SUPERMAN III
Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Annette O'Toole, Robert Vaughn. Dir. Richard Lester, Warner Brothers, 1983I turned 16 on November 24, 1983, which means I spent most of that year as an attitudinal, hormonal, suicidal/homicidal 15 year-old. Which is to say I found myself at an age where much of childhood still called loudly, yet the call of "maturity" competed, ever drawing my friends & I to a vocal, showy display of putting away childish things. That, combined with an inability to form a macro-view of Richard Pryor's career & articulate it, helped make Richard Lester's SUPERMAN III the franchise instalment to reject & mock, based on lackluster reviews and our few friends' bemusement upon seeing it. 1983 was also the summer of RETURN OF THE JEDI. In a time of competing summer blockbusters & poor press, SUPERMAN III proved easy to disregard & dismiss.
The concept of contempt prior to investigation had yet to reach me at 15, & I would likely have dismissed it if someone brought it to my attention. In any case, it never occurred to me until I found SUPERMAN I-IV in Goodwill last week that any opinion of III which I held was 100% hooey. I've seen exactly three minutes of it - the three minutes where Supes battles himself for control after exposure to contaminated Kryptonite.
I'm glad I waited until 2022 to see or write about it. Had I seen it then I'dve said something ignorant, something clever, something facile & meaningless. I would have been as honest as my despair to be seen as "cool" allowed.
It would not have occurred to me to note that movie franchises outside STAR WARS, particularly action franchises, tended to use UA's James Bond or US knockoffs such as Our Man Flint or Matt Helm as templates, which means action/adventure movies leavened with as much meta-humor & as many one-liners as possible. A franchise such as SUPERMAN had no chance to be much more than a series of action-intensive comedies. As such, they were always likely to be a mixed bag, & proved to be, dependent largely on director & screenwriter. Richard Lester, director of A HARD DAY'S NIGHT & the cult classic ROBIN&MARIAN, gets a more comedic screenplay here, and when III functions in pure-comedy mode he gets it just right.
When Reeve & Pryor, alone or together, appear onscreen, things happen. Reeve's ongoing performance as Kal El/Clark Kent has always been a comedic one, and that continues in SUPERMAN III.
Teasing my maiden viewing of SUPERMAN III on Twitter, I namechecked Pryor's '85 summer comedy, BREWSTER'S MILLIONS. Elaborating, I realized as I watched it & BUSTIN' LOOSE & WHICH WAY IS UP last year that I loved Pryor's work & always had because no one, of any color or whatever, ever embodied the Everyschmoe Pryor did in the '70s & '80s. From SILVER STREAK to BLUE COLLAR to THE TOY to SUPERMAN III, I cannot think of another American actor who fully embodies the hangdog-underdog dynamic as Richard Pryor, & to a fault.
If someone thinks of their favorite Pryor roles, I believe all will be some variant of Anyschlub. The only role immediately occurring to me in which Pryor plays a character not just ringing changes on himself would be A RAGE IN HARLEM, the less spoken of which the better.
Pryor's computer-programmer/hacker-savant, August "Gus" Gorman feels, in many ways, like the ultimate version of the down-the-street/basically-good guy Pryor had played for about a decade, except that Gus is a true savant, possessed of no real insight into how he does what he does. While that blind spot leaves room for Robert Vaughn's pale Luthor-a-like to advance his nefarious scheme, it disrespects Pryor's preceding characters, who tend to be plenty smart regardless of formal teaching.
That said, SUPERMAN III's chief problems can be found in its producers' failure to chart a more "serious" trajectory for the franchise & in its sequences involving Robert Vaughn's Ur-villain, Ross "Bubba" Webster. Vaughn's Webster is a chalk-pale imitation of Lex Luthor, leading me to wonder why Hackman's Luthor couldn't have played svengali to Pryor, or why Pryor couldn't have been a computer genius who understands his gift & renders it in service of the average guy. Vaughn only exists here to satisfy some racist notion that a black man can't carry a villainous role, surely. Otherwise, he serves no real purpose.
I imagine it's clear by now that I tend to prefer the superhero franchises predating the MCU & DCEU. The striking thing, to me, is that what I most bemoan in the OG models is what I admire most in the modern iterations: vision. As I noted, the franchise model for the first four SUPERMAN films is something like James Bond, cheesy action studded with epic one liners, each new adventure not so much sequel as "Another story from the continuing adventures of..." with an eye toward rivaling the prior film's setpieces while spending less money. The more recent DCEU Superman films, while less successful, at least possess the virtue of a comprehensive character/story arc. Would that they had 1/4 the sense of humor of the first four.
Part of what made dismissing SUPERMAN III easy for me involved Margot Kidder's Lois Lane. For all that I go harder on actresses than actors I am also a loyalist to what, & who, works. I've never seen INDIANA & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM. Why?
Simple. No Karen Allen, no sale. I felt the same way about Kidder's Lane. After two movies being such an effective foil for Supes & Clark Kent, I could not, would not imagine a replacement. Which made Annette O'Toole's Lana Lang such a great surprise & addition. What's the popular fast food tagline - different is good?
