin is interested in more than just a story for his
paper. He’s a foreign agent out to get information on the new test plane
and has a couple of goons (Richard Reeves and Ric Roman) doing his dirty
work for him.
Said
goons follow Chris to his cabin, try to strong-arm him into giving them
the plans to the ship (which he has cleverly hidden in the barrel of the
gun) and kidnap him but are later caught by Superman who they spill a
lot of bean to. When Martin realizes his scheme is being exposed he
returns Chris to the cabin, ties him up and sets the place on fire.
Superman gets wind of the plan via a mailman who reports that he has
just seen Chris and flies to the rescue. When he explains to the young
flier that he can hitch a ride back to Metropolis with Clark Kent who
should be arriving at any moment Chris is grateful:
“He’s a pretty swell guy in spite of what Lois
thinks of him.”
“Well, he’ll be glad to hear this.”
And I bet this is so. Superman must get a bit tired
of hearing his alter ego constantly lambasted. Hell, everyone likes to
be liked.
So
Superman rigs it so that Martin believes the flyer to be dead, lures the
duplicitous news man into a trap and confronts him. His time around
Superman saves his brawn and allows Chris to wipe the floor with the
shady character while he watches with enjoyment.
There’s a few gaping holes in David Chantler’s
script, particularly regarding the time element of the mailman getting
back to Metropolis in time to alert Superman to having seen Chris (and
the odd business of the gun being left outside in plane sight and no one
picking it up) but these are minor quibbles.
JET ACE, directed by Tommy Carr, isn’t a
superior episode, but it’s solid and enjoyable with a likable
performance by Bradford even though I bet anything Chris White was
adopted.
November 2007
THE
WHISTLING BIRD
I suspect the first time I realized that
intelligence could be at great odds with parental affection was the year
my mother and father gave me both bongo drums and a chemistry set for
Christmas. The bongos—tied into America’s short-lived flirtation with
Calypso culture in the 1950s—didn’t last long because they required
practicing which I had no patience for (about a year later a similar
scenario would be repeated when I attempted to master the saxophone
until my father—whose late afternoon martini sessions had been
negatively impacted by my infernal screeching—coerced me into giving up
the instrument by raising my allowance a quarter a week, an attractive
bribe I quickly accepted).
The chemistry set, however, was quite a different
matter and while I really had no interest in actually mastering the
properties of the chemical world, I certainly was attracted to creating
stuff that might produce visual results (i.e. an explosion). To this
end—and tiring of the boring experiments outlined in the little booklet
that accompanied the set—I began a concentrated effort to combine all
the ingredients at my disposal in an attempt to achieve the intended
dramatic effect. With no great reaction from the set’s limited
resources, my next step was obviously to up the ante. In order to
accomplish this I waited until a Saturday when my parents were away from
the house and then telephoned a few of my closest pals come to over and
help me with my plan. Placing a bucket in a fenced in area behind the
backyard, we began to fill it with every liquid at our immediate
disposal, not just from the chemistry set, but from the garage and
house, a mix that included everything from my mother’s perfume and bath
oils, to ant killer, root beer (Hires), my brother’s Vaseline hair
tonic, Ajax cleanser, vanilla extract, detergent, turpentine, acetone,
anything and everything we could find that would pour into the mixture.
I guess we tried this on two or three occasions before getting a
satisfying reaction. Suddenly on that immortal day the concoction began
to bubble and hiss and a kind of milky and frothy material rose up and
started to pop and spit. The explosion that followed wasn’t
earth-shattering, but it was sufficiently loud enough so that
inquisitive neighbors were soon spilling out of their houses to see what
all the ruckus was about. It was at this point that we determined
it would probably be wise to go back to playing baseball, eating PEZ for
lunch and watching Sky King instead of searching for a new
version of the A-bomb.
Uncle
Oscar, making his second appearance on TAOS (played by the wonderful
Sterling Holloway), dreams up his explosive purely by accident when he
is trying to do the world a favor by coming up with a new (6) flavored
postage stamp. Invited to the grand unveiling of the stamp by Oscar’s
niece Nancy (Allene Roberts)—who, by the way, Jimmy seems mighty chummy
with—Clark (embarrassed at having been caught napping in his office—yes,
Superman naps!) and the cub reporter are on hand for the big trial
testing but when Kent fixes the stamp to an envelope with his fist,
kabooom!! The implications are obvious, that Uncle Oscar has unwittingly
invented one of the world’s most powerful explosives, a fact Kent wants
to let the authorities know about. Unfortunately, a group of bungling
spies (Toni Carroll, Joseph Vitale, and Otto Waldis) who have been
watching the goings-on from an upstairs window
also
want to get their mitts on the potential weapon. Uncle Oscar, however,
has wisely left a portion of the formula out of the instructions and
confided this essential element exclusively to his chatty parakeet
Schyler, which means the trio must somehow get the creature to spill the
goods. They attempt this by switching Schyler with winged look-alike but
this doesn’t work and before you know it the spies threaten the lives of
Oscar, Jimmy and Nancy. Eventually trapped in a secret, lead-lined (and
therefore X-ray vision proof) room which is filling with water, things
look pretty grim for all concerned until Superman shows up, hears the
water and pulls everyone to safety.
For me Holloway makes the episode come alive with
his quirky delivery of lines and amusing physical take on things. I’m
also fond of the wrap-up scene where Superman,
having
once digested the liquid explosive to save his friends, decides the
crooks aren’t worth another sampling of the unpleasant solution and
tells them to run for their lives instead. Reeves is great in this scene
showing a very human side to the Man of Steel.
While not a superior episode, Holloway’s presence
and some excellent chemistry between the cast makes it enjoyable and
satisfying light romp.
Kaboomb!
September 2007
DIVIDE
AND CONQUER
Movies and television have seldom been charitable
to the scientific community. The history of both mediums are rife with
depictions of men of science as either diabolically mad figures (Dr.
Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Pretorius, etc.) or brilliant but
addle-brained eccentrics and technical misfits out of touch with their
fellow men.
Personally, I was lousy at science in school, but
enjoyed putting on my father’s lab coat, making my best friend up as the
Frankenstein Monster (he was older and taller), having him lie up on the
tool bench and turning on every machine in the garage—which in addition
to dangerous power tools included some pretty nifty electrical gizmos
with great control knobs and switches—to imitate the original creation
sequence from the 1931 film Frankenstein. Imagine our combined
surprise when one afternoon my father came home early from work, decided
to do a bit of woodworking and discovered what we were up to. After the
yelling and threats were over I was summarily banned from the garage for
life save for the weekly chore of sweeping up the sawdust. And that was
the end of my scientific career other than a short and disastrous
flirtation with a chemistry set which I will touch on in a future
column.
All
his great powers aside, Superman needs the voice of science when he is
confronted with a tough problem. When an unnamed Latin American
country is interested in publishing a foreign edition of the Daily
Planet, White, Kent and Lois visit and in the process walk into the
attempted assassination of the democratically motivated president
(Donald Lawton) whose enemies, including his own vice president (Robert
Tafur), wish to get rid of him. Superman intervenes, however, and saves
the ruler, but at the instigation of the unmasked plotters is placed in
jail pending an investigation of the attempted crime. Superman, of
course, can see through this scheme of wanting him out of the way, but
being an example to all of a law abiding citizen refuses to simply break
out of his confines. There must be another answer.
Enter Dr. Lucerne.
Veteran
character actor Everett Glass appeared on TAOS twice as the helpful Dr.
Lucerne who instantly solves—at least in theory—two of the Man of
Steel’s biggest physical challenges of his career, how to alter his
molecular density (his atoms are packed tighter, the Professor explains)
to allow him to move through an otherwise impenetrable wall (The
Mysterious Cube) and in this episode how to split himself into two
separate entities so he can be in two places at once. Glass had a long
career as a character actor, often portraying men of intellect. He had
small but memorable parts in both sci-fi classics The Thing From
Another World and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and was
great at projecting wisdom and brains without a trace of conceit or
arrogance. Luckily Superman has him as a confident too and quicker than
it takes most of us to decide to tie our shoes Lucerne comes up with the
answers
Superman
is looking for. However, just as in Cube there are dangers
connected with this plan of separation even if the theory becomes a
reality. First, in dividing himself his powers could be split and
therefore radically diminished. Second, he risks the possibility of not
being able to reassemble himself. It’s a no-brainer for Superman,
however, and (with the help of a double whose head shape doesn’t much
resemble Reeves’) he instantly becomes twins. Just as predicted, his
powers are reduced, but even so he succeeds both in keeping the
President safe and rounding up the plotters. Just for the record,
the doppelganger, double or twin has always intrigued man. Some of the
greatest writers, from Dostoyevsky to Robert Louis Stevenson and
Vladimir Nabokov have been fascinated by the concept and used it in
their writings. Movies too have taken full advantage of the notion as
has television, particularly in dramatic and adventure shows of the 50s
and 60s, when in such programs as Bonanza, 77 Sunset Strip
and The Rifleman the double concept was often exploited in
storylines. And, of course, TAOS would also play with the idea in the
second season’s Face and the Voice.
Directed by Phil Ford with a script by producer
Whitney Ellsworth and Robert Leslie Bellem, Divide and Conquer
has always been one of more popular of the later color episodes and with
both the appearance of Professor Lucerne and Superman’s similar
experiments with his own molecular makeup seems a perfect companion
piece to The Mysterious Cube.
Science was always a great help to Superman but I
continued to give it a wide berth. Even today, all these many years
later, I get uncomfortable when I smell sawdust and remember my friend
and I and our makeshift laboratory and that unforgettable look on my
father’s face.
August 2007
THE
LADY IN BLACK
The first football game I ever attended was at San
Francisco’s now defunct Keyser Stadium, circa 1957. It was a contest
between the city’s 49ers and the Chicago Bears. This was particularly
appropriate because the guy who was treating my dad and I to this
athletic confrontation was John Stevens, a friend and owner of the local
liquor store in our town who, as a young man, had played a season for
the windy city’s gridiron franchise. Right before the game started John
turned to me and said through a wide grin “Bruce, I’m now going to teach
you two things today; how football is played and how to duck beer
bottles.” He turned out to be a good teacher at both. A few years down
the road, however, there was a strange breach in our relationship. John
insisted that I had come into his store one night, gone to front counter
where the magazines were displayed and swiped a particular adult
publication. He called my father rather than the police and my dad gave
me hell, told me to return the periodical and apologize to John. Problem
was I hadn’t taken it. I went up to the store and swore to him that he
had been mistaken and while he wasn’t really all that upset about the
episode—teenage boys had a long history of pilfering such material—he
never believed my tale that I hadn’t taken it despite my sticking to my
story even into adulthood when I would occasionally run into him. Even
then after such a long time the episode continued to bother me. No
wonder not being believed has supplied the impetus for many a crime
story (from Hitchcock to Richard Kimble), the innocent man alienated
from his friends and society for adhering to a story that no one accepts
as true.
Just
ask James Bartholomew Olsen (Jack Larson) in the second season’s
The Lady In Black as he stays in the apartment of one of his
mother’s friends, a certain Mrs. Jones (who resides at 360 Apple Tree
Lane), and where he keeps hearing peculiar noises through the wall.
