by Tom De Haven
The movie, though. What were they thinking? I’ve watched that first Superman movie at least half a dozen times, three times in the past year, and it’s never not incredible to me that something so poorly built, so full of bad choices, with so much bad script and so many throwaway performances, something so fundamentally schizophrenic … could still cast a charm. But it does.
Although Mario Puzo gets credit for both story and screenplay, virtually nothing in the movie comes from his three hundred-page epic, which everyone who read it pronounced unfilmable. (Lifting mainland China into the air is just one of the feats Puzo had Superman performing.) The script, in large measure, was written by Robert Benton and David Newman, who had collaborated a decade earlier on the Superman Broadway musical. (I can’t help it, that Bob Dylan lyric “there’s no success like failure” just popped into my head.) Newman’s wife, Leslie, contributed Lois Lane material. Tom Mankiewicz, who’d written some of the earliest James Bond movies, finessed their work (for which he received a “creative consultant” credit), as did the British novelist George MacDonald Fraser (who goes uncredited).
Whenever I start watching the first Superman movie again, I think maybe this time the three separate parts—the worlds of Krypton, Smallville, and Metropolis—will link in ways I missed every previous time. Never happens. The scatteredness includes even the inexplicable prologue, which ought to beguile and ends up pointless, bewildering, and stupid. Following a barrage of stainless-steel credits that plunge at the audience from a cheesily rendered distant galaxy (as awe-inspiring as some out-of-the-box Fourth of July sparklers), enormous movie-palace curtains, in nostalgic high-contrast black and white, fill the screen. Curtains part to reveal a boxy neighborhood-theater-sized movie screen, upon which a comic book cover is projected and a date—June 1938—superimposed. To anyone watching who doesn’t know already that June 1938 was the cover date on the first issue of Action Comics, the information is meaningless. What’s dopier, while the comic book on display is titled Action Comics, and features the distinctive logo, the cover drawing is not Shuster’s famous Superman-hoisting-a-Huffmobile, but instead some drawn-for-the-movie-in-pulp-style rocket ship. Then, with a young boy’s voiceover, we’re told that the city of Metropolis was ravaged by hard times and despondency in the period of the Great Depression, how it was in need of a savior to lift its citizens from misery. Anyone watching for the first time would assume the picture to come is going to be a period-piece, Superman in June 1938, during the Great Depression. But no. Because suddenly—wham! — Alexander Salkind’s chromium name comes whirling in from the background, John Williams’s triumphal music blares, and in full color we’re transported to a planet circling a humongous red sun that looks to be fixed about a thousand miles away from its surface. Even so, the planet is an ice planet.
Five minutes into Superman: The Movie and already it’s a mess of miscues, tacky effects, and impossible logic. It gets worse.
You could take that first real part of the movie, the World of Krypton, and run it with those robot-and-human silhouettes from the Sci-Fi Channel’s old Mystery Science Theater 3000 kibitzing throughout; that, in fact, might be the only way to watch it with enjoyment. Donner’s Kryptonian civilization appears to consist of a gigantic white observatory-type edifice and a population of fewer than two dozen men and women who wear black or white togas and live underground in glass-fronted hives. This couldn’t possibly be any further opposite the “paradise lost” of the comic books.
Surrounded by a handful of highbrow actors (Trevor Howard, Harry Andrews, Maria Schell, Terence Stamp), Marlon Brando fondles a phosphorescent crystal rod like it’s a Prussian general’s riding crop and wanders the Hall of Justice, delivering apocalyptic dialogue as though he’s groggy with a migraine. Reportedly Brando suggested that his character, Superman’s father, Jor-El, be portrayed on screen either as a giant potato or a blue suitcase, for which he could provide the voice. He was persuaded to go in front of the camera instead, but unfortunately sporting a preposterous white pompadour that makes him resemble an aging Nashville countrypolitan singer. “Claiming he wished to preserve spontaneity in his performance,” says Jake Rossen, “Brando didn’t memorize his lines. Instead, he tacked them up to every available surface out of the camera’s view, including the forehead of … actor Sarah Douglas, who played one of the three traitors Jor-El banishes into the Phantom Zone” (Superman vs. Hollywood, 91). I watch Brando’s performance and suddenly I’m doing what people sometimes do now when they’re talking about how much CEOs are overpaid: I think, Brando probably earned ten thousand dollars, there, just nodding his head; now he just made another fifty thousand, taking those mincing steps toward Susannah York; and for that pained grimace, at least another thirty …
The planet Krypton suddenly starts coming apart at the fault lines, and Jor-El and Lara tuck their infant son into a rocket ship that not only doesn’t look like the rocket ship on the bogus comic book cover we saw in the prologue but resembles nothing so much as a gigantic Christmas tree ornament. And off the baby goes to Earth. Not soon enough.
