Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
The explorer Dr. Henderson offers Perry White exclusive rights to the story if the Daily Planet will help finance an expedition into the Henderson caves, where his father vanished forty years earlier. The caverns are a river system, so Lois and Henderson go in by boat with Clark following. They land in a grotto; the boat drifts off, and a sack of dynamite aboard is set off by a waterfall, blasting open a passage. Hawk-men, a winged race living in the caves, seize the two and carry them before a golden statue that is unmistakably Henderson's father. Tied to a slab, they are lowered toward a cauldron of molten gold, and Lois understands how the statue was made. Clark arrives, becomes Superman, is swarmed by hawk-men, fights them off, pulls Lois and Henderson from above the gold and flies them out, dynamiting the entrance behind them as the hawk-men pursue. Back at the Planet, White reads the report, says nobody would believe a word of it, and burns it along with the photograph.
Why It Matters
- The hawk-men, with their wings and beaked helmets, are the series' one excursion into pure fantasy, and the vat of liquid gold and the gilded statue give the film a pulp-magazine atmosphere that the Famous Studios unit otherwise lost.
- The ending, in which the editor destroys the only evidence, is unusually cynical for the series and is the nearest it comes to a joke about its own implausibility. It is in the public domain with the rest of the series.
Notes and Trivia
- Seymour Kneitel directed three of the eight Famous Studios entries.
- The hawk-men sequence has often been compared to the pulp covers of the 1930s and to Flash Gordon's hawkmen, then a cinema serial.
- See also: Superman: The Mummy Strikes (1943), Superman: Secret Agent (1943), Superman: Jungle Drums (1943).
