In the early 1970s, the Salkinds—son Ilya and father Alexander—acquired the rights to do a Superman movie. While there were plenty of TV movies and pilots and series and such that had been done throughout this decade starring costumed heroes—Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Dr. Strange, all of which we’ll get to in due course—there hadn’t been a theatrically released comic-book superhero film since Batman in 1966, and even that was tied to a TV show. The Salkinds, though, wanted Superman on the big screen.
Superman had remained the most visible superhero in the world into the 1970s. Besides continuing to be DC’s flagship comics character, he was the subject of a Broadway play (It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman), which was made into an awful ABC special in 1975 starring David Wilson (who played the man of steel as kind of a demented Ted Koppel). Marvel and DC’s first intercompany crossover happened in 1976 and teamed Superman with Spider-Man in a classic comic by Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, not to mention the epic Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.
For years, the Salkinds worked to get their production going. William Goldman and Leigh Bracket were both approached to write the screenplay, and then Ilya actually hired Alfred Bester—Hugo Award-winning author and former comic book writer (he’s the one who wrote the famous Green Lantern oath)—to do it, and man, do I want to live in the parallel universe where that happened. In our universe, Alexander overrode his son and instead hired Mario Puzo, because he was much better known. Looking back four decades, it’s hard to imagine any circumstance under which anyone would think the author of The Godfather was a better choice for a superhero film than the author of The Stars My Destination, but whatever.
The Salkinds’ list of possible stars for the film—whether in the title role, as Jor-El, or as Lex Luthor—is an impressive who’s who: Muhammad Ali, James Brolin, Charles Bronson, James Caan, Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Jenner, Perry King, Kris Kristofferson, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Nick Nolte, Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Lyle Waggoner, Christopher Walken, and Patrick Wayne (who was actually cast, but dropped out when his father John—yes, that John Wayne—contracted cancer). In the end, while A-list actors Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman took on the roles of Jor-El and Luthor, respectively, they went with an unknown, Christopher Reeve to play Supes. Amusingly, Reeve was suggested early in the process by the casting director, but was rejected by director Richard Donner as being too young and skinny. This led to a Superman film where Jor-El and Lex Luthor had pre-title billing, while the title character was relegated to third billing after the title.
Donner, by the way, was one of another impressive list of possible directors considered, among them Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Richard Lester (who wound up taking over from Donner, more on that in a bit), Peter Yates, John Guillerman, Ronald Neame, Sam Peckinpah (who was dropped from consideration when he pulled out a gun during a meeting with the Salkinds), George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. (Amusingly, Alexander was skeptical of hiring Spielberg, wanting to see how Jaws did first; when Jaws was a hit, Spielberg was in too much demand to be available. Irony!)
The original plan was to film the first two movies simultaneously, and Puzo’s original screenplay was to cover both movies. Having said that, Puzo turned in a 550-page screenplay (the average movie is around 125 or so), and several writers both credited (David & Leslie Newman and Robert Benton) and not (Tom Mankiewicz, given a “creative consultant” credit, and George MacDonald Fraser, who said he did very little work) were brought in to curb the script’s excesses both in tone and length.
From this development process, chaotic even by the high standards of Hollywood, we got a series of Superman movies. And the chaos continued, as Donner quit in disgust after having filmed about three-quarters of the second film. Richard Lester—originally hired as a go-between once Donner stopped talking to the Salkinds—replaced him, re-shooting large swaths of the second movie. Lester was brought back to helm the third film. Hackman didn’t return for the third, and Margot Kidder’s role as Lois Lane was reduced to a glorified cameo (despite her getting better billing in number three), and rumors have persisted that they were marginalized due to their siding with Donner. Those rumors were helped by the fact that Hackman returned and Kidder’s role returned to prominence in the fourth film, after the Salkinds had sold off the rights to Cannon Films.
That fourth film was, like the third, a disappointment both critically and financially, and it signaled the end of the Superman films for the time being.
“He’s not just a mild-mannered reporter…”
Superman
Written by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman, and Robert Benton
Directed by Richard Donner
Produced by Ilya Salkind
Original release date: December 15, 1978
Superman II
Written by Mario Puzo, David Newman, and Leslie Newman
Directed by Richard Lester
Produced by Ilya Salkind
Original release date: June 19, 1981
These two films were conceived simultaneously, at least partly filmed simultaneously, and intended to be released one year apart. (The title card at the end of the first movie said to expect Superman II next year.) While that didn’t go as planned (Donner’s ouster and Lester’s re-shoots of the second film added a year and a half or so to the process), the two movies do work as a kind of single extended storyline…
We open on the planet Krypton, with Jor-El prosecuting three revolutionaries who are convicted of treason and sent to the Phantom Zone. Their leader, General Zod, boasts that some day Jor-El will kneel before him, as will his heirs. He’s half right…
After Zod, Ursa, and Non are sent off to the Phantom Zone (a flat square in which the trio can be seen to be trapped, a very low-key but effective bit of SFX), Jor-El tries to convince the council that the world is about to explode. The council thinks it’s just a normal shifting of orbit, thus proving that nobody writing the script understands anything about astronomy (shifting orbit is kind of a big deal). Jor-El and his wife Lara put their infant son Kal-El into a small ship and trundle him off to Earth, where he’ll be powerful, and the many-years journey through space (allegedly through many galaxies, also showing that nobody writing the script understands anything about astronomy) has him being educated by the ship.
Krypton goes boom. Everyone dies. It’s sad.
Kal-El’s ship crashes outside of Smallville, Kansas, where the toddler is rescued by Jonathan and Martha Kent, who raise him as their own, naming him Clark. They know from jump he’s different—not five minutes after they rescue him, he lifts their car with his bare hands—but he keeps that light under a bushel for the most part. Jonathan tells his teenage son—annoyed at not being able to be on the football team (which would, it should be pointed out, be horribly unfair)—that his gifts are for a higher purpose, not to score touchdowns. Right after that, Jonathan dies of a heart attack.
After the funeral, Kent takes a crystal from the ship he came to Earth in and is compelled to go north. He reaches the Arctic, er, somehow and throws the crystal into the snow, which then constructs a giant Krytponian fortress. An AI that mimics Jor-El teaches him, basically, everything over the course of twelve years, and then Kent flies off in his familiar Superman outfit.
Kent moves to Metropolis and gets a job at the Daily Planet as a reporter, er, somehow. He meets Lois Lane and is smitten, and surreptitiously saves her life from a mugger’s bullet. He later introduces himself as Superman by saving Lane from a helicopter crash, and then proceeds to stop a couple of robberies and rescue a cat from a tree. Everyone wants to know who this guy is, and he decides to give Lane the exclusive interview, and also takes her flying. (He comes within a hairsbreadth of revealing that he’s also Kent, but chickens out.)
From his headquarters underneath the city, Lex Luthor and his henchfolk, Otis and Eve Tessmacher, plot their latest scheme, a violent real-estate scam. He’s buying up cheap land in the Nevada desert, then will commandeer a couple of missiles to hit the San Andreas fault and sink California into the ocean (“like the mystics and statistics say it will“), thus making his new acquisitions valuable beachfront property.
He also gets his hands on some Kryptonite that is in a meteor that crashed in Addis Ababa. Using a special frequency that only Superman (and dogs) can hear, Luthor summons Superman to his lair and hits him with the Kryptonite. With the deadly rock slowly killing him and rendering him helpless, Luthor tosses him into a pool.
Luthor only needs one missile to sink California, so he sends the other one to Hackensack, New Jersey.* However, Tessmacher’s mother lives in Hackensack, so she goes behind Luthor’s back and removes the Kryptonite (but not before kissing Supes first), freeing him to stop both missiles. Hackensack is saved, but the missile actually strikes San Andreas before he can get there. However, he is able to repair the fault and save several lives.
*Digression: I first saw this film in the theatre at the age of nine when my aunt took me to see it. We saw the movie in a theatre in Hackensack, and when Luthor revealed the target of the second missile, we all lost it in the theatre. And when he stopped the missile, we cheered particularly loudly, as Superman had just saved all of us…
One life he can’t save, though, is Lane’s, as an aftershock buries her car with her in it. However, Superman, unable to face a world without her, manages to go back in time so he can save her. Sure.
Once everyone is safe, Superman takes Luthor and Otis to prison.
Later, Lane travels to Paris to do a story on terrorism, and terrorists take over the Eiffel Tower, threatening to destroy it with a hydrogen bomb. Superman flies across the Atlantic, saves Lane, stops the terrorists, and tosses the H-bomb into space. However, the bomb’s shockwave hits the Phantom Zone trap, and Zod, Ursa, and Non are freed. They go to the moon first, destroying a moon lander and killing the three astronauts. They then proceed to Earth where they terrorize a small town and eventually travel to D.C. where they force the president to abdicate to them.
Superman misses all this because Kent and Lane are assigned to a story in Niagara Falls, and Lane finally figures out that Kent is Superman. Kent denies it at first, but eventually he capitulates, and flies her to the Arctic to show her the Fortress of Solitude. He then relinquishes his powers so they can have sex. (Really, that’s the only explanation that makes sense, since they hop into bed right after he de-powers. It has to be that that was the only way for them to safely copulate. Obviously somebody read “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex“…)
They head back southward from the Arctic, er, somehow. En route, they stop in a diner, where a trucker takes Kent’s seat, and when Kent attempts to take it back the trucker beats the shit out of him. Right after that, they find out about Zod and the crew, and Kent realizes he has to get his powers back, even though the AI that now mimics Lara because Marlon Brando was too expensive to get back for another film told him that the process was irreversible. So he goes back to the Arctic, er, somehow, and reverses the irreversible, er, somehow.
Luthor—who escaped from prison thanks to Tessmacher, and invaded the Fortress of Solitude, thus learning most of Superman’s background, including all about Zod and his gang—works his way to the White House to tell Zod that he can give him the son of Jor-El. Zod takes the Daily Planet hostage, as kidnapping Lane is the best way to call Kal-El out, and sure enough, Supes shows up and they duke it out—first all over the streets of Metropolis, and then Superman leads them north to the Fortress. They bring Luthor along, as well as Lane as a hostage.
That last part was clever, as Superman surrenders rather than allow Lane to be hurt. Zod also tells Ursa and Non to kill Luthor. Luthor tries to suck up to Superman now that they’re both on the hit parade, and Superman whispers about the power-removing thingie to him. Luthor turns around and betrays Supes by telling Zod about it, and they put Supes back in the box that will again take his powers away. However, Superman reversed the polarity (or whatever) before company arrived, and so the effects are now outside the box instead of inside it. Zod, Ursa, and Non are now normal, and Superman kills all three of them in cold blood. (Well, to be fair, he only actually kills Zod. Lane kills Ursa, and Non just falls into a chasm on his own.)
