Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs
SUPERMAN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Richard Donner
SUPERMAN II (1981)
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester
SUPERMAN II – THE RICHARD DONNER CUT (2006)
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester
SUPERMAN III (1983)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by David and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester
SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
*½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras B
starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Sidney J. Furie
by Walter Chaw The split in Superman–his faultline where he’s the weakest, the most vulnerable to attack–is there from the beginning. He is a Zen kōan whose existence represents the essential riddle at the heart of any mythology for an infallible, omniscient, omnipotent being. He is an eggshell’s impregnable yet permeable surface: incredibly strong and prone to shatter; seamless but filled with life; unknowably alien and a reflection of everyone’s secret self. An incubator and vessel, the source and the end. He is the immovable object and the irresistible force, the “eternal boy scout,” branded at various times by the terminally unempathetic as “boring”–the rejoinder to which is that he’s been the centre of thousands of stories (tens of thousands?) in uninterrupted serialized adventures since his first appearance in Action Comics on April 18, 1938. Superman has persisted through every era of the United States from the Great Depression to now and every war since WWII, through the fall and rise again of the Ku Klux Klan and every form of mass media, in endless rejuvenating cycles bleeding into each other until their borders become a meaningless melange coalescing into a logo that is as archetypal in the West as the outline of a mushroom cloud. He is the literal “super” man, and somehow he means the most to the bullied and the broken–not as a fantasy of retribution, but as hopeful indication that even the most perfect of us are beset by doubt and alienation. He is the essential shining metaphor for post-modern existentialism.
His weakness isn’t “kryptonite,” the material of his destroyed homeworld, sodden with the radiation of the red sun that destroyed it. In various incarnations, kryptonite is either deadly to him, or it mutates him, or it divides him into his Freudian expressions of Id and Ego, or it makes him stupid, or very smart, or outlandishly evil. It can do all that because kryptonite is an element left over from a massive childhood trauma that destroyed every notion of cultural and personal history. (Small wonder, then, that he’s been Russian, an Asian-American, Black, a robot, a cyborg, a child, an old man, and a woman.) Kryptonite can’t transmit through lead, and Superman also can’t use his X-ray vision to see through lead. I have always wondered if his vision works on a property other than light–or else what good would it do for him to see through an outer covering into a dark interior? At one point, Superman in the comics constructed a suit made of lead that would protect his body from kryptonite and prevent others of his people, if there were any, from seeing into him. What does lead become, then, if the metaphor for kryptonite is trauma? Is it denial? If so, the things his enemies hide behind sheets of lead are in league with the kind of deception in which Superman himself engages when he dons a cape to insulate himself from humanity, or wraps himself in forgetfulness when he wishes to separate himself from his past. Superman has a weakness, and it’s this: his unexamined self, his existence as a fractured being driven mad by the trap of his essential difference. He is Jesus in the Christian mythology, drowned in temptations but without the sweet release of a crucifixion that will finally take. Superman’s weakness is that he can’t have you knowing how broken he is. He is shackled by the burden of our hope.
The term “kryptonite” has entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “Achilles heel.” Superman is thus etymologically equivalized with Homeric, Virgilian beings, a quantum hero who assumes multiple forms and usages according to need and circumstance. The noble gas krypton (KR, atomic #36) was discovered by Scots scientist William Ramsey in 1898 in the residue of a distillate of liquid oxygen. Its name derives from Homer’s ancient Greek meaning “the hidden one” or the “secret one”; Superman’s entire story is about deception. The film rights for Superman were purchased by the father/son team of Alexander and Ilya Salkind in 1974 with the plan, learned from their experience producing Richard Lester’s expensive but profitable, jokey, good-times IP pics The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, to make a Superman film and its sequel back-to-back. Over the course of a three-year development period, directors like Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin, and George Lucas were considered and rejected while Mario Puzo, fresh off the glory of the first two The Godfather films, was retained to lend a little class to the property, submitting an unfilmable, NYC phone directory-thick script 550 pages long and packed with slapstick and camp elements the eleventh-hour choice of director, Richard Donner, deemed objectionable. Fresh off The Omen, Donner recruited Tom Mankiewicz, son of Joe and nephew of Herman, to “start from scratch” after six million bucks had already been sunk into the production. At this point, just two months away from shooting, the role of Superman hadn’t even been cast yet. Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Neil Diamond, and Sylvester Stallone were courted or auditioned. Even the Salkind family dentist was brought in for a screen test. The problem? Who do you get to play perfection without earning our resentment, to demonstrate self-knowledge without cynicism and genuine altruism hand-in-hand with righteous self-interest?
The trick with Superman is never to find enemies who punch harder than him, but rather problems that are only exacerbated by force. It’s not to find bad guys who can fly faster than him, but rather issues around nourishing a society’s rotting moral conscience. Superman is not a physical hero, he’s a spiritual one–and so the best Superman stories are about the reclamation of idealism as opposed to the apocalyptic levelling of cities. These themes are embedded in the brief lines given to Superman’s biological father, Jor-El (Marlon Brando), in Donner’s Superman (1978): In a recording packed in the escape pod an infant Superman takes from the exploding planet Krypton to the dying planet Earth, he tells his 18-year-old son Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman (played by Jeff East) that the focus for the next 12 years of his tutelage will be not “mere facts” but his moral development. Jor-El clarifies that this will be an epistemological education, one founded less on science than on personal opinion, though he doesn’t account for how his wisdom will potentially conflict with the moral education child alien Clark received from his adoptive earthling parents, midwest farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent (Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter). In one of the few scenes of Clark in his hometown of Smallville in the first two films, he’s the high-school football team’s ballboy, falling for pretty redhead Lana Lang (Diane Sherry) and getting bullied by strawman jock Brad (Brad Flock). Jonathan sees him showing off (in the extended television cut disowned by Donner, a child Lois Lane on a passing train sees Clark keeping pace with the speeding locomotive and is accused of lying–the gentlest of three instances of child abuse in the first two films and just one of many examples of Lois getting gaslit as part of her character arc) and accuses him of such. Clark complains about it being wrong not to do what he’s capable of doing. “Every time I get the football, I can make a touchdown. Every time. I mean, is it showing off when a man is doing the things he’s capable of doing? Is a bird showing off when it flies?” It’s an excellent question Jonathan doesn’t answer directly.
As a “good” Christian, Jonathan wants to privilege the Sermon on the Mount over the Ten Commandments. This god he’s raising will cherish the meek, not murder the first-born children of enemies who refuse to bend a knee. No, Superman’s Kryptonian antagonists will embody that kind of Old Testament rule in the sequel. He tells Clark he was sent to Jonathan and Martha and, by extension, the ideal of a progressive United States they represent–good, clean, upstanding, white–for some mystical and ennobled but unknown purpose. He is teaching Clark to hide, to be fearful of the others’ notice, to deny the calls of the ego and the flesh. Jonathan, an acolyte of a victim cult, has programmed this alien creature to live in contradiction: the tyranny of the weak and the madness of false modesty–the most visible and destructive organized religion in modern history pretending it’s still a persecuted minority. It’s this, above everything else, that attracts the ire of archvillain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman): the audacity of a god pretending to be a man in order to claim martyrdom. Clark has been sold into a monastic existence without his consent, and there will be hell to pay. In a deleted scene, the hologram of a dead Jor-El predicts both the likelihood of the necessity for Clark to hide his origins along with his inability to do so, while in the movie’s prologue, Jor-El’s wife, Lara (Susannah York), Kal-El’s mother, provides the insight into their baby’s plight on Earth:
LARA: But why Earth, Jor-El? They’re primitives, thousands of years behind us.
