Happy 40th, Superman (the Movie)

I was one of the first few hundred (or maybe few thousand) to see the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie, at a New York pre-premiere press screening in 1978.

 It was a very hot ticket. Mike Shain (mild-mannered reporter for a New York metropolitan newspaper) and I were on our way to the second screening when we ran into a then-famous movie director and his famous actress girlfriend coming back from the first. Our screening was so crowded that the only seat I could find was in the front row. You could say I was in that movie as well as into it.

Everybody there that day knew that a lot of money was spent on it.  Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, both released just the year before, had raised the bar for visual effects epics.  John Williams had made his reputation as epic big screen movie score composer on those films--he did the score for this one.  Everyone wanted to see Marlon Brando, the Godfather himself, slumming as a highly paid space alien.  Nobody knew much of anything about this Christopher Reeve kid. And most of all, nobody knew how anyone could make a Superman movie in 1978 that wasn't ridiculous.

Still, what if he was back?...Not the paunchy George Reeves from the reruns, but the Superman of childhood wonder?  The tests of that would certainly involve the actor and the story, but most of all...could he fly?  For this was a time, boys and girls, before CGI, when most visual effects were still mechanical and not computerized, and when there were many true "special effects"--that is, physical effects done on set, on the day of shooting.

Nobody had yet seen a credible flying sequence on the big screen.  The movie, everyone knew, would rise or fall on whether Superman could fly.

So perhaps knowing this, the moviemakers made everybody wait almost an hour to find out.

Or maybe they didn't plan it that way. Though the three parts of the movie were reputedly in the original Mario Puzo story, there were so many writers eventually involved, so much turmoil between the producers and the director, so much that had to be accomplished in so short a time (and they were filming a lot of scenes for the second movie as well) that it could be one of those classic messes, like Casablanca, that almost unaccountably turns out to be more than the sum of its crazy parts.

director Donner at left

Or maybe it was director Richard Donner who made it all work.  That's certainly the tenor of the featurettes that accompany the boxed set of Reeve Superman movies.  Donner and the actual script writer (billed as Creative Consultant due to Writers Guild rules presumably) Tom Mankiewicz managed to imbue contemporary Metropolis with comedy but preserve Superman himself from ridicule, sarcasm or even irony.  (Though the mythos was good for a few laughs, as when Clark Kent can't find a phone booth where he can change into Superman.)

Violating all kinds of expectations, each of the three distinct sections of the film has its own style.  But the tone for each was just right, while the rhythm from one to the other built the film's energy.  Together they made it an epic.

First there was that dazzling title sequence, with the neon blue names zooming out (quite an effect in the front row.)  It became a much imitated style, making its way to TV commercials (as did the circling tracking shots of 2001 a decade before.)

The Krypton section that began the film was a bit shaky, but then this part of the origin story always is, despite the otherworldly appeal.  In each of the prior dramatizations, the outfits and haircuts of the advanced alien Kryptonians always looks ridiculous a few years later.

In this one, Marlon Brando spouts ornate nonsense in his best Claude Rains accent to the remarkably crypto-fascist Kryptonians in their glowing white outfits, and condemns villains who wouldn't show up again until the second movie.  Maybe the denial of a scientific prediction of the planet's peril by the supposedly advanced Krypton leadership makes a bit more sense now than it ever did before.  Still, the function of Krypton in the story is to die quickly: Krypton as crypt.

While the design is conceptually bold, the Krypton scenes didn't even look that good in 1978, when the movie was rushed into theaters to meet its holiday play dates.  Both the sequence itself and the look of it vastly improved in the year 2000 re-edit and re-mastering.

As the destruction of Krypton he predicted begins, Jor-El sends his infant son on a course to Earth, for mixed motives apparently: because he has a better chance of surviving there since he's from a society thousands of years ahead of Earth's, he'll have super powers and be indestructible.  But also because (as his recorded voice later tells his grown son in the Fortress of Solitude) the Earthlings "can be a great people, Kal-El.  They only lack the light to show them the way.  For this reason above all, I have sent them you, my only son."

