Superman (1978)

(Take a look at the name of the poster file and see if you think it says what I think it says.) So, I know everybody’s seen this one, but I just saw it again at the Paramount here in Austin. Part of their 70mm series.

Back in 1938 two teenagers came up with a superhero that would change the face of the world. (Well, the comic book world, anyway.) Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel couldn’t know what they had thrown at the world. Action Comics picked the Man Of Steel up, put him in the lead spot of their weekly comic and then gave him his own. Then came the myriad (I’ll have to remember to use that word in my eulogy) of other superheroes in his vein: Batman, Captain Marvel, The Green Hornet, The Green Lantern, The Brown Hornet; all of them came from this one little guy who couldn’t be killed by human means. He could only be killed by Kryptonite, a meteor from his dead home planet.

Of course, his arch nemesis, Lex Luthor, found some and used it every chance he got.

Superman had been on the big screen pretty much forever. The 40s had Dave Fleischer’s animated series. I’ve seen one of those and they’re pretty good, but there’s really no dialogue. It’s all about Superman running around saving Lois Lane from herself. You’ve heard the phrase “Curiosity killed the cat”? Well, it almost killed Lois, too. She would just run to the danger to get a story and The Supster would have to pull her out of it.

Then came Kirk Alyn’ serials. He hung out there for a couple of series and kept kids on the edge of their seats (and coming back to the theatre) until his successor, George Reeves, took the suit. He took over for one serial and then ran to tv. Television brought Superman in a lot of different guises: cartoon, live-action and, in the 90s, a combo of the two. (Pretty much, anyway.) Lois And Clark was more of a romance: kind of like Beauty And The Beast with a sense of humor. I never bothered watching it, though.

In 1978 Richard Donner and couple people at Paramount Studios decided it was time for an update. And it was good.

After everybody in Hollywood tried to get the lead role, they went with this little guy that nobody had heard of, Christopher Reeve. Of course, now he’s more well-known as “the guy who fell off the horse,” but back then he was totally unheard of. He fit the part perfectly, though. He was big (worked out just for the part), had black hair, a square jaw and a spit curl. What more could you want in Superman? (All joking aside, I do wish him well in his endeavor to walk again. I’d love him to make an appearance in the new Superman movie…if it ever gets made.)

Lois Lane was played by Margot Kidder, another perfect match. No longer was she just running towards the danger for the story, she was actually pursuing her man! Not exactly the strongest of women’s roles in modern film, but it works in this movie for the most part.

And Gene Hackman, that grand old man of 70s film. Absolutely perfect as over the top bad guy Lex Luthor. He’s equal parts Batman baddy (from the tv show, not the movies) and Bond baddy. He’s not in it for the money. He just wants millions of people to die. Is that so wrong. What can you expect from a guy who lives in the sewer.

On Lex’s side are Otis (Ned Beatty) and Miss Tessmacher (Valerie Perrine from Lenny and Slaughterhouse Five–she was in a Bond movie, too (Diamonds Are Forever), but only as a Vegas showgirl). Otis is a total bumbling fool without a brain cell to his name. He can’t even really spell his own name. (Remember Otisville?) Miss Tessmacher is constantly being dressed in sexy lingerie and yelled at by Lex. She really has no purpose in the movie except to look good and be the moral center of Lex Luthor, Inc.

The movie starts on the surface of Krypton where Jor-El (Marlon Brando who got $4 million for his 10 minutes) is sending General Zod (Terence Stamp–Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert) and his crew into a mirror. They’ll come into play in the second movie. (The two movies were partly shot at the same time and the missles from this one were going to release Zod and Co. Unfortunately, Richard Donner was fired for “creative differences,” so Richard Lester had to come to the rescue for the second one.) Jor-El then tells the Krypton Senate that the planet will explode in 30 days. Why do they not realize this? It’s only going into another orbit. Uh, I think that would be enough to alarm me. That would play hell with the Earth. Maybe Krypton is made of stronger stuff, though. (Yeah, ice.)

Anyway, Jor-El and his wife send their baby, Kal-El, to Earth. Then the planet turns into the sinking scene from Titanic. Young Kal-El makes his journey in an ice star and lands in a wheat field next to a road where a farming couple, Jonathan and Ma Kent, are driving by. (Of course he lands in the country. That’s where all UFOs land.) They take the kid in after he lifts their truck and raise him as their own.

Of course Clark (their name for him) goes through all of the typical teenage things: first love, bullies, why can’t I tell people that I can run faster than a train. (By the way, they should have never shown him running. That looked really, REALLY bad. I think I could do better special effects than that with camera angles. And, is it just me, or does Jeff East look more like a young Ricardo Moltalban than a young Chris Reeve? My suit is made of rich Corinthian Leather.)

So Jonathan dies. Clark leaves. He builds a Fortress of Solitude at the North Pole. (He must be stronger than our climate, too. He’s wearing a pretty damn flimsy jacket.) He meets his dead father. He moves to Metropolis. Gets a job at the Daily Planet (without a journalism degree…I wonder about the integrity of that paper…and Jackie Cooper is so stereotypical as the chief editor that he has to be a parody. Pretty funny stuff. But what’s up with those swinging doors to his office? I don’t think any editor would have doors like that). Meets the love of his life, Lois. And the rest is just a quick save of the Earth.