JOR-EL: He will need that advantage to survive. Their atmosphere will… sustain him.
LARA: He will defy their gravity.
JOR-EL: He will look like one of them.
LARA: He won’t be one of them.
JOR-EL: No. His dense molecular structure will make him strong.
LARA: He’ll be odd. Different.
JOR-EL: He’ll be fast. Virtually invulnerable.
LARA: Isolated. Alone.
They’re both right, of course, though Lara is the shepherd of their son’s psychological and emotional health. In the second film’s theatrical cut, because Brando, citing unpaid wages, filed an injunction against the production preventing the use of footage he completed for the sequel, Lara is the one to instruct Clark when he chooses to turn his back on his gifts. Brando’s estate posthumously approved his appearance in the so-called “Donner Cut” from 2006, but even if his performance is, emotionally and technically, shockingly realized and, frankly, gorgeous, it makes more sense for York’s Lara to be the one to address their child’s questions about morality. The specific American exceptionalism of Superman is there in the red and blue of his suit; the “purity” the white in Old Glory is meant to represent has been replaced by a deep yellow, which I’m taking to represent the golden calf, the false idol in Christian mythology. Tellingly, scenes on Krypton pre-destruction see the Kryptonians clad in blinding, reflective white suits trimmed in black. There isn’t much moral ambiguity on Krypton: there is good, and there is evil. Jor-El and a geriatric leadership council are good, so good, despite a fatal blindness to their impending planetary doom, that scientist Jor-El also serves as a legal prosecutor. A trio of treasonous insurgents–General Zod (Terence Stamp), Ursa (Sarah Douglas), and the mute Non (Jack O’Halloran)–are bad.
The essential reason the theatrical version of the second film doesn’t hold up as well past the demands of childhood is that the disambiguation of Krypton is transplanted to our garden of earthly discord. Clark must decide in the first film whether or not to “interfere in the history” of human affairs to resurrect the woman he loves (and he makes the obviously wrong choice, directly resulting, in the Donner Cut, in the freeing of the trio of baddies from their cosmic imprisonment), whereas in the sequel, the conflict is simplistically reduced to a slugfest between superpowered creatures, peppered with slapstick that gets truly out of hand in Superman III. Lester, at least at this stage of his career, is allergic to hard questions, and in his desire to reinsert irreverence and camp into Donner’s mythopoetic Superman, he betrays a certain contempt for the character, Donner, or both. When asked to take over for Donner, whom the Salkinds found to be slow and opinionated, Lester opted to dodge the tricky question at the centre of Superman II of whether or not Superman deserves to be happy even if it means giving the world over to a fascist dictatorship. He also grants Superman the power to wipe memories with a kiss–a power that does not always work, as we discover in Superman IV, though that doesn’t prevent the Man of Stealing Memories from trusting it will work this time.
Opening with a newsreel covering the founding of the DAILY PLANET newspaper from the ashes of the Great Depression, Superman immediately launches into an extended sequence set on an antiseptic, monochromatic Krypton. Then Baby Kal-El lands in a Norman Rockwell-influenced vision of Kansas that becomes 1950s-tinged (pompoms and hot rods) when “Clark Kent” reaches teenhood. Superman and the story proper both take flight when he departs his crystalline arctic base (given the psychologically loaded designation “The Fortress of Solitude”) for Metropolis, where Clark has secured a job as a reporter on the DAILY PLANET’s “city beat.” His qualifications? Possibly forged recommendations and an inhumanly-fast typing speed. It’s enough to wrest assignments from the experienced and feted but lamentably female Lois Lane (Margot Kidder). From the start, in other words, time is wonky in Superman, jumping stylistically from the 1930s to ’50s to “modern-day” ’70s in what feels like a considered strategy to cover the entire history of the character through emotional pastiche. Jor-El tells Kal-El in his first communication with him upon Kal-El’s eighteenth (Earth) birthday that he, Jor-El, is long dead–“many thousands of your years” dead, in fact. A trick of relativity? The near-light travel of the infant Kal-El’s pod distorting our perception of the passage of time? Makes sense, except that later, villainous real estate investor Luthor–“villainous” probably goes without saying when it comes to real estate investors–does his own math to figure out what planet Superman is from and comes up with a number nowhere near multiple millennia. Is Jor-El wrong, or is Lex Luthor wrong? I think the inability to put a finger on time serves the film’s timelessness in a direct way and the strangeness of Superman in an indirect way. Superman is a tripartite godhead: Essentially immortal, a Methuselah in the body of a baby, he is the father, son, and holy ghost (Clark and Kal-El and Superman)–the pulp embodiment of the mystery of the Christian trinity, his effectiveness as saviour hindered, as it must be, by how the journey of this hero demands that he convince himself he’s human and shares human interests.
Luthor steals two nuclear missiles and fires them at targets on opposite coasts. To slow Superman, he manages to string a chunk of kryptonite around his neck and leaves him in a pool to drown. Luthor’s paramour, Ms. Tessmacher (Valerie Perrine), frees Superman after eliciting a promise from him that he will save her mother on the East Coast before pursuing the missile fired at the San Andreas Fault. Superman, who can fly fast enough to influence the rotation of the Earth while turning back time, shouldn’t be troubled by this delay, but, again, the conflict for Superman is never physical, only existential. As promised, he sends the first missile into space–where, in the Donner Cut, it will free the trio of supervillains, Zod, Ursa and Non. The second missile causes an earthquake, leading to Superman rushing about to save school buses full of children, a commuter train headed for derailment, and a community in the path of the waters from a broken dam. He doesn’t realize until too late that a fissure has swallowed Lois, the woman he loves, and killed her in a terrible, protracted death. Enraged now and reminded of his failure to save Jonathan Kent despite all his great power, he enacts what was originally the end of the second film and flies into space at impossible speed, temporarily reversing the orbit of the planet and essentially resetting the clock on his failure.
Both missiles would still be in the air at this point while Superman tearfully endures Lois’s tongue-lashing for letting her car run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, meaning that millions will die so his girlfriend can live. I like to imagine the world off-screen left wondering what the hell happened to their saviour in the moment of crisis. What happened was Superman chose individual happiness over the needs of the many. In the film, the question of the missiles isn’t asked, Luthor and his henchman, Otis (Ned Beatty), are delivered to prison, and Superman breaks the fourth wall to smile warmly at us as John Williams’s score swells on the soundtrack*. We are charmed. If you see this film at 5, as I did, you are perhaps more than charmed. You are bewitched, carried off to the wood and the wild by its magic. Now? Now we are split between what we know happened, should we follow the logic, and what we are shown happened. The real ending vs. the happy ending: dealing with the calamitous product of our fall vs. the reframing and normalization of our failure. The pandemic is over. Back to work. Superman’s most potent superpower is the ability to make us think what he wants us to think.
