Their names were familiar only to comic book aficionados. Then, rumors began to circulate in the early s that a big budget Superman movie was in the works. Once again, Siegel and Shuster were left out of the equation. This time, the two men tried a new approach. They bypassed their lawyers and went straight to the media.
Legally, DC Comics owed Siegel and Shuster nothing, but bad publicity was costing the company dearly. Rabbi Simcha is a sought-after television and radio guest, and has been profiled in many publications, including the New York Post, the Jerusalem Post and the Washington Post. He is also the author of Up, Up and Oy Vey! All That Glitters is not Goldwyn: What began as a low-grade form of entertainment, a somewhat disreputable venture at the turn of the nineteenth century became the most powerful international tool of American cultural power. Together with the Warner Brothers, William Fox, and Samuel Goldwyn, these Moguls, whose lives and times are richly documented in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society, created a constellation as brilliant as any the firmament could offer.
The Moguls, the men who invented the majesty and mystery of Hollywood, were a rough-hewn bunch of ambitious men determined to thrust themselves into the epicenter of American life. Like Sam Goldwyn, famous for his malapropisms, many were semi-literate in English and made vulgarity and crudeness their stock in trade. They are like eunuchs. They began arriving in America during the s, penniless boys drifting restlessly from job to job. Cutting their teeth on the ragged, half-world of fashion and retail, they became masters in gauging market swings, acquiring a special feel for detecting public taste.
They finally struck it rich with the Nickelodeon, among the first to realize that people who were willing to stand in an arcade for a penny to see a movie, would pay a nickel to sit, as opposed to a quarter for live entertainment. Within the next two decades they transformed a practically non-existent industry into one of the largest in America. As immigrants themselves, the moguls in the making picked up on the dreams and aspirations of other immigrants and the working class, two largely overlapping groups, who would comprise a large portion of the early movie-going audience. By , most of the future moguls were owners of small chains of moving-picture parlors that boasted whitewashed exteriors, uniformed ushers and male vocalists.
Clever tacticians with a nose for making money, they understood that real profit lay in the distribution and eventually in production of movies. These dream peddlers were particularly adept at turning a spark of talent into a blazing star. Carl Laemmle did the same for Mary Pickford. The Moguls were uncomfortable with their Jewishness. When they finally gave to Jewish causes, they gave, according to Ben Hecht, as a way of doing penance for not being good Jews. How about relief from the Jews.
The Moguls wanted desperately to be regarded as Americans and not as Jews. In a slew of anti-Nazi films Hollywood produced in the thirties and forties, nary a word is mentioned of anti-Semitism abroad. Neither scholars nor gentlemen nor very good Jews, the Hollywood Moguls, nevertheless, sounded a fundamental chord of American life. They had their finger on the pulse of Main Street as well as the main chance.
Connoisseurs of mass entertainment, they reinvented a nation in the image of their dreams and gave it its most enduring cultural legacy. The real-life family murder that gave birth to Superman. Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.
For more than 70 years, Superman has been the king of superheroes. Whether fighting injustice, defeating evil-doers or saving the world in comic books, on TV or on the big screen, the Man of Steel has proved himself both indestructibly popular and unassailably virtuous. Yet, having spent all those years fighting for truth and justice, it now seems that Superman has been keeping a deep, dark secret about his true origins and no, it is not his secret identity as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent.
Far from being born on the pages of Action Comics back in — as is generally acknowledged to be the case — it seems that the Man of Steel actually came into being six years earlier, on the night of June 2, , when an elderly Jewish immigrant from Lithuania died during a robbery at his second-hand clothing store. Only now can the tragic story of the birth of Superman be told for the first time.
To understand its poignancy, we must go back to mid-town America — Cleveland, Ohio to be precise — and the brutal killing of immigrant Mitchell Siegel at the hands of a gang who robbed his clothes shop. The story of that tragic night has remained unknown outside the Siegel family until now, and Jerry never once mentioned the crime in the hundreds of interviews he conducted before his death in Perhaps he feared that people would make a link between the tragedy and the creation of Superman, and the aura of proud invincibility that surrounded the Man of Steel would be pierced.
