by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched Superman
II: The Richard Donner Cut, a 2006
re-edit (with a few scenes actually reshot) of the 1980 film Superman II. I recently got a boxed set of the first Superman:
The Movie from 1978 — the first of
four made with Christopher Reeve in the Superpart — produced by Alexander and
Ilya Salkind in partnership with Warner Bros. and directed by Richard Donner.
The Salkinds’ idea was to shoot both Superman and Superman II in one go — much the way Peter Jackson would later
make all three of the Lord of the Rings films consecutively rather than the more usual practice of having to
wait until the first film drew enough customers the studio felt it merited a
sequel (or didn’t) — but apparently either they or someone else in authority
over the project didn’t like the way Superman II with Donner was turning out. So they fired him
with about two-thirds of the movie already shot, and they brought in Richard
Lester, who as I keep pointing out in these pages hardly seems like the right
choice for a superhero movie given that by far the most famous credits on his
résumé are the first two Beatles’ features, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Lester in turn had the script tweaked, deleting one of Donner’s best
scenes (more on that later), and though John Williams had done the original
score for both Superman movies
Lester brought in his favorite composer, Ken Thorne, to replace him. Williams
apparently didn’t mind because he was busy working on the first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he agreed to let the producers use as much of
his music as they felt they needed (including the famous Superman theme). I’ve never seen the Richard Lester version
of the film and Charles had, but so long ago he really didn’t remember it, but
one thing that came off the imdb.com “Trivia” pages on both films was that
Lester was bound and determined to shoot over 50 percent of the film’s total
footage (the minimum standard of the Screen Directors’ Guild for sole credit on
a film) so he could be the only director a) given screen credit and b) paid
residuals.
In the early 2000’s, Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane on both
films (and who apparently enjoyed working with Donner but did not get along with Lester), said that there was enough
footage for Donner’s Superman II in the Warner Bros. vaults to assemble a Donner-directed version of the
film. Apparently this was delayed a few years because Warner Bros. needed to
negotiate with some of the other participants (including the estate of Marlon
Brando, who’d played Superman’s biological father Jor-El and who’d been
intended for a major role in Superman II, speaking to his son Kal-El a.k.a. Clark Kent a.k.a. Superman on a
regular basis through recordings he’d left inscribed on crystals in Superman’s
Fortress of Solitude at or near the North Pole) to clear the rights to the
footage — which they managed to do in 2006 so they could use Brando’s footage
as Jor-El in the Brandon Routh “reboot,” Superman Returns. (So, to play a character who reappears in video
recordings well after his death, they used an actor who’d himself been dead for
two years via his surviving video footage.) I don’t know how it would stack up to the Richard Lester version but the
Richard Donner Superman II — on which Donner himself worked in 2003 and appended this bizarre
apologia to the closing credits: “Since the making of this film in the late
1970’s, a greater awareness has developed regarding the cruelty to animals in
connection with the fur business, and the health risks associated with smoking
and second-hand smoke. Therefore, I do not condone the use of tobacco and fur
products as depicted in this film. — Richard Donner” (Marlboro paid the studio
$43,000 for quite prominent product placement in the film) — ended up as
two-thirds of a delight. Christopher Reeve told one interviewer he had based
his interpretation of Clark Kent on Cary Grant’s performance in the 1938
screwball comedy classic Bringing Up Baby, co-starring Katharine Hepburn and directed by Howard Hawks, and though
that hadn’t been all that apparent in the original Superman it was in Superman II. The
plot of Superman II is the
usual superhero-film mess (more recent movies like Black Panther and Logan have shown it’s possible to make a well-constructed movie out of a
superhero comic book and give it depth — the social commentary of Black
Panther and the tragic cast of Logan put those films well above the common run of
superhero movies), but the writing committee on this one — Mario Puzo (once
again credited with the story even though people associated with the film
insist that virtually nothing he wrote ended up either in it or the first Superman), David and Leslie Newman, Tom Mankiewicz — stuck
a bunch of plot lines together and came up with an entertaining mess.
The
opening repeats footage from the first Superman and shows Brando as Jor-El condemning three
renegade Kryptonians — General Zod (Terence Stamp), Ursa (Sarah Douglas) and
Non (Jack O’Halloran) — to permanent imprisonment in the Phantom Zone, a realm
of utter nothingness in which they will live for all eternity. Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster apparently
came up with this concept in the early 1960’s because plotting Superman was getting so boring they had to keep coming up
with new dangers for him simply because in order to keep the character fresh
and current they had to make him vulnerable to something. They decided that the way to do that was to keep
confronting Superman with leftovers from his now-destroyed original home
planet, Krypton — including Green Kryptonite, verdant-colored meteorites from
the wreckage of Krypton that could incapacitate and kill Superman if he’s
exposed to them long enough (this is how the DC Comics people got the idea of
teaming Superman with their other big superhero, Batman, since as a normal
human being Batman was invulnerable to Kryptonite), as well as a whole rainbow
of alternative Kryptonites — including Gold Kryptonite (though it’s red here,
reflecting Krypton’s red-giant sun), which could permanently strip Superman of his super-powers and turn him
into just another mortal Earthling. That’s one of the plot lines in Superman II; the film actually starts with about 10 minutes of
clips from the first Christopher Reeve Superman and this reminds us of the three people Jor-El
caught rebelling against the authorities on Krypton and trapped in the Phantom
Zone, presumably forever, just before Krypton itself blew up and rendered the
whole issue of who should rule it moot. Only when Superman grabbed the nuclear
missile Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) had aimed at Hackensack, New Jersey at the
end of the first film and hurled it into space (this was the price of Luthor’s
girlfriend Eve Teschemacher, played by Valerine Perrine, agreeing to free
Superman from the Kryptonite-studded pendant and chain Luthor had put around
him before pushing him into an underwater pool — she wanted Hackensack spared
because her family lived there), it exploded in mid-space and opened a hole in
the Phantom Zone that allowed General Zod, Ursa and Non to escape.