There has possibly never been more perfect casting for pre-existing characters than Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder. Reeve understands the burden of playing every facet of a reluctant, deceitful god, and Kidder is believable as an aggressive predator. She enters the first film finishing up a story about a serial rapist and trying to pitch it into a series by referencing a past article she’s written about “sex and drug orgies in senior citizens’ homes.” She says her new piece will have everything: sex, violence, and the ethnic angle. She’s stone cold, this Lois. Clark, on the other hand, is a home-schooled weirdo, a good boy who sends half of every check back to his midwestern, silver-haired mother, an evangelist in the Rousseauian church of people being essentially good, Lois, gosh. He is an anachronism from a 1950s situation comedy, and Lois is a sexually liberated career woman (“You can see through things? What colour is my underwear?”) so repulsed by the notion of ever showing weakness that she fights an armed mugger over ten bucks, two credit cards, a hairbrush, and some lipstick. What she doesn’t know is the mugger would have killed her if not for the intervention of this thing, who stops the bullet and pretends she’s gotten away with her defiance. Superman holds an ace in the hole–the secret of himself–in all three of his incarnations’ relationships with her. Though the Metropolis scenes are set in the proverbial now, Reeve’s rapport with Kidder is more akin to His Girl Friday’s Golden Age of Screwball alchemy. Shot by Geoffrey Unsworth (Cabaret, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Zardoz) in a classical style that favours masters over rampant coverage, the cinematography accommodates both the scale of Donner’s epic vision and the Hawksian dynamic between Clark and Lois, which often sends Reeve and Kidder ping-ponging across the frame in balletic synchronicity. It’s a rare and beautiful balance, Superman. A piece of pop mythology for all time.
Richard Lester’s Superman II replaces the prologue Donner shot with a new sequence: a terrorist attack at the Eiffel Tower designed to place Lois in humiliating peril for her ill-considered, brash, opportunistic impulsiveness. Later, Lois leaps into the Niagara River in what is arguably another attempt to humiliate her–but as Lois is correct in her deduction that Clark is Superman and will save her from certain death, it is, instead, just another instance in which the man she loves gaslights her into thinking she’s crazy. Lois hides on the underside of the Tower’s lift in order to…what, infiltrate a nest of suicide bombers for her next big scoop? It’s ridiculous on its surface and immediately shakes our trust in Lois as a smart journalist victimized by a practiced liar. She’s a bit of an idiot here, an adrenaline junkie with self-destructive tendencies who needs the steadying hand of a (super)man to save her from herself. She was always kooky but never a dingbat. This is Lester, who had Raquel Welch introduce herself in The Three Musketeers by falling down a flight of stairs. Upon freeing Lois, Superman launches the bomb in the Tower’s lift into space, where its detonation frees our trio of villains, who then reach the moon and massacre a multinational team of astronauts before setting a course for Earth. Landing in some American backwater, they engage in fitfully amusing fish-out-of-water shenanigans. Forty-two years on, I still wonder why Ursa recoils when a rattlesnake bites her. Does it puncture her skin? It’s like in Superman IV when Lex Luthor clips a strand of Superman’s hair that’s holding a 1000lb. weight in an exhibit using a pair of ordinary, not-enhanced-by-kryptonite bolt cutters. Are these earthbound Kryptonians’ other vulnerabilities? Snakes and bolt cutters? Careless.
Meanwhile, in both versions of the film, Superman and Lois fall in love, consummating their relationship first in bed, then with Superman giving up his powers to be with Lois. There’s no explanation for this sacrifice in Lester’s version–it just is, and so it goes: get married to a normal and become normal. In Donner’s cut, Superman transforms into Clark at the Fortress of Solitude and tells the ghost of his father that he’s found the girl of his dreams. Jor-El says that as favouring a single human jeopardizes his ability to help all of humanity, Clark must choose: Superman or husband. Jor-El is from the school of ‘if you’re going to do something, do it with your whole heart or not at all.’ It’s a choice epic heroes make, of course, charting the path nearer Scylla or Charybdis. It’s the Trolley Problem, except it’s one of you tied to the tracks–or three of you. In his defense, Lester has Superman enter a crystal chamber after making his decision; his flesh is melted away and reconstituted, then split apart via a series of photographic exposures into his three personas, leaving only Clark, in Clark-wear, behind. It’s a powerful, literal representation of Superman as a trio reduced to a single identity. Stripped of his deception, he is weakened drastically and suffers the indignity of being bullied by a disagreeable trucker (Pepper Martin) at a greasy spoon somewhere outside the Fortress of Solitude. It’s in this diner that the miserable newlyweds witness, on television, the havoc wreaked by Zod, Ursa, and Non, causing Clark to immediately repent and search for a way to recoup his gifts.
Clark is able to become Superman again using the very first crystal he discovered upon losing Pa Kent and turning 18–a green rod that led him north like a magnet. In the Lester, the crystal escapes destruction wrought by Clark’s impulsive metamorphosis because Lois, carelessly, leaves it sitting out after Clark shows it to her during their courtship. In the Donner, the shade of Jor-El presents the crystal to his son, telling him he expected this and is prepared to undo Clark’s intemperance but that the act of undoing it will result in the erasure of Jor-El from the memory banks of the Fortress. Clark thus completes his Oedipal split, having made an unfortunate object choice in Lois and murdered his father. He’s a man now, imperfect and alone. The first time he leaves the Fortress, back in the original Superman, the crystal death mask of his father is animated in the foreground of the frame and revolves so that Kal-El assumes the “face” and posture of his dad. Part of Jor-El’s opening monologue to his 18-year-old son is the prophecy that the son becomes the father, and this is the visual representation of that. When Clark becomes Superman for this second time, the death mask reappears but doesn’t revolve for Superman to assume the role of the father again. He is in tension, at odds, with his father. He’s suddenly on his own, without the safety nets of parents–fathers, two of them–who are long dead. Lester’s version affirms how daft Lois is: a silly, thoughtless girl who isn’t careful with precious things. Donner’s version features a heartbreaking exchange between a man and the father he’s disappointed. A father who died long before the son could prove himself to him. It’s incredible. I feel it in every single fibre of me.
Indeed, I feel Superman in every fibre of me. Not because I have delusions of grandeur but because I have self-loathing and a history of disappointing the people who’ve believed I could do and be what I could not do and never be. Superman is a perpetual alien. He tries to pass, yet even in his human guise, he is novel and neurodivergent, the object of ridicule for having been raised by two pairs of ancient parents and larded with extraordinary expectations. His specialness, he discovers, is insufficient to save the individual people who are important to him, much less the world. He is a god but still only has a finite amount of fingers to plug the millions of holes sprung in ideological dikes. I used to love the cathartic, crowd-pleasing coda to Superman II, in which the Man of Steel, having returned to the remote diner to avenge the beating he took as mortal Clark, throws the bully into a pinball machine and jokes to the proprietor, “I’ve been working out.” I’ve grown to hate it, because it’s beneath Superman–and Kal-El (and Clark, too)–to be this petty and brutal. There are two other moments in the Christopher Reeve Superman cycle where the terrifying potential for limitless violence is intimated, the first when Clark tells Jonathan he’d like to rip Brad “to pieces,” the second when artificial kryptonite has corrupted him in Superman III and he’s right on the brink of raping high-school crush Lana Lang (Annette O’Toole this time). Clearly, all that’s keeping Superman’s id at bay are his confused upbringing and ever-slipping fundamentalist moral code–his belief that he is meant for some mysterious higher purpose. His faith in a warm lie.