Lane is having trouble handling being in a relationship with Superman, as she knows he’ll be in danger all the time. When Kent asks what he can do, she says, “Say you love me.” Instead, he kisses her and, without her consent, gives her super-amnesia. He didn’t even say he loved her, the bastard. She no longer remembers anything after Niagara Falls.
Superman goes back to the diner in order to beat the crap out of the trucker, which is spectacularly petty and unworthy of him, then he puts the flag back on top of the White House (Zod removed it forcibly) and promises the president that he won’t let him down again.
“Superman’s bad!”
Superman III
Written by David Newman & Leslie Newman
Directed by Richard Lester
Produced by Alexander & Ilya Salkind
Original release date: June 17, 1983
A completely absurd Rube Goldberg sequence ensues over the opening credits involving a seeing-eye dog abandoning a blind person (which would never happen), phone booths being knocked over like dominoes, wind-up penguins wandering the streets, people falling into construction holes, and other weirdness that toes the line between slapstick and dangerous. None of it has any bearing on the plot.
Lane is off to Bermuda for vacation, and Kent heads back to Smallville for his high school reunion, though for him it’s a working trip, as he’s going to write about small-town life and going home again for the first time in years. Jimmy Olsen goes with him to take pictures.
En route, they encounter a chemical fire, which Superman puts out, though Olsen breaks his leg trying to get pictures. In particular, Superman stops the fire before an acid can heat up. At room temperature, it’s inert, but when it’s heated it turns into an acid that can eat through anything. This will probably be important later.
He then goes to his reunion, where he’s reunited with Lana Lang, whom he had a crush on in high school. She married the prom king, had a kid, then divorced him, leaving her a single mother in a town where the only eligible bachelor is an asshole. As Kent’s urging, she considers a move to Metropolis.
A down-on-his-luck schlub named Gus Gorman takes a correspondence course in computer programming and discovers he has a tremendous aptitude for it. He gets a job working for industrialist Ross Webster as a low-level programmer, and he manages to embezzle more than $85,000. This comes to Webster’s attention, and he decides not to prosecute Gorman, but instead to employ him more directly. He has Gorman reprogram a weather satellite that apparently can affect weather, er, somehow to hit Colombia with a tornado that will destroy the coffee crop, thus giving Webster a monopoly on non-Colombian coffee, which he controls. (Colombia was holding out.) However, Superman saves the South American nation.
Webster decides he must destroy Superman, so he has Gorman use the satellite to examine Kryptonite so they can fabricate a batch and kill Superman. However, there’s an element the satellite can’t recognize, so their Kryptonite is imperfect. It doesn’t kill Superman, but it does make him evil. He stops saving people, straightens the leaning tower of Pisa (thus badly damaging tourism in that Italian city), trashes a bar, and just generally makes an ass of himself. Webster uses his masseuse, Lorelei, to seduce him and get him to aid in his plan to control the world’s oil—Gorman stops all the drills and sends all the oil tankers to the mid-Atlantic via computer, er, somehow. The one tanker that refuses to comply with the order, Lorelei sends Superman to trash, causing a major oil spill.
Lang’s kid sees Superman at one point and urges him to be good again, and it’s enough to cause a crisis of conscience. Superman and Kent have an endless semi-virtual fight in a junkyard and Kent emerges victorious. However, Webster has built a super-computer that Gorman designed that can defend itself against any attack. From there, Webster tries to kill Superman, but it doesn’t work. Gorman tries to pull the plug, but the computer is able to draw power from elsewhere. Superman flies back to Smallville and retrieves the acid, which the computer reads as harmless. Then Superman opens the canister and heats it up, causing it to eat through the computer, destroying it.
Webster and his cronies are sent to jail, but Superman lets Gorman go for some inexplicable reason. He re-leans the tower and cleans up the oil spill. Lane returns from her Bermuda vacation with a big story about corruption in the Caribbean to discover that Lang is now working as a secretary at the Planet.
“Destroy Superman!”
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
Written by Christopher Reeve, Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal
Directed by Sidney J. Furie
Produced by Menahem Golan & Yoram Globus
Original release date: July 24, 1987
Superman saves the lives of some cosmonauts in space whose orbiter is threatened by debris, then returns to terra firma to find out that a tabloid monger named Warfield has bought the Daily Planet and plans to turn it into the same kind of sleazy rag he specializes in. He puts his daughter Lacy in charge, though she’s slightly less of a scum-sucking weasel than her father, and also has a crush on Kent.
Kent is selling the family farm, and he finds a Kryptonian crystal that can do one big thing and then go inert. It’s the last gasp of his Kryptonian assistance, and will probably be important later.
A kid writes a letter to Superman care of the Planet asking Superman to do something about all the nuclear weapons. The president has just announced that a recent summit with the Soviet Union went south, and they’re going to have to make sure their nuclear arsenal is far stronger and more powerful than ever. (Ahem.) Superman doesn’t like this, and he agonizes about it for some time. He reveals his true identity to Lane again and takes her flying so he can discuss this in depth with her—and then he kisses her into amnesia again, which makes you wonder how many times he’s done this.
He marches to the United Nations and announces to the General Assembly that he’s removing all nuclear weapons from the Earth. This is met, not with outrage and (justifiable) accusations of Superman being a terrorist, but instead raucous applause. Okay, then.
Luthor escapes from prison with the aid of his nephew Lenny, whom Luthor describes as “the Dutch elm disease on my family tree.” He then gathers a consortium of arms dealers to restock the nuclear weapons that Superman is regularly tossing into the sun.
In addition, Luthor steals a lock of Superman’s hair from a museum that the man of steel donated it to and creates a Superman clone that looks nothing like Superman called the Nuclear Man, who is as powerful as Supes, but has Luthor’s voice. Luthor lures Superman to his lair the same way he did in the first movie (which takes Supes away from a ridiculous dinner date involving both him and Kent, as well as Lane and Lacy) and then the two men of steel duke it out all across the world. The Nuclear Man takes out the Great Wall of China; Superman repairs it with his wall-repairing vision (yes, really). The Nuclear Man activates the volcano outside Pompeii; Superman plugs it with a piece of another mountain. The Nuclear Man steals the Statue of Liberty and throws it at midtown; Superman catches it and puts it back, but not before the Nuclear Man scratches him, making him sick.
Luthor betrays his consortium and uses the Nuclear Man to threaten Metropolis. Superman uses his Krypton ex machina to restore himself and then he beats up the Nuclear Man some more, saving Lacy’s life in the process, as the Nuclear Man kidnaps her and takes her toward the moon before being too far from the sun deactivates him. Somehow, Lacy doesn’t die in the vacuum of space, and Superman rescues her, then places the Nuclear Man in a power planet, where he provides energy for the world, er, somehow.
Superman then holds a press conference saying that the world has to help itself and he can’t interfere. Okay, then. Perry White buys the Planet back, Luthor is back in jail, and Lenny’s in a school for boys.
“You’ve got me—who’s got you?”
It’s funny, one of the (justified) digs against Zack Snyder’s interpretation of Superman in Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is that Superman acts out of character. Supes is a hero, not a mopey, angst-ridden person who would snap Zod’s neck or just stand there when the Capitol Building is blown up.
Those arguments tend to long for the good ol’ days when Christopher Reeve was Superman, which sounds good, but watching these movies again, it’s obvious that the Salkinds and the people they hired (and the people who succeeded them) didn’t always get it, either. We’ve got Superman giving up his power and responsibility so he can get laid, we’ve got Superman beating up a bully for no compellingly good reason except for an immature “gotcha” moment that is unworthy of him, and we’ve got Superman casually letting Zod, Ursa, and Non die in the Arctic—in Zod’s case, by his own hand.
And then we’ve got Superman altering Lane’s memories without her consent. Not just once, but twice. You can argue that the first one was to save her from the emotional trauma of dating Superman (though that’s damned presumptuous of him) but the second time? He does it just so he can go on a consequence-free joyride with her and get her advice. To say that’s appalling doesn’t begin to cover it.
What’s fascinating watching these movies again is that, in terms of general plot, the third one is actually the one that’s the best straight-up Superman story. Webster is the perfect villain, a greedy industrialist, who uses his underlings to further his agenda at the expense of the common person. It’s only too bad that the movie is dumber than a box of rocks, wasting a great actor in Robert Vaughn, not to mention the comic talents of Pamela Stephenson. (Stephenson was a brilliant comedian, but most people she worked for couldn’t see past her looks, so she quit acting and comedy in disgust, and instead got her PhD in clinical psychology.) Richard Pryor didn’t annoy me as much as I thought he would, mostly because he does have a certain amount of heart, and he’s also actually funny, which is one up on most of what passes for comedy in the misbegotten third film.
Mostly the third movie shows absolutely no understanding of how computers work, which is a problem if that’s what you’re basing your plot on. On the other hand, the absurd slaptstick opening sequence makes it clear that nobody involved in making the film is taking it seriously, so why should we? Which is good, as the junkyard scene of Good Kent facing Evil Superman is not only idiotic and embarrassing, it goes on waaaaaaaaaay too long.
The first movie is, unsurprisingly, the strongest of the four, though even there you can see the seams from the lunatic process by which it and its sequel were both written and filmed. (It doesn’t help that top-billed Marlon Brando can’t even be arsed to do anything as good as phoning in his performance; he’s a disaster, and substituting Susannah York’s Lara for him in the second film is frankly something of a relief.) The opening on Krypton is actually quite well done, even with the drag effect of Brando’s somnabulent line readings, the crystalline art direction for Krypton making Superman’s home truly alien. The Smallville scenes are brief and effective (if you’d told me before this week that Glenn Ford was only actually in two scenes as Jonathan Kent, I’d have said you were lying; he created that much of an impression that it felt like he was in it more), and while Luthor’s plan is pretty over-the-top and absurd (also, where does he get the resources to build an underground headquarters, fly around the country to alter missiles and steal Kryptonite, and so forth?), it still works, and has consequences. Superman going back in time to save Lane probably seemed like it would show the depths of their love, but mostly it just comes across as artificial suspense.
The second movie has much bigger problems. Terence Stamp and Gene Hackman make up for a lot of those flaws, as they’re both superlative bad guys, if somewhat one-dimensional. Still, the moment when the president kneels down and mutters, “Oh God,” and the general corrects him, “Zod!” is one of the finest villain moments in superhero movie history.