The Krypton story is really Chicken Little retold, and it’s the Moses story, too. The Christian allegory, when you think about it, doesn’t work quite so well. If this is God sending his only Son to the world, then what kind of Supreme Being is Jor-El? Not so hot. He’s about to die. He waited too long and didn’t build a rocket large enough for the whole family; yes, he leaves a hologram to give his only son moral instruction upon reaching adulthood, but it’s a hologram, it’s not a father, or a Father either.
If Krypton’s civilization is so super-scientific, I always wonder, why couldn’t the other scientists corroborate those seismic pressures Jor-El warns them about? Why couldn’t they take readings of their own? A seismic pressure is a seismic pressure, it doesn’t require faith. The story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and ends up seeming like science fiction of the Toga Age. Always best to get the Krypton stuff over with quickly and the baby speeding toward Earth. Donner takes his own sweet time of it. The first part of Superman: The Movie couldn’t have come out much worse if he’d gone with Brando’s suggestion about the blue suitcase.
The second section, the World of Smallville (with Jeff East as the teenaged Clark Kent, his voice overdubbed, which you’d think would be a huge insult, by Christopher Reeve) is the part of the movie that plays things the straightest, hyperbolic but straight, and to the point—primarily because of its shot-to-shot narrative clarity, the shots as stylized as comic book panels, and the slightly speeded up Studio-era quality of the acting. Clark Kent in Kansas, in high school. Cornfields, blue skies, America the Beautiful. Judging by clothes, hot rods, letter sweaters, and soundtrack (“Rock Around the Clock”), the sequence is set during the mid-1950s, which would fit with that 1938 prologue. If Superman came to earth as an infant in the late thirties, he’d be in high school in 1955, ’56. But then that would make him nearly forty in the “contemporary” Metropolis section which follows, and he’s not; Christopher Reeve is a twenty-five-year-old. Donner’s movie stumbles all over the temporal map; Gene Hackman’s Luthor even comments at one point that he’s seen confirmed reports about a rocket ship that arrived on earth in 1948. It’s best not to pay attention to interior logic, since there isn’t any.
The bridge between the second and thirds parts of the movie, the part when Clark Kent uses a crystalline cudgel to build a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic wasteland and then confronts the ghost of Jor-El, or rather his hologram, is more mysticism lite disguised as science fiction, Lost Horizon meets The Ten Commandments.
The third part of the movie, and the only one that’s actually about Superman, the World of Metropolis, is a schizoid free-for-all, a hectic mixture of well timed-out screwball comedy and the dopiest buffoonery, of special effects that can get you giddy for being fooled so well (the flying, most of it), and others that simply look cut-and-paste (the flying, all the rest of it). And I want to reach out and smack Gene Hackman for hamming it up
like he’s playing the King from Huckleberry Finn. And Ned Beatty—who’s he supposed to be, anyhow, Steinbeck’s Lenny? No, wait, Steinbeck’s Lenny in Looney Tunes: “Which way did he go, George, which way did he go?” Was there a lot of coke on the set, was that it, or was it just what always seems to happen to a movie whenever the source material is comics, rampant Adult Attention Deficit Disorder?