The scripted ending to Superman II became the ending of Superman when Donner and co. couldn’t satisfactorily write themselves out of a corner, leaving Lester’s team to conjure a “kiss of forgetfulness” that was ludicrous and incomprehensible to me even at the age of seven. Lois, the epitome of narcissism, complains after she and Superman join forces in murdering the trio of villains, who were already stripped of their powers with the accidental help of a treacherous Lex Luthor, that having to share Superman with the rest of the world is causing her to lose sleep. She has a long, insufferable speech about it, and these changes to her character–changes Kidder objected to so forcefully that, coupled with her resentment of the Salkinds’ treatment of Donner, she was essentially written out of Superman III–are vile and ugly. I don’t like to think of hard-hitting investigative journalist Lois as a selfish, self-obsessed child. Rather than deal with the adult consequences of a bad marriage and disordered solipsism, Lester has Superman kiss the memory of their romance out of Lois. The epilogue, then, where Superman replaces the flag the bad Kryptonians tore from the roof of the White House and flies off into orbit to again smile warmly at the audience, is coloured by the inconsistency of what’s come before. The lies used to be sweet and the secrets necessary; when a man uses sex to manipulate a woman’s perception of her abuse, there are terms for that sort of man and none of them are super. Loathe to recycle the kiss, Donner resorts to Superman once more turning back time to a point before he freed Zod et al. from their captivity. He does, however, tack on the epilogue of Superman turning into a bully–and it’s worse there, in the Donner Cut, because the time-travel shenanigans mean the trucker would have no idea why he’s getting his shit handed to him by this stranger he’s never seen before.
Still, the potential for Superman to turn viciously fascist is always there beneath the surface. While I hate this scene, I understand it as part of a greater story arc–a Michael Corleone kind of arc, if you’re into the Puzo of it all–in which there’s a strong sense that violence is in the blood, and to become fully human, you must become fully ape. Superman’s destiny is to destroy the world. He is a cult leader, which is tenable so long as he’s a god–and deadly the moment he is merely a man. The fate of the world hinges on the success of his deception. The “monster” arc of his story drives the good part of Superman III. Lester’s proclivity for broad, unsophisticated humour and his desire–as everyone seemed to desire in the ’80s–to work with Richard Pryor, a self-proclaimed fan of these films, comprises the bad part of Superman III. The good part is really good, and the bad part is absolutely wretched. Said good part cleaves Superman and Clark into separate entities after his exposure to a billionaire’s synthetic kryptonite. They fight in a junkyard over the possession of Superman’s soul. Call it the Id and the Ego battling it out for control of the Superego, why not. This battle royale comes after Superman has threatened to rape Lana, straightened the Leaning Tower of Pisa (note the jokey tenor when Superman visits foreign landmarks as opposed to American ones, e.g., the Eiffel Tower of Lester’s Superman II), created an ecological disaster by breaching the hull of an oil tanker (whose crew is involved in Dollar Store Naked Gun gags), gotten shitfaced at a bar, and fucked bombshell honeypot Lorelei (Pamela Stephenson) in an act that must inevitably end in the death of the human partner, mustn’t it? Unless the prostate is the only non-superpowered muscle in the super-body. Peter Berg’s Hancock brilliantly addressed this in a blue outtake from that film.
I’ve gotten ahead of myself. In Superman III, Pryor plays unemployed temp worker Gus Gorman, who accidentally discovers that he’s a computer genius when he figures out how to embezzle millions by skimming fractions of pennies from the rounded-off figures in the ledger of billionaire Webster (Robert Vaughn). (Actually, he’s a multi-millionaire; in 1983, that was enough of an atrocity already.) Instead of having him arrested, Webster opts to put Gus’s savant-like abilities to use building a supercomputer that eventually gains sentience and turns Webster’s sister, Vera (Annie Ross), the real brains of the operation, into a cyborg. Her transformation is genuine nightmare fuel, as is Superman’s slow devolution into a frustrated, ordinary human male. Lois, meanwhile, is relegated to an off-screen vacation in Bermuda at the beginning of the film and only resurfaces at the end to serve as a sexually jealous rival of Lana, the new secretary to DAILY PLANET editor Perry White (Jackie Cooper). There’s also a gag involving a broadly demonstrative Italian trinket salesman that is, if not overtly offensive, at least covertly offensive. One could argue that Superman III being two diametrically opposed films with almost nothing in common delivers meta-pleasure in its depiction of Superman’s split: two individuals in tension, sharing the same body. I think of how there’s a framed picture of Ed Asner’s Lou Grant in Perry White’s office in the Donner cut of II that Lester replaces with a photo of Bill Cosby. The former makes sense for an editor of a newspaper who’s either sharing a universe with Lou Grant or tipping a cap to the pop-cultural representation of his job; the latter only makes sense if some idiot is referencing the Bill Cosby routine about Superman from 1968 or thereabouts. 1983, after all, is still a year before “The Cosby Show” catapulted the Coz into the stratosphere of universal awareness. Even Lester’s sucking-up is mistimed.
The sexual politics of Superman III are the only vaguely consistent thread joining the film’s two halves. In an effort to redeem bimbo Lorelei, she reveals a brilliant mind for technobabble–though it plays more like a Catskills sop to the tediously offended than like a genuine attempt to reclaim the character. Vera, the puppeteer behind the Remington Steele-like fraud of a company figurehead Webster, is brutally desexualized, drawing the exhausting/exhausted equivalence of an intelligent and capable woman to a severe-looking and miserable one. Between the diminishment of Lois and the elevation of Vera emerges a pungent worldview that has ossified in its creche: undisturbed by introspection through several leaps in thought that would still, as far back as 1983, have raised gorges and eyebrows. It’s interesting that both Lorelei and Ms. Tessmacher pine for “good guy” Superman, not necessarily in a sexual sense, but in a domestic yearning sense. They imagine salvation in the arms of a traditionally desirable if emotionally stunted and morally uncomplicated partner. Being married to someone who never lies is probably not as great as it sounds. Superman is a lie they are telling themselves, a fantasy in the same way that Lorelei’s exaggerated sexuality is a fantasy, gratifying only itself and vulnerable to total and catastrophic collapse. If Lorelei shows herself to be the intellectual superior to an inferior man, no harm, it’s almost as old a gag as the bimbo archetype itself. If Superman fails to maintain the fantasy that his empathy can save the world, though, then the world can not be saved. Superman is the best version of us. And if the best version of us is not enough, it’s no wonder Superman has a nervous breakdown.