But the fact that parts of this movie were filmed a year or more apart are evident in differing hairstyles and actors’ weight and looks. The movie is at once serious and slapstick, with Non in particular made the butt of jokes for no compellingly good reason. (If you want to know what the movie would have been like had Donner finished it himself, one can get the “Donner cut” on DVD.)
Worse, though, is that Superman isn’t a hero in most of this movie. The Eiffel Tower scene is pretty much it—after that, he’s too busy mooning over Lane to actually notice that three Kryptonians are wreaking havoc. And does he lure them out of the city right away to avoid people getting hurt? No, he stays in town so we can have the big fight in Metropolis before heading north.
Reeve does superlative work in these films. Forty years later, the effects don’t look all that special, but they were cutting-edge for the time, and gave much more verisimilitude to Superman’s powers. But what Reeve accomplished was something that nobody else who has played Superman in live action has truly managed: he made us believe a person could use a pair of glasses as a disguise. He did that by not relying on his outsized specs—his posture, his body language, his voice, all of it changed when he was Kent. It remains one of the most effective dual-identity performances in the superhero pantheon, and it—along with Reeve’s general earnestness—helps sell the movies and cover a multitude of sins.
Which is good, as the movies commit many. Despite their flaws, though, they did pave the way for more superhero movies in the theatre.
But before we dive into that, we’ll be looking at some of the TV movies of the 1970s and 1980s released on either side of Reeve’s efforts. Next week, Marvel’s first attempts at Spider-Man and Dr. Strange.
Keith R.A. DeCandido does sometimes believe that a man can fly.
Keith – thanks for this fantastic write-up! Superman has been my favorite superhero ever since I was a little boy, namely due to seeing the Reeve films when I was small. I must confess, I had not seen these movies in years and years and so last year, finally bought the first two Reeve films to re-watch. Looks like I made a good choice in not buying the latter 2. Anyway, I sat down to watch them expecting to be disappointed. Shockingly, amazingly, I spent most of the movies with a stupid grin on my face. Gosh do I love them. Are there plot holes and cringy moments? Sure.
But as one of your final paragraphs so superbly states, Reeve is simply marvelous in the titular role. He won me over when I was a little boy and he won me over anew last year. My cynicism melted away and my soul was strangely warmed upon seeing the earnestness and sheer heart of Superman. So, I guess these movies may not look as good as the superhero movies of the modern age, but I love them far more. One more note – Kidder is simply wonderful as Lois, who plays a fantastic counterpart to both Kent & Superman. Just like Reeve is “my” Superman, Kidder is “my” Lois.
I have always felt that Christopher Reeves, especially in the first film, embodied the “truth, justice, and the american way” concept more so than any Supes since. The first Captain America film had that same feel to it (and also Caps got the obligatory ‘get darker’ deal later on also).
More importantly MAN OF STEEL WOMAN OF KLEENEX! One of my most quoted reads, especially the part that discussed the essential ickiness of interspecies dating.
The first movie was redeemed for me by this dialogue (from memory):
S: Is that how you get your kicks, Luthor? By planning the deaths of millions of innocent people?
L: No, by causing the deaths of millions of innocent people!
Muhammad Ali? Was he considered for Superman? Wow!
It would have been nice if, somehow, the Hackensack missile was actually targeting whatever city the theater you were watching it was. Did you think that at the moment?
Also, I did not remember that many of the flaws in “getting Superman” as a character people point out in Snyder’s films were also present in these. It truly rests on Reeve’s shoulders that the films and the fact that they were the first BIG movies with Superman that people liked.
Awesome write-up, though I do think you’re being unfair to Richard Pryor, who was a bright spot (the only bright spot) in SIII.
Superman IV was the first one I saw in theaters, and even as a 7-year old I was massively disappointed by how dumb it was.
For a long time, I had a low opinion of all the Reeve Superman films. I thought they were all pretty cheesy and dumb, even the first one that everyone loved. A few years back, I revisited them and found that the first film was better than I remembered, but the second one was still just as bad as I remembered, if not worse. The Donner Cut improved a lot about the second film, but totally fumbled the ending. But I gained a much greater appreciation of Superman III, which is almost a perfect embodiment of the spirit of the goofy Silver Age Superman comics as well as telling a more coherent and consistent story than its predecessors, and which is much kinder to Clark Kent (as opposed to Kal-El/Superman) than its predecessors, and which benefits enormously from the luminous presence of Annette O’Toole. Here are my blog posts on the films:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/re-evaluating-the-richard-donner-superman-films/
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/as-for-lesters-superman-ii/
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/re-evaluating-superman-iii/
But Superman IV is still a total disaster and I didn’t even try to reassess it.
I was expecting this post to cover the ’84 Supergirl as well, since it’s part of the same series/continuity as these films. Is that one coming up later?
By the way, amazingly enough, there actually is precedent for Superman IV‘s “Rebuild the Great Wall of China Vision.” The George Reeves TV series had one episode where Superman used his x-ray vision to reassemble a torn-up note in a wastebasket via stop-motion animation (though maybe that was symbolic of his mind piecing the text together, I guess), and another episode where he uses super-breath to blow a collapsing chimney back into shape (by reversing the film of its collapse) after a gangster breaks it off in an attempt on Clark Kent’s life.
While we’re at it, there’s comics precedent for Superman’s amnesia kiss. I recently read a 1941 comic where Clark and Lois were trapped in a burning barn and Clark hypnotized Lois into a trance so that he could change to Superman and rescue her without her being aware of it. I guess they abandoned that power later because it made things too easy for Clark.
At one point or other in his almost 80 year history, Superman has displayed a lot of different powers. I’m still waiting for a movie or TV show that shows us that he can alter the shape of his face and telepathically control someone else’s thoughts and actions. Or shoot a mini-Superman out of his hand.
I’d just like to note the third movie has one of the scariest moments in movie history (if you were a kid in the ’80s), when a woman is grabbed by the supercomputer and turned into a robot. It’s one of those scenes I remember watching between my fingers. Computers are scary!
@7/MaGnUs: I gather there was a story in the ’50s or so where Superman hurled Titano the giant ape back to prehistory where he could live happily among all the giant prehistoric predators (umm…), and the final panel showed him using his super-vision to look back through time to confirm that the big gorilla was happy. Evidently this was something the readers deemed too implausible, so in the reprint they rewrote the dialogue so that Superman was now just using his power of “super-imagination,” whatever that is. Which, unsurprisingly, wasn’t deemed any more plausible, so they changed it back in the next reprint.
How do you talk about Christopher Reeve’s performance and NOT the “Excuse me General, would you care to step outside?” moment? It’s the best hero arrival in any movie EVER.
Also, I’m not sure it was intended that Superman and Lois killed the Kryptonians, in a permanent way. In a deleted scene they’re shown being escorted away by the police, so I guess they went down a “super fun happy slide” in that cut. But even in the existing official cuts they disappear into a foggy abyss. When that happens in superhero fiction, I never count it as a death per se; it’s more like a question mark, just in case they ever wanted to bring characters back (see Sherlock Holmes for a classic example).
Not quite as official as snapping a neck.
@6/ChristopherLBennett: I always thought that Superman 4 was such a messy very special episode about nuclear weapons, and Nuclear Man. Cannon did not care about it. So they’ve cut down the special effects budget and all of Metropolis was filmed in Milton-Keynes.
MilesPrower: what’s under the Fortress is the Arctic Ocean. The three Kryptonians were normal humans. No way they survived that.
MDNY: I thought Pryor was good.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The first two are by far the best of the bunch with the first one coming out ahead of the sequel. And to this day the soundtrack remains my favourite super-hero music.
For me, the best part is where Superman drop Lois off after their flight and suddenly appears at the front door as Clark Kent. When Lois step out of the room for a moment, Clark decides to reveal his secret identity to her. And Reeve NAILS the transformation from Clark to Superman. His posture changes. His face changes. He simply becomes another person. He sells the idea of the glasses as a disguise. And then, just as quickly, he reverts to Clark. It’s an amazing performance.
Yes, they’re goofy and fun and that’s the point. I don’t need a big body count, particularly one created by the heroes, in order to enjoy a superhero movie. And on that note, I never got the idea that Zod, Ursa and Non had died. Sure, they fell into a pit but it was filled with fog and we never did see where they landed. For all we know, the pit led to Supes super-jail beneath the fortress. At least we didn’t have this Superman snapping Zod’s neck.
The Richard Donner cut is a much better take on the sequel but there are a few jarring moments in it, seeing as it was cobbled together from discarded shots, screen tests and what not. It’s still work checking out
#13
You’re forgetting how this movie series could twist itself into a goofy pretzel to make things happen. Look at the creation of Nuclear Man for crying out loud. Not survive it? “The Kryptonians have broken out of my Arctic prison!” says Superman in the sequel that never happened. See, it’s easy.
So between the release of S II and III there was a murder comedy (Deathtrap)starring Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine. All the kids in my neighborhood, who’d loved the Superman movies, and the various action movies Caine had been in, went to see it.
The reaction when they kissed, after murdering Dylan Cannon’s character, was (in retrospect) very amusing.
There’s a very funny bit where Clark Kent is preparing to change, runs up to a pay phone that is free-standing rather than in a booth, looks at it, shakes his head, anduses the revolving door.
Christopher: I didn’t include Supergirl because four movies is a lot for one post as it is. Going forward, I’m gonna try to keep it to no more than three movies per post, and adding Supergirl would’ve been too much.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
No discussion of these movies is complete without at least a mention of the iconic John Williams theme.
Something everyone should do: Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex
And as Pamela Stephenson doesn’t get enough respect: NTNON “There’s A Man In Iran” (Ayatollah Song)
@13/krad: “what’s under the Fortress is the Arctic Ocean. The three Kryptonians were normal humans. No way they survived that.”
But Clark was a “normal human” when he somehow managed to trek on foot from the depths of the Arctic back to civilization with Lois, and then back again by himself. If we can accept that he somehow avoided freezing to death in those conditions, then we can accept that the Phantom Zoners survived being dunked in the Arctic Ocean long enough for Superman to retrieve them and dump them in the Deleted Scene PD’s paddy wagon.
@17/wiredog: The weird thing about the phone booth gag is that Superman virtually never changed in a phone booth in the actual comics or on TV; indeed, the only times it happened in the comics seem to have been done as humorous winks to the cliche of Superman changing in a phone booth. So the origin of that cliche is kind of a mystery. It seems the idea comes mainly from one of the early Fleischer cartoons, but how it came to be seen as something Superman did routinely is unclear. It’s just one of those memes that took on a life of its own.