Whatever the true reasons for the secrecy surrounding the loss of his father, there is little doubt that it had a stunningly profound effect on year-old Jerry Siegel. It was just after 8pm, as Mitchell Siegel was closing up his clothing store, that three men entered the shop. Siegel, a hardworking year-old who had emigrated from Lithuania a number of years previously, and who also worked as a sign-writer to make ends meet, asked if he could help the men.
One of them asked to see a suit, and when Mitchell handed it over, the man began to walk out without paying. What happened next is unclear, as the police report is incomplete. Even so, a struggle ensued and either Mitchell was shot in the chest and killed, or collapsed from the shock and suffered a fatal heart attack. Obsessed with comic books and science fiction magazines, Jerry was a geeky, unprepossessing teenager who was both unpopular and awkward. After the death of his father, he poured himself into the writing and creation of science fiction stories and fantastic characters, and in , he and his friend Joe Shuster first began to talk about a new sort of comic book hero.
After a series of false starts, they finally came up with an invincible crime-fighting superbeing who came dressed in a very distinctive outfit. For the next five years, Siegel and Shuster shopped Superman around to countless comic book companies and newspapers — but with little success.
Through the Forties and Fifties, Superman quickly became an American icon and influenced a whole range of successful superheroes, including Wonder Woman and Captain America. Created by Bob Kane, Batman appeared for the first time in Detective Comics a year after Superman and it was a hit, too. At the top of the superhero pile, however, was Superman. Apart from his starring role in the comic books, he could also be found as the star of his own radio serial, in cartoons and in movies, as toys, on cereal packets and even lunchboxes.
Yet, neither Siegel nor Shuster received a penny of the millions being made from their creation. The pair went to court on a number of occasions over the years to try to recover their creation for themselves, and although they won small settlements, they seemed unable to win back the rights to Superman.
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For Jerry Siegel, it was a happy ending to what had started as a tragic, but very simple tale. Jerry also says he wrote about the world he grew up in: It was a place and time where weaklings — especially Jewish ones, who were more likely to get sand kicked in their faces by the bully down the block if not Adolf Hitler — dreamed that someday the world would see them for the superheroes they really were. No one did more of that than the Man From Metropolis.
Superman was the real thing — as muscle-bound as the Polish-Jewish strongman Siegmund Breitbart and as indestructible as The Golem — and an inspiration to every Jewish schlump who knew there was a super being inside him.
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Even kryptonite radiated with symbolism: He started life as the consummate liberal, championing causes from disarmament to the welfare state. All were classic nebbishes. Clark and Superman lived life the way most newly arrived Jews did, torn between their Old and New World identities and their mild exteriors and rock-solid cores. That split personality was the only way Superman could survive, yet it gave him perpetual angst. Leaping over skyscrapers, running faster than an express train, springing great distances and heights, lifting and smashing tremendous weights, possessing an impenetrable skin — these are the amazing attributes which Superman, savior of the helpless and oppressed, avails himself of as he battles the forces of evil and injustice.
The advent of the super-hero was a bizarre comeuppance for the American dream. Horatio Alger could no longer make it on his own. What made Superman different from the legion of imitators to follow was not that when he took off his clothes he could beat up everybody — they all did that. What made Superman extraordinary was his point of origin: Clark Kent was the fiction. The Green Hornet had to go through the fetishist fol-de-rol of donning costume, floppy hat, black mask, gas gun, menacing automobile, and insect sound effects before he was even ready to go out in the street.
The Lone Ranger needed an accoutrement white horse, an Indian, and an establishing cry of Hi-Yo Silver to separate him from all those other masked men running around the West in days of yesteryear.
But Superman had only to wake up in the morning to be Superman. In his case, Clark Kent was the put-on. Had they but known! And for what purpose? Did Superman become Clark Kent in order to lead a normal life, have friends, be known as a nice guy, meet girls? Superman as a secret masochist? Field for study there. How can one be a cowardly star reporter, subject to fainting spells in time of crisis, and not expect to raise serious questions?
The truth may be that Kent existed not for the purposes of the story but for the reader. His fake identity was our real one.
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In drawing style, both in figure and costume, Superman was a simplified parody of Flash Gordon. Shuster represented the best of old-style comic book drawing. His work was direct, unprettied — crude and vigorous; as easy to read as a diagram. No creamy lines, no glossy illustrative effects, no touch of that bloodless prefabrication that passes for professionalism these days.