It’s hard to put up with all the goony stuff, but impossible not to be gladdened and beguiled by the light comedy of Reeve and Margot Kidder, as Lois Lane, in their scenes together, when it’s just the two of them. Starting with that first rooftop interview (famous line: “What color underwear am I wearing?”), the courtship of Superman and Lois has the chemistry of the best forties major-movie-star romances. Reeve lends Superman a grace and a likability he has never had before, never quite. He’s slender, he’s buff but still he’s slender, he’s no human bulldozer—he’s sexy.
He’s dressed in a blue bodysuit with a big red letter S appliquéd on the front, red high boots, red trunks, yellow belt, and a red floor-length cape, and still he’s very sexy. That’s a successful fantasy! And for the first time since Phyllis Coates played her back in the first season of the old George Reeves TV show, Lois seems the kind of female a guy like Superman might actually fall for. Margot Kidder is the Siegel original minus the cruelty that often crept in. She can wisecrack and deliver a zinger, but there’s no venom. She plays Lois Lane as both a feminist and a postfeminist: demands respect for her skills (of which spelling is not one), but also likes to dress girlie (her underwear is pink, Superman answers in reply to her question, having used his X-ray vision), and she is obviously someone with an erotic life as well as a professional one. So, by the smile and the look in his eye as he takes her flying around Metropolis at night, is he.
Yes, and every time I watch the boy-girl stuff in the first Superman movie (and in the pretty lousy sequel, in Bryan Singer’s movie, and in Smallville, maybe in Smallville especially, since the teenage hormones are so especially potent there), I can’t not think of Larry Niven’s smarty-pants scientific description of what would most likely occur if a humanoid superpowered alien ever actually mated with a mere earth woman. And I quote: “Superman would literally crush LL’s body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout. Lastly, he’d blow off the top of her head” (“Man of Steel,” 53). With his super-ejaculation. Okay, enough.
Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, 1978 (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)
38
Not long ago I was visiting a friend of mine who lives in Westchester County, New York. As he was driving me from the train station to his house, we passed a walled-off property to our left and he told me, “That’s where Christopher Reeve lived, right back behind there.” I looked. “Died there, too, I think,” my friend added. “Maybe. I’m not sure.” Riding along the same road the next morning, I kept a lookout for that wall as it was coming up, now on our right. And that’s all I could see, too, just a long curving high wall, but my friend said there was a large estate behind it and a big house. He didn’t know who owned the place now.
I mentioned that it had always seemed to me—not to sound crass or anything—but it had always seemed to me that whenever people talked about Christopher Reeve after his riding accident in 1995—paralyzed from his neck down, life on a ventilator— whenever people talked about that, about him, in the next breath they’d always mention the morbid irony of his having played Superman. They couldn’t not. I couldn’t not. You’d see his picture sometimes, in magazines, on magazines covers, Reeve by himself or with his wife, Dana, and the headline or cover line would be something like “Superman Chris Reeve: Never Lose Hope.” It was inevitably phrased some way in terms of Superman, to remind you that he’d once played the most powerful man in the world, the most perfect, the healthiest man, and now he was paralyzed. “The actor Christopher Reeve, best known for his portrayal of Superman …” In the public story about the post-accident Christopher Reeve, there was always a subtext, and it wasn’t all that sub: How could such a thing happen to Superman? And if it could happen to Superman …
Talking about Christopher Reeve, and particularly his accident, reminded me of the so-called Curse of Superman, which I didn’t bother mentioning to my friend; he’d already started talking about something else by then. Just as well. The Curse of Superman, which still pops up in both comics and movie discussion groups, refers to how supposedly it’s bad luck for an actor to play the role. George Reeves shot himself or was murdered, and Christopher Reeve—similar name, weird, spooky coincidence right there — Christopher Reeve was thrown off a horse that refused a jump. For terrifying examples of the Curse of Superman, though, that’s about it. A lot of different actors have played the character over the past seventy-plus years, including Bud Collyer, who played him more often and longer than anyone, on radio and several different animated cartoon series, and he did just fine, became a famously affable network game-show host, died at a ripe old age. Kirk Alyn from the Columbia serials claimed that he was typecast after playing Superman and couldn’t get any roles. Unfortunate, but not tragic. Bob Holiday, who’d played the part on Broadway in It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman, gave up show business soon afterward to build vacation homes in the Poconos. No tragic curse there, either. Very successful business. Dean Cain from Lois and Clark still shows up on TV, network and cable. If I were Tom Welling, from Smallville, or Brandon Routh, from Superman Returns, I wouldn’t be worried about any curse.
