MovieNight

Appearing in 1987, when most assumed that the series had been put to rest, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, with a story dreamed up in part by Reeve, plays like the unholy union of a PSA and the WWF. Stirred by a schoolboy's letter, Reeve decides to rid the world of nuclear weapons by tossing them in a giant net and throwing them at the sun. Meanwhile, Hackman's Luthor, aided by slang-talking surfer nephew Jon Cryer, creates a new super-rival: Nuclear Man, who locks horns with Reeve against a variety of rear-projection backdrops. By this point, the production values had dipped so low that director Sidney J. Furie might as well have imported footage from the old George Reeves series. Unsurprisingly, the series ended there, its first two entries illustrating what grand-scale entertainment could do, the remainder illustrating the perils of doing it to death.

Part of the first wave of high-concept, big-budget, special-effects-heavy films that emerged in the wake of Star Wars, 1978's Superman: The Movie, like a handful of its contemporaries, threatened to give blockbuster event movies a good name. Fresh off the success of The Omen, director Richard Donner took on the story of the Man Of Steel with the seriousness due an American myth, using newfangled effects to make the fantastic seem plausible. The film's "You'll believe a man can fly" tagline might have provided a brilliant marketing hook, but it also served as something of a mission statement, particularly in Superman's early segments. From Superman's Kryptonian origins to his coming of age in Smallville, Donner lends his story a sense of awe usually reserved for those filming westerns, baseball movies, or The Bible. The film becomes comic-booky only when its hero, having disappeared into his Fortress Of Solitude for much of Vietnam and Watergate, hits jaded Metropolis. By his own admission on this new DVD version's commentary track, Donner saw Superman as three films in one, with the gag-and-fight-heavy Metropolis segment evincing a different tone than what came before. Even if it feels removed from, and in some respects not on par with, the rest of the film, it succeeds on its own terms (one horrifying bit of spoken verse by Margot Kidder's Lois Lane aside). Effective both as Superman and as the bumbling Clark Kent, Christopher Reeve still seems ideal for the part, if for no other reason than his ability to summon up a convincing sense of intensity when charged with saving the world. He would need to rely on this skill more and more as the Superman sequels—now released on no-frills DVDs alongside the features-packed original—piled up. With one exception, they illustrate the diminishing returns that plagued most blockbuster franchises in the sequel-mad '80s. Originally entering production at the same time as the first Superman, 1981's Superman II was also to have been directed by Donner. When the budget mounted, temperamental producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind first ditched the two-at-once plan, then ditched Donner, bringing in their Three Musketeers director Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night, Petulia) to finish the project after the original Superman turned a substantial profit. The seams show, but Lester's visual wit and trademark energy steer Reeve's struggle with Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman, returning from the original), Kryptonian outlaw General Zod (Terence Stamp), and his cohorts in all the right directions. One Metropolis fight scene alone would make it a worthy successor, but the film also allows Reeve and Kidder ample time to develop the humanity (or Kryptonity) of their characters. Not so 1983's Lester-directed Superman III, which displayed the series' first struggle with what could be called the Planet Of The Apes Paradox: How do you keep topping previous entries with conspicuously smaller budgets? Superman III's answer is to play for laughs, but outside of an opening-credits slapstick ballet that could have come from one of Lester's '60s comedies, they come few and far between. The ideas might sound good, particularly the synthetic Kryptonite that turns Superman into a boozing jerk, but they never get developed, while high-profile guest star Richard Pryor appears somewhat puzzled at his own presence in the film. But the bottom of the barrel remained ****. Appearing in 1987, when most assumed that the series had been put to rest, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, with a story dreamed up in part by Reeve, plays like the unholy union of a PSA and the WWF. Stirred by a schoolboy's letter, Reeve decides to rid the world of nuclear weapons by tossing them in a giant net and throwing them at the sun. Meanwhile, Hackman's Luthor, aided by slang-talking surfer nephew Jon Cryer, creates a new super-rival: Nuclear Man, who locks horns with Reeve against a variety of rear-projection backdrops. By this point, the production values had dipped so low that director Sidney J. Furie might as well have imported footage from the old George Reeves series. Unsurprisingly, the series ended there, its first two entries illustrating what grand-scale entertainment could do, the remainder illustrating the perils of doing it to death.