So starts the tracking of the Christ story, which some of us saw in it and which Mankiewicz has since confirmed was deliberate.  In some ways it's intrinsic to Superman's function as a kind of savior with godlike powers.  It's there in Jerry Seigel's description, and it certainly suggested itself to me and my friends when the Superman television show was first popular, just as we were starting Catholic school.  I recall hushed discussions among us about whether Superman and God were the same.

After a few scenes of the only begotten son's journey through space (during which he's treated to Jor-El's educational recordings, part one) his capsule skids into a Kansas wheat field, where Ma and Pa Kent in their pickup see the crash, and the toddler (sans swaddling clothes), holding his arms out to them.

So a virgin birth of a being from the sky. And once the child lifts their truck above his head, they realize they must keep him, just to protect him and his innocence from those who would exploit his powers or treat him cruelly because of his difference.  So they accept their divine mission.

The Kansas section can be criticized for the abundance of perfect Andrew Wyeth/Winslow Homer imagery--the fields, sky and clouds in every shot. (It was actually shot outside Calgary, Canada. But the fields and the sky were real.)

Unfortunately for the critics who want to call it hokey, it's beautiful. Esteemed cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth (who died shortly after this film, which is dedicated to him) shot painterly uncluttered foregrounds against vast vistas to create a mood, that together with the simple dialogue and characterizations, create a meaning.  Scenes like this have been attempted many times since, never as successfully.

Together they tell the story of Clark Kent's roots, which become Superman's. They are the rural equivalent of the original roots of Superman in the Jerry Siegel's 1930s vision.

The time sequence as given by the film is somewhat complicated.  The brief introduction notes 1938 as the birth of the Daily Planet, but within the film 1948 is named as the year Krypton blows up.  This makes Superman a Baby Boomer, in more ways than one.

 Later, Jor-El says it happened thousands of years before, sort of confusing matters.  But if it was 1948 and the super baby's journey takes three years, then he's a teenager in the 60s (though the Kansas vehicles suggest the 40s and 50s, and the diesel train that teenage Clark outruns would be no earlier than the 50s or 60s.  On that train, by the way, is Noel Neil, the original Lois Lane from the movie serials and the 50s TV show.  She's playing Lois Lane's mother, a joke that mostly got cut in the 1978 version but is restored in the 2000 edit. Also in the restored scene is Lois' father, played by Kirk Alyn, the very first live action Superman.)

Clark is 18 when he leaves the farm to do his Krypton father's bidding.  There's a transitional scene in the Arctic where Clark throws a crystal shaft that builds his Fortress of Solitude, and he stays to complete his Kryptonian education.  The Brando voiceovers suggest this takes several years.  So if he emerges in 1978, he's 30 when he begins his public ministry--the same age as Christ was.

At the end of the Fortress of Solitude sequence, we see simultaneously for the first time Christopher Reeve and the adult Superman in his classic blue and red costume.  And for the first time, very briefly, we see him fly.  Bingo.

 Then the movie moves to Metropolis. The tempo and mood change immediately.  It's the cluttered, fast, jangling, cynical city of 1978--the one just outside the movie theater where I was watching this film.  (In a few years, I would actually be working in the very building that portrayed the Daily Planet: the New York Daily News building, as a freelancer on assignment.)

Here's where the previous two sections pay off, especially the mood and content of the Kansas scenes.  We see Clark as an awkward, even bumbling adult.  We know from previous scenes, that he's really not--this is an act.  But his deadpan physical comedy (Reeve said he'd looked to Cary Grant's performances in similar roles) works seamlessly with the mildly satirical comic mood that embraces the Daily Planet characters.

Yet Clark's essential character--sincere, principled and naturally good without irony or apology--is also revealed.  Though the fields around the Kent farm are timeless, they echo an America identified with the Depression era.  He is the idealistic rural heartland 1930s America, here to redeem the overmechanized metropolitan 1970s.