Despite his insistence that something is amiss, no one will believe his
story, not even his pal and co-worker Clark Kent who is very busy
(though oddly not so busy that he’s typing at super speed) and chalks it
up to a bad case of “indigestion of the brain”. More to humor him than
anything else, Kent finally sheds his reporter’s duds and visits Jim in
his red, blue and yellow garb and finds the cub reporter out on his
feet, the result, or so one of the neighbors who has supposedly stumbled
upon him claims, of a nasty collision with an unseen beam. The cat
petting neighbor, Mr. Franks, is played by veteran character actor Frank
Ferguson, probably best known for his portrayal of Mr. McDougal, the
irate owner of a house of horrors, in the classic monster comedy
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. His wife in this particular
episode
is Virginia Christine, an equally familiar face in many films and TV
shows of the 40s and 50s, later a TV coffee huckster for
Folgers (Mrs. Olson) but also known to many genre fans as the Princess
Ananka in
The Mummy’s Curse, an association she was reportedly none too
pleased about. Also in the cast as the mysterious, scar faced and
impatient hardnosed character is John Doucette, miles (and one season)
removed from his earlier slapstick performance in the first year episode
The Birthday Letter. I always find it interesting in this
episode that Ferguson and Christine as the Franks are so unimpressed or
surprised to come home and find the
Man
of Steel in their living room. The Mrs. actually seems indifferent
if not bored by his appearance. One would think that running into
Superman in any case would hardly be a common occurrence in a town as
big as Metropolis and moreover, if you were a crook, as these two turn
out to be, that his showing up in the middle of your little stolen art
game—which is what all of this turns out be about—might just be a bit
unnerving. But when he finally assures Jim everything will be all right
and flies off they hardly give him more of a departing glance than they
would the Avon Lady. Talk about your cool customers.
This
show, written by Jackson Gillis and directed by Tommy Carr, is a bit on
the claustrophobic side with most of the action confined to either the
apartment where Jim is staying or some very obvious studio-bound sets
such as the bus stop or the basement where the hot art items are
smuggled in. It’s terribly predictable even for a half hour TV show.
I would have to say that George seems rather disinterested this time
around, a foreshadowing of some of his limp performances in later
seasons. I usually like those rare shows where a few of the cast members
have some time off and we are given time with just two of the characters
but there isn’t much between Reeves and Larson here. The whole thing
just seems overly formulized, sluggish, too transparent and lacking
sufficient energy even if it sports a solid supporting cast. It’s not
one of the second season’s finest hours,
but
it has moments as do almost all the shows. Sometimes, in this crazy and
unpredictable universe, just knowing that our TAOS friends are always
there for our enjoyment is pleasure and satisfaction enough.
Now if I could only get Professor Twiddle from
Through the Time Barrier to take me back to 1959 so I could show
John Stevens that I didn’t steal that magazine.
June 2007
JUNGLE
DEVIL
The first
dream I ever experienced—or at least the first dream I recall with any
degree of clarity—was also one of the most vivid of my life and I have
never forgotten it. I was about two years old at the time and shared a
bedroom with my older brother. In the dream I suddenly awoke to the
sight of a very large gorilla climbing in through our open window.
Strangely, I was not particularly frightened by this intruder, really
more fascinated than anything else, and calmly watched the animal as it
glanced casually in my direction. It seems this gorilla had no agenda
other than a need for some immediate shuteye and therefore settled down
on the floor, curled up in a fetal position and began blissfully snoring
away. Intrigued, I crawled out of my bed, walked over to the beast,
stroked its fur several times and that was that. The next morning, and I
guess for a long time after that, I enthusiastically regaled my family
with tales of this dream until it became a kind of Dettman Legend.
Everyone was quite amused by it except me. I took the whole thing deadly
serious and would never back away from the fact that it had actually
happened. In retrospect, what is odd for me to understand after more
than fifty-five years is just how I even knew what a gorilla was. We had
no TV in those days. I had never gone to a zoo. My parents didn’t take
me to the movies until I got a bit older. What had triggered this image
of a giant simian?
In
any case, this nocturnal run-in with my gorilla pal ignited an active
curiosity about these creatures and I later came to regularly be on the
lookout for them in TV shows like Ramar of the Jungle and
Sheena (not that Sheena herself, in the person of statuesque beauty
Irish McCalla, wasn’t attraction enough) as well as feature
movies featuring such series characters as Tarzan, Jungle Jim and Bomba.
Later I would learn that certain actor/stuntmen in Hollywood actually
made careers out of both impersonating gorillas on the big and little
screen or sometimes just renting their costumes out to the various
studios. The most famous of these players were Charles Gamora, Ray
“Crash” Corrigan and later Steve Calvert (who purchased Corrigan’s
suit). To be honest, none of their costumes were true anatomical
duplicates of a real primate and were rarely terribly scary but they
were fun to watch anyway as the actors pounded on their chests and
grunted away.
Certainly close to the bottom of the barrel in
gorilla impersonations was the titled Jungle Devil which was
featured in this second season show. Portrayed by bartender/actor
Calvert, this had to be one of the mangiest, out of shape and
thread-barren adversaries that ever stepped before a camera, but it
frightened me nonetheless. To add insult to injury, the Superman
producers, for some reason, wanted the gorilla to be a silver color and
the resulting paint job began to immediately rot the head so it had to
be eventually replaced. Still, I’m pretty certain it took George Reeves
as Superman a lot of control to take the scene where he confronts the
beast seriously. For the record, Calvert in this get-up would also
square away against Phyllis Coates in the Republic serial Panther
Girl of the Congo.
Jungle
Devil has Clark (who for once ditches his signature suit and tie for
a safari styled hat and coat straight out of Banana Republic), Lois and
Jimmy (the latter having stowed away on the plane carrying the reporters
to some country called Zinaya—wonder if he had time to get all his
shots) trying to locate missing scientist Dr. Harper (Damien O'Flynn)
and his wife Gloria (actress Doris Singleton, probably best known for
playing Lucille Ball’s scatterbrained and myopic pal Carolyn
Applegate on I Love Lucy) who are being held captive by the local
tribe of local natives who have understandably taken umbrage at Gloria
accidentally losing the diamond eyepiece (in a pool of quicksand) from
the wooden statue of their tribal god. In retaliation they refuse to let
the scientific exploration proceed on its way until the stone is
returned to its proper place.
I
should also mention at this point that if the so-called Jungle Devil of
the title is far from intimidating, the natives themselves, mostly
middle-aged guys who don’t look to have seen a treadmill in their entire
lives, appear about as threatening as the cast of Seseme Street. Still
they manage to kowtow the Harpers who seemed doomed to not only spend
the rest of their lives in a studio manufactured jungle set but to have
to endure the repeated dance exhibitions by these natives who haven’t
exactly been choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
Enter Clark, Lois and Jimmy who are also summarily
surrounded and taken prisoner by the pot-bellied, spear waving locals.
When the cub reporter sees their plight his bravery and patriotic ardor
shoot to the surface.
“Let’s show them we can die like Americans!”
Clark has a better idea.
“Let’s live like Americans.”
Easy for him to say.
Everything
is eventually righted when Clark replaces the idol’s diamond
peeper with a new version he has made by applying so much pressure from
a super squeeze to a lump of coal that its is transformed into a gem
(which amazingly fits just perfectly into the wooden eye socket). This
only happens, however, after he has been taken away by the natives for a
sacrifice to the Jungle Devil and tied to a stake. This is a
perfect opportunity to materialize into the Man of Steel (a convenient
burst of smoke helps camouflage the transformation) and after taking a
harmless rock to the head shoos away the easily discouraged animal.
If you remove Superman and the Daily Planet crew
from this show, scripted by Peter Dixon, it could pretty easily be
recycled and used for a Ramar or Jungle Jim episode.
It’s
one jungle cliché after another and so obviously studio bound—not even
relying for atmosphere on any integrated newsreel footage of jungle
critters—that you half expect the actors to trip over a camera chord at
any moment.
Still, I loved it as a kid and no matter how many
times I saw it I waited with baited breath and great anticipation for
that moment when Superman faced the Jungle Devil.
He never invaded my dreams though. Those were
reserved for Irish McCalla
May 2007
MY
FRIEND, SUPERMAN
By Bruce Dettman
At one time or another
everyone seems to have had a special friend, someone a bit different
who, for one reason or another, they create a unique bond with. My
special friend was named Buster. Buster, my senior by some fifteen
years, lived just down the block from us with his elderly mother and
stood nearly seven feet tall (in an era when even professional
basketball players rarely eclipsed the 6 foot 6 mark). In addition to
Buster’s extraordinary height he had the mental capacity of about a
twelve year-old except in the area of mechanical things where he was
quite exceptional. Buster designed and built a special bike to
accommodate his size as well as putting together a fantastic HBO train
layout. He regularly showed two short 16 millimeter films in his garbage
(one featuring Abbott and Costello and another one about an albino ape)
and charged a penny for the local kids to come over and watch them. He
also had a pool table and taught several generations of boys how to
shoot eight ball. For Halloween fun he would dress up as the
Frankenstein Monster, prop himself up against his garage door and lure
kids over who thought he was a dummy or mannequin. The reactions when
they realized he wasn’t could be pretty dramatic. On scorching summer
days, accompanied by neighborhood pals Jimmy (best tree climber on the
street) and Richard (best spitter on the street), I would walk downtown
with Buster and watch as kids continually (and tentatively) approached
him, dropped on their knees and raised up his socks to see if he was
attached to stilts. Naturally we all felt smug and superior since he was
our buddy and not theirs and usually treated “Bus” to a double Frostee
ice cream cone. The long and hot vacation days of our youth that we
thought would never end finally did just that and we grew up and went
our separate ways, all except Buster who stayed at home with his frail
old mother. Jimmy died of a brain tumor and Richard was an early
casualty of the Viet Nam War. The last time I saw Buster was about ten
years ago. I was waiting around at a train station one morning and
noticed some little kids around me laughing and pointing at something
and when I looked to see what had grabbed their attention I saw it was
Buster standing alone on the other side of the tracks. He was bent over,
looked very old and grey and moved with great difficulty. I approached
him tentatively. I didn’t know if he would remember me. He looked up.
“Hey Bus,” I said for
the millionth time in my life.
“Hey Dettman,” he said
in that familiar high-pitched voice of his.
He knew me instantly.
We talked and he said he
now lived in a special home but still had his pool table and asked
where all the guys were (meaning the decades of children who had once
visited him) but I didn’t have the heart to tell him about Jim and
Richard. Eventually a bright-colored van slid up and he climbed in and
said he’d see me soon. The little kids were still watching him and I
wondered if they too were tempted to see if he was walking on stilts.
Meeting
with Buster and remembering my unique friendship with him reminded me of
Tony in the second season’s My Friend Superman. Obviously, Tony,
who owns a diner just around the corner from the Daily Planet (and who
has a daughter named Elaine who the overly shy Jimmy Olson has the hots
for but can’t seem to work up the nerve to ask out on a date), needs to
impress his customers with the fact that he is great pals with Superman
even though he has never actually met the Man of Steel. Apparently the
poor little guy (played by Tito Vuolo) is just bored with flipping
burgers (one of which he has christened a Superburger in honor of
his idol) and has decided to bring a little excitement into his daily
drudgery by inventing this relationship. He’s even gone so far as to
have a mangled rifle on display in the diner that he informs customers
Superman was responsible for bending out of shape. Tony’s rich
imagination and white lies aren’t his real problem, however.
His real problem is a trio of local gangsters who are running a
protection racket and squeezing weekly payments out of merchants in the
neighborhood including the poor restaurateur who’s keeping mum about the
whole business. Through some misunderstandings regarding Lois (Noel
Neill) taking a mysterious vacation, these underworld characters think
their racket is going to be exposed unless they head-off the reporter
and the victims who are now willing to come forward to reveal their
crooked activities. Superman ultimately figures things out and shows up
at the diner where the loyal patrons curtail the three bad guys by
throwing all manner of diner food at them, particularly pies. Although
from the get-go the slant of this episode, written by David Chantler
with veteran Tommy Carr at the directorial helm, runs consistently on
the light and frivolous
side,
this Keystone Cops/Three Stooges finale just seems totally out of place
on TAOS even if in upcoming seasons there would be other pretty
ridiculous scenarios and segments. Still, emerging in a season that
would deliver such excellent episodes as Panic In The Sky, Superman
In Exile and The Face and the Voice this blatant baboonery seemed
jarring, almost embarrassing. According to one account, producer Whitney
Ellsworth, feeling bad that bad guys Paul Burke, Terry Frost and Joseph
Vitale had to be the brunt of this meringue shellacking, gave the actors
a few extra bucks. They certainly deserved it.