Here's a new one: a director's cut from someone who isn't the credited director. When producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind decided to make a Superman film, they adopted the same strategy they chose for The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers: shoot two at once and save some money. But as with the Musketeers films, the plan didn't quite work out. The Salkinds fired Superman director Richard Donner before he could complete the sequel, brought in Musketeers director Richard Lester to replace him, and lost the participation of Gene Hackman (who declined to come back for the Lester-shot footage) and Marlon Brando (whose footage was cut after he raised a stink over missing profits from the first Superman). Released in 1980 in Europe and 1981 in America, Superman II met with popular success, but fans, teased by footage that showed up in TV cuts, kept the idea of a truer, Donner-ier version alive, and the clamor has finally culminated in a new cut reconstructed by Michael Thau with Donner's approval. The standard line holds Lester's version as too camp, blaming him for all the film's failings and crediting Donner with everything that works. That wouldn't be fair even if it didn't disrespect Lester (here repeatedly called "the other director"), who helmed masterpieces like A Hard Day's Night and Petulia, especially since the new cut reveals that Donner deserves a great deal of the credit and blame for both versions of Superman II. Most of the key scenes originated with Donner, and while his cut solves some of the original version's problems (no more Superman logo snares made out of cellophane), it has problems of its own. Big problems. Anyone wanting to avoid camp will want to fast-forward through the painful comedic scenes featuring Hackman as Lex Luthor, with moll Valerie Perrine. One key scene obviously comes from patched-together screen tests, and the finale maddeningly repeats a cheap trick from the first Superman film. It's nice to see the Brando footage and the restored scenes of Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder's breezy chemistry. But where the original cut at least played as a relatively cohesive movie, loose ends and all, this looks like little but loose ends. It's a curio, not a corrective.

Comic strips in newspapers or magazines have often been used as the bases of films, but never on such a big scale as in Richard Donner’s Superman – the Movie. The scenes look as if no money has been spared on them, nor ingenuity, for that matter – both very desirable in an elaborate fantasy lasting over two and a quarter hours. For those who know Jerry Siegel’s and Joe Shuster’s comic strip, which has been running since the ‘30s, no introduction to their hero will be needed. Others will be glad of the opening sequence, which is a prologue showing how Superman came to be launched towards Earth from the planet Krypton. Marlon Brando, the only well-informed member of Krypton’s council, ruling from a cast concrete capital in a landscape of ice, predicts the planet’s destruction within 30 days. When this is not heeded by such experienced colleagues on the council as Trevor Howard or Harry Andrews, he and his wife (Susannah York) decide to launch their baby son earthwards in a spacecraft that looks more beautiful than practical – like a starfish in pale pink ice. Krypton duly blowing up is suitably spectacular; and when, after a long journey, the baby arrives, he’s a little boy capable of holding up car with one hand when the wheel-jack fails. The middle-aged childless American couple with the car who pick him up in a field naturally adopt him, and by the time he’s in his late teens he’s kicking footballs over the horizon and outrunning fast trains, such are his powers. Only these feats are not, evidently, what he’s here for; and he is summoned northwards to hear words of wisdom nobly delivered, from a reincarnated Mr Brando, speaking from a lovely crystalline building that recalls Ibsen’s Temple of Ice. His next appearance is in what looks like New York but is called Metropolis, to work, of all places, as a reporter on a newspaper. It’s called, most appropriately, the Daily Planet, with Jacki Cooper as a nice old-fashioned news editor and Margot Kidder as pretty little Lois, the “ace” reporter. Dressed in a dark city suit and wearing horn-rimmed specs, Superman seems frightfully shy and square; but this is only a disguise, and he has just to put on a red cloak and boots to become another being who can fly through the air – well, rather too much like Batman, who also came from a comic strip, I often found myself thinking. It seems he is here “to fight for truth and justice in the American way,” which brings him into conflict with one, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman). He describes himself as the best criminal brain of his time, working from luxurious headquarters with a pretty secretary (Valerie Perrine) and a silly side-kick (Ned Beatty). When it eventually gets to the Planet that someone is actually flying around at night, obstructing criminal activities, the news editor naturally puts Lois on to the job; and it is to her, for romantic reasons, that Superman first displays himself in a rather charming and also funny scene, for he has X-ray eyes, and while he can assure her that her lungs are not suffering from smoking, he can also tell her the colour of her underwear. A subsequent scene when he saves her from a crashing helicopter is good cliff-hanger stuff which ends romantically when they seem to be waltzing away together through the night sky, and one is only sorry when he has to turn to more serious business, such as substituting for an airliner’s dud engine. These feats, and the actual flying, are arranged by the special effects department with equal gracefulness and naturalness, and superbly photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth; so the film picturesquely and gradually winds up towards the great confrontation and battle of wits between our hero and Luthor, who intends to use a doctored nuclear missile to destroy the whole of California – it’s just part of a deal in real estate. What with bridges going down, dams bursting and cars piling up on motorways following some big explosion, the film seems for a time to become mere destruction drama, but happily the lighter touch is eventually restored with Superman’s arrival in the nick of time, to save his Lois and civilisation. All this makes a highly entertaining, though undemanding mixture, of sci-fi, romance and comedy, which could hardly have come off at all at any lower artistic level, nor without such a happy choice for the central part as Christopher Reeve. He manages the two sides of the character, the super and the shy, wonderfully well by bringing to both just the slightest suggestion of burlesque, as if, in fact, he was inwardly enjoying rather a good little joke.