No, the only verifiable Superman curse is the one that Jerry Siegel swore in April 1975 against Warner Communications, the Salkinds, and his old archenemy Jack Liebowitz.
One thousand press releases mailed out required a lot of postage, which Siegel could ill afford to pay for. I try to imagine what it must have been like for him after weeks passed and nobody called for more information or to request an interview, nobody. I see him wearing a wrinkled white dress shirt and dark pilly trousers, bedroom slippers; slumped in a chair from Goodwill, staring off into space. It’s late morning, it’s midafternoon, it’s nighttime. He looks exhausted, jowly. His wife, his daughter, maybe some guys he works with at the California Public Utilities Commission, everybody tries to snap him out of it, but no dice; he’s done for. Nobody cares. He’s finished. Then the phone rings.
It wasn’t the Los Angeles Times, just a local weekly giveaway arts newspaper called The Cobblestone, a staff writer named Phil Yeh. Jerry’s nine-page J’accuse had landed on Yeh’s desk, and when he’d read it and finally called, he was expecting to be told to go to the back of the line. Despite the smallness of the newspaper, Jerry invited Yeh to his apartment. Any attention, any publicity was better than none. After Yeh’s story came out, though, more nothing ensued.
But then late in October, a reporter from Washington happened upon the press release and contacted Siegel by phone, then took a train to New York and a cab to Queens and spoke with Joe Shuster. Contacted for comment, DC and Warner declined. Jerry’s unchallenged version of things ran as a front-page story in the Washington Times.
At that point Tom Snyder, host of NBC’s late-night Tomorrow Show, invited Jerry Siegel to tell his story on the air.
A successful political cartoonist and teacher, Jerry Robinson happened to be working late at his drawing table with the television on the night Siegel appeared on Snyder’s show. As a teenager, Robinson was Bob Kane’s first assistant and then primary ghost-artist on Kane’s Batman comic books. During their overlapping stints at National Comics, he’d been acquainted with both Siegel and Shuster and was astounded now by what he heard Jerry tell Snyder. He’d known about the “troubles” the two partners had had in the late 1940s and was aware of the first couple of lawsuits, but he’d fallen out of touch with both men long ago and just assumed, since he’d never heard any further gossip, that they’d come to some kind of settlement with DC. It outraged him to realize
that the creators of Superman were living in near-poverty, worried about their medical bills and money for their old age. It was unseemly. It was shabby. Well connected, not just in the New York cartooning community but in the theatrical, literary, and academic (he taught at the School of Visual Arts) communities as well, Robinson decided to do whatever he could to help. He telephoned NBC that night, to get in touch with Jerry Siegel.
Neal Adams, another, younger New York City cartoonist, also heard about Siegel’s manifesto and situation. Adams had drawn Superman comic books himself during a brief period in the early 1970s and was admired by fans and peers for his illustration-based drawing style, a post-Alex Raymond loaded-brush realism. Although he no longer drew mainstream comics (he’d found ad work more lucrative), Adams was currently president of the Academy of Comic Book Arts, a recently constituted organization lobbying for creator rights, including ownership of original artwork, and royalties. “Essentially,” said Adams, “what I and the guys in my studio did was, we decided that day that we would make an effort that these two guys would at least be treated reasonably at the end of whatever that effort might be. That effort turned out to be about three-and-a-half months long” (Weisinger, introduction to Siegel, “Superman’s Originator”).
Combining their resources, Robinson and Adams and whatever volunteers they could find tried to make things embarrassing for Warner; any negative publicity about the ongoing plight of the two creators could leave an ugly blot on the upcoming Superman movie.