In which film does Superman hear about a fire at a chemical plant and immediately fly to help? He land behind the fire chief and says ‘What’s happening here chief?’ the chief shouts ‘Somebody get this man a helmet!’ as he turns, sees who it is, says ‘Oh it’s you.’ and calls to whoever, ‘Cancel the helmet!’ before going on to describe the threat. That’s one of my favorite moments.
princessroxana: that was in Superman III. The fire chief was played by Al Matthews, who’s probably best known for playing Sgt. Apone in Aliens. (“Somebody wake up Hicks…..”)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m honestly not sure if I’ve ever seen IV or not — based on when it was released, it’s not impossible that I saw it in the theater, but I don’t have any memories of it, and at this point I have absolutely zero desire to actually watch it to confirm one way or the other.
I do remember enjoying the first two movies when I saw them in the theater, and again when I watched them on disc a few years back. I vaguely remember seeing III in the theater, but again I have no desire to revisit it.
Reeve really was quite good.
Also – hopefully this isn’t too off-topic…but seeing this Christopher Reeve speech at the Oscars never fails to bring me to tears. Truly, my Superman.
Christopher Reeve is the best Superman, maybe that’s my age showing.
@7.MaGnUs. There was a Superman comic in the late 70’s that had an answer to how does he look different. Can’t remember it all but the gist was the glass in his glasses was from the crashed spaceship that brought him to earth (regular glass melted under his supervision). These glasses also caused a “magic krytonian bs effect” on the people he looked at so they saw Clark thinner and less attractive than Superman. I can’t believe I remember it, the minutiae that sticks with you, yet I can’t find my housekeys, again,
@26/mammam: I think that explanation about the glasses was one of those things in comics that quickly get abandoned and ignored because nobody much liked the idea.
My preferred explanation is that people don’t see through Clark’s disguise because it doesn’t occur to them that a co-worker of theirs would even have a disguise. People tend to accept the ordinary as ordinary. For instance, plenty of famous actors are able to walk down the street without being recognized, because people just don’t expect to see them in that context or don’t recognize them without their glamour makeup and hairstyles. Most likely, people would probably just say to Clark, “Hey, did anyone ever tell you that you look kinda like Superman?” And he’d go “Yeah, I get that a lot.” (Somebody once came up to me in a video store to say that he thought I looked like Paul McCartney, but he didn’t think for a moment that I actually was. I never quite saw the resemblance myself, but hey, better Paul than Ringo.) Of course, that explanation doesn’t work in the Silver Age, when Lois was constantly trying to prove that Clark was Superman.
“From his headquarters underneath the city, Lex Luthor and his henchfolk, Otis and Eve Tessmacher, plot their latest scheme”
Admit it, everyone, you totally read “Tessmacher!” in Hackman’s scream-voice. You maybe even said it out loud.
Dr. Thanatos@2:
“The first Captain America film had that same feel to it (and also Caps got the obligatory ‘get darker’ deal later on also).”
At the risk of going off topic, I didn’t feel like Cap got darker. I felt like the world got darker on Cap, and his coming to grips with how the United States has changed was a huge part of both Winter Soldier and Civil War. I think Steve Rogers has remained constant and true to the character set up in The First Avenger.
By the way, Eve’s last name is actually spelled Teschmacher.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000250/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_55
@27.ChristopherLBennett. You’re probably right, I mentioned it to a friend who said it sounded like the “break the fourth wall” issues comics used to have (maybe still do), he remembers one where Superman and Batman sat in their dressing room and answered fan mail
@31/mamman: No, I tracked it down, and it was actually explained in-story. It was Superman #330 by Martin Pasko and Curt Swan, from a concept by Al Schroeder III.
https://www.supermanhomepage.com/comics/pre-crisis-reviews/pre-crisis-mmrs-intro.php?topic=c-review-pc-sup330
While dealing with a hypnotist villain, he came to realize that the Kryptonian material in his glasses had been allowing him to hypnotize everyone into seeing the image of Clark Kent that he tried to project — someone feebler, plainer, and less impressive than Superman. Somehow it even worked on cameras. This was in 1978, so that continuity lasted for another 8-9 years before being rebooted, but I don’t think this point ever came up again.
Now, that wouldn’t explain one of the dumbest moments from the ’40s Superman radio series, in the last kryptonite story they did. Superman had lost his memory due to the kryptonite, and he’d wandered off and ended up becoming a star baseball player due to his superpowered pitch and other abilities. Lois and Jimmy were sent to cover the story of this phenom, and upon seeing him in person — without glasses, speaking in his Superman voice, and performing astonishing feats of strength and physical prowess — they immediately recognized him… as Clark Kent! And yet they never recognized Superman as Clark Kent. (Maybe his cape was hypnotizing them into thinking Superman looked different? Or maybe it’s like Martha Kent said in the Lois & Clark pilot — in those tights, nobody’s looking at his face.)
The screenwriter names (besides Christopher Reeves, of course) seem awfully familiar. Didn’t they go on to write ST VI: TUC?
I think there also may be bits that I remember from the first Superman movie that weren’t actually in the movie, but were in the novelization.
I hope my memory is working properly, but as I recall Luthor didn’t intend for the missle to go to Hackensack, but when Otis reprogrammed it he read the numbers backwards or upside down because of the way he had written them on his forearm so he wouldn’t forget them.
Amy Bisson: Konner and Rosenthal were credited as co-screenwriters of Star Trek VI, and were assigned to work on the script by Paramount, but according to everyone involved, nothing of theirs made it to the final film.
raaj: Your memory is not working properly, but it’s okay, the movie is several decades old….. Otis did, in fact, screw up the sequences, but that meant that Luthor had to send Tesmacher in to fix Otis’s screwup. Luthor and Otis blocked the convoy as it went over a bridge with a big truck, and acted like redneck bumpkins in order to distract them long enough for Tesmacher to fix Otis’s mistake. His mistake, by the way, was to think there were only four numbers to program rather than five. He thought 117 was the fourth, when the fourth was 11 and the fifth was 7.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@36: It always seemed to me that when Luthor revealed the second missile’s destination, and Teschmacher protested “My mother lives in Hackensack!”, the implication was that he had decided to nuke Hackensack specifically in order to kill his girlfriend’s mom. He’s not a nice man. (Something I really like about Hackman’s performance is that despite the underground lair and the jokes and other pulp-villain trappings, he plays Luthor in a way that doesn’t let you completely forget that in the real world, gangsters and white-collar criminals aren’t particularly cool, they’re unpleasant petty narcissists.)
Superman I and II are rocky but beautiful. I like them the way I like the original Iron Man movie, before the Marvel movie machinery got slick. You can see them trying different things, not being sure what works.
My two favourite bits, unmentioned: how about that theme tune, huh? Duh, duh, duh, duh, SUPERMAN!
Also I love the prison warden in the first movie actually gets to say “Our city is safe again, Superman–thanks to you!” It’s one of the heart-on-its-sleeve moments that really make me warm to the Reeve movies.
I like Reeve as Superman, but I just don’t buy the goody two shoes hero schtick. Why?
Because in real life Superman would be a villain.
Think about it. Dual life, with two personalities that are different. One works all day at a paper, and the other does Superman stuff (at night? on the weekends? on his lunch break? when does he sleep?) That’s a prescription for schizophrenia.
So Superman saves a kitten in New York City. He’s a hero. Yay. Now he has to save every kitten, every bus load of nuns, EVERYONE ALL THE TIME. He lets one kid get hit by a bus, he’s a bum. That’s how the world works.
Superman may be a nice guy, but people are ungrateful douchebags. He’d get tired of that crap pretty quick, turn cynical, and eventually just let people die. Probably even justify it in his own head with “well, a busload of nuns is already married to God, so they can burn. I’ll save the cheerleader squad instead.” Short trip from there to outright villainy.
@39/ragnarredbeard: Mother Teresa’s big thing was preaching about how pain and suffering brings one closer to God, and so she would often encourage the suffering of people she cared for by withholding treatment, and yet she’s still held up as an icon of goodness and purity by the general public. People don’t always react the same way all the time.
Besides, you’re neglecting that there are all sorts of people that do act like Superman. Look at social workers; they get treated horribly by so many people, and there’s definitely a huge amount of turn around in the profession. But there’s also those that stay in the job despite the mistreatment by people they’re trying to help and the horrors that they have to face on a daily basis and the general lack of financial or psychological support that’s endemic in the profession because they’re entirely willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others. They don’t even get the public lauding, they get nothing but the negative blowback, and yet there are still plenty that keep going.
I think your post is more a reflection of your own cynicism than anything.
Still, if you want to see a take on your perception of Superman, check out Mark Waid’s “Irredeemable”.
(Also, schizophrenia has nothing at all to do with dual identities; you’re thinking of dissociative identity disorder, the thing that most all media calls schizophrenia. But also you can’t contract DID that way anyway.)
>39, maybe that’s what happened to Hancock?
I was a kid at the time and ate up these Reeve-as-Superman movies as kid entertainment. Aside from Ursa killing that poor kid out of hand, and the scary woman-becomes-a-robot that somebody above mentioned, they worked very well as such. Maybe better than the current round of super hero flicks does, or so I thought. I tried the first of these on my seven year old, and the apocalyptic scene of Krypton’s destruction pretty much killed it for him.
Every time I try humming that Superman theme, it magically turns into Star Wars. Very frustrating.
People can debate who’s the best Superman like who’s the best Bond, but I think Reeve has it locked down for a long time to come.
@31/mammam and @32/CLB: I had that issue! I couldn’t afford many comics as a child, but on the rare occasions that I was sick enough to stay home from school, my Dad would swing buy the 7-11 and buy a couple at random off the spinner rack for me. That particular time I had a rather nasty flu, and Dad brought me three Superman issues, including #330. The Spellbinder story was mostly forgettable, but the “Superman’s glasses” explanation seemed completely brilliant (to a flu-addled six-year-old), and it stuck with me for decades. I wasn’t a regular Superman reader, so I didn’t know that this explanation was generally ignored by later writers.
@39:
While I admittedly have no first hand experience with either, I think superpowers would work like money; having some just makes you more of what you already are.
Probably should have said something about the article itself — excellent work, as always, Keith. For me, and most of my age-cohort, these movies were the only superhero movies that existed, and pretty much defined what they should be. They’re not without flaws, as everyone has said, but Christopher Reeve IS Superman for me and a lot of people my age. And John Williams is a complete genius. He defined what heroism sounds like. Put it all together, and I DID believe a man can fly.
