When Richard Donner’s Superman was first released in 1978, getting audiences to believe a man could fly didn’t just mean state-of-the-art special effects – and these don’t hold up too badly even now. It meant convincing them that superhero films were worthwhile in the first place; it meant event-movie seriousness, a great John Williams score and opening intergalactic credits that were a little like the recent smash Star Wars; it meant Hollywood grandeur and acting nobility, a film that began looking like a weighty action thriller with substantial comedy moments, a disaster movie, or rather averted-disaster movie, giving us a tremendous shot of the San Andreas fault opening up, and a supernatural time-travel drama.
Superman is a very 1970s New York film, with some great, bustling streetscape scenes, and the film is shot and lit in a familiar realist way quite different from the hard, flat, unreal colour and production design of Marvel or DC films now. It was the great origin myth movie, the origin myth for superhero movies themselves, the product that now dominates cinema. And for this film, the “extended universe” was the actual universe, our universe: a standalone drama with Superman at its centre, and bad guys lined up ready to be fought.
Mario Puzo claimed he was paid a million dollars simply for drafting a page-long story synopsis; a snowy-haired, Shakespearean-voiced Marlon Brando plays the Man of Steel’s tragic father Jor-El who warns his home planet Krypton of the impending climate crisis, in vain. Susannah York is his all-but silent mother – and no less a figure than Trevor Howard plays one of the Krypton worthies who ignores the warning. Jor-El’s baby is dispatched to our human planet, crashing to Earth in the farm belt in 1938. His teen angst years are given short shrift and after a kind of quasi-timeless existential coming-of-age in the icy Fortress of Solitude, he is somehow given his famous costume and moves to Metropolis in 1978 as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent.
And so begins the most famous example of UST, or Unresolved Sexual Tension, in screenwriting history: endlessly flirting with reporter Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), a smoker of Marlboro cigarettes who after a date-slash-exclusive-interview wonderingly gives him his name: “What a super man … Superman!” So nothing to do with Nietzsche. Gene Hackman is a tremendous Lex Luthor: the wisecracking villain and acting heavyweight that Superman deserved.
Christopher Reeve endowed Superman/Clark with a goofy seriousness and reticent, gentlemanly charm, a family movie hero quite different and more mature than the sleeker, cooler, younger figure that pretty much everyone since has tried to portray; Reeve dons a big and unsexy pair of glasses to match those worn by snooker legend Dennis Taylor. The actor’s own catastrophic accident in 1995, which resulted in him becoming a wheelchair user, gave the likable Reeve his own poignantly mythic, extratextual part of the Superman legend.
This Superman alludes explicitly to its origins in the Depression-era comics, and Clark has a quaint 30s habit of using the phrase “Swell!” from his boyhood. Maybe now this movie looks quaint in the same way. But there’s still a surge of adventure and fun.
• Superman is released on 7 April in cinemas.