Having turned down a cameo in the Salkinds’ non-starter Supergirl, Reeve was lured back to the franchise one last time by new rights holders Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus in exchange for getting to set up his passion project, Street Smart, at Cannon Films. (If you haven’t seen Street Smart, by the way, it’s a masterpiece–one of many directed by the great chronicler of our internal rot, Jerry Schatzberg.) Also returning for Superman IV: The Quest for Peace are Kidder, Hackman, Cooper, and Marc McClure’s Jimmy Olsen, looking decidedly long in the tooth as the boy photographer. It bears mentioning, too, that in the span of a decade, Kidder has lost a great deal of her fire. She seems bedraggled, and it’s tempting to read her struggles with addiction and mental illness into her decline. She will always be one of my favourite actors, and Lois is her signature role, but she’s phoning it in here, a fall brought into cruel relief by a budget so dire that reshoots were likely a luxury the production couldn’t afford. Reeve is typically exceptional, but veteran director Sidney J. Furie struggles with the formula. None of the jokes land–and none of the dramatic moments land, either. I love Furie’s Little Fauss and Big Halsy and The Entity, but I wouldn’t call either of them fleet or snappy. The other condition of Reeve’s involvement was that the story revolve around nuclear disarmament, a cause Reeve had grown passionate about. In the film, Superman takes it upon himself to dismantle the world’s nuclear arsenal just as Lex Luthor uses Superman’s DNA to create Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow), a towheaded clone who speaks with Gene Hackman’s voice and is powered by the sun. Just like Superman, as it happens, so when Superman blocks out the sun to neutralize Nuclear Man, he should neutralize himself in the process.
Best not to get lost in these details and instead lose oneself in the philosophical problem of unilateral disarmament at the hands of an American nationalist, Christofascist zealot. What would happen if one system of governance was given the power to impose itself over all others? Let me rephrase that: what would happen if one religion were given the power to impose itself over all others? The real tragedy of Superman IV is that the elements are there for a good Superman movie, but it didn’t spend enough time in the slow cooker for the meat to come off the bone. Worse, Jon Cryer, as Luthor’s nephew Lenny, is brought on board presumably as bait for the John Hughes crowd, who were never going to see this movie even if you put Molly Ringwald and a chestnut mare in it. Cryer is tedious, and Mariel Hemingway, as an heiress executing a hostile takeover of the DAILY PLANET with the intent of turning it into a tabloid (remember, this is already the “sex and drug orgy” paper of record), is never light. There’s a scene in a gym where Clark bumbles around before almost murdering a gym bully with a casually tossed barbell that doesn’t play as menacing so much as casually malignant in a way I don’t think Clark would ever be–but this is post-Superman III Clark, who has already demonstrated psychotic proclivities I’m not convinced can be completely erased by a salvage-yard rumble with a suspiciously overpowered ego-projection. The Clark who bests Dark Superman is Superman pretending to be Clark, thus cloaking his violence behind a cosplay of harmlessness. Quentin Tarantino’s diagnosis of Superman as essentially contemptuous of the humanity he’s being forced to perform as the saviour for comes into striking relief in Superman IV. I said he was a three-part god, but what if he’s merely a Kryptonian binary? Clark is New Testament meek, whereas Superman is Old Testament powerful. Only one of them is honest about their true nature.
Although Superman IV is a lousy script (by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, of The Jewel of the Nile infamy) and the wrong director, I’ll say its conclusion, wherein Superman realizes he’s pretty powerless in the ultimate fate and affairs of Man, is poignant. He apologizes for presuming to even try. Bryan Singer takes the hopelessness of this Superman for his underappreciated Superman Returns (which docked the same year as the Donner Cut, 2006), crafting a Kal-El resentful of his isolation, broken by his trauma, and looking for hope in a son he would be forced to battle and eventually murder when Brainiac controls him in the unmade sequel. That Superman is my Superman, adrift a million miles and a few thousand years from home. Who has lost his mentors, the girl who loves him, and his sense of purpose and self-worth. He is unmoored, an alien, a stranger in a hostile land, and whoever could have explained the meaning of his life to him is gone. All that’s left to him is the illusion of hopefulness he needs to maintain when he doesn’t believe it himself. He is emptied of meaning in every way, save his usefulness as iconography. We are all representations of ideas. Our only function is to satisfy or disappoint the expectations of people who can be bothered to think of us over the din of their own quotidian frustrations. We need Superman because we need imperfect gods: the ones who love us enough to lie to us about being there when we need them and who will promise to uphold a particular set of values while doing the dirty work of greasing the machinery that makes us feel bad to think about. He is our unstable sense of self. He has everything anyone could ever want, and all he feels is regret that he can’t be allowed to score a touchdown in the big game for a dad who is gone and a girlfriend who has started a family with someone else. He wishes he was ordinary. We wish we were him. He is our kryptonite and we are his.
by Bill Chambers Warner’s “Superman: 5-Film Collection (1978-1987)” brings together the theatrical cuts of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies plus Richard Donner’s re-edit of Superman II on 4K UHD disc in a box set that seems almost cynically engineered to leave room for future double-dips to improve on it. I understand Warner not wanting to include alternative cuts of the other films if the elements couldn’t be satisfactorily refurbished for 4K, but this would’ve been the perfect context for a UHD upgrade of Superman Returns, which presumably carries the baggage of too many cancelled creatives to spur a standalone reissue. And there are the usual technical slip-ups that have sadly become par for the course where the studio’s franchise bundles are concerned (see also: the Mad Max Anthology and Rocky: The Knockout Collection). Still, three of the four films look absolutely radiant in 4K; all of them are presented for the first time with their original logos intact (Saul Bass “W” for the first three, inanimate Warner shield for the fourth); and a bounty of extras dating back to the DVD era resurfaces on the 1080p Blu-rays for each title. Rao giveth, Rao taketh away.
Superman is the only real letdown from a video standpoint. That’s because the master dates back to 2018, more or less the UHD format’s infancy; the newer transfers of the remaining films throw into sharp relief how much better the original could look with a fresh scan and state-of-the-art grading. When you see the clips from Superman in the montage that opens Superman II, it’s as if someone’s removed a protective layer of cling film that had been subtly occluding the image, adding one layer of diffusion too many to Geoffrey Unsworth’s gossamer cinematography. (Donner once described Unsworth’s lensing as “slightly untouchable.”) Superman‘s 2.40:1, 2160p presentation, complete with HDR10 and Dolby Vision, does give us a truer colour grade compared to the teal-infused DVDs and Blu-rays, and it boasts the usual upticks in fine detail and dynamic range, with HDR enriching the black level and embellishing highlights, lending authenticity to bright light sources and a dose of magic to the Kryptonian ephemera (glow-y rods, glow-y suits). But there’s a dullness to the image, which looks undersaturated until the palette is pushed to extremes by its four-colour roots (e.g., Superman’s costume, kryptonite). The film grain, too, is thick as flies during the opening aerial view of Krypton and elsewhere. When it gets as dense as it can here, it suggests either they didn’t go back to the camera negative or the HDR is interacting badly with the grain structure–both of which were more forgivable in 2018.
The Superman platter’s other disappointment is that it drops the 70mm soundmix that appended the previous disc, although it is frankly overrated anyway. (As Michael Thau, editor of Superman II’s Donner Cut, noted back when Superman made its DVD debut, the 70mm mix shows the timidity of sound mixers working in newfangled six-track Dolby, and, owing to production delays, on an abbreviated schedule at that.) Instead, we get a 2.0 lossless version in DTS-HD MA of the Dolby Stereo mix that accompanied 35mm prints, which is of historical interest but lacks the heft of the Dolby Atmos default. Indeed, it sounds monophonic in nature. Comparing the two, however, reveals a number of souped-up effects replacements–and additional effects–that can give the Atmos track an anachronistic quality. Superman may have a timeless beauty, but it belongs to an analog world, and the digital authority, nay, complexity of the re-recorded audio creates a sense of cognitive dissonance for which the track’s thunder only partially compensates. Its revisionism is at least 100% Donner-approved: Thau says Donner went from approving changes to suggesting them, the shortcomings of the soundtrack having weighed on his mind for decades.
