by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I saw yesterday at the downtown library was the
1978 Superman: The Movie, a
ground-breaking film in that it was the first movie based on a comic-book
superhero that not only made money but was a blockbuster hit, the sixth
highest-grossing film Warner Bros. had released to that time, and its success
has shaped much of the movie industry ever since. It’s a film that has entered
the ranks of legend because of its bizarre production process; it was the
brainchild of scapegrace producer Alexander Salkind — a business buccaneer
whose activities seemed to produce as many lawsuits as movies — and his son and
business partner Ilya. Somehow the Salkinds had acquired the movie rights to
the Superman character from DC Comics, and they mounted an intense production
process, platooning in various teams of writers — including Mario Puzo (who got
credit for the original story even though almost nothing he wrote ever got into
the final film — but after the success of the films based on his novel The
Godfather Puzo’s name was big box office)
and the team of Robert Benton and David Newman, who’d written Bonnie
and Clyde — along with an uncredited Tom
Mankiewicz and Leslie Newman, David’s wife, who got called in because director
Richard Donner (who got the job after the original director, Guy Hamilton,
withdrew when the shoot was moved from Italy to England and Hamilton, a British
tax exile, had to give it up because he could only spend 30 days per year in
the U.K. before being subject to British taxes) thought he needed a woman to
write credibly for the Lois Lane character.
The original plan was to shoot
enough footage not only for the Superman movie but its sequel, Superman II, but that got screwed up when the Salkinds decided to fire director
Donner from the second film and hired Richard Lester (whose most famous credits
were the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night
and Help! — not exactly the
credentials one expects for a superhero movie), who reshot about two-thirds of
Donner’s footage for the sequel. Just about everybody involved with the production ended up suing
Alexander Salkind — even Ilya filed a suit against his old man — including
Donner and Marlon Brando, who earned $3.7 million plus points for 10 days’ of
work as Jor-El, Superman’s natural father, who presumably perishes after the
opening sequence in which the planet Krypton, Superman’s ancestral home, is
destroyed when its sun goes nova or something and Jor-El and his wife Lara
(Susannah York) send their baby boy Kal-El on a miniature spaceship to Earth,
where he’s going to grow up to be You Know Who. (I recently joked in these
pages that a real trivia buff is someone who knows all three of Superman’s names, including his original one from
Krypton.) The Salkinds cut a distribution deal with Warner Bros. and approached
a lot of well-known action stars for the role of the Man of Steel, including
Clint Eastwood (too old) and Sylvester Stallone (were they kidding?) as well as
Jon Voight (who would have been an interesting but also a rather loopy choice)
before they finally settled on a little-known 26-year-old actor named
Christopher Reeve, continuing the casting tradition of previous live-action
Superman projects of using a relatively fresh-faced performer who didn’t have a
lot of associations with other parts to live down. Part of the writing problem
with this film is that, like a lot of big action blockbusters since, the basic
concept and the packaging were the main attractions and the movie’s actual plot
was really an afterthought — one doesn’t get the impression through a lot of these films that there was a story
at the heart of them that the filmmakers were just burning to tell. The 1978 Superman was the film whose blazing success launched a
hundred superhero movies — the cycle is still going on and, with two of the
biggest studios in Hollywood literally being invested in comic-book characters (later Warners bought D.C.
Comics to gain the film rights to all their characters, and more recently
Disney has done the same with Marvel), it shows no sign of stopping any time
soon. But seen today it’s really not a very good movie: it’s perfectly
acceptable popcorn entertainment but it lacks the richness and sheer perversity
of the 1989 Tim Burton Batman
(which if pressed I’d name as my all-time favorite comic-book superhero film).
The 1978 Superman is clearly a
transitional work, stuck in time between the outright camp of the 1960’s Batman TV series (and the disappointing feature film made
from it) and the more “serious” approach to superhero legends we’ve seen since,
and the movie seems weirdly unbalanced, comically campy at times and earnestly
serious at others. Part of the problem is Christopher Reeve; he’s drop-dead
gorgeous as Superman (he worked out and added about 25 pounds of muscle to his
frame for the role), he’s utterly convincing when he takes to the air —
apparently Reeve could really fly, not of course under his own power, but he’d
had enough experience with aircraft that he could pitch, roll and yaw in front
of the blue screen (they were still using blue instead of green screens for
special effects then — and that meant having to use a lighter shade of blue for
Superman’s costume than the one in the comics because the original one washed
out in front of the blue screen) and make the movements credible. But as hot
and muscular as he is as the superhero, he’s way too nerdy as Clark Kent — and frankly, I like my
Supermen more butch, more along the lines of Kirk Alyn and George Reeves.
