Originally Posted by
Jim Kelly
My memory of how it was screened in the theatre is that you would sit in your se"at and the first thing is the red S would be projected on the curtains of the theatre screen. They had curtains in those days--I don't guess many movie theatres still have curtains now.
So that was the first thing you saw, which got you excited. Oh what's going to happen? There were no trailers (or if there were they were shown before, then the curtains closed and the S was projected . . .). Next the theatre curtains opened and you saw another theatre screen with curtains, in black and white, and those curtains opened. And you know the rest after that.
So you were taken on an adventure, one curtain opens into another, a comic book opens into an old movie the old movie opens up into outer space, outer space takes you past all the planets and the credits roll and you travel through the cosmos to Krypton.
At every level, you're moving beyond this world to some other world, the world of a black and white movie theatre, of a comic book, of an old fashioned newspaper publisher, of the solar system and of the depths of space. Of a distant alien world.
The movie keeps doing this.
We move through space to the agrarian world of Smallville (much more rural than was usual in the comics at the time), to the great wheat fields from which young Clark Kent is torn away, after the death of his father, that parting with his mother (which is one of the greatest single scenes as it speaks to some archetypal reality of all human experience). The hero must begin his journey to enlightenment, leaving behind the safe world he has always known.
He journeys to the world of the far North, ethereal, to a crystal kingdom where he enters the inner world of understanding. Then to the world of Metropolis and the worlds it contains.
Then to the subterranean world (the literal underworld) of Lex Luthor--to which Superman must eventually travel (this scene was much longer but cut in the final edit), the hero's journey to the underworld being another archetype in many epics. There in the water, a metaphorical womb, he nearly dies but is brought back to life by a selfless act--from Miss Teschmacher of all people.
Then begins his apotheosis. Superman rises and conquers one challenge after the other and when set with the greatest challenge, the death of the woman he loves, he powers past that challenge to change the world itself.