Slickness, thank God, was beyond his means. He could not draw well, but he drew single-mindedly — no one could ghost that style. It was the man. It looked as though it were being drawn in a bank. But, oh, those early drawings! Superman running up the sides of dams, leaping over anything that stood in his way No one drew skyscrapers like Shuster. Impressionistic shafts, Superman poised over them, his leaping leg tucked under his ass, his landing leg tautly pointed earthward , cleaning and jerking two-ton get-away cars and pounding them into the sides of cliffs — and all this done lightly, unportentiously, still with that early Slam Bradley exuberance.
So what if the stories were boring, the villains blah? This was the Superman Show — a touring road company backing up a great star. Everything was a stage wait until he came on. Then it was all worthwhile. Besides, for the alert reader there were other fields of interest. It seems that among Lois Lane, Clark Kent, and Superman there existed a schizoid and chaste menage a trois. Clark Kent loved but felt abashed with Lois Lane; Superman saved Lois Lane when she was in trouble, found her a pest the rest of the time.
Since Superman and Clark Kent were the same person this behavior demands explanation. Then, it appears, he wanted Lois to respect him for his fake self, to love him when he acted the coward, to be there when he pretended he needed her. She never was — so, of course, he loved her. A typical American romance. He had contempt for her. Another typical American romance.
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Love is really the pursuit of a desired object, not pursuit by it. There must be other desirable objects out there, somewhere. So Clark Kent acted as the control for Superman. A sissy wanted girls who scorned him; a man scorned girls who wanted him. Except to help them. And then get the hell out. Real rapport was not for women. It was for villains. This entry was posted on vendredi 4 janvier at 6: You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.
You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site. Everybody wanted to be like Superman, the hero from outer space, who could not fit in society as Superman, so he invented a character that was better suited for American society — the feeble, bespectacled Clark Kent. They managed to make the Americans live the dream, divorced from reality. Undoubtedly, the goal was to take over the greatest superpower in the world, to control all aspects of its daily life, and to harness it in the service of Jewish goals worldwide.
Whenever someone challenges this, Superman is ready to deal with him. Farroukh Majidi, university professor and international photographer: You should focus on that — not about a movie about a Jewish person who was the best, who was a savior, or a hero, or whatever.
This is not going to touch us. What is touching us, what is ruining us, ruining our culture, is the penetration of their culture through mass media, through their movies, through this television. This is what we have to be aware of.
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This film was produced and distributed by Universal Studios. He made money and used it for the Jewish enterprise. Le 16 , Jean Cocteau note dans son Journal: Il vieillit comme nous. Tout y est odieux et prestigieux. Sa tactique est, en tout cas, payante: Vitesse terrible avec laquelle un nom circule. Non, vraiment, il n'y aura pas besoin de tirer comme un dieu pour l'abattre, lui, comme un chien. Je ne le crois pas: Trente ans plus tard, il dira, plus directement encore: Celle du second tirage annonce deux titres parus: Le premier est paru le 21 janvier , le second le 20 juillet Le 23 , Jean Cocteau note dans son Journal: Cent cinquante ou deux cent cinquante exemplaires.
En arrosant des villes au hasard, de 4. Je lui en fais la commande ferme. Ses conditions seront les miennes. S'il lui faut une avance, je la lui fais. Le livre parut le 1er novembre. Quel pot aux roses! Il nous abandonne haletants… aux devinettes…. La Question juive en France qui parut un moment si tragique n'est plus qu'amusante aujourd'hui.
Le beau racisme latino-mongolo-juif! L'ouvrage, qui portait le titre: Je voudrais donc que vous remplaciez son nom par une injure de votre choix, ou que vous supprimiez la phrase. Parmi ces auteurs on trouve: Le prix de la transaction est de 10 francs [3 euros environ] et un petit tableau de Renoir. Que ne troussez-vous maintenant trois petits actes, en vitesse, de circonstance, sur le pouce, Les Mouchards?
En effet, si on devait le faire enregistrer au moment de le produire devant un tribunal, on devrait payer une amende assez forte. Le 11 , Jean Cocteau note dans son Journal: