How ‘Superman’ created the superhero movie genre
The story of Superman is perhaps the first great American myth. He’s not only one of the most recognizable figures in all of modern culture, he’s also the predecessor to so many great and beloved stories that came after his.
Without our Man of Steel, we would have no Batman, no Spider-Man, and certainly no Avengers. And just as every superhero owes a life debt to Superman, all modern superhero movies walk in the footsteps of Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman movie.
Re-watching it for the first time in maybe ten years, I was uncommonly moved by the opening titles sequence. Opening credits are uncommon these days, and Superman’s are striking and bold: Whooshing blue text against a backdrop of stars, accompanied by John Williams’ ludicrously triumphant Superman theme. It all seems to announce that the movie we’re about to see isn’t simply a Superman story; it’s the story of Superman, in its purest and most inspirational form, and I must admit it nearly had me tearing up.
The prologue on Krypton is a little marvel of science fiction film making. Though visually separate from the rest of the film, Marlon Brando’s brief performance as Superman’s father Jor-El leaves a deep emotional impression. His parting words to his infant son are, perhaps intentionally, nearly Biblical in nature, foretelling the boy’s fate as a savior to the people of Earth. I remember skipping over this sequence as a kid to get straight to the Superman parts; perhaps the emotions at stake on Krypton become a little more apparent with age.
Once little Kal-El is found by the kindly old Kents, we’re treated to a series of scenes in Clark’s hometown of Smallville. The time period and setting feel almost dreamily unspecific, with imagery of farmhouses, windmills, and teens riding around in old-fashioned convertibles, evoking a mid-century, Norman Rockwell-type feel. In many ways, Superman is a relic of this era, and the teenage Clark Kent seems right at home in this version of Smallville.
Nearly an hour into the film, we’re finally introduced to Christopher Reeve as Clark. His performance is brilliantly awkward: He looks visibly anxious as he stutters through his sentences, pushes his enormous glasses up his nose, and bumps into every possible obstacle he can find. He’s such an innocuous wallflower that the camera nearly ignores him in every shot, and we barely notice him until he speaks up. He looks like he’s about to faint every time Lois Lane (played raspy, charismatic, and ambitious by Margot Kidder) looks at him. The warm dramatic irony in this is that we know it’s an act. Superman’s not really a nebbish, clumsy square, but he has to pretend to be, and Reeve makes us feel like we’re in on the joke without ever winking at the camera.
Then he tears his shirt open, spins through a revolving door, and there he is: Superman, brightly colored, center screen and glorious. It’s a masterstroke of character presentation. He takes off in flight, and even though we know it’s not real, it doesn’t look fake, because we’re looking at a real person made to fly through clever camera trickery. We believe it in the same way we believe the flight of the Millennium Falcon: of course it’s not real, but it’s not fake.
No actor before or since has played Superman so effortlessly as Christopher Reeve. His Superman is so fundamentally different from his Clark Kent (notice how even his hair parts in different directions depending on who he’s being). He’s a lean, eager and earnest presence: a good man, not just a powerful one. Every detail, from his calm words to his warm smile right down to his posture tells us this isn’t an actor playing Superman: this is the Man of Steel himself.
We live in a Golden Age of superhero movies, where some of the very best ones operate by placing our heroes in relatively “real world” settings (think Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy or Jon Favreau’s Iron Man). But Superman the Movie was the first of its kind, and it did things the only way it knew how: It slapped a big, goofy, earnest comic book hero right up on the screen in all his primary colored glory. It’s a movie that deserves to be watched, not just as an ancestor to today’s multi-layered superhero epics, but as a grand, emotional masterpiece in its own right. As the film’s posters advertised, “You’ll believe a man can fly.”
—capnkirk94@gmail.com