(Supposedly Reeve based the Clark Kent part of his characterization on Cary
Grant’s performance in the screwball classic Bringing Up Baby — but he wasn’t a talented enough comedian to pull
that off, and as good as she is as Lois Lane, Margot Kidder was hardly in
Katharine Hepburn’s league either.) Where the 1978 Superman scores is in its special effects: though made 35
years ago, pre-CGI, the effects work compares favorably to anything being
filmed today. The tagline for the film was, “You’ll really believe that a man
can fly!” — and you do. The film was dedicated to the memory of the great
cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, who died shortly after it was finished — and
I suspect Unsworth, who’d worked as a camera operator for Jack Cardiff on
Michael Powell’s masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death and 22 years later had been the director of
photography on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (to my mind the finest film made during the second half of the 20th
century), was hired largely because he’d done such a good job simulating
weightlessness on 2001 that he’d
be able to use the same techniques to simulate aircraft-less human flight.
It’s
the human aspects of Superman that let the side down, particularly the lack of a
really intimidating super-villain. They hired Gene Hackman to play Lex Luthor
(reuniting him with the writers of his star-making film, Bonnie and
Clyde) but Hackman threw the filmmakers a
curveball by refusing to have his head shaved to resemble the famously bald
Luthor of the comics. Instead he insisted on keeping his real hair, and the
filmmakers had it sculpted in a series of deliberately awful “do”’s to give the
illusion that Luthor was wearing a series of ill-fitting wigs. What’s more,
they gave Luthor only two henchpeople, both of them played as comic relief:
Otis (Ned Beatty) and his sort-of girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (played by
Valerie Perrine in the mold of the character of Adelaide from Guys
and Dolls) — and made them such idiotic klutzes that when Luthor complains that the greatest
criminal mastermind in history has been stuck with such lame assistants, it’s
hard not to feel for him. The filmmakers would have been better off casting
Brando as Luthor (and having him play it like he did Kurtz in Apocalypse
Now) and Hackman as Jor-El, though Brando
isn’t half-bad — and I say that as a decided non-fan of Manic Marlon. For once
he doesn’t mumble; he uses much the same voice as Jor-El he used as Mark Antony
in the 1953 MGM Julius Caesar and
he manages to capture the orotund solemnity the writing committee clearly meant
the character to have — even though it gets risible when he keeps popping up
even after he’s supposedly died in the apocalypse that consumes Krypton,
appearing as a spectral presence and giving his son unneeded advice.
(Ironically, Brando went on playing this role even after he died; his unused footage for the Superman
II sequel got incorporated into the recent
“reboot,” Superman Returns.) Were
we supposed to believe this was all in Superman’s head, or did Jor-El beam
himself into the Phantom Zone just before Krypton exploded so he could survive
and stay in contact with his son telepathically? Superman is also an odd action movie in which the women
out-act the men; Margot Kidder continues in the Noel Neill tradition of spunky
Lois Lanes — when she takes on the mugger who’s trying to steal her purse and
beats him even without super-assistance from the hapless Clark Kent, it’s nice
to see we have a Lois for the feminist era (and Neill herself makes a welcome
cameo appearance as the mother of a pre-pubescent Lois in an early scene) — and
even though her character is a walking cliché, Valerie Perrine manages to bring
real pathos to the dipshit she’s playing.
The 1978 Superman is a mess as a movie and yet it’s nice to see
Christopher Reeve trim and fit — even though there’s an overlay of unintended
pathos from Reeve’s later real-life fate that gives the film in general, and
his performance in particular, a weirdly sad aspect its makers didn’t intend
and couldn’t have anticipated (much the way there was a deep sadness in Fred
Astaire’s last appearance on an awards show in 1985, a few months before his
death, in which a man famous for his dancer’s ability and grace could now
barely walk to the podium, let
alone dance). There are enough elements in this film that do work — the long, romantic flight on which Superman
takes Lois Lane is a marvelously lyrical set-piece that communicates the
gentler emotions that have been pretty much excluded from superhero films
since, and I’ve always loved the in-joke when Clark Kent is looking for a place
to change into super-drag and sees one of those hooded pay phones that by 1978
had taken the place of the fully enclosed phone booths he used in the comics
(the one scene in this film I remembered from the only other time I saw it, a
badly cut TV version I watched on a black-and-white set on its first TV airings
after the theatrical release) — that the 1978 Superman is still worth watching for reasons other than its
historical importance establishing the comic-book movie as an audience
attraction for all ages. But one wishes it could have been a better film and
one that really rose to the potential of the Superman mythos.