If I see a picture of superman above me be reminded of my childhood first. So I really want to be able to fly like superman hehe
@34/hoopmanjh: “I think there also may be bits that I remember from the first Superman movie that weren’t actually in the movie, but were in the novelization.”
There was no novelization. Rather, the tie-in novel for the movie was actually an original novel set in the comics continuity, Superman: Last Son of Krypton by Elliot S! Maggin, who wrote a lot of Bronze Age (’70s) Superman comics. It was marketed as a movie tie-in and had photos from the movie on its cover and in a mid-book insert, but it was an entirely distinct story, albeit covering similar ground such as Superman’s origin and childhood. (In fact, LSoK was based on a treatment Maggin had done for a Superman feature film in 1974 or so. Warner Bros. passed on it and went with Puzo’s script instead.) LSoK is a much, much better Superman story than the movie, and one of the finest Superman stories ever written. They did the same thing for Superman II, with a second original Maggin novel called Miracle Monday.
@43/Anthony Pero: Yes, exactly. That’s the thing that defines Superman. What makes him super isn’t his power; it’s the innate decency that compels him to use that power for the good of others. We see this in stories where he loses his power but still puts himself on the line to help people, or in Elseworlds stories where Kal-El’s rocketship lands somewhere else (say, in Gotham City or the USSR) and he still turns out heroic even when not raised with the wholesome values of a Middle American farmer.
@39,43,46
Its probably worth mentioning that Brandon Sanderson has a series that explores the concept of all Superheroes going insane and becoming evil, called The Reckoners. Its not because they become disillusioned as @39 postulates regarding Supes, however, but a side effect of using their superpowers.
@46 — That would be an excellent explanation for why I might remember bits from the book that didn’t actually appear in the movie …
@32. ChristopherLBennett, @42. Brian MacDonald
I can’t believe you tracked it down and you remembered it (you know who you are). The things that stick in our heads. I usually read comics when I was sick too, I’d run out of other things to read and would steal them from my brother’s room, he was the big comic book fan
@39. That’s one of the reasons I love the Post-Crisis continuity (where all of DC’s heroes exist in the same universe) so much; in a world with Superman, I have to assume that other costumed heroes would rise to follow his example.
When Superman’s not around, there’s Black Lightning, Gangbuster, or the Guardian, and that’s just in Metropolis.
@51/Cybersnark: The heroes were in the same universe pre-Crisis too; that’s how we got team books like Justice Society/League of America and crossover books like World’s Finest and The Brave and the Bold. It’s just that the solo books didn’t reflect or acknowledge that shared reality as much as the team-up books did.
@41: Regarding trying to hum “Superman” and getting “Star Wars”. I’m not sure whether this would help or not. “John Williams is the Man” is a text about Star Wars, set to iconic John Williams movie themes – but not the Star Wars theme. (It came to mind because one of the themes used is in fact the Superman theme.)
@26 – mammam: Yeah, I remember reading about that one. No surprise it didn’t stick.
@51,
Shared-universe makes it even easier for Superman to turn into a villain. Say there’s a 12 alarm fire across town and Black Lightning shows up first. Supes drops in and the fire chief says “too late, mate”. Does Supes take that one-upmanship crap from lesser heroes? No, he’s SUPERMAN. Better than any other man, he’s SUPERMAN. Those other heroes have no business hogging his glory. After all, he’s SUPERMAN. And that Justice League thing? Where do they get off? He can wipe the floor with any of them or all of them at the same time. He’s SUPERMAN.
Of course he’d be a villain.
@55/ragnar: “Does Supes take that one-upmanship crap from lesser heroes? No, he’s SUPERMAN. Better than any other man, he’s SUPERMAN. Those other heroes have no business hogging his glory.”
Wow, that is the exact opposite of how Superman thinks. Only very small and petty people base their sense of self on being better than others — just look at the current US President. Superman, like all truly great people, is incredibly humble and selfless. That’s what’s great about him — he has all these amazing powers, but he sees everyone else as amazing and wondrous. He’s not a hero because he can lift mountains, he’s a hero because he lifts up people.
I think I read something from Keith that commented on this recently, talking about the flaw in the song that cites tugging on Superman’s cape as something it’s dangerously unwise to do. The thing is, Superman is the kind of person who, if someone tugged on his cape, would politely say, “Yes, can I help you?” or at most “Please don’t do that.”
Christopher: That wasn’t me, though I have mentioned in the past that tugging on Superman’s cape is no big deal.
Batman, though — you don’t tug on his cape. Unless it’s the Adam West version, in which case, the same thing applies. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad: All I can say is I knew there were theories about the dangers of Superman having sex with a human being. I had no idea Larry Niven himself had written an essay about it. Thanks for providing the title and linking to Wikipedia.
As for the four films, the first one is still the best. I’d argue it’s still the best Superman movie made, period. Certainly better than the Snyder-verse entries, and also better than the Singer version (which I actually enjoyed a lot). And the second film has issues, lots of them, and this is coming from someone who only saw the Donner-approved special cut. I’m actually not at all eager to try the Lester version.
Zack Snyder, what are you doing here? ;-)
Some people on Facebook asked me if I was reviewing the theatrical version of the second movie or the Donner cut.
The question genuinely surprised me, because the Donner cut isn’t a movie. It’s a stitched-together artifact of what might have been. It never occurred to me to even consider the possibility of reviewing it over the theatrical release, as at best it’s a nifty bit of pop culture ephemera, but to me its like reviewing the deleted scenes instead of the movie……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@56,
The Superman represented by Christopher Reeve *may* have been all you say, but Man of Steel Superman is brooding, probably depressed, and ripe for turning heel.
Which in a nutshell is why some people disliked Man of Steel.
Some superheroes are dark and broody, I’m looking at you Caped Crusader! Some like Superman and Captain America are just good guys and don’t care if people think that’s corny. Yes, if you tugged on Superman’s cape he’d turn to you with a smile and say, ‘Can I help you, ma’am?’
@60/krad: Well, I like the Donner Cut for the most part, because the Donner footage it does contain is much, much better than what’s in the Lester version. Lois is a far stronger character with more agency in the Donner version, and Clark getting his powers back actually makes some sense, because it requires Jor-El’s spirit/computer avatar/whatever the hell he’s supposed to be to sacrifice himself in order to restore Clark’s powers, so there’s an actual price to it rather than just a nonsensical copout, plus it works better as a resolution of the characters’ arc from the first movie. It may be an incomplete glimpse of a movie we didn’t get, but I’m glad to have that glimpse because it’s a far, far better movie.
Where it falls apart is in tacking on the same ending as the first movie. That was a totally dumb idea. Yes, the original plan was for that to be the end of the second movie, but they’d already changed that plan by the time they shot the movies, which is why that footage is complete in the first film to begin with. If they had finished the Donner version, they would’ve come up with a new ending to replace the time-warp one. So it’s an error of fact to end the reconstruction of “what Donner’s Superman II would’ve been” with that sequence, and it makes it a less enjoyable viewing experience in combination with the first film. As I said in my blog review, if I watch the Donner Cut again, I’ll stop just after Clark leaves Lois on the balcony. Sure, that means Lois still knows Clark is Superman, but there isn’t actually anything in Superman III that directly contradicts that (indeed, her jealousy of Lana at the end makes little sense otherwise), and I dismiss The Quest for Peace altogether, so it’s fine with me if she still knows.
@61/ragnar: I would agree that your description applies to the Superman of Dawn of Justice, but I disagree that it describes the Clark/Superman of Man of Steel. For all that movie’s titanic flaws (which I’m sure we’ll get to in time), the thing that worked best about it was that the character of Clark transcended the movie’s attempts to tear him down. He remained committed to doing good and helping others despite all of Objectivist Jonathan’s attempts to teach him to be selfish and passive.
As ever, I think I saw these movies in a weird order: IV, then III, and then I don’t think I saw I or II all the way through until many years later, I just saw them in bits. Watching them in the 90s, it was impossible not to compare their take on Clark and Lois with Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher’s portrayal in New Adventures of Superman, notably the very different take on Clark. Perhaps more in the later two movies than the first two, “Clark” seems to be a useless disguise (disguised as something useless, that is, not a disguise that is useless) who quickly gets cast aside when the fun starts. I think the secondary females in the last two films suffer badly. Actually, Annette O’Toole is quite well-served but then the next film completely ignores her. (Were they already trying to distance themselves from the less popular films and just follow the first two?) Lacy had potential but there’s no time to develop her in a rather short film that also has to find a role for Lois. It might have been nice to see it followed up on.
Karma houdinis do seem the order of the day. Gus Gorman gets let off the hook despite giving Superman synthetic kryptonite intended to kill him because he has a last minute change of heart. Is it because he was too stupid to understand what was going on? Similarly, Miss Tessmacher is on board until someone whose name she knows is in danger, then goes right back to helping Luthor in the next movie, but she doesn’t get flown to jail. (Is this Luthor’s back-up plan, that if she changes sides she’ll make sure Superman goes after the missile he doesn’t care about?) By the way, I’ve heard Gene Hackman basically left SII with Donner and refused to take part in reshoots, making Luthor’s appearances rather sporadic and possibly explaining why Miss Tessmacher disappears halfway through the film.
Received wisdom seems to be that Ma Kent is still alive when Clark becomes Superman: That’s the take used by semi-sequel Superman Returns and by continuities “inspired” by it like Smallville or Man of Steel. But it seems to ignore Clark describing himself as an orphan when he joins the Daily Planet (he could be referring to his Kryptonian parents but he’s leaving himself open to someone checking) and selling the farm at the start of IV as if he’s inherited it. I tend to assume she died during the twelve year time skip.
Ah, Superman turns back time. Which Donner insisted on reusing for his director’s cut after 25 years of pop culture making fun of it. Aside from the anti-drama of giving your hero the power to reverse any mistake, he turns back time and then…doesn’t change anything. He just tells Lois to get out of the car then flies off, leaving her to get buried by the landslide again. Did he stop it happening when we weren’t looking? Does he think she can outrun it if she’s not trapped in the car?
I prefer it if Superman did kill Zod. It’s more interesting from a character point of view and it lets us laugh at people who say “Christopher Reeve’s Superman would never have killed General Zod!”, convinced that reluctantly killing someone to save innocent lives is worse than cheerily throwing a villain who’s no threat to anyone into a bottomless cavern like a Golden Age heroic sociopath (which, let’s face it, is what Golden Age Superman pretty much was). Even if you convince yourself that Zod somehow survives, we’re left with a more extreme version of Clark getting his own back on the trucker, inflicting extreme physical punishment on a weaker opponent for…what? Revenge? Vigilante street justice?
