The Weird Superman

As Western civilization awaits the new Superman movie with a mixture of instinctive excitement (a new Superman movie!) and queasy apprehension (what is with the Green Lantern’s haircut?), I find my mind turning to my favorite entrant in the long-running film franchise: Superman III.

I will concede that this admission of affection is rooted in that most undisciplined of emotions—nostalgia. Just as I did not control which movies I was shown or taken to as a youngster, I cannot be held responsible for my abiding enthusiasm for those movies that I was shown or taken to. For whatever reason, growing up I was not exposed to Star Wars, but I did see—again and again—the four Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve. So, naturally, I consider Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Perry White to be more companionable characters than Luke, Leia, and Han Solo, and to this day I insist that Reeve was a bigger (and better) movie star than Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford rolled into one—since, at the time, I doubt I could have picked any of them out of a lineup. 

You can keep your Battle of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back—I will take the Battle of Metropolis in Superman II. I make no claim for the superiority of the object of my nostalgia over yours, though a movie series that propagated the virtues of “truth, justice, and the American way”—rather than the chronicle of a dismal “forever war” between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire—has some undeniable merit. 

In my defense, my enthusiasm for Superman III suggests that my cinematic tastes, even as a wee lad, were not entirely mindless. Unlike the solemn self-importance of the three films that surround it, Superman III is rowdy, rangy, and irreverent—I even remember referring to it not by its title but by the following descriptor: “the weird Superman.” Because the movie was, and remains, very weird.

In one indication of the movie’s distinctiveness, let us consider its origin story: According to Jake Rossen’s book Superman vs. Hollywood: How Fiendish Producers, Devious Directors, and Warring Writers Grounded an American Icon, screenwriters David and Leslie Newman happened upon an episode of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in which the guest, Richard Pryor, made clear his deep devotion to the Superman movies. Before long, the producer Ilya Salkind and the studio, Warner Bros., had settled on Reeve’s unlikely, perhaps even inexplicable, costar. “Box office rewards would be doubled,” Rossen writes of the thinking at the time. “Some people would come for Superman, others for Pryor.”

Well, you know what they say about best-laid plans, but regardless of the commercial outcome of this bizarre collaboration between the Man of Steel and the star of Silver Streak, the results were, artistically, nonpareil. Consider the opening scene, which was relocated from the planet Krypton to the altogether homelier terrain of an unemployment office. There, Gus Gorman (Pryor) attempts to secure additional benefits despite having loused up multiple job opportunities, including one as a kitchen technician (otherwise known as dishwasher).

Having disabused the audience that this will be another rousing intergalactic adventure, the smart, cynical director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, Petulia) proceeds to present Metropolis not as a vibrant, bustling city but as a shabby, ill-managed burg whose weary inhabitants are distracted to the point of placing themselves in physical danger—or at least looking very foolish. For example, a roller-skating woman rolls in the direction of a hot dog cart which is then propelled into a bank of soon-to-topple phone booths. Later, ricocheting gunfire between cops and a bank robber leads a passing car to collide with a fire hydrant—an event dire enough to require, finally, the intervention of Superman. 

Lester, who has a Robert Altman–like eye for examples of oddball human behavior, offers a world of breakdown and frustration: Clark Kent cannot operate a newspaper vending machine without tearing the paper asunder, the Daily Planet photographer Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure) fails to capture the fire hydrant rescue because he neglects to put down the hot dog he has been eating, and the editor Perry White (Jackie Cooper) is reduced to drawing bingo numbers for a contest for readers. When the setting shifts to Smallville, Lester films the heartland with a notable lack of sentimentality: In one rather touching scene, Lana Lang (the lovely Annette O’Toole), here a divorcee, admits that she had to pawn her ring amid soaring gas bills. In another, Clark, Lana, and her little boy while away an afternoon at (of all places) a bowling alley. It’s all a portrait of faintly depressing American averageness—within the infrastructure of a comic book blockbuster.

Even when the plot takes off, the theme of pervasive failure dominates: With a heretofore untapped aptitude for computers, Pryor’s character, Gus, falls into the orbit of a corporate tycoon (Robert Vaughn), who recruits him to develop Kryptonite to fell Superman—but, failing to replicate the exact components of the deathly substance, merely draws out the malicious side of the superhero’s personality. Even Kryptonite is in desperate need of being made great again.

What did I take from this peculiar movie at age 5 or 6? Well, I certainly was engaged by its peculiarity, including the spectacle of the Kryptonite-impaired evil Superman stirring up trouble of various kinds: One memorable scene features him spitefully adjusting the (formerly) Leaning Tower of Pisa. Today, though, I think the film holds up as a portrait of early ’80s American malaise not unlike our present period of economic uncertainty, martial breakdown, and the general sense that things are going to pieces. 

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