THE MOLE SHEBANG

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Superman and the Mole Men--The new Superman flick is "too woke," or so I'm hearing, in the opinion of Fox News and other commentators, mostly because of writer-director James Gunn pointing out in an interview that the Man of Steel is an immigrant. Fox host Tomi Lahren pronounced, without seeing the film, that it "went woke and will probably flop!"

She also sneered that "in his comments Gunn conveniently forgot to delineate between IMMIGRANTS and ILLEGALS, but that's par for the course..." [caps her's] This would be a more withering criticism if Lahren hadn't "conveniently forgot" that, um, Clark Kent aka Superman certainly is an illegal, undocumented alien, by any standard.

Other voices from around the MAGA-verse have similarly squawked, I understand. Why am I taking note of these dimwits rising to Gunn's well-dangled bait? Because I shudder to think what howling accusations of wokeness they would direct at the very first Superman feature film, 1951's Superman and the Mole Men. This very low-budget, 58-minute saga, produced for Lippert Pictures, was intended essentially as a pilot for the long-running syndicated TV series The Adventures of Superman (1952-1958) starring George Reeves. In terms of liberal social and civic values, this movie is woke like a grad student on Red Bull.

The story here unfolds not in Metropolis but in the small town of Silsby, "home of  the world's deepest oil well." Indeed, they've drilled so deep in Silsby that they've encroached upon the underground civilization of the Mole Men. These dome-headed, furry little goobers, who have come to the surface to explore, make whatever they touch glow with phosphoresence (they're played, by the way, by little people including Munchkin veterans Jerry Maren, Billy Curtis and John T. Bambury, and "Philip Morris Bellboy" Johnny Roventini).

Clark Kent (George Reeves) and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) arrive in town to do a story for the Daily Planet about the well, only to find the company shutting it down, fearing radioactivity. As word spreads about the Mole Men, the townies quickly start to organize into a mob. Before long, it's clearly a job for Superman. 

While movies don't come much more cinematically bare-bones than Superman and the Mole Men, it's heart-lifting to watch in the context of our current times, because it's clear-eyed about where the real threat in our society lies, when it it comes to aliens and other outsiders: with ourselves. Clark/Superman is sympathetic to the Mole People, and the villains in the story are the reckless, bloodthirsty, xenophobic townspeople, led by a gun-wielding bigmouth played by the great Jeff Corey. It's very easy to picture this guy in a red cap.

The conflict that this movie depicts, however crudely, between seething, reflexive hatred and fear of strangers and openminded welcome of them to our immigrant-made republic seems every bit as ingrained now as it was then, and of course that's depressing. What's cheering, however, is that Superman, at least this vintage of him, has been on the right side of this divide from the start: the side of Truth, Justice and the very best version of The American Way.