SUPERMAN:THE MOVIE Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty. Dir. Richard Donner, Warner, 1978
I think Nick Hornby said that pop music must serve more than nostalgia to keep us playing it over & over again. That's true of films, too. Watching Richard Donner's SUPERMAN for the first time in 20 years tonight, I found myself almost as giddy as the 11 year-old me seeing it on a big screen 44 years ago, yet I also found its story still resonant, somewhat to my surprise. Look at the film's gorgeous opening scenes on Krypton, in which Marlon Brando's Jor El warns its rulers the sun will go full nova in days. They retaliate, censuring & silencing him, evoking our leaders' response to Dr. Anthony Fauci or Greta Thunberg & the legion of scientists behind both. Dystopian futures ideally reflect our present in some way, but screenwriter Mario Puzo, with help from Laraine & David Newman & BONNIE&CLYDE's Robert Benton, presents a dystopian past, as Krypton explodes 50 years before the action of Donner's film. Given that Donner specifically included anti-apaartheid & green-friendly signs & slogans throughout LETHAL WEAPON, it's conceivable he meant the Krypton scenes to align with early warnings about climate change, but the entire sequence is now prescient regardless of intent.
Full disclosure:even in 1978 a desperate need for others' approval allowed me to agree with smart-aleck friends who blasted SUPERMAN's notorious ending as ludicrous. That particular criticism dogs the picture today, too, but if anything is ludicrous that critique is.
We've been watching for 2 hours. We've accepted that being from a world with two red suns will make Kal El nigh invulnerable on a world with one yellow sun, which is NOT how science works. We've accepted that a pair of horn rims and parting his hair to the other side makes an impenetrable disguise. The US Navy transports two nuclear missiles overland with an escort of three or four trucks, missile armed and visible, and that's no problem, but the idea that Superman can reverse time by spinning the Earth backward - this is the hill we die on?
Suspension of belief remained intact through equally farcical science early on, but the reversal of time is our Ted-Danson-brings-Saving-Private-Ryan-to-a-grinding-halt moment?
Maybe we object that Kal El ignores his father's prohibition of interfering with human history. If so, we may have missed the point of the movie, which seems to me that merely by sending Kal El to earth Jor El has already broken his own commandment. The very existence of a superbeing, never mind one who keeps planes from crashing and missiles from landing, irrevocably changes human history. Kal El may not, as his father says, be human, but after a lifetime on Earth he chooses free will and ignores Jor El, with no apparent consequence, except that it tips Margot Kidder's Lois Lane that Clark Kent may have a secret, setting up the other half of SUPERMAN II, as the Krypton sequence does at the film's beginning.
I thought I was one smart kid in '78. From 11 onward I could tell anyone foolish enough to ask every problem and flaw in the film. I thought that made me cool. Even if it did, now I see those problems & yet find that suspension of disbelief, helped along by a little nostalgia, makes all those criticisms superfluous, if not silly. Today, even the shortcomings contribute to the movie's sense of innocence. SUPERMAN forged the template. Fast forward 30 years to IRON MAN to find a film shot through with SUPERMAN's DNA.
Donner, producers Ilya & Alexander Salkind, and screenwriter Puzo, the creators of the template, have one key advantage over every subsequent superhero film - a complete absence of cynicism, in story & in production. Two years later Warner Brothers, confident of a hit in SUPERMAN II, cheaped out a little on the visual effects, which look crude compared to the first - & its effects didn't exactly give George Lucas sleepless nights - and the fall from innocence began.
Everything works in SUPERMAN:THE MOVIE. The things that didn't work then don't much matter now, leading me to think they probably didn't matter then, either. What makes it all work, however, isn't the set pieces or the visual effects or even being the first of the modern superhero movies. It's the performances of Puzo's well-drawn characters.
As a kid, I had no idea who Glenn Ford was. Today I own GILDA and have seen a few of his noirs and I love his late-career victory lap here as Jonathan Kent, Clark/Kal's surrogate dad. So it goes throughout. Jackie Coogan's all-bark-no-bite "Chief" Perry White is the model against which J.K. Simmons's J. Jonah Jameson rebels.
Valerie Perrine and Ned Beatty almost upstage Gene Hackman's hilariously vain Lex Luthor. When Beatty's Otis tells Luthor "my arm was too short" to write the correct missile coordinates I laughed for a few minutes. SUPERMAN makes me wish Hackman did more comedies.
Which leaves Margot Kidder & Christopher Reeve. I had not seen Bob Clark's BLACK CHRISTMAS in 1978 - my parents weren't THAT liberal - so I had no way to know that Kidder's Lois is very much that movie's Barb, now grown up and a workaholic rather than alcoholic. It's a great update to the character, Kidder making her a '70s independent woman - or Hollywood's approximation of one - tough & jaded & vulnerable and wistful without contradicting herself. It is difficult, even with hindsight, to imagine an actor more suited to embody a new Lois than Kidder.
Reeve, for me, remains the gold standard. I don't necessarily dislike subsequent Supermen so much as I find them disposable & interchangeable, unlike Reeve, whom I accept and adore as both Kal El and Clark Kent. A few grafs back I observed that Kent's physical disguise doesn't seem impenetrable. Reeve's performance as the bumbling & bashful Kent gives it the required opacity. I forget that Reeve trained at Juliard until I watch him essay both Clark & Kal with deceptive ease. It's essentially a comic performance, one he does with such skill it almost looks like he's not working.
Those who buy into Quentin Tarantino's Bill's theory that Clark Kent is Kal El's critique of humanity have missed a couple points. First, Bill's the villain of KILL BILL, & villains lie. 2.Clark Kent is not weak & cowardly, he's kind, compassionate, and humble. Clark Kent is Kal El's defense of humanity as worthy of redemption.
Whatever my kvetching as a younger man, tonight I discovered there is nothing I don't like about SUPERMAN:THE MOVIE. It's funny. It's fresh. It's a good '70s New York picture. It's my kind of superhero movie. Always reluctant to pronounce a movie perfect, I will say SUPERMAN is goddamn fine and, brothers & sisters, that ain't bad.
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