This
isn’t a terrible show like some that would follow in later seasons, but
thanks to a harmless somewhat anemic script it doesn’t have a lot to
recommend it either. I do remember as a kid thinking it nifty to watch
Superman in an early scene typing at super-speed but little else excited
me about it. Incidentally, it’ always a bit embarrassing to see how
Hollywood at that point portrayed teenagers—and yes that’s actress Ruta
Lee, then acting under the moniker of Kilmonis, as the girl—and I have
to admit I still cringe during the scene when the kids come into
the diner to dance to the jukebox. Still, it’s basically a lightweight
human interest story with not enough Superman and too much of Tony’s
tall tales and exaggerated Italian accent.
Still, some 50 years ago
when the show was over and I might have felt slightly disappointed by
not enough Superman footage, I could always shoot down the street for a
fast game of eight ball with Bus.
Back then, I thought he
would always be waiting for me.
April 2007

THE
MYSTERIOUS CUBE
By Bruce
Dettman
The problem for writers dealing with Superman is
that, well, he’s super. While this smacks of the embarrassingly obvious,
think of the predicament laid at the feet of the creative forces that
weekly (on TV) or monthly (in the comics) had to come up with some
scenario significant of challenging or taxing the character to levels
worthy of his powers. You couldn’t drag out Kryptonite with any
regularity or it would soon become boring and predictable (the comic
book guys eventually solved this by inventing variations on the standard
green Kryptonite and gave us assorted colors that affected the Man of
Steel in different ways) so alternate concepts had to be created to test
his mettle.
As a kid playing Superman in a pretty realistic
suit that my parents fashioned for me one Halloween (and which
subsequent to the holiday I wore beneath my street clothes nearly
everywhere I went), I tried my best to come up with make believe
situations and characters that might prove an acceptable threat to my
super powers. One of these involved locking myself in the bathroom,
cranking up the water
temperature in the shower to full heat, letting the intense steam fill
the room then grimacing in front of the mirror as a reaction to the
paralyzing effects of what I called Kryptonite gas. I have to admit that
I had a great time with this scenario—which sometimes took as much as
fifteen minutes to play out—and recreated the scene dozens of times
until my parents—never at home during the actual dramatic moment—started
to notice that the relatively new bathroom wallpaper was beginning to
peel off at an alarming rate. They never figured out the cause but I was
smart enough to put a halt to this in-house cliffhanger. After all, I
had already lost a painful amount of my allowance about a year before
for pretending that our backyard peach tree was a giant squid and going
after it Captain Nemo style with my older brother’s Boy Scout hatchet.
On TAOS, the Man of Steel had several run-ins with
Kryptonite, of course, and at other times tangled with radioactivity (Superman
In Exile), intense cold (The Big Freeze) and electricity (Crime
Wave) but always came away from these brushes with death relatively
unscathed. In the 1957 season the writers, in this case the team of
Robert Bellem and producer Whitney Ellsworth, having exhausted the more
obvious ways of trying to destroy him, decided to change tactics a bit
and thought small—molecular small, that is. In Divide and Conquer,
Superman split himself in two and risked the possibility of never being
able to unite his two halves. In The Mysterious Cube (one of the
color episodes that nearly everyone I’ve ever talked to—even
non-Superman fans—seem to remember in the same way that they recall the
second season’s Panic In The Sky), he takes a chance on not being
able to reassemble his anatomical components after an attempt to move
through the heretofore impenetrable substance of which the cube is made.
It’s not really that the episode itself is so
outstanding. Like many of the series’ later shows it’s a bit
claustrophobic, too set-bound with some pretty deficient dialog and
villains you can’t take all that seriously. And yet, there is the
Cube.
The Cube is what everyone remembers, not much of
the plot or the characters but rather the idea that someone has actually
come up with a material which seems impervious to all Superman’s powers.
He can’t break through it, see through it or burn through it. How, we
all wondered as kids, could this be? Could there actually be something
Superman couldn’t master? And those crummy crooks laughing at his failed
attempts. Oh, the pain of it! Yep, I still remember the sinking feeling
in my gut when George Reeves bounced feebly against it.
In any case, the plot has this guy Paul Barton
(Bruce Wendell) a crook who has been hiding out in the mysterious cube
for seven years (created by “a scientist who isn’t with us anymore”), so
the police won’t be able to arrest him for his crimes after the statute
of limitations has run out and he can be declared legally dead. Why he
puts the cube in the middle of Metropolis rather than out in the boonies
where he can’t be so closely monitored is anyone’s guess. Paul is
understandably a pretty cranky guy since all these years he’s not seen a
soul and lived on concentrated food tablets and vitamins.
Paul’s
brother Steve (Keith Richards – no, not that Keith Richards!) who
incidentally played the lead in the 1949 Republic serial The James
Brothers of Missouri opposite Noel Neil, and helper Jodie (Ben
Welden) are on the outside gearing up for Paul’s emergence as a free man
from the enigmatic structure. Superman shows up but can’t put a dent in
the thing, so consults with Professor La Serne (Everett Glass), who also
helped him out in Divide and Conquer and who suggests (as calmly
as I’d suggest a new coffee brand) that he might be able to redistribute
his atomic particles and move through the cube. As it turns out, the Man
of Steel has no problem with the process, but not wishing to hedge their
bet, Jodie and brother Steve and kidnap Lois and Jimmy to prevent
Superman from going in and getting Paul. Hearing their plans he pretends
he cannot penetrate the cube, has Washington authorities turn back
Paul’s clock so that he comes out of hiding minutes before the statute
of limitations has run out, and saves Jimmy and Lois.
The
Mysterious Cube is fun mostly for the concept (just think of all the
other amazing uses that could be made out of the miraculous material
such as regular buildings, shops and airplanes, but I guess its secret
was lost with its inventor) not so much the execution which, under
director George Blair’s direction, is be a bit flat and listless. Still,
there’s was just something about that cube that sticks with you, even
after nearly half a century.
And for the record, my parents decided to paint
rather than re-wallpaper that bathroom.
February 2007
STAR
OF FATE
By Bruce
Dettman
When kids of my era thought of Egypt, one image
invariably came to mind…mummies. Pyramids, Cleopatra and the Nile might
have crept into the mix sometimes, but by and large ancient Egypt was
inexorably tied up with visions of live and murderous mummies limping
slowly along, shredded bandages trailing behind them, their arms
outstretched in search of victims to claim in the name of some ancient
curse. As enamored of mummies as anyone else my age, I was particularly
lucky that only thirty miles from my home was San Jose’s famous
Egyptian/Rosicrucian Museum. At least once a year I would persuade my
father, who was pretty good in humoring my sometimes obsessive tastes in
oddball things, to visit the place where I never tired of the exhibits,
particularly the very realistic replica of a famous eighteenth dynasty
Egyptian tomb which was dark, dank and very atmospheric. As for the
mummies on display, having seen Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. in the
Universal Mummy series, the real things, shrunken, usually diminutive
and not very scary, were always a bit disappointing, but I never failed
to check them out anyway.
There was just something about Egypt, not only
distant and shaded in a far away past, but so mysterious and alien. I
later took a few college courses in Egyptology and read a lot of works
on the subject, including several on the world’s most famous hunters of
Egyptian relics such as Flinders Petrie, James Breasted and, of course,
Howard Carter, discover of King Tut’s tomb. No Egyptologist that I
encountered in print,
however, bore the slightest resemblance to Dr. Barnack (Lawrence Ryle)
from the second year episode Star of Fate who looks and behaves
as if he would be more inclined to break into a downtown bank vault than
an ancient burial chamber. The guy has thug written all over him and
when we meet him he is in the midst of a bidding contest against curio
store owner Mr. Whitlock (Paul Burns from Riddle of the Chinese Jade
and other shows) for the ownership of a mysterious and supposedly cursed
Egyptian jewelry box. When the bidding doesn’t go his way (it
reaches the $10,000 mark) he responds by poking Whitlock in the ribs
with a snub-nose revolver that I guess all archeologists have handy in
case they run low on cash.
In
any case, Barnack, with his secretary Alma (Jeanne Dean) tagging along,
takes the box home with him. Leaving her alone with instructions not to
open it she ignores his instructions and does precisely that with the
result that the next instant she is stricken by some mysterious
influence and rendered unconscious. Lois and Jimmy show up just a short
time after this as does the returning Barnack, yet when Lois pleads for
the archeologist to get help for her he snaps “You do it. I haven’t got
the time.” Meanwhile at his curio shop (which includes a Superman
puppet) Whitlock enters clutching the box which he has just retrieved
from Barnack’s place after Alma lapsed into a coma (which suggests that
he too ignored the stricken girl). Barnack appears at this point and
not only takes back what he thinks is the real box—but which in reality
is a clever copy—but leaves
Whitlock
tied up and ready to be blown to smithereens by some nitro placed on a
Cuckoo Clock by the always well equipped Barnack. Luckily Superman
comes to the rescue and the box is brought to the Daily Planet office.
Not having learned by example, Lois also tempts fate by opening the
container and like the others seems to fall victim to the curse, but
when Clark a moment later tries the same thing a poisonous needle hooked
up to the box with a spring breaks off against his (steel-like)
finger.
The doctor (played by Arthur Space, later the vet
on Lassie) later wonders aloud to Perry White why Kent wasn’t
hurt by the poison.
“That is strange. I’ll have to ask him about that,”
White responds.
In any case, this deadly needle not only explains
the secret of the box’s legendary curse, but hieroglyphics inscribed on
it identify the antidote for the poison as a leaf found only beneath the
Great Pyramid in Egypt. Superman flies there, lifts the structure
(effectively staged as several huge foundation blocks) high enough to
retrieve the curative plant and gets it back to Metropolis in time for a
life-saving serum to be made. Meanwhile Jimmy who, despite knowing of
Barnack’s violent tendencies (and being what appears to be a good foot
shorter than the archeologist), physically confronts him alone at his
home where at gunpoint the cub reporter is forced into an empty
sarcophagus only to be subsequently replaced by Superman who then rounds
up the doctor.
A
slow-moving and somewhat limp script by Roy Hamilton doesn’t help this
slightly disappointing episode anymore than Tommy Carr’s somewhat flat
and disinterested direction. A bit more creative energy and pep are
needed. The regulars handle themselves well as usual, but the action
just feels tired and a bit forced. It’s not helped by Clark’s lame
explanation that he didn’t feel the effects of the poison because of a
protective band-aid on his thumb either.
However, what this episode really needed is—you
guessed it—a mummy.
January 2007
SEMI-PRIVATE
EYE
By Bruce
Dettman
For the better part of the 1990s, I lived in an old
downtown apartment building (circa 1915 or thereabouts) on Dashiell
Hammett Way (formerly Monroe Street) in San Francisco. The famous
mystery author resided at this same location for a short period during
the early 1920s and while it is not known for certain which room was
definitely his, quite a number of scholars have come to believe that it
was the space I rented, No 9. Being a fan of detective novels,
particularly of the so-called hardboiled school practiced by Hammett,
James Cain, Raymond Chandler and others, I delighted in the fact that I
could very well be living in the same room where the embryonic seeds for
his Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man might have taken root.
I also came to hang out at John’s Grill, a famous local watering hole
and restaurant a few blocks way, reportedly frequented by the author
during his San Francisco days. One evening in the early 1990s, the
eatery hosted a kind of Dashiell Hammett event.
