Hollywoodland Review Gets Reeves Wrong

It may be revealing to see ourselves as others see us, but it's also instructive to see others as others see them. As a baby-boomer, I found Manohla Dargis' review of "Hollywoodland," in the New York Times about the murder/suicide what-was-it mystery of the death of George Reeves, the 1950s TV Superman, startling.


That original TV Superman series is the first TV program I remember not only distincttly, but specifically. I recall sitting on a bar stool at the Little Dutch Inn, a place my parents owned, in Bloomsburg, PA in the early 50s seeing the Superman episode where Reeves as Kent/Superman and Lois Lane visit a deserted town where a strange gas has felled all but a handful of sinister residents.

I remember seeing the "Superman Vs. The Mole Men" movie, repeated in two parts during the first season of the series, and geezo, it sure charmed me. Reeves apparently charmed about everyone except himself. But he had a proverbally infectious 1,000-watt smile that lit up little 1950s TV screens and continues to evoke some internal joy every time I see it all these years later. You could light a room with George Reeves' smile.

It's still eerie viewed today. Dargis thinks Reeves' had a very "B" movie and "C" TV acting talent. If that. It's discouraging to say this, but Reeves himself would have agreed that wearing that Superman "monkey suit" as he once called it, was demeaning. World War II detracked his career, and as an actor, youth is important. Reeves, like Errol Flynn, may eventually have found a new appreciation as a bulkier but better character actor. He never lived to fulfill such possibilities.


He most certainly was not, as Dargis suggests, an overweight has been.

His work in that pioneering series lives on today. And I sure did not see Reeves the way Dargis seems to, as a bloated, low-talent loser. Reeves enjoyed his drinks, even breaking out his portable bar at the end of a day of Superman filming, and he didn't mind being supported in the manner to which he'd become accustomed by his paramour, Toni Mannix, wife of an admittedly thuggish movie mogel, or so they say. You can't always go by what they say, though.

While it is easy enough to mistake the role an actor plays for the actor as a person, and that's a mistake of major proportions, I am convinced that we respond to elements of the actor's person in his performances. Some, the recently deceased Glenn Ford, for instance, another of my 50's heroes, said he always basically played himself.

Reeves had a persona that appealed to a lot of people, and if it failed to reveal the depths, whatever they were, beneath the shine of those teeth evenly lined up like refrigerators at Sears, you did and do get a sense of his underlying good guy nature.

I'm inclined to believe Reeves was murdered rather than that he shot himself if only because I suspect he would not have betrayed the children who believed in him in that particular manner, not to mention the significant evidence that speaks against suicide. Hollywoodland may not do the best job in the word of examining the Reeves mystery, but it captures some of that doubt no one raised at the time, unfortunately

It really was not Reeves untimely and mysterious death that installed him in my memories, though. It was his performance as Superman and Clark Kent. Regardless of what Mr. Dargis may think, that was an "A" performance.

copyright Allan Maurer, 2006 (May be reprinted if byline, link, and copyright notice are included)