More to George Reeves than Superman
The Adventures of Superman also stabilized the career of George Reeves, a busy character actor who had weighed in as a big-screen player as early as 1939, his early accomplishments including a small but memorable role in Gone with the Wind. Resembling very closely the definitive Superman as drawn by DC Comics mainstay Wayne Boring — an aspect recaptured in times more recent by the Fort Worth-based Superman artist Kerry Gammill — Reeves found the role to be both ennobling and stifling.
Typecasting is by turns a terrible and wonderful thing. The phenomenon hardly paid off in immediate returns for George Reeves, for such a maverick TV program had required a while to catch on with a mass audience. But the show immediately recast ReevesÂ’ popular image in terms of funnybook melodrama, striking an odd balance between earnestness and hokum.
And for all the prominence that The Adventures of Superman would eventually bring to Reeves, the image also re-directed his larger career into a cul-de-sac. By the time he had mustered the strategic gumption to return to the big screen with a key role in DisneyÂ’s Westward Ho the Wagons! (1956), ReevesÂ’ hopes of outgrowing Superman had dwindled to near-zero.
Reeves stuck with that series, rather, for the longer haul, nurturing the escape-hatch ambition of becoming a director, until his unexpected death in 1959. This jarring loss worked an awful strain upon that first generation raised in the glare of the television screen. Worse yet, the on-the-spot TV-and-newspaper accounts sensationalized things unreasonably by proclaiming the death of “Superman,” as it were, to be a suicide (Yes, and 1959 A.D. was a troubling time for TV-watching kids. The Little Rascals’ Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer had been slain earlier that year in a disagreement over a petty debt.).
Suicide-vs.-murder speculation has escalated all along in ReevesÂ’ case, provoking more in the way of scandal-mongering than of any appreciation of the actorÂ’s greater versatility. The Los Angeles-based film scholar Jan Alan Henderson, who has long raised a saner voice as one of ReevesÂ’ biographers, now has balanced the scales more decisively with a detailed critical history and filmography.
The new book is called Behind the Crimson Cape: The Cinema of George Reeves (Bifulco; $45). Henderson and co-author Steve Randisi have compiled an exhaustive catalogue of Reeves’ movie assignments, dating from a Mexican-bandit impersonation in 1939’s Ride, Cowboy, Ride. Blessed with endorsements from Reeves’ Superman co-stars Jack Larson (who played sidekick Jimmy Olsen) and Noel Neill (Lois Lane), the book deals in concise historical and aesthetic discussions in addition to supplying such just-the-facts details as cast-and-credits rosters, a chronological perspective with deep-focus views of the film industry itself, and incidental details as to how Reeves’ more generalized body of work relates to his span of Superman stardom. The selection of little-seen photographs — movie stills and advertising pieces, as well as personal-appearance shots — is particularly generous.
Reeves, born in 1914, first had aspired to become a boxer but abandoned the interest in deference to his mother. His early screen-acting plateau as one of the red-haired Tarleton twins in Gone with the Wind pointed Reeves toward a mixed bag of roles for various of the major studios. After a hitch of uniformed service in the Second World War, however, Reeves found his fortunes confined more strictly to the B-movie production units. His star turn in 1951Â’s Superman and the Mole Men pointed toward the teleseries. And the rest is hardly as simple as its looks at first glimpse.
For Reeves was a complicated personality, with a range of talents too vast for most of his acting assignments and a set of ambitions and aspirations too great for that signature role to accommodate. The extent of his work prior to Superman is fascinating, and so are the insights that this splendidly informative book brings to the artist and his art.
On the Web: http://www.glasshousepresents.com/jan_alan_henderson.htm.
Contact Price at mprice@bizpress.net.