The
actual statue from the film version of The Maltese Falcon was in
town to be showcased and various Hammett enthusiasts and celebrities
were on hand including Elisha Cook Jr. who played Wilmer in the original
Warner Brothers movie—opposite Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney
Greenstreet and Peter Lorre—and who was the last major cast member still
alive. My intent was to have a few seconds with the actor myself, not so
much to inquire about his participation in the over explored Falcon,
but rather to quiz him about some of his lesser known roles including
his part in the second season episode of TAOS, The
Semi-Private Eye. Unfortunately, as is so often the case at these
affairs, he was instantly cornered and surrounded by a gaggle of local
dignitaries, none of whom had the slightest idea of really who Cook was
or what his screen career had entailed but who wanted to make sure they
shared a photo op with him. He looked pretty old and frail by then—he
would die not long after this—and it was a bit difficult to realize this
was the same man who Jack Palance drilled so gleefully in the classic
movie Shane which just happened to the first movie I ever saw. I
made several attempts to reach him but the throng was too much and I
finally gave up and settled for my beverage of choice and conversation
with a retired cable car driver named Fred.
If
nothing else, Semi Private Eye is a great showcase for Jack
Larsen’s comedic skills and he accounts himself beautifully. His
Humphrey Bogart impression is not so over-the top as to seem unduly
exaggerated nor so subdued that you don’t get it. It’s a nice balance.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Cook is Homer Garrity, a
Metropolis gumshoe (who even Superman knows by reputation) whose life
the Man of Steel saves when some enemies of the shamus secretly
dump a chimney of bricks on him as he strolls down the street (Superman
defies physics by simply tossing the bricks back up on the roof where
they perfectly re-assemble themselves). Garrity thinks almost being
clobbered by the masonry is just an accident but Superman is not so sure
and departs with the suggestion that “If I were you I’d look up once in
awhile.”
Meanwhile, Lois is in one of her periodic moods to
prove that Clark is Superman. This time around she rigs a phone book
with fifty pounds of weight so as to expose his super strength,
but
he gets wise to her scheme and (as usual) outwits her (by switching
phonebooks and when she shows up in his office tossing the book into her
lap). This only infuriates her more and she decides to hire a private
detective (the aforementioned Garrity) to follow Kent which she is
certain will once and for all reveal his double identity. (Did it ever
occur to Lois that Superman, who has saved her skin—not to mention the
whole world’s—many times over has a reason for his disguise and that it
would be counter productive to betray this?) Things get out of hand
however, when she and the detective are kidnapped by a couple of crooks
named Noodles and Cappy (Douglas Henderson and Richard Benedict) whose
successful blackmailing business has been compromised by an earlier
Garrity’s investigation and who were behind the earlier shower of
bricks. This opens the door for Jimmy, who seems to have mighty romantic
notions about the private eye business, to slip on fedora and trench
coat and a lisping Bogart accent and go after the crooks himself. The
twosome aren’t too impressed by either his getup or persona, however, and
soon Jimmy, thanks to a trap door, finds himself stuck along with Homer
and Lois in a basement which the two baddies marinate with lethal gas
bombs. Superman gets to the root of all of this, of course, and all ends
happily ever after with the bad guys ju-jitsued into dreamland by Jimmy
and the detective.
This is as a kind of an interim piece for the show,
a transitional crossroad of the series which lies between the violent
noirish content of the first season and the often adolescent tenor of
the final two years. Despite the fact that the criminals are obviously
willing and able to kill (dumping the chimney, exploding the lethal gas
bombs) it’s hard to take them too seriously. Even had Jack Larson’s
wonderful comedic turn not by itself dulled what could have been the
hard edges of David Chantler’s storyline (murder, assault, kidnapping,
and blackmail) the somewhat tongue-in-cheek performances of Henderson
and Benedict, the latter much scarier in the first season’s Night of
Terror, greatly marginalized the threat posed by the gangsters.
George Blair kept his directorial touch light and mostly relaxed and
it’s a stretch to think anyone is ever in any real danger..jpg)
It is still a lot of fun though thanks to Larson
whose comedic timing is impeccable, and Cook who gives a wonderfully
deadpan and understated performance which flies in the face of the tough
persona of the fictional private eye then gaining momentum as a stable
of early TV.
I still wish I would have cornered Cook that night
a few years back and talked to about his memories of the show and how he
was the first guy I ever saw murdered on the screen but it just wasn’t
to be. And by the way, Fred the cable car driver kept confusing him with
Wally Cox.
November 2006
THE
GOLDEN VULTURE
by Bruce Dettman
When you were a kid, pretending to be a pirate was
a bit different from other flights of role-playing because, well let’s
face it, pirates were mostly bad guys. This created a bit of a dilemma
for my generation since we Baby Boomers traditionally gravitated towards
the right side of the law. We were quick-drawin’ cowpokes,
wrong-rightin’ town marshals and honorable cavalry officers saving
settlers and fightin’ redskins in the old west. We stormed the beaches
of Iwo Jima and took on the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge during WW
II. We were detectives solving tough cases and even Superman flying over
our backyards. Pirates, however, placed some demand on a rigid sense of
right and wrong infused in us by the likes of Hoppy, Captain Midnight
and Matt Dillon. Still, there was an allure to pirates, to their
independence and swaggering bravado and on more than one occasion I
fashioned an eye patch, “borrowed” one of my mother’s earrings and tied
a bandana around my head. Hawaiian Punch doubled for rum, but no matter
how hard I tried I couldn’t imagine my Dalmatian, as good an actor as he
was, as a convincing parrot.
My most significant introduction to pirates on the
screen was the scene-stealing, scenery-chewing Robert Newton in the film
Blackbeard. I had previously also viewed Wallace Berry as long
John Silver in Treasure Island, but Wallace’s Long John was a bit
of a pussycat (he even cried in one scene) and made little impression on
me. And, of course, there was Captain Hook from Peter Pan (one
version animated by the Disney folks and the other a live musical
production featuring Cyril Richard as the one-armed, alligator-fearing
villain to Mary Martin’s Peter) but again, this was entertaining stuff
but not gritty or realistic enough for me. Newton, however, was as
mad as a hatter: cruel, dangerous and certainly not likely to break into
a song and dance routine. The Newton film ended with an unforgettable
scene depicting Blackbeard buried up to his greasy head in the sand
awaiting a much deserved drowning death from the invading surf. With all
of these traits solidified in my embryonic noggin, the image of the
pirate as barbaric, ruthless and cagey was born.
The other actor who made a large impression on me
during this period was not a traditional
pirate but rather Peter Whitney as Captain McBain,* a modern-day (circa
1953) version of the breed on the second season’s episode The Golden
Vulture. As a kid, I found Whitney’s portrayal strangely
unsettling although on viewing it as an adult (well, chronologically at
least) I’m not altogether certain what specifically so bothered me about
the characterization. I have a hunch, however, given the seaman’s mostly
harmless demeanor at the beginning of the show and the rapid switch to
tyrannical and murderous villain by the end of the episode, that such a
drastic metamorphous was unfamiliar to me and therefore disturbing to a
young mind not yet indoctrinated to the mercurial whims of the human
psyche.
The
action begins when Jimmy Olson (Jack Larson) is out enjoying himself
fishing at the seashore—you would have thought he would have had his
fill of angling in The Evil Three—and discovers a floating bottle
with a message in it which he takes back to the folks at the Daily
Planet. Lois (Noel Neill) smells a scoop and with Jimmy tagging
along—and not letting Perry or Jimmy know what they’re up to—they visit
the salvage ship, the Golden Vulture, alluded to in the message. There
they meet McBain who Lois’ wrongly thinks is just a bombastic blowhard
but who is actually in league with the ship’s owner in a clever scheme
to turn stolen jewelry into phony pirate loot that they sell for big
profits to museums. On top of this,
McBain is a sadistic bully who torments his crew including Scurvy
(played by Vic Perrin, a one time very busy radio actor, whose voice
would later become familiar to millions as the unseen host/narrator of
TV’s THE OUTER LIMITS) who in an attempt to communicate to the
authorities on shore penned the note that Jimmy found in the bottle.
Lois continues to play it cool while McBain rattles on, but Jimmy opens
his mouth when Scurvy (can this really be the guy’s name?) enters the
room with a duplicate of the bottle and the crazy captain decides to get
rid of the meddlesome reporters. While Lois and Jimmy are getting into
this jam, Clark, investigating on his own, is discovered onboard and
finds himself pursued by the entire crew with no time or place to turn
into Superman (one has to wonder if at this point Reeves was
intentionally having a bit of fun when he pauses, looks around and says
“Stuperman,
where are you?”). Eventually (minus his glasses) he’s cornered and
made to walk the plank by McBain who now actually fashions himself a
real pirate. Seconds later Superman lands on the deck and we have an
enjoyable but somewhat comically staged fight between the sailors and
the Man of Steel
(who
seems to be having the time of his life devising different ways to
eliminate his attackers). With the whole gang subdued and tied into
sailor knots, Lois and Jimmy implore him to save poor drowning Clark but
Superman’s response—as he intentionally takes his sweet time going to
the reporter’s aid—borders somewhat on the cruel (“He’ll have to hold
his breath a bit longer”) since Lois and Jimmy truly believe their
colleague could drown at any moment. In any case, he finally exits and
Clark comes to the surface. Lois, not seeing Superman fly off, begins to
put two and two together until Clark intentionally pulls her into the
water and the idea disappears.
The Golden Vulture directed by the usually
on the mark team of director Tommy Carr and writer Jackson Gillis, has
always been one of my favorite episodes and unlike a few past favorites
that have wilted a bit with time and distance, I still enjoy this one
immensely. Reeves is obviously enjoying the particular show, and Whitney
remains a memorable bad guy—if not quite the fearsome villain as I
recall. The action stuff is well—handled and the night setting on the
boat is effectively claustrophobic.
Although I have not played pirate in over
forty-five years, I still like a good Jolly Roger yarn. I have, however,
substituted the real thing for the Hawaiian Punch. Yo-Ho-Ho.
*I have seen this
name spelled several different ways in various sourcebooks.*
September 2006
A
GHOST FOR
SCOTLAND YARD
By Bruce Dettman
When you’re young and lacking the
adult defenses of experience and maturity necessary to insulate you from
a wide array of imaginary terrors, the world can be a pretty scary
place, as I can readily testify. For instance, we had a large pile of
wood behind our garage and one horrifying day I was certain I glimpsed a
giant boa constrictor coiled menacingly atop of it. For months I
wouldn’t get near the spot. Several years before this I swore I had seen
a gorilla visit my brother and my bedroom in the middle of the night,
that I had actually crawled out of my crib and petted the remarkably
docile simian. Then there was the old lady who lived by a nearby creek
with, it was rumored, a houseful of killer cats. How any hundreds of
times did I walk several blocks out of my way to avoid that harmless
abode?
Other fears, less local but just as potent, came to
me courtesy of our twelve inch Packard-Bell TV set which my parents
bought back in 1953. After all these years I can still see the chestnut
colored cabinet, the round-shaped controls and the dinky speaker.
However
modest by today’s standards, it not only magically delivered into our
living room Davy Crockett, Crusader Rabbit, Jack Benny and Zorro, but it
also brought forth elements which prayed substantially on my adolescent
fears and insecurities. Oddly enough, at least in my case, these were
rarely culled from the so-called big scary moments that intruded upon
the minds of many of my friends. I was not, as an example, scared by the
Frankenstein Monster tangling with the Wolfman, by Kong going after Fay
Wray, by the Mummy drinking Tana Leaves or the Blob ingesting an entire
community. What bothered me was rarely predictable and still, to a
certain degree, is. A couple of these I still recall: a certain
Twilight Zone episode about a woman going down into a hospital
morgue and meeting a sardonically grinning attendant (“Room for one
more, honey”), the haunting main musical cue from the show One Step
Beyond and an Alfred Hitchcock Presents concerning a house
sealed off from a violent storm—and a reported serial killer—save one
open window in the basement which the camera repeatedly focuses on. All
of these and several more tapped into some vulnerable psychic spot in my
adolescent brain and sent shivers up my spine. On such nights, going to
bed I would force my Dalmatian ahead of me into my darkened bedroom.