For about half an hour there’s a montage of him saving people and catching criminals. That’s pretty funny. Especially when he saves a kitten that’s stuck up a tree. He gives it to the little girl who runs inside telling her mom about the man who “swooped out of the sky.” Mom’s reply? “Haven’t I told you to stop lying?!” Smack!! Whoa! No way would that get by today. (There’s a pretty definite run of domestic violence going on in this movie. At one point Miss Tessmacher asks a pretty good question about their Kryptonite plan (“So what?”) and precedes it with “I know I’ll get a belt in the mouth for this, but…” What the hell were we thinking back in the 70s?)

Then the actual plot starts. Sort of. Lex is going to reprogram a couple of nuclear missiles to go towards the San Andreas Fault and Hoboken, NJ (?). He wants to blow the West Coast off the map and sell his useless land in the deserts of California as Lex Luthor Land, or something like that. It takes Superman the last 45 minutes to get through this. Of course, the movie is almost two and a half hours long. That’s a lot of exposition, but it’s worth it. Otherwise, Marlon wouldn’t have been in it.

I do have a few questions, but they involve spoilers. In case you’ve never seen this flick (yeah, right), don’t highlight the next bit of text. Otherwise, that’s the only way you can read it.

Ok, now we’ve gotten rid of all of the uninitiated. Let’s talk about what I really wanted to talk about: THE RULING OF THE WORLD!!!! I figure I’ll take over as the Central Ruler and all of you can be my minions. No one else really needs to be around.

Oh, wait…wrong website. Oh yeah! The movie!

We’ve already established that Ms. Lane isn’t really the strongest character in film history. The problem I have is that, when she’s in her car and getting sucked into the ground at the speed of syrup, she’s listening to Supertramp! Ok, my actual problem is couldn’t she have climbed out before it went vertical? I know I would have left that piecer of a car the second it started going downwards. She, however, stuck with it the whole way! She must have been pretty hard up for a car. (By the way, the Earth must have known where she was. The crack ended just where her car was. Just lucky, I guess.)

The second question is, after Lois died, Superman flew around the Earth hundreds of times and turned it the opposite way, therefore turning back time. (He must not know CPR.)Wouldn’t that have put the bombs back in the air? Did he only bring it part of the way back, so the initial earthquake already took place, but the aftershocks hadn’t? But then they would have happened, anyway. They didn’t, though. He apparently stopped everything that happened after the first earthquake. But the gas station still blew up.

OUCH!!! I just blew a gasket. The flow of logic has stopped.

Ok, all. We’re back. No more spoilers. I’ll just gripe about the special effects, now. The flying scenes were still pretty good, although Christopher didn’t really seem to know what to do with his hands in a few scenes. But, Star Wars had just come out the year before. They pretty much revolutionized the use of miniatures with the Tie Fighters and other stuff. Why did that not apply to this movie? I was pretty scared, though, when the water was coming towards that model train town! After all, I could have spent days building it!

I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing this movie. You might think that I didn’t like it. Actually, I really do like it a lot. It’s a classic. Great family fun. (Well, except for the kid getting hit.) The only real problem is that it’s very dated. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, though. The story is still pretty cool. (Written by Godfather author Mario Puzo, nonetheless! Who knew? He wrote the second one, too. After that he quit. That may the downfall of the series.) The acting is great. (Especially Chris and Gene. Gene is so over the top that he almost leaves the top of the screen and Chris is, well…he’s Superman. No one else can take his place. And his version of Clark is so dumpy as to be almost charming. And you can tell it’s all an act. Check out the look on his face when he catches the bullet when he and Lois are held up.) The action is exciting. The few car chases that there are were building up to Richard Donner’s later work in the Lethal Weapon series. Basically, it’s a lot of fun. A little slow going at first (Krypton must have been a pretty boring planet. But I sure would like to get one of those glowing suits!), but it picks up well. The script goes from serious to cheesy at just the right times. (They seem to want Lex to be a Bond bad guy. “Everyone has their faults. Mine’s in California.” Not to mention some of Lois’s sexual innuendo: “Do you like pink?”)

By the way, watch for Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill (the original Superman and Lois) as young Lois’s parents. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be them on the train that Clark is outrunning at the beginning or if their scenes were cut and put back in for tv. They’re there somewhere, though. Also watch for Larry Hagman as a major transporting the nuclear missles and John Ratzenberger (Cliffie from Cheers) as the guy who pushes the abort button. He shows up in the second one, too. (As well as A Bridge Too Far and The Empire Strikes Back. Not a bad run of flicks for an unknown.)

It’s a great movie. Especially if you grew up with it. I’ve seen it quite a few times, but not in a while, so it was a great experience on the big screen. Can’t wait to get a DVD player. Then I can wait for it to come out on that format. They desperately need to remaster it, though. Maybe even do a special edition. There’s a lot they could add. Apparently tv version add around 50 minutes! Wow! That makes for a long super hero movie. But this copy was pretty washed out. If not a special edition, then definitely a remaster.

The sequels, of course, ended up being crap. The second one was almost as good as this one (some say better). Very exciting. Good (for the time) special effects. And everyone was into it! Then something happened. I think it was Richard Pryor. The third one (which I’ve only seen parts of) was horrible! Something about a bad Superman robot. Everyone was threatening to quit the series after this one, but some of them came back for a fourth! I remember when it came out. Nobody went to see it. They all quit. Now they want to do a new series. Tim Burton and Nic Cage. I don’t know about that. Tim did a great job with Batman (and put a new vitality in the genre…although it did spawn Spawn), but could he do Superman? I don’t think it needs to be that dark. And Nic Cage? I’m not sure that he could really pull it off. He’s a great actor…one of my favorites, actually. But could he be Superman? Doubt it. They have, however, rethought and are trying to come up with someone else to direct and star. That’s good.