Last week (it may have been Thursday?) TCM was doing a Christopher Reeve double-feature, the first movie up was the 1978 version of Superman (the original one, I know there were several sequels). I remember seeing this one in the theater (actually, surprisingly, I remembered a lot from the movie for not having really seen it all these years)
And yes, I don't think I have seen it in its entirety since then. First, we didn't have cable (didn't have many channels at all) and then later, after the horseback riding accident that paralyzed him, it made me a little sad to watch movies with him in it (he may have been my first celebrity crush....). But now, it's been long enough. I mean, it's still sad he's not in good health and still around and I wonder what he'd have done if that accident had not happened, would he still be acting if he were still around? He'd only be seventy-three, and I could see him playing "distinguished man" roles and maybe being a silver fox type, perhaps...
I remember my dad took all of us to see it. We saw a lot of movies like that - my dad favored sci-fi, so we saw all the Star Trek movies based on TOS, we saw the first three Star Wars (the ones usually designated as 4, 5, and 6 now). And Superman and its follow ups. And The Black Hole, which I think was marketed wrong; I've said before it was not a particularly friendly movie for a sensitive child like me but it was kind of sold as "funny robots" like Star Wars and then it took a heavy existential turn that I remember kind of messed me up. I think also being a Disney movie it was expected it would have a happy ending, and maybe arguably coming through a black hole and finding Paradise on the other side (implied as happening for the Good Guys) is a happy ending, but getting there was....kind of traumatizing. (I don't think I'm the only Gen Xer who experienced that)
But I remembered having liked Superman, so I thought, well, I'll see how this has held up.
It holds up pretty well, actually. Reeve was very good as Superman, combining the right note of literal unworldliness (an alien, even if one raised by a farm couple) with genuine good-heartedness and concern for others (famously, he upholds the bargain made with Miss Teschmacher, to save her mother in Hackensack first, and that leads to the plot point (spoiler) where he technically violates the thing his biological father told him he must never do....but he did it for love of Lois Lane)
(And yeah, that scene is STILL as much a gut punch now, maybe even more, than when I was nine years old)
I read somewhere recently that he played Clark Kent kind of like Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" and I can TOTALLY see that, and it works. It works really well.
It's actually weirdly kind of fun seeing Superman (or his secret identity) being awkward and maybe a little shy. But it also tracks! This guy is a farm kid, he grew up in rural America and he's now in the big city (a stand-in for New York, I guess) and he doesn't feel like he fits in. Heck, there's a scene where he's mildly taunted and excluded by some of his high school classmates in Kansas for being "weird," and I suppose there's truth to that: when you have some special quality or skill, you don't always fit in with most people.
(And yet, he seems to fit in okay with his newspaper colleagues)
There are a number of emotional (or inadvertently so, because of what I've experienced) scenes. Him seeing his father after his father died of a heart attack hits really differently for me now than it did in 1978.
And as I said before, the big pivotal scene with Lois Lane, where his doing what he promised leads to her technical demise (because he can't be everywhere at once) and that is one HECK of a gut punch (as I said, I even remember it being so when I was a kid who hadn't experienced all the loss I have now).
And yet, like movies of this sort SHOULD, it ends well: everyone is alive again (well, except Jonathan Kent), the "bad guys" get dropped off in prison (I guess Miss Teschmacher gets to escape?), and the day is saved.
And the bad guys: Reeve was great as Superman because he played him with just enough aw-shucks awkwardness to save him from being boring in the way the Princes Charming in the Disney princess movies are boring (where they are just Good. Their job is....prince. and there's not much else there). I think it helped a lot that he had good chemistry with Margot Kidder and good chemistry (!) with Gene Hackman who played Lex Luthor.
And Hackman was very good in his role - funny, and arch, and although he is cartoonishly evil, he's not....scary..... in the way some movie villains are. Maybe a little buffoonish and full of himself, so you know he'll get his comeuppance in the end. And Ned Beatty is funny as Otis, his thick-headed accomplice. Just in general a good cast who seemed (mostly) to really enjoy their roles (I've read that Marlon Brando did NOT like his role, and he does come across a little flat)
But there's also the whole mythos of Superman, or at least the version I know (from this movie). I can't speak to Superman's "Jewishness" (others more knowledgeable have written on that, but his creators were, and at least in some of the stories, there's a strong streak of Moses. And in this version, they play around a little bit with the God/Jesus thing - I mean, Kal-EL and Jor-EL. Not for nothing that El is one of the Names of God, and in fact, in one of her essays Madeline L'Engle suggests it should be used as the pronoun for God, since God would, really, be genderless, regardless of how we humans perceive God. Jesus was a man, of course, but God, God's self, would be a spirit beyond that...)
But there's also an American mythos there, and one I'm afraid we're losing. The idea that we can be better than we are. The idea we hold up Truth, Justice, and whatever the American Way is. The idea of being honest and fair, of caring for the vulnerable (and of course that is also an old, old, idea, going at least back to the Old Testament) and generally doing what is Good and avoiding what is Bad.
(Can we still even agree on what Good is?)
But yes. Watching the movie I once again see those echoes of things that were in pop culture in the 70s - a lot of the Americana stuff around the Bicentennial, and things like Schoolhouse Rock, and some of the hopeful pop music - an idea that we weren't perfect (and really, we were far from perfect, especially as far as matters of race were concerned), but we could TRY. We could try to be better than we were, that trying to be better was a worthwhile thing. And now, it does feel like there's a lot of cynicism, a lot of "why bother" sentiment. And I admit I've expressed it myself: a sense that the bullies and cheats have won, and those of us who try to be honest and true are just going to be the losers and the prey in their schemes, and there's no way to be a Good person and also win in this exceptionally fallen world, so you have two unattractive choice: try to be good, and risk being cheated and run over, or else give up whatever goodness you have and sink to the level of the worst.
And yes, my memory is VERY likely faulty here. I was a child in the 1970s. I had a stable family I grew up in, with parents who taught me that doing the right thing (honestly, kindness, hard work) was the way to get along in life. And I went to church and Sunday school and learned similar lessons there. And even if I was often a bullied and excluded kid, I did have enough people in my life (mostly adults) who kept to the "do what is right and you will eventually come out right in the end" that I continued to believe it. It's also possible that my parents' fairly tight control of what movies and tv shows my brother and I saw (and anyway, stuff had to be more "family friendly" back then, I think) helped us mainly be exposed to media where the good guys won and where doing what was "right" was the way to go.
I still don't like antiheroes (just like Madeline L'Engle wrote she did not). I would rather watch aspirational heroes where, even if I can't live up to how good they are, I can TRY. And there is that hopefulness in the old Superman movie, the tagline was "you'll believe a man can fly!" but it could just as well be "you'll believe truth and justice will triumph!"
Would that they do. As a nearly-sixty-year-old adult, I'm not nearly as sure of it as I was when I was nine...
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