Superman’s Smallville was filmed on the Alberta prairies, and the finished movie in 1978 gave audiences no hint of it.
Key facts
- The Smallville scenes in Superman: The Movie were shot on southern Alberta prairie in summer 1977, and the film premiered in December 1978.
- The Kent family farm was built near Blackie, with Barons and Beynon used for other scenes.
- Glenn Ford, aged 61, played Jonathan Kent.
- Mountain scenes were shot in the Kananaskis Valley, along the newly built Highway 40.
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. The mountain scenes were shot further west, in the Kananaskis Valley along the newly built Highway 40, so the crew never left southern Alberta.
For audiences watching the finished film in theatres in 1978, those fields were Smallville, Kansas. Nothing in the finished movie signalled otherwise, which was the job done well. The scenery had to disappear into the story.
The Prairie Hid 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 the film never set out to show where it was made. The finished picture went on to become one of the most successful superhero movies of its time and introduced Christopher Reeve’s Superman to audiences everywhere.
The fields behind one of the best-known origin stories in American pop culture were never in Kansas at all.