 Superman begins his ministry with a series of miracles.  The crucial one is the first, when Lois Lane is dangling from a helicopter which is itself dangling from the top of the Daily Planet building.  A crowd quickly gathers--noisy, excited, fearful but full of the adrenalin of disaster.  Recall that in the late 1970s and well into the 80s, Manhattan seemed like a more dangerous place than before or since.  There was more street crime, and it was also choked with fumes and dirt. There seemed to be a disaster a minute, of one kind or another.

Clark Kent does his first classic transformation, this time merely spinning in the kind of revolving door that he previously had gotten himself jammed up in, playing the hapless Clark. As Superman he says "Excuse me" to a young black hipster complimenting him on his outfit.  And then zooms straight up.

In a scene that is always exhilarating, he catches the falling Lois, who responds with her famous line: "You've got me?  Who's got you?"  Then he catches the falling helicopter.




The crowd cheers but it is more than amazement.  On their faces is evidence of a very un-70s Manhattan emotion: joy.

The series of other miracles that follows are the small ones, reminiscent of the early comic books and TV show: thwarting a lone criminal and then a gang, saving Air Force One, before rescuing a cat from a tree for a little girl.  This was Superman's original mission--helping others in time of urgent need.

Meanwhile at the Daily Planet and in Lex Luthor's lair, the movie never forgets that it comes from a comic strip. It never gets as silly as the Batman TV show of the 60s, with its earnest heroes and outlandish action. But it is playful in these areas.

Gene Hackman's theatrical Luthor is a comic arch villain, adding to the high spirits and anticipation of more Super exploits.  But behind Luthor's genial psychotic demeanor is an arrogance and tricky cynicism that will test the efficacy of Superman's virtue.

And the love story necessary to the film's climax begins. There's romantic banter when Lois interviews Superman on the impossible rooftop terrace of her apartment, but when she flies with him, the audience experiences that wonder and freedom of flight.  It's a little cheesy but it works.  As well as being a pretty good first date.

The main action of the movie is an ingenious sequence that doesn't bear close analysis.  Donner's directorial motto was "verisimilitude," which avoids disbelief in the rush of events, but can't completely escape the logical lapses.  It also takes the movie into the bigger is better ethos of superhero movies ever since.

There is one small vindication for the Superman ethic.  Luthor traps him with a necklace of Kryptonite (which looks disconcertingly like the crystal sliver that makes the Fortress of Solitude.)  He escapes it with the help of the voluptuous Miss Tessmacher (played by Valerie Perrine) whose function to Luther is obscure.  She extracts a promise in return, which she knows Superman will honor because he--unlike the perfidious Luthor--always tells the truth.

Superman (now known as Superman I or more often Superman: The Movie) was followed by three more films with Christopher Reeve. After a successfully charming TV series (Lois and Clark) in the 90s, a Smallville prequel TV series, and an attempt to pick up the feature film story with new actors (Superman Returns), a more recent movie went back to reimagine the origins and take it from there in a series of superhero extravaganzas.  But most still see Christopher Reeve as the definitive Superman, and his first Superman film as the acknowledged classic.

Postscript: I posted this before I learned that Margot Kidder had just died.  There were a few major parts in this film for which the actor was the filmmakers' second or third choice, but there was active competition for the role of Lois Lane, and Margot Kidder won it.  

Kidder's Lois didn't disdain or demean Clark; she barely saw him, but when she did she prodded him like a sister.  She won the role doing the balcony scene with Superman ( interviewing him on the terrace outside her apartment.)  Her lovestruck performance and interaction with Chris Reeve was the essential piece. That scene as a screen test, incidentally, is also what finally won Christopher Reeve the role of Superman.

Kidder played the part of Lois in the subsequent Reeve Superman movies, and remained close to Reeve the rest of his life.  Kidder died at her home in Montana at the age of 69.