Four Color Comics

I posted a rant about how awful Superman: The Movie is over at the Marvel Masterworks forums. My opinion was not popular. “The first film is generally beloved,” wrote one poster.

Not.

Pauline Kael, the late, great film critic for The New Yorker, wasn’t too fond of the film, either. Check out some of these quotes:

“Superman,” one of the two or three most expensive movies ever made, and with the biggest event promotion yet, is a cheesy-looking film, with a John Williams “epic” score that transcends self-parody—cosmic fanfares keep coming when there’s nothing to celebrate.

“Superman” gives the impression of having been made in panic—in fear that “too much” imagination might endanger the film’s appeal to the literal-minded. With astronomic sums of money involved (though not in ways perceptible to viewers), the producers and the director, Richard Donner, must have been afraid even of style.

“Superman” [...] has no controlling vision; there’s so little consistency that each sequence might have had a different director and been color-processed in a different lab.

The narrative immediacy of comic strips is what has such a magical effect on kids. The plot is socked to them, with exclamation points. And we go to “Superman” hoping for that kind of disreputable energy. But it isn’t there, and you can feel the anticipatory elation in the theatre draining out. Donner doesn’t draw us in and hold on to us; we’re with him only in brief patches—a few seconds each. The plotting is so hit or miss that the movie never seems to get started.

The Superman who announces “I’m here to fight for truth, justice, and the American way” needs a little ribbing. But the film doesn’t bring any ambiguity into this portrait of an outsize F.B.I. man from space. It doesn’t risk new sources of comedy. It sticks to dumb jokes about spelling, and low-comedy scenes between Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), the criminal mastermind who makes his home under Grand Central Station, and his bungling helper (Ned Beatty), with Luthor’s floozy (Valerie Perrine) looking on. You can see that Hackman likes the idea of dressing up in what must be Liberace’s castoffs and playing a funny maniac, and when he has a halfway good line he scores his laugh. But he’s strenuously frivolous, like a guest villain on a late-sixties “Batman” show. Most of the time, he and Beatty are doing deliberately corny material—a kiddies’ version of the kind of burlesque routines that Roy Kinnear does in Richard Lester movies—and the director can’t seem to get the timing right.

Probably the moviemakers thought that the picture would sell on its special effects—Superman’s flying, and his rescues, and the disasters and cataclysms. The special effects are far from wizardly, though, and the editing often seems hurried and jerky just at the crucial moments.

In the early scenes on the planet Krypton, where the infant Superman lives, we’re acutely conscious of the lack of elegance in the design, because Krypton, which is supposed to be more advanced than Earth by thousands of years, has plastic-chandelier decor, like a Vegas lobby.

The conversation of the advanced beings on Krypton isn’t very stimulating, either. Mostly, it’s just the infant’s father, Jor-El (Marlon Brando), delivering ponderosities. Brando has begun to look like an Indian chief.

Instead of going directly from the child actor to Christopher Reeve and letting him play the eighteen-year-old Superman, the film introduces another actor (Jeff East), who doesn’t look like the little boy or like Reeve. This intermediate figure is very inexpressive, and something about him seems all wrong—is it just his pompadour, or is he wearing a false nose?

When Superman takes his beloved up for a joyride in the sky, the cutting works against the soaring romanticism that we’re meant to feel, and, with Lois reciting Leslie Bricusse lyrics to convey her poetic emotions, even the magic of two lovers flying hand in hand over New York City is banalized.

“Superman” doesn’t have enough conviction or courage to be solidly square and dumb; it keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us—but half-heartedly. It has a sour, scared undertone. And you can’t help being aware that this is the sort of movie that increases the cynicism and sense of futility among actors.

What she said. And you know what? Superman: The Movie ain’t much better.