My own take on the super-amnesia: It’s not to protect her from the dangers of dating Superman, it’s because of bizarre plot rules that they can’t be together if he’s got his powers. He’s got them back so they can’t be together, so she has to spend all day around the person she loves and has loved knowing she can’t act on it. So he has her go back to viewing him as lovable but harmless Clark and loving Superman from afar. (It does feel very dated and it was amusing to see a column in Doctor Who Magazine, in the aftermath of the TV Movie giving the Doctor a romantic life, holding a 15-year-old movie up as evidence of why super-powered aliens can’t have romantic partners, especially not humans and especially especially not female ones, while ignoring the contemporaneous TV series in which Superman and Lois are having sex all over the place. But only after they’re married, because we’re not ready for Superman having pre-marital sex yet. Save that for Smallville.) The mind-wipe scene in IV is the definition of pointless though. (To be fair, he’s surprised that it automatically returns the memories he wiped, so it doesn’t seem like he’s done it before.)
(By the way, did you know that the previous rewatch in this series isn’t listed on the series page?)
@64 cap-mjb: Yes, Martha Kent is still alive when he becomes Superman. Don’t forget, Clark Kent asked Perry White to send half his paycheck home, and Lois guessed he was sending it to his sweet gray haired old mother. To which Clark replied, “Silver-haired.”
@64/cap-mjb: That’s right, Hackman didn’t participate in the Lester reshoots. When new Luthor material was needed, a double was shot from the rear and another actor imitated Hackman’s voice — you can tell the difference if you listen closely.
As for Martha being alive or not, Superman Returns ignores the latter two films entirely, positing that Superman left Earth sometime not long after Superman II. Of course, it’s also a “sliding timescale” sort of sequel, since it retcons the first two films’ events to happen about two decades later. So it’s only loosely a continuation. I’ve always taken Superman IV to indicate that Martha passed away not too long before, but I’m not sure.
In the original comics, both Ma and Pa Kent were gone by the time Clark became Superman. The idea of Pa Kent dying first comes from the original 1942 novel The Adventures of Superman by George Lowther, who also wrote for the radio series of the same name and adapted the same origin story to radio and to the George Reeves TV series (although he called the Kents Eben and Sara). But the Superboy comics of the ’50s had both Ma and Pa Kent dying simultaneously from a rare disease that Superboy blamed himself for exposing them to (pathos!). Of course, the John Byrne reboot had both Kents still alive and well in Superman’s present day, a precedent followed by Lois & Clark and Superman: The Animated Series. It’s only from Smallville onward that the “Pa Kent dying first” version has become fashionable again.
“Which Donner insisted on reusing for his director’s cut…” — The title is a misnomer for promotional purposes. It’s not actually Donner’s own recut of the movie. It’s Michael Thau’s cut in consultation with Donner.
Actually, Superman III explicitly stated that Clark’s mother was dead, as the last time Clark has gone home before the reunion was for his mother’s funeral. However, she was alive when he first joined the Planet staff, as he had half his paycheck sent to her.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Quoth cap-mjb: “(By the way, did you know that the previous rewatch in this series isn’t listed on the series page?)”
Huh? It is too on the series page……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Re: Superman as a villain: in addition to what’s already been said about his decency and upbringing, there’s also this classic observation from Grant Morrison:
Exactly so, I think. Part of Supe’s character has always been that he was raised to be “good people,” but another piece that’s worth considering is that his power allows him to be cool; he doesn’t need to stress over the mortgage or groceries, and he can show grace and mercy to bad guys in part because he can afford to.
And what’s the point in being a criminal yourself then? When you have no physical needs, only emotional needs that can be satisfied by feeling like you’re good, like you’ve done good, that you are loved and have been loving?
Interestingly, I think that’s a quality Christopher Reeve nailed perfectly, especially in the first movie. His Superman has such a wonderful, relaxed, charitable decency.
@69/eric: Right. People don’t become villains because they can; they become villains because they’re damaged, because something broke them. The only thing in Clark Kent’s life that could’ve broken him was the destruction of his planet and the loss of his birth parents, but he doesn’t remember that (depending on the version) and he managed to end up with loving adoptive parents who shored him up emotionally.
There’s also the idea from Maggin’s Superman novels that Superman’s empathy is a direct outgrowth of his superpowers. He can sense the entire EM spectrum and hear the faintest sound. He can directly perceive the energies of a living thing, and he can directly perceive their cessation, can experience what’s lost when a living thing dies far more directly than a human can. So he can’t be callous about death, can’t be unaffected by it. On a simpler level, it seems to me that those same abilities would give him great insight into other people’s emotional states, the way their heart rate and circulation and body temperature shifted with their moods, and probably the changes in their scent as well — the same things that makes dogs and cats superhumanly perceptive of our moods. So he’d essentially be an empath, able to know what other people were feeling. He couldn’t not be compassionate. Not unless he’d been born a psychopath, which he obviously wasn’t.
@65, 67 & 68:
Huh. Okay, I completely misremembered that “silver-haired” line, must have misheard it once and it stuck. But really, this page:
http://www.tor.com/tag/superhero-movie-rewatch/
You’ve got the link to this page and the link to the introduction and that’s it. No link to last week’s article. Right? Am I going crazy here or not?
cap-mjb: That link doesn’t go to the index page, this one does:
http://www.tor.com/series/the-great-superhero-movie-rewatch/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yep–there seems to be some glitchiness with the “Superhero Movie Rewatch” site tag for the Mole Men/Batman post–we’re looking into it. The series page/main index itself is all up to date, though.
krad (and moderator): Ah, thanks, I’ll use that in future!
My read on the trucker scene at the end of Superman II was that he went back to teach the trucker a lesson about bullying – don’t pick on the weak and helpless, they might not be as weak as they look…
Nothing to say he couldn’t feel a lot of satisfaction while doing so, of course. :)
Extra points for the blatant Warren Zevon reference, my friend.
@75/tbutler: The only lesson you teach a bully by bullying them back is that they’re right. It’s an endorsement of bullying. That’s how the cycle of abuse works. Hurting people to get them to submit to your will or viewpoint only teaches them that they have the right to hurt people to get their way — which is why abused children so often grow up to abuse their own children. Meeting violence with violence just perpetuates the cycle rather than countering it. It’s not a lesson, it’s just cruelty, part of the same culture of brute force. The movie undermined Superman by showing him doing something so petty — arguably even more than Man of Steel‘s neck-snapping, because at least in that case, it was something he was forced into by the circumstances (and talked into by Zod) rather than something unnecessary that he did of his own volition.
Personally, I believe I never saw as good as superhero film as Superman 1 and 2 until Avengers came out. That’s a long dry spell.
@40/Idran Re: schizophrenia vs DID; Thank you! I’m glad someone pointed it out, it was starting to bother me as I read through the comments.
Re: Man of Steel, Woman of Tissues; Why would you suggest I read that with my very own eyes?!
@36 KRAD: Are you sure they were fixing Otis’ mistake? Seems to me the first missile that Otis programs when the car goes off the road is the Army missile, and the second where Teschmacher reprograms it is the Navy missile. Unless you are saying he only ever intended to program one, but after the mistake went after the second missile as a backup?
I have a pretty strong attachment to these films, as I was completely in love with them as a child. I think the first one is still pretty decent (although my wife finds it boring), but you have to get around the time travel/spin the Earth thing. Other aspects I find problematic nowadays are the consent issues: The army officer saying to give Teschmacher a “rigorous chest massage, followed by mouth-to-mouth” quickly devolves into a joke where these army men turn this woman’s resuscitation attempts into an opportunity to molest her; the officer even makes his men turn around. Second, Teschmacher kisses Superman before removing the Kryptonite, and when asked about it, she says, “I didn’t think you’d let me later.”
One of the things I really like about the first one is the John Williams soundtrack. Not just the iconic theme, but the entire score. My DVD set has a “music only track” that is really nice. The music in II really takes a dive–the main themes seem to be replayed without the same nuance, and there are other places where tracks from the first one are stitched in. For example, when he’s flying around looking for a flower for Lois, it’s the music from his ship’s journey to Earth, which was a great piece of music in that scene, and the mismatching reuse pulls me out almost as much as the reuse of the “burning homestead” music does in Force Awakens. Indeed, the budget cuts/production fights in the Lester film are pretty apparent throughout, such as in scenes where Luthor has dialogue done in voiceover when he’s on a snowmobile. Luthor also doesn’t come off as strongly as a villain in that film.
I feel like III could have had potential. I like the Smallville stuff, and Anette O’Toole. But I cannot really get past the blatant misunderstanding of how computers work. I know there are a lot of unbelievable things in these movies, but some of the computer stuff is REALLY unbelievable.
The fourth I saw in the theater and liked as a kid; but obviously watching it as an adult makes you feel like you are watching someone’s Superman fanfilm.
It’s a shame that you didn’t at least allude to their child . That’s why I think of “Superman Returns” as being Superman 2 1/2. Lois has amnesia at the end of Superman two, then Superman returns, we see the child from the union that she cannot remember.
@80/crzydroid: I believe it was the same missile — that’s why they need to go back a second time to fix Otis’s mistake.
John Williams only scored the first film himself; all the later films were scored by other composers using Williams’s themes, sometimes new themes he wrote specifically for the films but left to the other composers to turn into complete cues. Ken Thorne did the music for Superman II and III. And Superman IV, intriguingly, was scored by Alexander Courage of Star Trek fame.
@81/John: When you put it that way, it sounds disturbing. How would a woman feel if she learned she was pregnant but didn’t remember the conception? She’d probably feel deeply violated. Anyway, I think Returns ignores the amnesia thing and has Lois aware of who the father is. It’s not an exact, literal sequel, if only because it bumps the timeline forward two decades.
Deeply violated yes but also panicky. Who was he? What if he comes back? Why the heck don’t I remember anything????
It always felt like Returns hedged its bets over Lois’ amnesia and whether or not her child was Superman’s, dropping heavy hints but never stating it outright while also adding enough ambiguity and dropping in the possibility that Richard’s the father to make it less than definite. She never really gives any sign that she knows Clark and Superman are the same person and her “…Nah” moment when Richard briefly suggests it seems to be played straight. And yes, the alternative, that she found herself pregnant with no idea how, is the stuff of nightmares. But that’s a discussion for another movie, methinks!