Better him than me, I figured.
TAOS
also was responsible for one scary scene that stood high on my list
of TV fright moments, although to this day I’m not altogether certain
why it made such a noteworthy impression on me. It was in the second
season’s A Ghost For Scotland Yard when Brockhurst’s magnified
head is seen to be floating in the night sky. Even today when I watch
this scene and observe actor Leonard Mudie’s fiercely skeletal noggin’ I
can dimly recall the uneasiness I felt as a boy observing this. The
music had something to do with this, I suppose, and Tommy Carr’s
atmospheric direction, but mostly that disembodied head just got to me.
Sometimes there’s no point in trying to figure these things out,
particularly nearly fifty years after the fact.
This
image aside, the episode is fun for a lot of reasons, not the least of
which is having Clark and Jimmy away from Metropolis and covering a
story in Europe. Although the entire cast of TAOS is always a joy to
watch with their terrific chemistry and talents on display, I always
find it enjoyable to see those episodes where a couple of the characters
are isolated away from Metropolis—The Deserted Village, The Haunted
Lighthouse, Rescue and Czar of the Underworld, for
example—and able to play off each other in a more concentrated and
intimate manner. This time it’s Clark and Jimmy with Lois only making a
token appearance during a phone conversation.
Heading back to the States (from Sweden) they stop
off in England to see Sir Alfred McCredy (Colin Campbell), an old friend
of Perry White’s. The whole country, it seems, is all abuzz anticipating
the return of Brockhurst, an unbalanced Houdini-like magician who has
been dead for five years but has vowed to return to seek vengeance on
his enemies.
Sir
Alfred, once the magician’s manager, has been signaled out as one of his
main targets and is pretty nervous about the situation even though, for
some odd reason, he keeps large framed photo of his arch enemy hanging
in his living room. Equally upset is Sir Arthur’s sister Mabel (played
by the always deliciously ditzy Norma Varden, perhaps best known to film
goers as the woman who allows psycho strangler Robert Walker to use her
neck for practice in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train). As
it turns out, the siblings have every reason to be afraid, not because
Brockhurst does return from the dead, but because he’s been alive all
the time (having faked his own vehicular death) and just biding his time
to return and carry out his murderous plans which call upon his talents
as both a magician and a mimic. He doesn’t reckon, however, on Superman.
Initially, however Clark Kent wants absolutely
nothing to do with covering such an outlandish story and tells Lois just
as much. He actually works up quite lather about the whole thing which
doesn’t
seem to make much sense but maybe he doesn’t think Superman should be
away from Metropolis any longer or perhaps he has a hot date or more
White Sox tickets. Jimmy, of course, wants nothing to do with the
reported ghost but almost becomes one of Brockhurst’s victims himself.
Jack Larson, for the record, is particularly charming and likable in
this episode. He’s always good, of course, but when Jimmy is frightened
you really feel it in the same way you empathized with his mounting fear
in The Haunted Lighthouse. I think it’s the way he uses his eyes.
Again, I recall being pretty unnerved myself when Jimmy finds himself
locked in a spooky carriage house with Brockhurst closing in on him with
his unsettling delivery of the line, “Crazy am I? I’ll show you!”
Another
two good scenes take are set at a news stand where the magazine vendor
(Clyde Cook) first warns the “Yank” (Jimmy) about how Superman shouldn’t
tangle with Brockhurst and at the show’s conclusion when he apologizes
for believing in the magician and gives the cub reporter a Superman
comic which Clark also gets a big kick out of.
It’s a strong episode with a nifty script by the
always dependable Jackson Gillis, memorable performances by all
concerned and even a few chills tossed into the mix.
For a few seconds, watching the show in the dark in
an attempt to get the full measure of mood out of it and try to rekindle
the acute fear I experienced half a century ago, I have to admit I
wouldn’t have minded having my old dog with me again.
August 2006
MAN
IN THE LEAD MASK
By Bruce
Dettman
Psychologists would
probably have a field day with me on this, but I have always had a thing
about masks. Today my living-room and den walls are decorated with a
wide array of ones I have collected from around the world as well as
those my friends have brought me from their travels. I guess this
pre-occupation dates back to when I was a kid and my favorite action
characters concealed their identities behind disguises, from Zorro and
the Lone Ranger to Batman and the Shadow, and I spent considerable time
with safety pins and discarded clothes fashioning my own versions as
well. For me the idea of a masked avenger, cloaked in mystery, was the
ultimate heroic image. My all-time favorite masked hero was the
character the Copperhead from the great 1940 Republic serial The
Mysterious Doctor Satan which I saw on Saturday afternoon TV in the
1950s. The robot-battling Copperhead sported a kind of metallic
serpent-like mask which I simulated with my yellow rain hood. I’m
certain the neighbors wondered why I was running around on sunny days
wearing this getup, but I suspect they early on became accustomed to my
overripe imagination.
Masks obviously played a
big part in the second year episode The Man In The Lead Mask, not
surprisingly, given my near obsession with such disguises, one of my
favorite entries at the time. The years have taken their toll on the
premise, however, and it no longer ranks so high on my preferential
list. It’s not a bad show, but it’s a bit talky and George Blair’s
direction a tad flat. Moreover, the script by Leroy Zehren and Roy
Hamilton contain certain plot elements which not only don’t work, but
which are pretty outlandish. Now to be honest, the plots, aside from a
very few TAOS episodes such as Panic In The Sky and Superman
In Exile, have never been all that important to me. They are merely
the incidental frames on which my favorite elements --
the
familiar characters, the interplay of the actors, the music and the
action sequences -- are hung. Still, you have to expect a bit of logic
from a storyline, even from a show based on a cartoon character. Before
I get to this severe lapse in logic in this particular show, I should
first describe that the plot has to do with a guy named Marty Mitchell
who sets up a plan to con a group of fellow crooks into believing he --
with the help of a gifted plastic surgeon – can, for the substantial fee
of $50,000, alter their facial appearance, but more importantly their
fingerprints. The fly in the ointment is that these guys have been on
the run or hiding for a long time and are low on bucks. To get a hold of
the necessary cash for the surgery they must venture out and commit
crimes wearing the same sort of lead mask Marshall used earlier in the
show to burglarize a post office, this to hide their identity as wanted
criminals. But as Perry White (who we are informed had a twenty year
career as a police reporter) says early on in the show “A trick mask
isn’t exactly inconspicuous.” Now there’s a no brainer that doesn’t seem
to resonate with anyone else. Nonetheless, the gang does go out wearing
these masks and not one is caught committing their crimes even though
the police dispatcher is head to describe the series of crimes by men
wearing “those same lead masks.” This isn’t exactly a shiny day for the
Metropolis Police Department; three guys walking the streets in large
lead masks and no one arrests or even stops them!! See what I mean about
logic?! In the end Superman discovers the whole thing is a great big
ruse and the bad guys are vanquished.
A
few cast notes. The fake plastic surgeon (Foley) is John Merton, a
familiar bad guy in scores of movies whose son, Lane Bradford, was
featured in the same season’s Jet Ace as Perry White’s nephew.
John Crawford, who plays Morrill (who, by the way, had he been wearing a
seat belt wouldn’t have sustained the injuries he did when Superman
stopped his speeding car), is John Crawford, later the country sheriff
in The Waltons. Paul Bryer,
balding
in the pin-striped suit, was briefly seen (but not heard – no dialog) in
the first season’s A Night of Terror. A bit of a blooper here as
well. When Superman takes on the crooks at the conclusion he is
unmistakably seen knocking Bryer on his keester. The very next second,
however, we see Bryer on his feet empting his gun at the Man of Steel.
These things happen.
One scene I particularly
liked is when Kent and Inspector Henderson are playing darts in the
policeman’s office. Reeves and Robert Shayne had good chemistry on the
screen and I always enjoy their scenes together. There’s friendship
between them but also a kind of rivalry and competition. It works well.
One question though. Isn’t Kent with his super aim taking undue
advantage of Henderson by continuously beating him at the game and then
making him buy him dinners as a result?
The
show ends with Jimmy getting one of the lead masks stuck on his head and
Superman pretending (wink) not to be able to free him from it. The irony
here, from what I have read, is that in rehearsals actor Reeves, who
suffered from mild claustrophobia, did experience trouble extricating
himself from one of the things.
By the way, at the diner
just across the street from the Daily Planet, Lois tells Clark she needs
a $10.00 raise for a new hat. Let’s hope she got it. Doesn’t sound as if
Lois was making much more than Noel in those days.
July 2006
The
Big Freeze
by Bruce
Dettman
Before I began writing this piece I sat down and tried to recall the
coldest I’ve ever been in my life. I finally decided, weighing one
chilly episode against another, that this would have to have been the
occasion back in college during spring break when two friends and I went
on a weekend camping trip into the Northern California boonies, normally
not the warmest time in this part of the state. As I recall, we had
skipped a traditional dinner for an all vino banquet and
eventually decided what a great idea it would be to pitch our ancient
tent near the thrashing sounds of the Pacific Ocean, too near as it
soon turned out. I dimly recall the sensation of waking in the
darkness, feeling something rising up beneath me like a great shapeless
monster and pushing me upwards, smelling the recognizable scent of musty
canvas as the roof of the tent collapsed on us then suddenly being under
water. We three geniuses survived, but only barely. We swam to shore,
realized that we had left everything in the tent including our wallets,
swam back to fetch what we could (never realizing until then how much a
waterlogged sleeping bag could weigh) then returned to the beach. Upon
reaching our car, however, we realized we had another problem, that the
car keys had not been salvaged and now residing at the bottom of the
ocean along with my copy of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf and my new
sunglasses, my buddy’s guitar and assorted cans of chili and ravioli.
And for the next hour, soaked to the skins and wearing only T-shirts and
shorts, as we struggled to get into that VW bug, tried hitchhiking and
even attempted to wrap some sheets of nearby cardboard around us we just
about froze.
None of this, of course, is
in the same league with Superman being exposed to temperatures reaching
2000 degrees below zero in The Big Freeze. This title, by the
way, has always sounded a bit out of place on TAOS, something
straight out of a gritty and dark film noir. Jack Webb, creator of
Dragnet, used “Big” to introduce all his early shows both on radio
and TV (The Big Crime, The Big Caper, The Big Girl). Wonder if
David Chantler, who wrote the screenplay, for this episode was a
detective fan?
In
any case, this fourth year color episode was a favorite of mine even
though even back then I much preferred the early shows.* I always seemed
to be a fan of plots where the Man of Steel’s powers are challenged or
even stripped away. Superman suddenly being rendered vulnerable was sort
of an adrenalin rush – you were afraid for him but also were mesmerized
and thrilled by wondering how he would meet this test whether from
Kryptonite, radioactive poisoning, or, as in this case, being turned
into a human popsicle. It was somewhat like going to horror films and
looking forward to being scared by the Creature of the Black Lagoon
or even The Blob. Even though you knew they’d be destroyed in the
last reel you loved being threatened and terrified. Similarly, you
wanted Superman to triumph but also wanted to see him in a dangerous
predicament worthy of his powers.
The predicament this time comes as a result of yet
another of TAOS’s
seemingly inexhaustible array of mad – or at least highly eccentric –
scientists. This time around it’s Doctor Watts (Rolfe Sedan), a little
fuddy-duddy of a guy with a peculiar speech pattern who rigs up the
ultimate
ice house to freeze Superman (possibly only until he thaws out, possibly
longer or even forever. Watts is not certain nor does he care). He must
have been working on the idea for quite awhile given all the equipment
he’s amassed (both Clark and one of the bad guys describes his lab as
looking like the inside of a TV set) but the immediate goal, working for
underworld kingpin Duke Taylor (George E. Stone, best known as Chester
Morris’ sidekick “The Runt” in Columbia’s Boston Blackie mystery series
from the 1940s) is to remove Superman’s interference on election day so
Taylor’s handpicked candidate can win Metropolis’ mayoral post.