Also on board is the first of three audio commentaries with producer Pierre Spengler and executive producer Ilya Salkind (a.k.a. the younger Salkind). The two were recorded separately, leaving nobody to butt in whenever Salkind starts rambling in slightly broken English (which is often). Spengler, who calls himself “a frustrated director,” admits off the top that he’s basically a number cruncher who negotiates deals. In other words, his influence on the Superman trilogy is significant yet abstract and difficult to see on screen. To be brutally honest, I can’t picture anyone other than the most compulsive or business-oriented fan sitting through these yakkers, myself included. It’s the producers laying claim to these films as their true auteurs–which may well be the case but is not a perspective that inspires curiosity. Moreover, the Salkinds are clearly the bullies in the Superman saga, making the absence of anyone to rebut Ilya’s “misty watercolour memories,” as the late Jim Gabriel used to say, feel like one of Kim Jong Un’s parades for himself. Forgive me, but I tapped out quickly.
Video-based extras originated with the DVD and Blu-ray releases of “The Superman Motion Picture Anthology” and can be found in standard-def on the aforementioned Blu-rays for each film. (You’ll want to hang onto that set if you still have it, since it contains the 151-minute Special Edition of Superman (a quasi-Director’s Cut) and some rather frank documentaries from producer Thau that didn’t get recycled.) Superman‘s bonus features launch with “The Making of Superman: The Movie” (52 mins.), a network TV special from 1980 narrated by Paul Thomas Anderson’s voiceover artist father, Ernie, though nominally hosted by Christopher Reeve, who right off the bat admits they’re not going to give away all the “secrets.” (He’s referring to the special effects but could just as easily be talking about any hint of controversy surrounding Donner’s departure from Superman II.) The most charming bit is a dialogue with the children of 1980, who are asked to summarize Superman and get tongue-tied trying to explain what becomes of Clark’s civilian attire when he changes into his alter ego. “He must have, like, a coat hanger or a closet where he can put his costumes and then change,” one little boy speculates. The film clips throughout are abominably cropped, with Superman frequently drifting out of frame, yet they’re a stark reminder of how persuasive the Superman illusion was in low-def on broadcast television–even in B-roll, where we can see the proverbial wires. Because it’s the ’70s, this kids’ special describes Miss Tessmacher as “luscious.” Also because it’s the ’70s, the puff-piecery is rawer than the modern equivalent, with Ilya Salkind sighing at one point, “Thank God Redford turned it down.”
Next up is Lee Sholem’s 1951 Superman and the Mole-Men (58 mins., **/****), the title character’s feature-film debut and audiences’ first taste of George Reeves in the role. It would ultimately be spun off into a TV series, “Adventures of Superman”, and truncated into a two-parter of that same show. Here, DAILY PLANET reporters Clark and Lois (Phyllis Coates) are covering “the world’s deepest oil well” when it’s abruptly shut down without explanation. Turns out the drill hit signs of life six miles down; before long, a couple of pint-size, encephalitic Larry Fines emerge from the well to explore the town of Silsby, scaring the bejesus out of passersby. (The sight of them renders Lois near catatonic.) They are ultimately a benign threat–assuming they’re not radioactive–and Superman must protect them from the lynch mob that villager Benson (the great Jeff Corey) organizes in reaction to their presence. Superman and the Mole-Men is primitive for a race and Red Scare allegory and even more so for a Superman story, as it features a square-jawed, no-nonsense Clark Kent (so stoic his alter ego seems redundant), an incurious, deferential Lois, and a beefy Superman who mainly deploys himself as a human shield. While I realize this incarnation of Superman has its Boomer devotees, it will seem as crude as a stick-figure rendition to anyone raised on later versions of the character. Still, the perfume of its particular B-movie vintage is enticing, and I appreciated Superman’s curt dismissal of Benson’s gratitude for saving his life. He knows this guy’s moment of clarity won’t last. No matter the target demographic, Hollywood was reliably cynical when it came to these tales of unruly posses (see: Fury, The Ox-Bow Incident). Too bad the movie wasn’t treated to a remaster for this occasion: Dupey and overcompressed, it takes me back not to 1951 but to the days of public-domain VHS titles.
Three “Cartoons” follow. Chuck Jones’s 1943 Super-Rabbit (8 mins., **½/****), a parody of the Fleischers’ Superman shorts, has Bugs Bunny using newfound superpowers to thwart a Texan who’s rounding up all the bunnies and killing them. (Yep, sounds like Texas.) The problem is that Bugs already has gifts we mortals can only dream of–and it’s a tad disturbing to see him panic-eat magic carrots to recharge his batteries. In Friz Freleng’s 1944 Snafuperman (4 mins., **½/****), one of the b&w Private Snafu animated training films Warner produced in cooperation with the U.S. military, the overeager, underprepared Private Snafu is transformed into Superman by his fairy godfather (“Technical Fairy, First Class”). He immediately tasks himself with dropping a bomb on Hitler but, being too good for navigation maps, almost lets it go over the Capitol building. Eventually, his greatest wish is for a field manual. As an aside, hearing “Enemies of Democracy, beware!” in an American cartoon feels peculiar now, like when you see pictures of Iranian women in bikinis from the ’60s. How the mighty have fallen. Lastly, Robert McKimson’s Stupor Duck (7 mins., **/****), from 1956, casts Daffy Duck as Superman and his secret identity, reporter Cluck Kent, who takes “mild pills” to maintain his “mild-mannered” persona. When Cluck overhears his editor watching a soap opera, he mistakes its villain for a real person and flies around the city trying to stop the elusive “Aardvark Ratnik.” I like that Daffy’s “stupor” suit is a pair of jammies with feet and a butt flap, but this is a one-joke premise and a predictable joke at that, with vacant backgrounds that hint at diminishing budgets. Rounding things out are a selection of Superman “TV Spots & Trailers” consisting of one TV spot (bizarrely, in 1.78:1/16×9), one teaser (1.78:1/16×9), and one theatrical trailer (2.35:1/16×9). All are effective at selling the then-novel conceit of a comic-book adaptation with A-movie production values, though Phyllis Thaxter receiving a coveted “whooshing” credit in the teaser is a real wtf.
Supermans II and III are stunners in 4K UHD. Unsworth passed away amid the transition from Donner to Richard Lester, who hired frequent John Landis collaborator Robert Paynter to finish the first sequel in his stead. Paynter largely eschews Unsworth’s haze except in scenes where a bridge is needed between his own work and Unsworth’s. (A rule of thumb is that if Gene Hackman is in the frame, Donner directed it and Unsworth shot it. (Hackman refused to scab for Lester.)) What’s more markedly absent on this disc is the kind of thick, coarse grain that pervades Superman in 4K, which may be down to Superman II having superior optical printing, or its source elements–purportedly, all four films went back to the original camera negative and the master internegative (for the many process shots)–being in better shape, or advances in the algorithmic interpretation of film grain. Who knows? Both Superman and Superman II were apparently shot on 100T 5247 (and although I can’t confirm it, I don’t see why they would switch horses for Superman III), the Kodak stock of choice among blockbuster filmmakers in the ’70s and ’80s for its high latitude and decreased grain. Despite an unanticipated susceptibility to fading colours, it seems to transfer particularly well to UHD–that is, if Poltergeist, the Indiana Jones movies, and now Superman II are any indication.
