Superman’s Smallville was filmed on the Alberta prairies, and most people watching the finished movie in 1978 never knew it.
Hollywood Comes To Southern Alberta
In August 1977, 61-year-old Glenn Ford stood on the Alberta prairie playing Jonathan Kent, the man who raised Superman. Ford, born in Quebec in 1916, was already one of Hollywood’s great Golden Age actors by the time he joined Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie. For the Smallville sequences, rather than building an elaborate studio backlot, the production came to southern Alberta and shot on real prairie land.
Three Towns, One Fictional Kansas
The Kent family farm itself was built near Blackie, Alberta, standing in for the fictional Kansas homestead where Clark Kent grew up. Barons was used for additional scenes involving young Clark Kent, while Beynon became the setting for the film’s cemetery sequence. Other portions of the production were filmed further west, in Kananaskis Country, giving the crew access to a range of prairie and foothills landscapes without leaving southern Alberta.
For audiences watching the finished film in theatres in 1978, those fields were Smallville, Kansas. Nothing about the finished movie signalled otherwise. That was, in a sense, the job being done well: the landscape had to disappear into the story rather than announce itself.
Hiding In Plain Sight For Almost Fifty Years
Nearly 50 years later, this is still one of Alberta’s more remarkable pieces of film history, largely because it was never designed to be recognized. Big-budget Hollywood productions filming in Alberta today tend to get local media coverage and location tourism built around them almost immediately. In 1977, a production of this size passing through Blackie, Barons and Beynon left comparatively little public trace, even though the finished film went on to become one of the most successful superhero movies ever made and introduced Christopher Reeve’s Superman to the world.
The Kent farm set built near Blackie has become something of a pilgrimage site for film location enthusiasts in the decades since, tracked down and photographed by people piecing the production’s Alberta footprint back together long after the fact. For everyone else, it remains a quiet piece of trivia: the fields behind one of the most iconic origin stories in American pop culture were never in Kansas at all.
How many people watching Superman over the decades ever realized they were actually looking at southern Alberta?