Taylor’s right-hand goon Little Jack is Richard Reeves, familiar to TAOS
fans from such earlier episodes as No Holds Barred and Jet
Ace.
Tucked not so subtlety
beneath the action plot is an obvious civics lesson. Yes, Superman is in
serious trouble and his plight is the central focus, but what this
episode really is about is the American electoral system and the
responsibility of exercising ones franchise (Jimmy, by the way, is not
yet old enough to vote). There are lots of comments and asides about
people not voting and the dangers of voter apathy. One particular line
of dialog has Lois almost flippantly remarking that there is no threat
to the election process because Superman will be around. Clark doesn’t
like this and says as much:
“Sometimes, Lois, it’s
not wise for people to depend on Superman to keep their own house in
order.”
Both
scenes, when Superman is frozen and when, thanks to emergence in an
industrial furnace, he is thawed out, are very much underplayed. The
latter scene, in particular, resonates with no discernable drama. Harry
Gerstad’s direction has about as much pizzazz as a three day old bottle
of warm beer. Not even any dramatic music to herald the return of
Metropolis’s savior. When in a frozen state Jimmy suggests he looks like
a snowman, but to me he more resembles a Roman or Greek statue minus his
pedestal. Although supposed to appear white, I detect a pale yellow cast
to the costume. Somehow the makeup just doesn’t quite work for me.
Speaking of makeup, I must
say that even as pretty gullible seven year-old I found it a tad
difficult to believe that with just a bit Lois’ cosmetics Superman can
temporarily and believably restore his regular complexion although Perry
White does quip “Where have you been, Miami? You seem to have a tan.”
One of my problems with
many of these color episodes is that there is a confined, almost
claustrophobic feel about them, particularly in the action scenes as
though the actors have little room to move or work. The vividness – some
might even say garishness – of the color of early TV suggests too much,
focuses too heavily on and betrays the obvious modesty and limitations
of the sets, something I rarely if ever considered in the black
and white episodes.
Had
The Big Freeze
been a second year episode with a better script and more adventuresome
direction I think it could have been a real winner. As it is, it seems
to be a lost chance with too much working against it as were several
other of the better color shows.
Still, as many fans always
say, any George Reeves and TAOS is better than none at all. But
then I haven’t watched Mr. Zero in an awfully long time.
*For the record, our family
did not own a color TV until much later, but given the state of the
technology back then, Superman’s costume probably would have ended up
orange and green.
July 2006

THE FACE AND
THE VOICE
By Bruce
Dettman
Let’s be honest here. There
simply are no easy years if you’re Superman, no lax and uneventful
stretches when you can take some time off, let things slide, kick back
on a beach somewhere with a rum and coke and watch the world drift by.
There’s always a nefarious somebody out there plotting to murder, rob,
counterfeit, kidnap and assault. All of this said, one would have to
acknowledge that the year 1953, the series’ second season, was a
particularly rough one on the Man of Steel. Predictably he had to
contend with the usual assortment of crooks, petty con men and hoodlums,
but the real challenges came from unpredictable factors that not only
put his super powers to the test, but on occasion his vulnerability and
mental health as well. It wasn’t enough that he ran up against
Kryptonite (and pain) for the first time. Or that he became contaminated
by a dose of radiation that temporarily forced him into exile or even
that he saved the world from the cataclysmic dangers of an advancing
meteor and in the process lost his memory. No, on top of all of this he
runs into a pretty well-thought out scheme to steal his identity by
impersonation.
I
remember as a kid loving The Face and the Voice which I still
rate as a top notch episode. Everything is new to you when you’re young,
of course, and I recall being tremendously intrigued by a couple of
things in this show. First, there was the idea of a physical double,
someone who could look exactly like someone else. Such a possibility had
never occurred to me before. The other was the concept of plastic
surgery, of actually rearranging someone’s features. That too was a new
one to me. A few years later in junior high school I had an egomaniacal
science teacher (he drove his fancy, girl-attracting Triumph sports car
to school and if you agreed to wash it and did a good job he wouldn’t
make you take the weekly test) who had a strangely waxen sheen to his
bizarrely unlined face. When I made the suggestion (behind his back, of
course -- he was also known to use physical punishment on boys who he
didn’t like) to several classmates that plastic surgery might account
for his skin condition, I was largely drawing from my memory of Face
and the Voice.
In this memorable episode
George Reeves hams it up royally as Boulder, the Brooklyn tough guy with
a complexion like peanut brittle until a plastic surgeon rearranges his
features to make him look like Superman. Reeves is simply wonderful to
watch in the dual role (make that three roles if you count Clark Kent)
and I suspect he had a terrific time doing the show. The doctor in
question, by the way, is actor I. Stanford Jolley, a much seen face from
hundreds of westerns, serials and B films of the 1940s. In fact, the
show is littered with familiar character actors. Along with Jolly
there’s the always entertaining Percy Helton as the voice teacher,
George Chandler, later a regular on Lassie as “Scratchy”,
dependable supporting player William Newell, and an unbilled Hayden
Rorke (a few years away from I Dream of Jeanie) as Clark’s doctor
friend Tom. By the way, just what kind of a doctor is Tom and why would
Kent have ever gone to see him? He refers to the reporter being in
excellent shape. Wouldn’t a physical on the Man of Steel readily
disclose some rather obvious physical traits?
In addition to playing the
somewhat over-the-top Boulder, Reeves, thanks to Jackson Gillis’ smart
script, also gets to stretch his Superman characterization a bit to
include the Man of Steel’s frustration, anger and even self doubt as he
continues to be non-plussed by reports of Boulder’s successful job of
impersonating him. At one point during his conversation with his
pal/doctor Tom he even begins to question his own sanity (“So there is
something wrong with me?!”). The anger part also gets a good workout
when Superman is chasing the frightened Inspector Henderson around his
desk (“Bill, we’ve been pals for years. I’d hate to use you as a
volleyball in your own office!”). By the way, Henderson has the same
painting of the Golden Gate Bridge in his office that Kent once hung in
his apartment living room.
One thing I’ve never
understood about this episode is the scene where Boulder robs the
jewelry store, is shot in the back by a guard and goes around the corner
where Scratchy is waiting for him with what looks like the same pair of
trousers and overcoat Superman wore in The Man In The Lead Mask.
When Boulder gets back to the big boss (Carleton Young)
he complains
that he took a slug and that the bullet proof vest did nothing to
protect his back. Then
he sits down and no one ever mentions the wound again. Hmm, Superman or
not, this is one tough guy. There are not too many people who can
ignore a bullet in the back. This is not a complaint though, just an
observation. My complaint would be the way chief villain Young goes down
for the count, not by so much as a shove from Superman but rather by
what has to be the lamest version of accidentally stumbling and knocking
himself out you’d ever (not) want to see. This self-destructiveness on
the part of the bad guys became a stable in later Superman shows. Hated
it as a kid and still do. By the way, since I’m in a nit-picking sort of
mood (Mondays will do that to you), Superman’s cape has some huge stains
on it. Where has he been flying?
And lastly, have you ever
noticed how much the unbilled actor playing Boulder hiding in the truck
at the end and then bolting from the scene when the real Superman shows
up looks a bit like Kirk Alyn? Nah, couldn’t be.
June 2006

PANIC IN THE SKY
By Bruce Dettman
I have a confession to make. Occasionally – but I
must stress only occasionally—when I leave my desk at work and go down
the hall I suddenly peel off my reading glasses and grab at my collar.
This slight momentary gesture is my odd way of separating the doldrums
of the day with the fantasy world that all my life has only been just a
flicker of daydreams away. Ok, on the surface I freely admit that the
idea of a 56 year-old man thinking he is about to shed his outer duds
and turn into Superman is a bit absurd, but what can I tell you? It
always gives me a certain lift (no pun intended) to imagine that there
might be more to life than routine and bad coffee. I think our
generation, we so-called Baby Boomers, are largely a confused lot, a
group mired in memories of youthful flirtations with social and
political unrest, revolt and rebellion against existing mores, customs
and the cultural infrastructure, yet reared as children in the noble and
self-sacrificing gestures of the Lone Ranger, Sky King, Captain Midnight
and yes, Superman. The rebellious kids of today are a different breed
and in some ways have it easier. It’s more of a black and white cosmos
for them. They dislike everything and never had any heroes or exemplary
fictional characters to suggest differently. So I tug at my tie and rip
off my spectacles and for a second dream of a cleaner, more rational
universe of good and bad, right and wrong, of absolutes and moral
certainty, and a guy in a blue, red and yellow suit who you could always
depend on, even to saving the world.
And
that’s exactly what he did in one of the best-remembered—and to many the
undisputed best episode in the whole run of TAOS—the second season’s
Panic In The Sky. It is recalled, however, not just for the drama of
the Man of Steel taking on an asteroid headed for the Earth, but even
more, I think, for George Reeve’s marvelous performance as a confused
and uncertain hero—a victim of amnesia not only trying to sort out the
truth of his identity but coming to terms with the demands and
responsibilities of that remarkable identity. In the space of
twenty-five minutes writer Jackson Gillis and director Tommy Carr
fashioned a tight and riveting storyline with substantial emotional
depth and characterization. It’s a winner in every department.
Even the start is highly memorable and offbeat
with the camera focusing on a group of Metropolis citizens silently
gathering outside Dick’s Meat Market to gaze up at the deadly sight of
the approaching asteroid, their faces marinated in partial shadow (and
hey, checkout the Noel Neill look-alike in the dark dress). This gets
the audience into an apprehensive mood from the word go. And it
permeates the whole show. As a child I was mesmerized, and a bit
frightening, by the ominous goings-on. The whole episode resonated with
a different feeling than the others, a deadly seriousness and sense of
gloom even though in the end you knew Superman would somehow triumph.
The Daily Planet crew are properly solemn as the
Earth’s fate hangs in the balance yet also compassionate and caring as
they struggle to help Clark with his amnesia (well, ok, Perry isn’t all
that compassionate but he has lots on his mind and at one point even
refers to his cub reporter as “Jiminy”). Noel Neill, Jack Larson and
John Hamilton give standout performances but then when didn’t they?
Jonathon Hale (from the first year’s THE EVIL
THREE) is terrific as Professor Roberts (described as Perry White as “a
gloomy cuss”). He’s not just “gloomy” he’s downright nasty and rude to
just about everyone except Superman. His poor assistant (Clark Howat) is
the recipient of most of this temperament (“Don’t be stupid!”) but
Roberts simply has no time for niceties and lets it be known in no
uncertain terms. He is, however, generally concerned about Superman’s
fate if he attempts to knock the asteroid off its course.
Things
I will never forget about this episode from watching it as a kid—things
that resonate with me to this day; indelible psychic imprints, if you
will. There are the scenes of George Reeves crashing (off-screen)
through the shower door (I remember almost turning my eyes away when
Jimmy Olsen discovers his body); Kent accidentally discovering his extra
Superman duds in his secret closet (having obviously learned his lesson
about the dangers of only having one outfit from The Stolen Costume—and
by the way, is that a bowling bag above the suits?); the
scene in which
Kent turns his back to the visiting Jimmy and unknowingly exposes the “S”
of his costume; perhaps most significantly, the moment when alone in his
apartment in his Superman outfit but still incongruously wearing Kent’s
glasses, he studies himself in the mirror. In this second of activity
the entire duplicity of the Kent/Superman identity crisis comes to a
head, the outcome poised between discovery and self-revelation. In the
next instant, of course, it all comes back to him (hey, what’s one
shattered end table when measured against saving mankind?) and he’s his
old self again.
This is the closest the series ever came to true
science-fiction, another reason probably that it is recalled with such
affection and vividness. That asteroid sure scared me as a kid, and
today, and if you squint your eyes just right and don’t focus too hard
at the string holding it up, it still looks other-worldly and menacing.
When Superman finally lands on the asteroid with the detonator it looks
just like the spot where the hitchhiking Kent is picked up at the
beginning of the episode by the female driver (Jane Frazee, an
occasional co-star of Roy Rogers) but who really cares? George’s
springboard work is exceptional here, particularly as he lifts off from
the observatory deck on his way to tangle to Earth’s greatest threat. If
he ever got higher into the air on the thing I certainly don’t recall
when.
For Jackson Gillis’ fine script and George
Reeves’ exceptional performance alone, this is a sensational effort.
Toss in all the other elements that made TAOS so consistently excellent,
supporting cast, terrific music, taut direction and you have everything
a fan would want.
Just writing and thinking about it almost makes
me want to go down the hallway and whip off my glasses except that I
think the boss is out there smoking.
(Thanks Mike Goldman For The Wonderful Photos).
June, 2006

BEWARE THE
WRECKER
By Bruce Dettman
All kids should have at
least one standout uncle and I did. He was my uncle Bill, my father’s
brother, and he’s been gone about fifteen years now. I still miss him.
He was not a man who did anything earth-shattering in his 70 odd
years—and sometimes it was impossible not to question a few of his
taller tales—but somehow the world has seemed a less interesting and
drabber place since he died. I always think of him when I watch
Beware The Wrecker, one of my favorite second season episodes of
TAOS, mainly due to the miniature plane that the villainous Wrecker uses
to blow up planes and ships and such.
One Christmas in the late
1950s, Uncle Bill gave me this incredible model plane for a gift. It was
a powder blue plastic replica of a P-38 and it was indeed a thing of
beauty. I couldn’t wait to see it fly. We waited until morning, however,
when my father, uncle and brother took it up to the local playground to
send it skyward. Well, my father had first go at guiding it across a
bright blue, cloud-covered horizon followed by my uncle and brother
taking their turns. I had never flown such a plane before, but I was
confident that when my chance came I would have no trouble. That’s what
I thought anyway. The reality was that when I took the controls the
plane suddenly made one great half turn then quickly nosedived into the
playground cement. There was very little left of it save scattered
chunks of blue. I looked at my father who was shaking his head with
disappointment, then at my brother who was mouthing some obscenity in my
direction. The worst part of this nightmare was confronting my uncle who
had given me this beautiful plane now completely destroyed thanks to my
incompetence. I was looking down at the cement, fighting off tears,
when I sensed him approach, felt his firm hand on my shoulder then heard
his voice. “Guess the Navy’s the place for you,” he said through a
laugh. “Let’s go get some pancakes.”
Like I said, I still miss
the guy.
In any case, model planes
figures prominently in Beware the Wrecker as the unseen
blackmailing mastermind uses these as carriers of explosives to destroy
airplanes, steamships and freight trains with threats to continue this
mass mayhem unless his financial demands, directed at Inspector
Henderson, are met. When you think of all the people killed in these
attacks this has to be the most violent of all episodes though the human
element is never addressed.
Despite the serious nature
of the violent plot (rumors persist that this segment was dropped from
the syndication package after the 911 attacks), I have to confess that I
also recall it for its lighter moments, some of them on the humorous
side
As a great fan of
exchanges between Jimmy and Perry White, I have to say that the scene in
this episode as the cub reporter tries to persuade the editor that he
can crack the Wrecker case, is among my favorites. It would not
be possible to convey in writing how good the comedic timing, facial,
expressions and delivery are in this short bit of business—which I have
dubbed the “I blame myself” scene—but I have never been able to watch it
without laughing out loud. Both John Hamilton and Jack Larson are simply
brilliant in it.
There are other things
that come to my mind about this show, a crazy quilt of thoughts and
images. Lois (Noel Neil) looks great and actually gets to wear a few
different outfits for once including a sweater with a curious emblem
that wouldn’t be out of place on Flash Gordon. Then there’s
Superman with his super hearing not being able to tell that the
Wrecker
(on a recording played over the phone) has the same voice as Crane of
the steamship company (William Forrest) even though it’s pretty obvious.
In the carnival scene Clark’s ego gets in the way and he breaks the bell
at the 'test your strength' booth (obviously Lois’ crack that if he was
Superman she was “Queen of the May” got to him a bit). He then is seen
by himself having a go at the ring toss a game (and misses!!!!!). A
couple of interesting faces in the cast are long-time character actor
Denver Pyle as Hatch, who rigs the planes and is then bumped off, and
Pierre Watkin, who played Perry White in the Kirk Alyn serials, as one
of the transportation magnates. Oddly, Royale Cole’s script has
Henderson, usually very formal, calling the Daily Planet staff by their
first names (odd to hear him address the editor as Perry).
Most important though is
the fact that as things turn out the much maligned, verbally abused
Jimmy had it right from the beginning. Crane was the Wrecker.
I’d like to think Perry
apologized and gave him a raise but somehow I rather doubt it.
June 2006

SUPERMAN IN EXILE
By Bruce
Dettman
A close
relative of mine designs security systems for nuclear power plants,
admittedly a somewhat stressful and demanding occupation given the state
of the world. On one occasion a few years ago he allowed me to accompany
him to one of these plants for a quick look-see. I didn’t really get all
that much of a chance to observe things given the degree of security,
but I was thoroughly frisked and allowed inside with an admittance badge
about the size of Wyoming pinned to my chest. This tour was a nice
gesture on the part of my relative—it took him several weeks to arrange,
even given his exalted position with the nuclear folks. I’m quite
certain that he would have looked decidedly askance at me had he known
that I while I was taking the walkthrough of the innards of this
technological marvel and nodding my head as if I were listening to every
word, I was actually thinking of Superman coming to the rescue of an out
of control nuclear pile in the 1953 episode Superman In Exile.
Yep, there was this very serious guy in a kind of fatigue-green jump
suit pointing out this or that control panel to me and all the time my
mind’s eye was seeing Superman at Project X (which looks strangely like
the prison complex from Five Minutes to Doom) battling to insert
the tube into its proper niche and neutralize a possible chain reaction
in the exciting opening scenes from this particular second year show.
This
very serious entry was certainly ahead of its time. While there were big
screen films and TV episodes that dealt with the dangers of atomic
explosions and the possibility of nuclear devastation (On The Beach,
Failsafe, Twilight Zone, etc.) very few people were
thinking or writing about meltdowns from nuclear power plants, not
for several years anyway. It took the 1970s blockbuster hit The China
Syndrome—not to mention a little real life incident called
Chernobyl—to bring the possibilities of such a cataclysmic scenario to
the general public’s attention. One line in particular that Superman
delivers, after realizing the extent of his contamination, is still as
relevant today as it was fifty years ago. “But it’s new, isn’t it?” he
asks soberly. “You haven’t quite figured out how to handle it?”
This was 1952 though and
the writers and special effects guys were a bit limited
budget-wise on what they could show. Still, Si Simonson and his crew did
a pretty good job. The sputtering, flame vomiting, crackling reactor
they came up with looked pretty darn dangerous, particularly to the kids
then watching the show. I’m sure director Tommy Carr had to helm the
scenes with Superman approaching the fire-belching monster pretty darn
carefully or George Reeves might not have gotten involved and you could
hardly blame him.
Anyway, Superman does indeed get involved and saves
the day but at a high cost, total radiation poisoning. It doesn’t kill
him, of course, but he’s got the stuff throughout his whole body and
can’t therefore get close to others for risk of endangering them. Clark
Kent has a similar problem.
This is a good show for Reeves. Lots of super angst
for the actor to showboat and he does a good job of it given the
restrictions of half hour formula TV. He’s earnest, vulnerable, and
believable. You really feel for the Man of Steel and as a kid, even
though I knew nothing of radioactivity (even though I begged my father
for a family bomb shelter), I was pretty concerned for him and wondered
how he was going to be his old self again.
He
achieves this by flying through a lightning storm, a dubious solution on
the part of writer Jackson Gillis, but who cares? Gillis also felt it
necessary to toss a crime subplot into the proceedings which isn’t
really necessary and highly forgettable, but the episode still is a
winner and highly memorable, if nothing else for George Reeve’s fine and
measured performance which for once made Superman a very vulnerable
character. And isn’t it nice to know that when things get a bit hectic,
he has a nice and cozy cabin in the mountains to get away to?
April 2006

DEFEAT OF SUPERMAN
by Bruce Dettman
Some moments resonate so
deeply within our consciousness, both collective and individual, that
they can never to be erased or diminished. Pearl Harbor, 1941, Dallas,
1963, September 11, 2001 are certainly dramatic evidence of this.
However, all such events are not culled from life’s true experiences but
in special circumstances can be connected to the fragile tissue of
fiction and make-believe. Anyone who grew up with the new invention of
television remembers when Davy Crockett in the person of Fess Parker
died at the Alamo. I still recall the horror of thinking one of my
favorite characters had actually been killed and having my father--and
later the Encyclopedia Britannica--confirm that yes, Crockett had indeed
perished in battle. Years later I would meet the actor and tell him–as
undoubtedly thousands had already done–how enormously this moment had
affected me. In response, he mentioned that as originally filmed
Crockett was seen actually falling from his wounds, but that producer
Walt Disney rethought things and had him die off camera so as to spare
the children of America. Parker, by the way, was a wonderful host
and gave me a tour of his winery near Santa Barbara. However, I must
say, there was something almost surrealistic about having one of my
boyhood heroes pour me a cup of coffee. The thought actually entered my
head that at any minute Rod Serling would walk through the door and
introduce a Twilight Zone episode. In any case, I probably would
have felt the same way had George Reeves lived and I’d had the chance to
meet him. Like everyone else, I mourned his loss when he died, but it
was not the first time I lamented his mortality. Here, of course, we’re
back to that thin line that can often separate fact from fiction.
Now
I’m not sure if it was in the second season episode “The Defeat of
Superman” that I first became familiar with Kryptonite. Perhaps I had
run across it earlier in my comic book reading but somehow I don’t think
so. The reason I question this is the profound and stomach-wrenching
effect the show had on me when I saw it for the first time. It was bad
enough that in the earlier “Crime Wave” I had thought for a few moments
that someone had found out a way to hurt Superman, but as it turned out
his supposed vulnerability to a room of electrical sparks was a ruse on
the Man of Steel’s part to trick and capture the bad guys. But this was
different. In Jackson Gillis’ script criminal kingpin Happy J. King
(Peter Mamakos) hires eccentric scientist Professor Meldini (the
gloriously overacting Maurice Cass) to probe for weaknesses in Superman.
Apparently by this time
it’s common knowledge that Superman’s home turf is the extinct planet
Krypton although I’m not certain how even Superman would know this
unless his real parents included an explanatory note in the missile that
brought him to earth. With this in mind and with some scientific
flim-flam bantered about, Meldini rigs up an experiment to see if his
theory that kryptonite can harm Superman is correct. Photographing his
reaction to being shot by a kryptonite bullet (at 360 Warehouse Street,
to be exact) confirms this so he goes on to make up a batch of synthetic
Kryptonite with the intention of luring Superman to his lair. By this
time Jimmy and Lois are in the thick of things and are captured by King.
Superman finds this out and shows up to rescue his two friends but the
tables are quickly turned on him when he is exposed to the kryptonite
brick. I still
recall
as a kid my stomach caving in when Superman drops to the ground like a
lead weight. Being a child and not able to rationalize that I was
watching a popular TV show and there was no way the hero was going to be
killed off I was completely terrified that my hero was actually facing
death. Through nearly half a century I can still hear Lois shouting to
Jimmy that his [Superman’s] breathing has become labored. I don’t know
if I began to cry at this point but I do know that my own breathing
began to slow down as I stared in wide-eyed disbelief. This couldn’t be
happening!!!!! But then Jimmy made sense out of Superman’s weak-voiced
reference to lead and before you knew it he was back on his feet
smashing in doors and launching the deadly metal into space (a byproduct
of this causing the automobile crash and death of King and associates)
Noel Neill and Jack Larsen
as Lois and Jimmy are not only loyal and resourceful in this episode but
give great performances, particularly Ms. Neill. She’s fairly
antagonistic towards Clark at the beginning of the show, even being
unethical enough to tear up his mail to prevent his participation in
things. Later she gets ruffled when one of the crooks suggests that
she’s practically Superman’s girlfriend.
“I
am not!!!” she nearly shrieks.
Methinks the lady
protests too much.
I also like the fact that
prior to Superman’s arrival when she thinks that he might be spared
contact with Kryptonite but that Jimmy and she might perish, she is
anything but pleased. Martyrdom is nice but better worn by someone else
even if it means Superman might be challenged. Lois is human and quite
obviously not interested in dying.
Later, of course, when
Superman is really in trouble the waterworks get turned on and she is
disconsolate, even frantic.
It’s my favorite Noel
Neill performance in the series, and I think Jack is great too.
Check and double check.
Mr. King.
January 2006

THE CLOWN WHO CRIED
By Bruce Dettman
It took me a long time to
realize that I was not alone in hating clowns. Stephen King, for
instance, would eventually let his readers know how he viewed them in
his epic horror novel It, but that was a long time in the
future. Back when I was a kid, grown-ups took it for granted that you
loved clowns the way you loved Oreos, Silly Putty, Mattel Fanner 50s,
PEZ, long summer days, and yes, Superman. Even if you secretly wanted to
keep your distance from these characters, whose exaggerated,
multi-colored features and limbs often made them seem more grotesque and
sinister than amusing, it wasn’t easy because they seemed to be
everywhere. There was Clarabell from the Howdy Doody show,
assorted variations on programs like Super Circus,
internationally famous clowns such as Emmett Kelly and of course Bozo
whose copyrighted likeness was utilized by dozens of kiddie show hosts
across the nation. My parents once gave me a boxed set of .78 records
called “Bozo Under The Sea” which came with a large storybook. To keep
Bozo breathing when he was submerged you had to turn the page each time
you heard the sound of bubbles. Needless to say, there were numerous
occasions when I’d refuse to touch the page to see what would happen,
but much to my dismay Bozo always managed to survive.
I
suppose this is why the episode The Clown That Cried initially so
appealed to me since one of the two clowns involved (Crackers played by
Peter Brocco) turned out to be a pretty nasty character, the first time,
I imagine, I had seen a bad guy clown. I suppose I felt a bit vindicated
by this. The other good clown is Rollo, portrayed by William Wayne. Now
this gets a bit confusing because although the plot has Crackers
knocking out Rollo and assuming his identity, the producers of the show
kept using Wayne in his makeup now impersonating Brocco. I guess Brocco
with his totally different facial structure looked too different to be
palmed off as Rollo (Superman’s X-Ray vision apparently doesn’t work
through makeup).
The background plot has the Daily Planet Staff putting on a telethon to
raise money for a kid’s camp--given the entertainment they’ve recruited
I can understand why it was a hard sell. Rollo has been asked to
participate which, as good clown, he is more than happy to do. Bad clown
Crackers, however, gets wind of this and decides to steal the funds
raised. Superman finally shows up to make an appeal for donations, gets
wind of the scheme and saves Rollo who is in a rooftop fight with
Crackers.
A word
about a couple of the cast members. Peter Brocco made a few other
appearances on TAOS, but I will always remember him most vividly as Krog
one of Commando Cody’s lunar nemesis in the cliffhanger Radar Men
From the Moon where it was his frustrating job to try and invade the
earth aided only by two petty crooks (including the Lone Ranger’s
Clayton Moore). Mickey Simpson, who played Hercules, was a beefy
character actor, invariably cast as a burly henchman, whose on-screen
credentials included fighting against the Earps at the OK Corral in John
Ford’s My Darling Clementine to TV roles in shows like The
Rifleman. He was also a regular on the syndicated series Captain
David Grief that about five people in the entire world ever saw but
which for some reason I recall liking. In his pre-acting days Simpson
had been the boxing champion of New York State and once did a stint as
Claudette Colbert’s chauffeur. As a child I recall being afraid that
Hercules might actually be a match for Superman but he lasted one head
thump.
Just
for the record, my feelings about clowns haven’t changed, a fact
attested to by the reality that late one night a few years back, when I
was alone in a train station, a very drunk guy in clown suit pretended
to be stalking me. Fortunately the train showed up in the nick of time.
I have to admit, I was awfully glad to see it.
October
2005
The Clown Who Cried photo courtesy of Lou Koza
Perry White’s Scoop
by Bruce Dettman
While strong debate might exist as to which actress was the best Lois
Lane or even who made the most effective Superman (yes, sacrilegious as
it might be, there really are people who prefer Christopher Reeve and
even Kirk Alyn to George Reeves) you would get few arguments, at least
among Baby Boomers, as to who was the most memorable Perry White. While
assorted actors including Pierre Watkin, Jackie Copper and Lane Smith
have portrayed the intrepid editor of the Daly Planet, some with great
skill, it is really only John Hamilton who is cemented in the public’s
mind as the feisty, frustrated, bombastic and cigar-chewing White. I
have to admit from the start that I am an unabashed giant fan of
Hamilton’s performance, particularly when Jack Larson (as Jimmy) and he
are locking verbal horns. What makes these confrontations so noteworthy
and effective (not to mention pretty darn funny on occasion) is that
there is also a sense, beneath the surface rancor, that White is
actually quite fond of Jimmy, the whole staff, for that matter. To be
quite honest, I’m often disappointed when we leave his office. There’s
just never enough Perry White in most episodes to suit me, but there are
a few exceptions and this one happens to be my favorite (with The
Evil Three running a close second).
For one
thing, it gets off to a slam-bang start with the guy in the deep sea
diving uniform getting plugged by a gunman from a car parked across the
street from the Planet. As a kid I found this a fascinating visual
concept. Later, when Superman also dons undersea gear in a successful
attempt to lure out the same assassin and we see him tear off the canvas
outer clothing to reveal his super duds I recall thinking it was one of
the coolest scenes I had ever seen.
The killing of the diver creates a chance for White, who’s been somewhat
critical of his reporting staff of late, to return to his roots as an
investigative reporter and solve the mystery. This sets up a lot of
great scenes and dialog between Jimmy, Lois, Clark and the aging editor
as they pile up the clues. Structurally, I think this is one of
the best-constructed episodes of the entire run with sharp dialog by Roy
Hamilton and tight directing by George Blair. There’s humor too. I
particularly like the scene where Perry decides to be the one to put on
the diving suit and take his chances with the killer downstairs. Clark
doesn’t think much of the idea and secretly crushes the helmet making it
unusable. “I can’t get that thing over my head”, White hollers. “Oh, I
don’t know” Jimmy says through a grin. Clark thinks this is pretty funny
too.
I also
enjoy the scene where Clark and White visit a downtown gym. There they
are met by counterfeiters Steve Pendelton and Robert Wilke (who in
his long career would play in everything from The Cat Man of Paris,
to bits in Roy Rogers’ westerns, to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea and perhaps most memorably, the target of James Colburn’s
switchblade in The Magnificent Seven) who suggests Clark take a
shot at the heavy bag. Clark does just this and pulverizes the thing.
“Guess I sometimes don’t know my own strength” he explains. Now why
Clark did this is anyone’s guess. He did something similar in Beware
the Wrecker when swinging a mallet in a strength contest he
destroyed the bell at the carnival. Guess there were just times when he
couldn’t resist showing off a bit. Anyway, the action continues
with the Perry being saved from a locked steam cabinet and the whole
group plus Jimmy nearly burned to death in a parked railway car.
Superman shows up to send Wilke to dreamland and to blow out the flames
and even Jimmy gets into the action with a well-delivered right cross to
Jan Aruan’s mug.
This
episode showcases some good detective work, lots of great musical
queues, a clever script, some exciting Superman moments but most
significantly it offers one of the best chances to watch John Hamilton
at work. Because of this, I suppose, Perry White’s Scoop will
always remain a great favorite of mine.
“And don’t call me
Chief!”
SIDE NOTE:
Like a lot of
fifties families, it was an unwritten law that we all sit down each
night at the kitchen table and break bread together (in the case of my
brother and I it was certainly preferable to breaking each other’s
skulls). However, the one exception was the night TAOS was aired. On
this evening I was allowed to sit in front of the TV to watch the show,
usually wearing the nifty Superman suit my parents had fashioned for me
one Halloween. I thought this was pretty nice of them since during
scenes like the one described above, I often got carried away with the
action on the screen and would invariably topple over my glass sending a
mini tidal wave of milk into my mother’s treasured beige carpet.
August 2005

FIVE MINUTES TO DOOM
by Bruce Dettman
Funny, no matter how old I get, when I
see George Reeves as Superman I always view him as older, wiser and more
mature than yours truly, even though I am presently ten years older than
Reeves was at the time of his death. This is hardly the case with other
actors when they have donned the Superman outfit. Dean Cain always
looked to me as if he just got his driver’s license and was probably
still battling acne, and while I liked and respected Christopher Reeve,
I always thought of him as just a few years out of college and probably
still paying back his student loan. So as I sat down to watch Five
Minutes To Doom, the premiere episode of the second season and the
first installment produced by Whitney Ellsworth and now with Noel Neil
as Lois rather than the first season’s Phyllis Coates, I once again fell
under Reeve’s impressively magnetic and lofty spell. Thematically this
episode, dealing with Superman’s efforts to prove an imprisoned man
innocent of a murder he has been framed for, is thankfully light years
away from the later color episodes with their silly plots and buffoonish
villains. This is gritty, no-nonsense and serious stuff. The
innocent man is the great Dabbs Greer who in my opinion gives one of the
best acting jobs ever seen on TAOS. Jean Willes, playing the bad guy’s
ethical secretary, was featured with Greer in the classic Invasion of
the Body Snatchers
(1956) although they shared no scenes. In her long career, this
sexy, cat-eyed brunette played opposite everyone from Lucille Ball to
the Three Stooges. Dale Van Sickel is also in the cast as the foreman
who tangles with Greer and is murdered. Van Sickel was one of the
movie’s greatest stuntmen. Mostly working at Republic alongside fellow
athletic stand-ins Dave Sharpe and Tom Steele, he occasionally put on a
costume hero’s outfit such as when took over the action stuff for Dick
Pursell in Captain America. He even played the Frankenstein
Monster once. Another familiar face is John Kellogg, a fine character
actor, who also appeared in “The Big Squeeze” and “Terror By Night” on
TAOS. He did lots of films and TV work although I’ll always remember him
most vividly as Jack Chandler on the Peyton Place TV series and
for catching a Robert Mitchum right cross in the great film noir classic
Out of the Past.
As I mentioned, it’s a great and I
think under-rated episode. Reeves was never better or more believable as
Superman while Jack Larson has great moments with John Hamilton (and
attempting to sell a vacuum cleaner). And even though I know
Superman will ultimately save Dabbs, I can never watch the episode
without feeling some of the excitement I did as a boy when time is
beginning to wear out. Ok, it’s hard not to ask Lois if she still sees
no resemblance between Clark and Superman when the former loses his
glasses. And I have never figured out why it takes the Man of Steel a
whole hour to fly a few hundred miles to the state prison, but these
minor issues aside this is a consistently well written, directed and
acted show.
Photo
courtesy of Jim Nolt (that's Jim and Dabbs!)
April
2005
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