This is the scenic route to saying I don’t think conventional noise-reduction accounts for Superman II‘s crystal-clear 4K presentation (allowing, of course, for the focusing tariffs of anamorphic lensing). Reviewing the film on “Sneak Previews”, Roger Ebert marvelled at the iconic genius of juxtaposing Superman against the Coca-Cola sign in Times Square, and the candy-apple gleam of the UHD transfer restores a pop-art brilliance to this tableau it hasn’t enjoyed since the cinema. At regular intervals, you’ll want to pause and savour Superman II–and, believe it or not, Superman III, which Paynter also shot. Each uses HDR10 to dazzling effect: The image on both titles has the uncanny quality of light passing through it, as in film projection, as opposed to light beaming out of it, as with television. Have you ever wanted to study Annette O’Toole’s freckles like Ptolemy mapping the constellations? Well, friend, your chariot awaits. The only downside is that the cut-rate effects in III now have a neon sign pointing to them. Audio configurations are identical to that of Superman, although an A/B comparison with the 2.0 DTS-HD MA alternatives confirms the Atmos tracks for the sequels don’t subject the sound effects to revisionism beyond furnishing them with more height and more depth. The films sound bigger than ever yet pleasingly of their time. Be warned, however, that other reviewers have observed distracting shifts in the pitch of John Williams’s (and Ken Thorne’s) score for II. Spengler and Salkind yakkers are the other listening option on the 4K platters.
Over on Superman II’s Blu-ray Disc, Reeve again hosts (and Ernie Anderson again narrates) another TV special, 1982’s “The Making of Superman II” (52 mins.). It begins in high “SCTV” style with footage from the movie’s star-studded Manhattan premiere, where the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger rubbed elbows with Henry Kissinger. (Surprisingly, Gene Hackman showed up, maybe because it was a benefit screening for the Special Olympics.) I thrilled to the copious B-roll of “Terry” Stamp, Sarah Douglas, and Jack O’Halloran doing their own stunts and to Stamp–bundled in a red kimono that makes him look like Ming the Merciless–waxing poetic about his signature role. “I don’t want him to be a multifaceted character,” he says. “He should be absolutely predictable.” Reeve himself offers that Clark is harder to play than Superman, and there’s a delectable behind-the-scenes clip in which he challenges the way Lester’s staged a moment where a car bumps into Clark, leaving an implausibly huge dent in its grille. However morbidly the piece ignores the production’s personnel shakeup, it has the courage to show moments like this, sans spin, that would never pass the PR sniff test today.
“Superman’s Souffle Deleted Scene” (1 min.) begins with sexual innuendo as Lois talks Superman through his “first time,” but a zoom-out reveals she’s referring to the soufflé he’s about to cook with his laser eyes. Har har. Next, “First Flight: The Fleischer Superman Series” (13 mins.) invites a handful of animators, animation authorities, and Soylent Green director Richard Fleischer (son of Max) to reflect on the genesis–and genius–of the Fleischer Brothers’ expressionistic, pulp-flavoured Superman cartoons. We learn that when Paramount offered the property to the Fleischers, director and gag man Dave Fleischer’s plan to spook them by asking for an outrageous sum of money immediately backfired. The Fleischers then innovated Superman and the medium (or genre, if you prefer), giving Superman the power to fly and producing the first cartoons in American cinema without any real laughs. The series became such a Big Deal, says CARTOON BREW’s Jerry Beck, that Paramount began advertising them with trailers–unheard-of for short subjects. Somewhat unfortunately, the featurette stumbles to a close with Warner congratulating itself, via Paul Dini and others, for following the Fleischers’ stylistic example with the Batman cartoons of the early ’90s. Though all nine of the Fleischer Brothers’ Superman shorts–Superman, The Mechanical Monsters, Billion Dollar Limited, The Arctic Giant, The Bulleteers, The Magnetic Telescope, Electric Earthquake, and Volcano–are graciously included, I can’t bring myself to review them in SD when there’s a just-released, albeit controversial, Blu-ray version out there. Know that they’re almost uniformly masterpieces. Superman II‘s destruction-heavy theatrical trailer (2.35:1/16×9) caps the bonus material.
Superman III carries a blessedly lighter supplemental load, starting with, you guessed it, “The Making of Superman III” (49 mins.), from 1984. Al Matthews replaces Ernie Anderson as narrator and Reeve no longer does the preamble, but it again opens at a benefit premiere on behalf of the Special Olympics–this one taking place over brunch. Reeve tenderly carting his toddler son Matthew around the garden party of hosts Eunice and Sargent Shriver is a bittersweet reminder of what we’ve lost, while a bit where the Shrivers compliment Richard Pryor on his profile in that morning’s NEW YORK TIMES is hilariously awkward. (He hasn’t read it.) Sargent Shriver, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s future father-in-law, becomes especially animated meeting Jackie Cooper, having grown up with him as a child star. The documentary glimpses of the shoot remain gratifyingly candid as Reeve rejects a proposed flying rig and Pryor improvises a line that wins over Lester. Alas, you can feel the dead energy of the set, whose locations–gravel pits, petrochemical plants, ski slopes–are grandiose without exciting the imagination. Next up is a 20-minute block of Deleted Scenes, 11 in total–many of which are pre-existing scenes with additional footage imperceptibly restored. Nothing of substance, I’m afraid. (I did laugh at a little boy getting catapulted into a tree, as well as the Ladies League honouring Superman with a complimentary cookbook.) These are panned and scanned at 1.33:1. Lastly, a three-minute theatrical trailer (1.78:1/16×9) sells Superman III as a Richard Pryor vehicle with Superman in it. It’s agony, much like writing this review.
Although graded more or less identically to Lester’s cut, the 2.40:1, 2160p presentation of Richard Donner’s Superman II isn’t as consistently spectacular because the retrofitted CGI has a lo-res look undisguised by the decision to use a “film out” source. And it’s too crudely rendered to benefit from the application of HDR10. (Additionally, a mastering error leaves the final shot of Superman vertically stretched, like an anamorphic frame before it’s un-squeezed.) On the other hand, the Dolby Atmos track pushes the bass of the theatrical mix to deeper lows and doesn’t, to my ears, screw up the music; the new audio stopgaps are seamlessly integrated compared to the jerry-built vfx. Note that I previously covered the Donner Cut’s excellent Blu-ray extras in a 2006 review of the film’s DVD release. For what it’s worth, Donner’s video introduction and commentary with Tom Mankiewicz appear on both discs.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace‘s 2.40:1, 2160p transfer is the best a Cannon movie has ever looked at home, which makes it all the more maddening that cheapjack production values hamstring so much of it. The optical compositing is poor throughout–the lighting and the colours never quite match from layer to layer, and I suspect HDR is only making things worse by pushing black levels to reveal detail, emphasizing their unevenness between the different elements of a given effects shot. (Too, it’s obvious that a high volume of print debris was denoised out of the image in these Vaseline-smooth moments.) There is also a sun-dappled brightness to A Passage to India DP Ernest Day’s cinematography that HDR10 can overamplify, flooding faces with light until they nearly clip. Nevertheless, The Quest for Peace is almost handsome for the first time in its home-video afterlife. I wish I could heap unqualified praise on its Atmos track for lending the picture a sense of scale it doesn’t have on screen, but a funny thing happened on the way to mastering it: the music was allegedly sourced from a temp version of the Alexander Courage score, and in any event sounds, without exaggeration, like a bootleg recording from someone wearing a wire–flat, thin, and prone to distortion. Toggle over to the 2.0 DTS-HD MA alternative for the opening and closing theme, I guess. But one shouldn’t need to.