@84/cap-mjb: All the more reason not to see Returns as a literal sequel. It’s sort of like the old DC Earth One/Earth Two theory, where the same heroes and the same formative events (Krypton exploding, the Wayne murders, Diana going to Man’s World) happened on two different Earths 20 years apart and with a number of differences of detail. Also Alan Brennert’s classic “To Kill a Legend,” where Batman was given a chance to travel to another 20-years-later parallel Earth and save that world’s Thomas and Martha Wayne. In this case, it’s a world where the events of the first two Reeve movies happened in approximately the same way two decades later, but everything diverged after that.
Further on the glasses disguise…
I always thought it was ridiculous until last week. I stopped at the hospital pharmacy, handed my prescription through the hatch, and the assistant disappeared off with it. She returned a few minutes later with a colleague, stopped, looked around and then said to her colleague ‘He’s gone! He didn’t wait for his medication!’
In her absence, I’d put my glasses on; when I took them off, she suddenly recognised me.
@86/Henry: Admit it — that means you’re actually Superman!
But seriously, I can see that working with someone helping customers at a counter; they see dozens of strangers a day and probably just recognize them based on a couple of distinguishing features. It’d be harder to get that trick to work with people who see you every day and know your face and voice well, e.g. your co-workers at a great metropolitan newspaper.
@82: Just double-checked the film, and they are definitely two different rockets. Aside from the Army/Navy escorts, aside from the different colored and labeled Army/Navy trucks, the rockets themselves are different colors–the first is dark green and says “US Army,” and the second is a very light gray. In the chase scene, the dark Army rocket that Otis programmed is caught by Superman and thrown into space, while the light colored one that Eve programmed is shown going towards California.
I think the correct interpretation based on onscreen evidence is that the Hackensack target was not part of the original plan.
Also, was aware Williams did not score II, which was my point–tthe music in II suffers for it. ; )
I give IV large credit for remembering, even if only for reasons of expediency, that Superman had a mother. And deciding that Lois knows perfectly well who he is. (Both items that could have been used to improve the structure of “Returns”.)
@87/ ChristopherLBennett: Sadly, I don’t have anything else in common with Superman, so I’m definitely not him. And what you say about strangers and regular acquaintances is probably quite true. But for a while there I believed that Kent’s disguise could have worked!
Daniel S: Thank you for getting my reference to “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” :)
crzydroid: Yes, I’m sure.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Folks, the next Great Superhero Rewatch will be a bit late, as I have deadlines crawling up my butt…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
92. krad, F’n A man. I’m starting to think we’re not your only priority ;)
Honestly, Stephenson should have stuck to acting. As her regular column in the Saturday Grauniad demonstrates she is a really bad psychologist, prioritising the “need” to have sex over mental health, going so far as to encourage people to stay in severely unhealthy relationships because they’re getting laid.
“You…You’ve got me??! Who’s got you?!”
Probably the best single line in any superhero adaptation ever.
And two more words:
Christopher Reeve.
Gotta call you on this one, KRAD. I think they understood it quite well. It’s likely that Kal-El’s rocket flew through space most likely at a significant fraction of the speed of light, which means time dilation kicked in. So, while “many thousands of ‘our’ years” passed by in reality, for Kal-El, it was just two or three.
69: I like the quote – I suddenly realized this was how Superman would sit. He wouldn’t puff out his chest or posture heroically, he would be totally chilled.
Reminds me of a line from (I think?) a Tarantino film: about how, for every other superhero with a dual identity, the superhero is the mask. Iron Man is really Tony Stark; Tony Stark made the decision to create Iron Man. Bruce Wayne was Bruce Wayne from birth, and then he decided that he would create Batman. Sometimes it’s a secret, sometimes it’s open, but the civilian identity is the real them; it came first. Tony Stark can decide to stop being Iron Man; Iron Man can’t decide to stop being Tony Stark.
But Superman was born Superman; the mask is Clark Kent.
So for all the other superheroes, the origin story is about “how and why did they become extraordinary?” The murdered parents, the years of obsessive training, the radioactive spider, whatever. For Superman, the origin story – the real origin story – is “why did he decide to become normal?”
@97/ajay: Wonder Woman?
@96/leandar: Time dilation isn’t anywhere near that extreme. Even at 99% of lightspeed, time would only be slowed by a factor of 7 (e.g. if you traveled to a star 14 light-years away, 2 years would pass aboard ship). A trip through “many galaxies” would be a trip of tens of millions of light-years at least, not just thousands, and to get a time dilation that severe, you’d have to reach something like 99.99999999999% of lightspeed, which is effectively impossible. Even if you could exert enough thrust to reach such an extreme velocity, any given atom of space gas or dust would hit you like a high-intensity cosmic ray and your ship would vaporize on the first impact.
Besides, the script contradicts itself — at one point, Jor-El says that thousands of years passed on Kal-El’s journey to Earth, but later, he says he could be holding his son right now if Krypton hadn’t exploded, suggesting it happened only a few decades before.
@97/ajay: “But Superman was born Superman; the mask is Clark Kent.”
That was the interpretation in the Silver, and Bronze Ages, but it doesn’t really hold water. After all, Kal-El came to Earth as an infant. Except in the versions where he has super-memory, he doesn’t remember Krypton at all. In the standard radio and screen origin in the ’40s and ’50s, in the Donner movie, and in most comics and screen origin stories since 1986, he’s grown up believing he was Clark and only learned of his alien origin when his powers kicked in at adolescence. So in those versions, Clark is the real person and Superman is the facade. Or rather, Superman and Mild-Mannered Reporter Clark Kent are both facades, but the real person underneath them thinks of himself as Ma and Pa Kent’s boy first, Kal-El of Krypton second.
People misunderstand Bill’s speech about Superman in Tarantino’s Kill Bill. It wasn’t meant to be an objective critical assessment of Superman as a character, it was meant to reveal the mindset of Bill as a character. The cynical way that he interpreted Superman established who Bill was and how he saw humanity.
Keith,
You write, “The council thinks it’s just a normal shifting of orbit, thus proving that nobody writing the script understands anything about astronomy (shifting orbit is kind of a big deal).” Seems to me that the writers understood conservative politics exactly; given the similarities to the environmental disaster we are starting to see unfold and the Republican leaders of this country have their heads in the sand (or, more accurately, up the arses of big oil).
@CLB #56 “He’s not a hero because he can lift mountains, he’s a hero because he lifts up people.”
I’ll be damned if that sentence didn’t immediately make me tear up. Thank you for summing Superman’s character up so perfectly.
Speaking of which, the overly long fight sequence that KRAD complained about in the essay is what endeared me to Superman III despite all its flaws. In the end, Clark is the hero. Superman is the disguise.
@98 JanaJensen — She grew up (depending on continuity) a relative equal to her people. It’s only after she moved to the World of Men that she had an identity FAR superior to mere mortals. Though I suppose the same could be argued in Clark’s case, as they have already argued.
@101 Rowanblaze — That was always my favorite scene in the Reeve universe, too. The concept of the evil lurking within us and the need to fight against it resonated with me ever since I saw it as a kid.
Krad, in general — You say that Donner quit, and actors followed suit. That doesn’t seem to mesh with what I’d heard — that the Salkinds forced Donner out because of his pay. He wanted too much money, Brando wanted too much money, and Brando was getting paid by the screen-minute, which is why they cut his original scenes in the second. Then they brought in a bad comedy director, which is the reason for the misplaced happenings during the Metropolis fight, and the Rube Goldberg sequence in the third. And probably the other bad comedy in the third.
@102/reagan: Richard Lester was not a bad director; he has some well-regarded work on his resume, including A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (made for the Salkinds as the same kind of two-films-in-one production as the Superman movies), and Robin and Marian. Comedy isn’t intrinsically bad, but there were differing opinions on how serious a Superman film should be, and the change of directors midstream led to some tonal and structural problems with Superman II.
@102/Reagan Yes, from what I heard also Donner didn’t quit, but was fired…Though out of protest Reeve and Kidder quit metaphorically by packing it in and not performing at their best under Lester, and Hackman (along with Beatty and Perrine) managed to quit outright…Lois having an extremely limited role in Superman III was said to be the Salkind’s punishment of Kidder for speaking out against the firing of Donner…@103/CLB A friend of mine and I have often noted that Lester wasn’t a bad Director, just a bad Director to do Superman..
@104/capt_paul77: As I’ve said before, I think Superman III is a better movie than its reputation has it, and a better movie than its predecessor. The first two films are too divided between Silver Age goofiness and ’70s verisimilitude, and that tonal inconsistency weakens them. SIII is more sure of itself, more consistent, and if you get into the right mindset to take it on its own terms, it’s a lot of fun. Lester was the wrong director to take over Superman II, but once he got to make his own movie from scratch, he got a better result.
@CLB/105 I agree SIII isn’t quite as bad as it’s made out to be, not as great at the first or as good as SII (though my opinion of that film has altered a bit since first seeing it) and much better than SIV…Missed seeing SIII in the theatre (first saw it when ABC first aired it) which brings me to another point on the film…Yes, it got lukewarm reviews and word of mouth, but decent enough at the box office, not an expecred blockbuster like the others, not quite a box office bomb either…I remember 1983 being a particularly cometetive movie summer, which included a couple of other high profile franchise films, in particular SIII was released close to another highly expected sequel film called Return Of The Jedi, which caused it to get lost in the shuffle somewhat, adding to it being remembered “poorly”…I also recall some people not really sure what to expect from Richard Pryor, who at the time had only just started to transition away from his Raunchy Comedy/R rated movie image…Supposedly Pryor was a fan of the first two films, and during an interview on the Tonight Show jokingly told Johnny Carson he wanted to be in a future one, and the Salkinds thought his wishes were serious..
@105 CLB: I know Richard Lester had done other movies before this. But I got the Three Musketeers solely based on the fact that it purported to use the actual book as a plot. I have never seen such boring swordplay, and the comedy fell flat for me in every scene. I literally didn’t get past the scene (20 min? maybe 30?) where the Musketeers meet D’Artagnan and resulting sword fight before shutting it off and never watching it again. Considering I’m something of an OCD completionist, this is poor performance.
While I did like the scene with two Supermen, the rest of the movie was so nonsensical that the only redeeming feature was the terror-computer at the end. And Annette O’Toole.
@107/reagan: I didn’t care for Musketeers myself, but apparently it was well-reviewed. The point is, it’s unwise to assume a creator is incompetent overall just because one or two of their works wasn’t to your taste. No one hits a winning game every time.