O'Toole is about as different from Kidder's Lois as possible while remaining a strong, independent woman, O'Toole's Lang a single working mom getting over high school mythology the hard way. Though also pursued by the alcoholic, adult version of Brad, Lana's boyfriend in the first film, O'Toole's Lang, if torn between Supes & Clark, still never has some ridiculous moment of temptation with the drunken buffoon. Lana Lang knows her own mind and makes a more mature love interest for Reeve than Kidder's Lois. Add O'Toole's name to the too-long list of actresses who did extraordinary work in the '80s & are barely even in the business today.
About 85% of SUPERMAN III works well. The whole Robert Vaughn/Richard Pryor world-domination plotline left much to be desired, while still affording Pryor plenty of room for his shtik. What it comes down to is, O'Toole & Pryor, the two elements which made the movie easy to ignore in 1983, made the movie watchable, and more, in 2022. I doubt I would've seen that in the '80s, or admitted it. Yet another example of my belief that films find us when we're ready. SUPERMAN III did.
Teasing my maiden viewing of SUPERMAN III on Twitter, I namechecked Pryor's '85 summer comedy, BREWSTER'S MILLIONS. Elaborating, I realized as I watched it & BUSTIN' LOOSE & WHICH WAY IS UP last year that I loved Pryor's work & always had because no one, of any color or whatever, ever embodied the Everyschmoe Pryor did in the '70s & '80s. From SILVER STREAK to BLUE COLLAR to THE TOY to SUPERMAN III, I cannot think of another American actor who fully embodies the hangdog-underdog dynamic as Richard Pryor, & to a fault.
If someone thinks of their favorite Pryor roles, I believe all will be some variant of Anyschlub. The only role immediately occurring to me in which Pryor plays a character not just ringing changes on himself would be A RAGE IN HARLEM, the less spoken of which the better.
Pryor's computer-programmer/hacker-savant, August "Gus" Gorman feels, in many ways, like the ultimate version of the down-the-street/basically-good guy Pryor had played for about a decade, except that Gus is a true savant, possessed of no real insight into how he does what he does. While that blind spot leaves room for Robert Vaughn's pale Luthor-a-like to advance his nefarious scheme, it disrespects Pryor's preceding characters, who tend to be plenty smart regardless of formal teaching.
That said, SUPERMAN III's chief problems can be found in its producers' failure to chart a more "serious" trajectory for the franchise & in its sequences involving Robert Vaughn's Ur-villain, Ross "Bubba" Webster. Vaughn's Webster is a chalk-pale imitation of Lex Luthor, leading me to wonder why Hackman's Luthor couldn't have played svengali to Pryor, or why Pryor couldn't have been a computer genius who understands his gift & renders it in service of the average guy. Vaughn only exists here to satisfy some racist notion that a black man can't carry a villainous role, surely. Otherwise, he serves no real purpose.
I imagine it's clear by now that I tend to prefer the superhero franchises predating the MCU & DCEU. The striking thing, to me, is that what I most bemoan in the OG models is what I admire most in the modern iterations: vision. As I noted, the franchise model for the first four SUPERMAN films is something like James Bond, cheesy action studded with epic one liners, each new adventure not so much sequel as "Another story from the continuing adventures of..." with an eye toward rivaling the prior film's setpieces while spending less money. The more recent DCEU Superman films, while less successful, at least possess the virtue of a comprehensive character/story arc. Would that they had 1/4 the sense of humor of the first four.
Part of what made dismissing SUPERMAN III easy for me involved Margot Kidder's Lois Lane. For all that I go harder on actresses than actors I am also a loyalist to what, & who, works. I've never seen INDIANA & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM. Why?
Simple. No Karen Allen, no sale. I felt the same way about Kidder's Lane. After two movies being such an effective foil for Supes & Clark Kent, I could not, would not imagine a replacement. Which made Annette O'Toole's Lana Lang such a great surprise & addition. What's the popular fast food tagline - different is good?
O'Toole is about as different from Kidder's Lois as possible while remaining a strong, independent woman, O'Toole's Lang a single working mom getting over high school mythology the hard way. Though also pursued by the alcoholic, adult version of Brad, Lana's boyfriend in the first film, O'Toole's Lang, if torn between Supes & Clark, still never has some ridiculous moment of temptation with the drunken buffoon. Lana Lang knows her own mind and makes a more mature love interest for Reeve than Kidder's Lois. Add O'Toole's name to the too-long list of actresses who did extraordinary work in the '80s & are barely even in the business today.
About 85% of SUPERMAN III works well. The whole Robert Vaughn/Richard Pryor world-domination plotline left much to be desired, while still affording Pryor plenty of room for his shtik. What it comes down to is, O'Toole & Pryor, the two elements which made the movie easy to ignore in 1983, made the movie watchable, and more, in 2022. I doubt I would've seen that in the '80s, or admitted it. Yet another example of my belief that films find us when we're ready. SUPERMAN III did.
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