Co-screenwriter Mark Rosenthal inherits the microphone for Superman IV‘s audio commentary. Calling the tacky opening credits “graffiti on a black screen,” he proceeds to roast Golan-Globus for the “greed and chaos” that left the production in tatters. The dissolution of Cannon and key players being dead frees Rosenthal to spit venom, and though I doubt the writing team behind The Jewel of the Nile, Mona Lisa Smile, and Mercury Rising were ever going to rehab Superman for the big screen, he talks a good game, making the earliest drafts of the script sound tantalizing as they grappled with the notion of Superman as God on Earth. (If God therefore exists, why hasn’t He made Earth perfect? This remains a heady notion worth exploring.) Terming the whole fiasco “a really almost unethical betrayal of Chris Reeve,” Rosenthal says the powers that be conspired to break Reeve’s promise to the original cast–who returned as a personal favour–that the film would make up for Superman III. Cannon wouldn’t even pony up to shoot the UN sequence in New York, despite Reeve’s begging. As one might expect, Rosenthal laments the 45 minutes of cuts inflicted on the film to try to improve its box-office chances. If he overestimates the picture’s scope of influence when he speculates that Jon Cryer’s character inspired the creation of Scott Evil, it’s a refreshingly outspoken yak-track just the same.
On the Blu-ray, the 1988 TV special “Superman 50th Anniversary” (48 mins.) replaces the usual making-of. It is hosted by…drumroll…Dana Carvey, jokily billed as “Chief Historian, Junior Supermen of America.” Carvey pretends to go to Metropolis and interview “Metropolitians” (sic). Meanwhile, an all-star line-up of celebrities–this is surely the only time The Amazing Kreskin and Lou Reed shared a bill–pretends Superman is a real person, sometimes as themselves and sometimes within a put-on persona. (Fred Willard plays the mayor of Metropolis.) Marcia Gay Harden actually shows up in a major role but wasn’t famous enough yet to be listed among the heavyweights. I did like Reed’s cameo because he stays true to himself, complaining he “liked Superman better before, when he was more subtle,” but this is cringe theatre from beginning to end, with surprisingly little say about the appeal of Superman or his enduring legacy.
A 31-minute (!) block of 15 Deleted Scenes (2.35:1/16×9) bears out Rosenthal’s claim that Superman IV was heavily truncated in a last-minute act of desperation. Sourced from a workprint, they contain what would’ve been the best effects in the movie, i.e., clips from Donner’s Superman. Some of the elisions are totally justifiable, like Superman popping in to visit Jeremy’s classroom without arousing much enthusiasm from the student body, while others are expendable but adorable, like the sequence involving a man-child Nuclear Man prototype (Clive Mantle) with hair like Michael Damian and a pie plate for a dick. Outside a chic nightclub (and wearing a glittery new-wave suit), he picks a fight with Superman, who straight-up murders him by hurling him into a transformer! Lex then dustbusts his ashes. I’m not kidding when I say it’s better than anything in the finished film, but “better” is doing a ton of heavy lifting. One outtake, of Superman’s flight with Lois, sees her continuing to fly solo after Superman lets go; another shows Nuclear Man conjuring a tornado in the heartland that sucks up a little girl, forcing Supes to save her. Lex approaches the Kremlin with an offer to replenish their nuclear stockpile, explaining his sudden windfall in the movie proper, and Lacey is used to bait Nuclear Man, who’s less ambiguously into her. Then the filmmakers revert to unbridled idiocy with an epilogue in which Superman takes Jeremy for a ride in outer space, where they wave at helmeted astronauts while Jeremy breathes freely on his own. With these amputations, Superman IV definitely missed its chance to flame out on its own terms–and possibly become a more beloved cult film. The OK theatrical trailer (2.35:1/16×9) rounds out the platter. In the U.S., the “Superman: 5-Film Collection (1978-1987)” is packaged with a download voucher for digital copies of all five films in the set.
- Superman
143 minutes; PG; UHD: 2.40:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, Dolby Vision/HDR10), BD: 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), English 2.0 DTS-HD MA, French DD 2.0, German DD 1.0, Italian DD 1.0, Castilian Spanish DD 1.0, Spanish 1.0, Portuguese 1.0, BD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English 2.0 DTS-HD MA, French DD 2.0, German DD 1.0, Italian DD 1.0, Castilian Spanish DD 1.0, Spanish 1.0, Portuguese 1.0; UHD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Dutch, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish subtitles, BD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish subtitles; BD-100 + BD-50; Region-free; Warner - Superman II
127 minutes; PG; UHD: 2.40:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, HDR10), BD: 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), English 2.0 DTS-HD MA, French DD 1.0, German DD 1.0, Italian DD 1.0, Castilian Spanish DD 1.0, Spanish 1.0, BD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, French DD 1.0, German DD 1.0, Italian DD 1.0, Castilian Spanish DD 1.0, Spanish DD 1.0, Portuguese DD 1.0; UHD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Dutch, Traditional Chinese, Spanish subtitles, BD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish subtitles; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Warner - Superman II (The Richard Donner Cut)
116 minutes; PG; UHD: 2.40:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, HDR10), BD: 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), BD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, Thai DD 5.1; UHD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Dutch, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish subtitles, BD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish subtitles; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Warner - Superman III
125 minutes; PG; UHD: 2.40:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, HDR10), BD: 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), English 2.0 DTS-HD MA, French DD 2.0, German DD 2.0, Italian DD 2.0, Castilian Spanish DD 2.0, Spanish 1.0, BD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, French DD 2.0, German DD 2.0, Italian DD 2.0, Castilian Spanish DD 2.0, Spanish DD 1.0, Portuguese DD 2.0, Hungarian DD 2.0, Polish DD 2.0, Thai DD 2.0; UHD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Dutch, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish subtitles, BD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish subtitles; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Warner - Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
90 minutes; PG; UHD: 2.40:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, HDR10), BD: 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), English 2.0 DTS-HD MA, French DD 2.0, German DD 2.0, Italian DD 2.0, Castilian Spanish DD 2.0, Spanish 1.0, BD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, French DD 2.0, German DD 2.0, Italian DD 2.0, Castilian Spanish DD 2.0, Spanish DD 1.0, Portuguese DD 1.0, Hungarian DD 2.0, Polish DD 2.0, Thai DD 2.0; UHD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Dutch, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish subtitles, BD: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Castilian Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish subtitles; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Warner
*Williams’s score is so etched on my DNA that I found myself in tears during his opening suite on this rewatch. It will certainly not play the same for everyone, and Williams has gathered his share of detractors over the years, but in terms of phrases, bars, and even single notes that can reduce me to (and cause me to mourn for) the awestruck child I used to be, transfixed over the power of this medium, there is John Williams–and there is everyone else. I have no criticism for his Superman score, because I have no distance from it.
