Super New Year

 

 

 

 

First off, I can't believe I never got around to Superman before now.  Going on 9 years, off and on, on this blog, and with some of the entries being memories of childhood, a mention of this movie would have seemed to fit.  

Early on in my childhood, movies were a rare treat. I don't really remember all of them.  Most likely I saw several Disney animated films as a child.  One of the podcasts I regularly listen to, All 80's Movies Podcast, has frequent guests on it's show.  One of the questions the  hosts ask  their guests is "What is the first movie you ever saw?"  For me, my earliest memory is Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but I can't really remember one damn thing about the movie except that it had Angela Lansbury in it.

Likewise, I went with my parents and sister to see Patton at the drive-in, and I can't remember diddly about the first experience.  But I do know that it caused my father to determine that we as kids would be allowed to see no movie rated higher than G.

I had to beg and plead for my sister and me to be allowed to go see Star Wars. I  am not sure if my arguments on the subject convinced him to relent or if he was influenced by some other people that it was not that bad.  I always say that his main objection to PG and higher was the presence of language, since, if it was violence he probably would have not even considered Patton in the first place.

So Star Wars is probably my earliest theater going experience i can really remember.  A year later, on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve, I am not sure which, we were allowed to go see our second PG movie, Superman.

The producers promoted the film with a memorable tagline : "You'll believe a man can fly."  And, as I can recall, it was pretty impressive at the time.  Nowadays it looks pretty quaint, having been exposed to CGI and the like, but it still looks pretty decent. 

The first of the potential Superman franchise had it's eye on it's sequel already, so there were some setup scenes that included the introduction , early in the movie, of the villains that would serve as foils for the man in the blue suit in the sequel, Superman II.  The first film had some pretty good clout in the form of it's stars.  One particular note was the name Marlon Brando.  His name appears, along with Gene Hackman, before the title "Superman" appears on screen. Such was the clout of Brando, given that his screen presence only really occupies less than 10 minutes of the opening scene. 

In addition, Glenn Ford had an all too brief appearance as Clark's ("Kal-El") Earth father. Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill, who played the original Superman and Lois Lane in the first 1940's live-action version of the Superman saga made a brief cameo as the parents of a young Lois Lane on a train.  Among others who had cameo roles, if you are quick, you can see Larry Hagman, John Ratzenberger, and Rex Reed.

The casting for Superman was probably not quite as expansive as the casting of some other coveted roles, like, say, Scarlett O'Hara, but quite a few names were in the running.  For instance, the producers sought out James Caan, and imagine that for a minute.  Hard to think of the same guy who had recently played a very emotional and rough character like Sonny Corleone trying to pull off the shy and reserved Clark Kent...  I also read that Arnold Scwarzenegger tried for the role.  (At least HE wouldn't have needed any padding as Superman, but even Jimmy Olsen would not have been fooled by the Clark Kent disgiuse in that case...)  

From wikipedia I gleaned the information that a whole raft of other then big names were either courted or tried out for the role.  Among these were Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone and even Paul Newman.  The one that caught my eye, however, was Neil Diamond.  That would have been the biggest mistake of the movie had it gone that way.  Diamond is a great singer, but he couldn't act worth squat. His one starring role, in 1980's The Jazz Singer, proved that.

The cache of big names didn't stop there.  The script was written by Mario Puzo, the same guy who brought us The Godfather saga, after William Goldman turned down the offer.  Puzo was a great writer in his own right, but I would love to have seen what Goldman would have done with the story.  (Goldman is the man responsible for the scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride as well as a host of other great dialogue driven films, so the dialogue would have popped for sure.  He won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for All the President's Men, which I've been meaning to track down a copy of to review,)

As well, instead of Richard Donner, look at the list of "who could have been"  in the director's chair: Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, George Lucas. And, if the producers had been a little more confident in him during pre-production, Steven Spielberg.  But by the time they got the ball rolling Spielberg was already involved in his next opus, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The movie had what was, at that time, the biggest budget, at in the neighborhood off $55 million. Fortunately for the financial backers it was a huge hit and made well over $300 million in it's first run, a good enough showing that all that pre-setup in the picture to point to the sequel wasn't wasted.  (Just as an endpoint, since I won't be reviewing it here, the early scenes involving Jor-el and the three rebels figures prominently in Superman II.) 

Superman: (1978)

On the planet Krypton, Jor-El (Marlon Brando) delivers a sum-up of his case against three renegades, General Zod (Terence Stamp) and his cohorts Ursa (Sarah Douglas) and Non (Jack O'Halloran).  In the end the three are sentences to a life (actually "Forever") sentence in The Forbidden Zone (essentially a two-dimensional prism that floats endlessly through space.)