Now the
Terrible Trio, who like Superman at the end of the first film have no problem
surviving in the vacuum of outer space (there wouldn’t be superhero stories if you couldn’t do a lot of suspension of disbelief, but one of the big
things that annoyed me about both films is that Kryptonians can apparently
survive in vacuums: even if you accept that a Kryptonian becomes “super” in
Earth’s environment because of the heavier gravity caused by their red-giant
sun as opposed to our little yellow one, they would still have to be able to
breathe), come to Earth with the intent of enslaving the indigenous people
(i.e., us) and making Zod absolute ruler. They’re not worried about Superman
because they figure that even though he’s “super,” too, there are three of them
and only one of him. In a scene that for some reason Richard Lester refused to
include in his version of the film even though I thought it was the best part
of this one, Lois Lane decides to determine once and for all whether Clark Kent
and Superman are the same. She corners him in a hotel suite and aims a gun at
him. She fires it, and he isn’t harmed; he admits to being Superman but then
tells her, “If you’d been wrong, you’d have killed Clark Kent.” “With blanks?” she says. That kind of insouciance runs
throughout much of the first two-thirds of Superman II and quite frankly works a lot better than the
action scenes, which are pretty by-the-numbers — the three bad guys from the
Phantom Zone smash things and get the U.S. President (E. G. Marshall) literally to kneel before Zod and swear obedience, and
Superman is hors de combat because in a scene between him, Lois and the ghost/spirit/bionic
entity/however Jor-El has survived to
continue to nag him even from beyond the grave (I joked that Superman would be
thinking, “Did Thor have to go through this with Odin?”), he’s been told that
in order to fulfill his great mission to bring peace and justice to Earth he
has to love all humanity but can’t develop any affection for one specific
person. Accordingly Jor-El tells his love-struck son that if he wants to stay
with Lois Lane and the two of them be a couple, he has to walk into a red-lit
chamber in the Fortress of Solitude which will strip him of his super-powers
forever and turn him into a normal Earthling with normal human capacities and,
presumably, a normal human lifespan.
No sooner does Superman actually do this,
though, that we’re convinced, “Oh, this isn’t going to last. Some way or other,
the writers will figure out a cockamamie plot device that will allow Clark Kent
to regain his super-powers and become Superman again.” Until they do that,
Clark gets beaten up in a truck stop by a redneck who was putting moves on Lois
— thereby tasting his own blood and feeling pain for the first time — and Zod,
Ursa and Non move in to take over the world, leaving earth’s population to
wonder, “Where the hell is Superman?” Superman is making a long, arduous trek
to his former Arctic redoubt, much the way Ronald Colman had to trudge through
mountains and passes for years trying to rediscover his lost Shangri-La at the
end of Lost Horizon, and at
the end Jor-El — or at least a crystalline projection of him from Krypton’s
idea of a digital video recorder — re-bestows Superman’s powers on him and he
can go about the serious business of saving the world from the Krappy
Kryptonians. For a movie that’s been so stylish up until the end — the byplay
between Clark Kent and Lois Lane has come closer to William Powell and Myrna
Loy than anything contemporary to the late 1970’s or anything we’ve seen since
— the final action sequence at the Fortress of Solitude is really dreary and anticlimactic (maybe because the
big-budget blockbuster superhero movie was still a relatively new genre in 1980, the rule hadn’t been set that the final
action sequence is supposed to be the biggest, flashiest and most entertaining
sequence, sort of like the end of a fireworks display, but it seems to have
taken a while for that rule to crystallize: the end of the 1989 Tim Burton Batman is also a bit disappointing compared to what had gone before, but it didn’t
matter because that doesn't matter so much because the rest of the film was so good) that that may have been what got Donner fired. (Then again, the final
sequence of the Beatles’ Richard Lester-directed film Help! — filmed in the Bahamas because the Beatles and
Brian Epstein had set up a tax shelter there and they had to do some work in the Bahamas to establish themselves as
legally entitled to it — is also a pretty weak send-off to an otherwise quite
good movie.)
Superman II is
mostly a fun movie, not a great one but “made” by the charm as well as the
physique of Christopher Reeve (though, as I noted in my comments on the first
Reeve Superman, knowledge of his
subsequent decade or so of disability followed by a too-early death gives a
tragic cast to his most famous role neither he, the filmmakers nor the original
audiences could have anticipated) and the chemistry between him and Margot
Kidder. When I saw the first Superman in 2013 at the San Diego Public Library (the last movie I saw at their
downtown location before they moved to 12th and Imperial) I wrote that
Reeve seemed too dorky, nerdy and un-butch
as Clark Kent — but this time around his performance as Clark Kent works as
well for me as his Superman. And apropos of nothing in particular, though the real-life model for the fictitious
“Metropolis” where Clark Kent lives and the Daily Planet publishes remains ambiguous in the comic books —
indeed, a lot of people have theorized it was supposed to be Cleveland because
that’s where Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were living
when they invented him and his world — in this movie it’s definitely New York City (which also appears as “Gotham” in
the DC Comics Universe): we get an aerial shot of Manhattan Island similar to
the one that opened the 1961 film of West Side Story and we also get some emotion-inducing shots of the
New York skyline with the two World Trade Center towers still in place.