And no, S3 doesn’t make a lot of sense, but what I’m saying is that you need to find the right mindset for it. If you want it to be in the more serious vein of superhero movies that we have today and that the first two Superman films inconsistently tried to be, then of course it’s not going to work. But if you’re able to appreciate the pure, unapologetic absurdism and zaniness of Silver Age DC Comics, then S3 captures that spirit very well. Audiences at the time saw it as a step backward because it came at a time when superhero comics and movies were trying to move away from the silliness of the Silver Age, and in that sense, it was somewhat retrograde. But with the perspective of time, it’s possible to recognize that the Silver Age style wasn’t necessarily worse than the later, more serious stuff, just different in approach and intent, and fun in its own way. The first two films are at odds with themselves because they’re trying to be more serious and naturalistic while still being laden with old-fashioned superhero goofiness. They’re trying to be both at once, and it weakens them. But S3 picks a side and sticks with it throughout. It may not be the side audiences at the time would’ve preferred, but that consistency of tone is to its benefit, if you’re just able to get into the right mindset to appreciate the tone it chose.
I’ve always enjoyed the first one, I remember seeing it when it first ran in theatres, and it was among the bigger topics of conversation among myself and my class/schoolmates at the time. Also remember watching it with excitement during the ABC TV airings, and would become a film I’d find myself watching if I came across it while channel surfing, in recent years having the DVD. Over the years I’ve come to recognize some flaws, but still a film I find much enjoyment from…I remember liking SII when it first came out, but on subsequent viewings found it bogged down a lot, though still generally not a bad movie, I did see the Donner Cut on cable, not bad, but still more similar to the original version than I thought/remembered, though the ending was a redundant cop out…As I noted earlier, missed SIII in the theatre, not great, but not as bad as its reputation…Like III missed SIV in the theatres, not seeing it until the late 90’s on a local TV station out of curiosity. The No Nukes/Anti Arms race message was noble, but lacked execution (another film with that concept also released in 1987 met with similar critical/box office results), and overall forgettable, except for its cringeworthy moments. Should also be noted Reeve had to be lured back for III after Donner’s removal, and wanted no part of IV until Carrolco made largely empty promises to give him crearive control and a chance to direct a fifth Superman movie. Reeve was actually the one who came up with the nuclear disarmament angle, and contributed ideas for a lot of scenes which he claims lost their intended impact due to a greatly reduced budget.
“But what Reeve accomplished was something that nobody else who has played Superman in live action has truly managed: he made us believe a person could use a pair of glasses as a disguise. He did that by not relying on his outsized specs—his posture, his body language, his voice, all of it changed when he was Kent.”
In other words, Reeve acted.
That should be no big deal. That is is says more about who’s played Superman than about Reeve’s acting. He was a good actor. If you want to see him act well, watch Deathtrap.
@110/Harry: I think that oversimplifies it. There are different kinds of acting, different specialities and skills. A given actor may not be skilled at altering his vocal timbre or body language but still be brilliant at conveying emotion and realism of performance. Not every good actor is a physical or vocal chameleon, any more than every good baseball player is a pitcher or every good doctor is a neurosurgeon. It’s one particular specialty within the profession. For instance, I don’t think anyone would say Michael Caine is a bad actor, but I’ve never seen him in a role where he didn’t sound like Michael Caine.
Anyway, having recently rewatched the 1988-92 Superboy series on DC Universe, I’d say that the show’s second Superboy, Gerard Christopher (who replaced John Haymes Newton after the first season), did almost as well as Christopher Reeve at differentiating Clark from Superboy, particularly in season 2 where he played Clark in a nerdy, bumbling manner even more so than Reeve did. There were also times when he bore a startling resemblance to Reeve.
@CLB/111 Wow, don’t remember that about Gerard, been a while since I’ve seen Superboy…I generally thought it was a decent series, my only issues was the local stations I watched on often moved it around the schedule, on some cases at inconvenient air times for me. From what I recall, would have worked better from a budgetary and story telling standpoint as an hour long series…Would be interesting to look at how well it’s held up, but I’ve yet to subscribe DC Universe…
@112/Capt_Paul77: Well, I’m going to begin reviewing Superboy on my Patreon in a couple of weeks, but to sum up: Season 1 is astonishingly terrible at first, but gets somewhat better about 1/3 of the way in when several veteran Superman comics writer/editors join its staff — not brilliant, but decently entertaining. Season 2 starts out at about the same level but gets worse toward the end. Seasons 3-4, under the new title The Adventures of Superboy, are an almost completely different, far better show; I’d say that in those two seasons, it was the best live-action DC show prior to Smallville, and I say that as a longtime fan of the 1990 The Flash. Certainly those seasons did labor under tight budget constraints, but they handled them smartly by doing a lot of strong bottle episodes driven by character and ideas.
@113/CLB Thanks, that’s pretty much how I remember it also, though I missed a bulk of the last two seasons…
@113, Superboy was filmed in Central Florida. My alma mater, UCF, successfully portrayed a state University and Orlando international turned in a fine performance as an airport.
I actually witnessed some of the filming. I looked out a library window one day and saw a man in blue tights and red cape hovering outside near the humanities building. I just had time to think ‘Damn, why couldn’t it have been Star Wars if I’m going to have delusions’ then I saw the crane and the camera crew.
@115/roxana: Neat! I once saw John Sayles shooting a scene from City of Hope on my college campus. It was something with Joe Morton driving by in a car, IIRC, though the main thing I noticed was that they were driving the wrong way on what was then a one-way street (before new construction closed off one end).
Rest in Peace, Richard Donner. :(
Aw, damn, I hadn’t seen that Donner had died. Poo.
I also didn’t realize he was a fellow Bronx native! Nifty!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, proud scion of the Boogie-Down
Oh wow, Richard Donner died. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if he had already died since I hadn’t heard about him in some time. But 91 years of age ain’t too shabby! RIP.
Also, I don’t think I’ve commented on the Reeve-era of Superman movies before, but to me Christopher Reeve as Superman, Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, and Terrance Stamp as Zod, are all the definitive versions of their respective characters. The first two films are very good to excellent. The first one may be in fact the best one, but I find the second one to be the one that’s most “fun” with Supes facing off with Zod and his posse and there are so many crowd-pleasing moments. I can just imagine movie audiences going wild to them like at the “care to step outside” line from Supes to Zod, and then crushing Zod’s hand in the finale. Great stuff! Superman III had a few moments I enjoyed as well but they’re so few I can just watch them on YouTube. Superman IV is just trash.
But I look at the DCEU version of Superman and it just feels all wrong. I don’t want a dark, brooding Superman. He should be optimistic and inspiring. Amy Adams’ Lois is bland, the dude playing Lex is super annoying, and Henry Cavill is the most beautiful guy to ever play Superman (and is just a fine specimen of human being period), but again, he just doesn’t hold a candle to what Reeve accomplished with both Superman and Clark Kent.
Oh wow, Richard Donner died. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if he had already died since I hadn’t heard about him in some time. But 91 years of age ain’t too shabby! RIP.
Yeah, he’d basically been retired since the mid-2000s. He was finally back in the news in December when WB announced they were developing one last Lethal Weapon film. Donner was attached to direct and it was going to be his swansong, but now that’s all up in the air.
(And frankly, Lethal Weapon 4‘s closing scene was the perfect sendoff for the franchise, but what do I know).
But I agree with you about Reeves, Kidder, and Hackman’s iconography. Nobody portraying those three in subsequent Superman films have really managed to equal them.
(Outside of live-action though, heh, I feel the same way about Tim Daly, Clancy Brown, and Dana Delany’s performances for the DCAU).
Richard Donner did an interview for Gilbert Gottfried’s podcast a few years ago, reflecting on his career. Worth checking out.
There was a moving article and tribute posted by ABC News correspondent, Will Reeve, to his father Christopher Reeve this past Father’s Day. Christopher passed away when Will was only 12 and had only ever known his father as paralyzed (and his mother passed away about a year and a half later when he was 13, the poor kid). Here is the article:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.goodmorningamerica.com/amp/family/story/abc-news-reeve-whale-watching-echoes-father-christopher-78377212
I would dearly, dearly love to see the Live Action Superman Squad meet up for a little meet-and-greet, if only so the (relatively) more grounded members can visibly wonder how much of this madness the Reeve/Routh & Welling versions are making up – answer? NONE OF IT.
Also, I would absolutely love to see some Villain try to unleash the Reeve/Routh Superman’s dark side … only to come up drier than prohibition in the Sahara: “I don’t really have problems with my dark side anymore – not since that time I strangled him, anyway.”
I was sure I commented on this before, but apparently not.
I’ve defended Superman 3 a lot more than I ever expected to over the past week or two on YouTube and elsewhere, but it’s purely either in comparison to 4, or just on the basis of “I will forgive an awful lot if I’m having fun watching a movie”. If I didn’t say that about Star Treks 9, New-3, and conversely about 10, I’m saying it now, and I do believe that my personal experiences made Jaws 3D a stupidly fun experience, whereas Richard Jeni made Jaws 4 sound so bad I’m worried I’d hurt myself watching it. There’s a slight difference here, of course, because I think Superman 3 is a good movie if definitely containing flaws (as opposed to Superman 4, which… Jonathan Cryer has stated being Lex in Supergirl is his penance for Lenny. And he should do penance). Jaws 3D is just campy and so bad, it’s good to me (largely because it was filmed where I worked, 20 years before I started working there).
Here’s the thing about Superman II.
Alexander and Ilya Salkind had always planned to shoot both Superman: The Movie and its sequel back-to-back. Marlon Brando had done his scenes for both movies (he was hired to bring a gloss of prestige to what would otherwise be regarded as a mere “comic book movie”). After Richard Donner had been fired, and Richard Lester brought in to direct the remainder of Superman II, it would have been a relatively simple matter to negotiate final directorial credit.
Re-enter Brando, who filed a lawsuit maintaining that he was not paid his percentage of the gross from Superman. Fearing that he would find a way to legally prevent Superman II from being released. the Salkinds chose to scrap every scene in which Brando appeared.
The result? A whole year and change of reshooting, which meant dragging Susannah York back as Lara and planting her in the Fortress of Solitude as the Keeper of the Archives of Krypton (or if you prefer, Mar-Yon the Librarian).
It’s not entirely humorless. In the Donner Cut, where Lois is eavesdropping on Clark asking Jor-El to become human, she’s wearing his Superman shirt. In the theatrical cut, she’s wearing a translucent nightgown.
Makes you wonder what else is in Kal-El’s wardrobe.