After the trial Jor-El pleads with the council to listen to his aguments once again that Krypton needs to be evacuated immediately because it is on it's last legs.  He is silenced and forced to eep it to himself, because none of the powers-that-be want to admit that there might be something to his predictions, (And isn't that the way with ALL politicians when world-changing scenarios come into the fore.)

Jor-El swears that neither he, nor his wife, will attempt to leave planet Krypton.  But he didn't say anything about his son, Kal-El.  Just before all hell breaks loose on the planet, he manages to send his son off in a space ship, destined for a remote planet called...Earth.

The ship takes a little while to make the trip, since Kal-El is a baby when it leaves Krypton, but by the time it arrives on Earth, the baby is about 3 years old. (Which makes one wonder what kind of technology Krypton had to keep him alive and well-fed all that time, since he obviously couldn't have operated any computer functions himself...)

When the ship crash lands on Earth, it is conveniently near an older couple, Jonathan and Martha Kent (Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter).  They adopt the kid as their own, using the ruse that the boy is an orphan from Martha's side of the family to hide his true origin.

Fast forward 15 years.  Young Clark (Jeff East) is struggling to be accepted in his coterie of friends because he is such a geek.  Of course, we all know that the "geek" is just a front, since Clark could handle the entire football squad single-handedly.  Clark has a tendency to show off, secretly using his superpowers, but since the kids don't know his secret, they just think of him as more of a "geek".

When Clark's adopted father dies, Clark discovers, hidden in the barn, a crystal from his space ship. He takes the crystal and treks north to the frozen tundra of the North Pole where he creates the Fortress of Solitude with it, and spends the next 12 years under the tutelage of his real father, via hologram.

The next thing you know, Clark is a fully grown man and has gone to Metroplolis where he has a job as a reporter, and meets three of the main characters he will interact with the rest of he film: Perry White (Jackie Cooper), his boss; Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure), the paper's star photographer; and Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) one of the star reporters.  (One thing, played for laughs in some scenes is Lois asking someone how to spell some word.  It's funny, but it made me wonder how she got a job as a reporter when she lacked the wherewithal of vocabulary... or at least a good dictionary...)

Superman reveals his presence very early when Lois, who is on a helicopter to go meet the President of the United states gets into a bind and nearly crashes.  Subsequently he foils a robbery, snares a guy trying to get to the top of the building without using the building's elevator, and rescues a cat in a tree.

Everyone wants to know about this mysterious hero, and Superman eventually agrees to an interview with none other than Lois.  Making Superman and Lois seemingly bosom friends (at the very least...)

Meanwhile, deep under the subway in his secret lair, mastermind criminal Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) is making plans for his domination of the real estate market by planning to hijack two nuclear warheads and use them to destroy most of southern California nd make all the desert land he bought up prime coastal property.  In this endeavor he is helped by his dimwit flunky, Otis (Ned Beatty) and his woman, Miss Tessmacher (Valerie Perrine).  (With stalwart help like this, who needs enemies...?)

Eventually things come to a head when Luthor entices Superman to his lair.  But Luthor is not an idiot.  He didn't entice Superman without a backup.  He has a piece of Kryptonite, a remnant of Superman's home world on hand, which will render Superman useless when he comes in contact with it.

With Superman out of the way, and the warheads on their  destination, things seem bleak.  But when Miss Tessmacher finds out that Luthor has sent one of the warheads to Hackensack, NJ(?), she rescues Superman, on the promise that he will stop the warhead going to NJ first, because that's where her mother lives.

(OK. Interjection here.  Superman is "faster than a speeding bullet". So why is he taking such a long time to overtake the first warhead?  We need that to happen so that the next part will happen, but it just doesn't compute...)

Superman does stop the first warhead, but the second one does it's damage by causing the San Andreas Fault to malfunction and start causing serious damage.  But Superman is able to keep the entire coast from disappearing into the Pacific Ocean.  Unfortunately, one of the losses in the event is the life of Lois.  Which doesn't really set well with Superman...

One of his father's admonitions during his training was that it was "forbidden for him to interfere with human history".  But Superman refuses to let that stop him.  He roars into space and using his super speed manages to reverse the turning of the Earth to go back before Lois died. (And thus, even though he took his own precious time chasing down the first warhead, he finds the wherewithal to fly faster than that to reverse time.. go figure.)

All's well that ends well, at any rate.  Lois is still alive and Luthor and Otis end up in prison.

 This movie is still pretty good even now, 47 years later, although at times, as I said before, it comes off a little dated by it's special effects.  But I can't fault it for that, after all, it was the best that Hollywood and the science of filming had to offer at the time,

Well, folks, time to fly off to the home front.  Drive safely.

Quiggy