“YOU’LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY!” spouted the early trailers and publicity for a movie that was mildly hyped in 1978 and never previewed as a movie, but has become one of the all-time great comic book adaptations, thanks in part to director Richard Donner’s insistence of verisimilitude and to focus on the origin story.
In 1948, millions of light years away on the planet Krypton, Jor-El (Marlon Brando, paid $3.5 million for a mere twelve days work) sends his son Kal-El on a rocket ship to Earth as the planet explodes.
Landing in the rural community of Smallville, Kal-El is adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent (Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter) and raised on a farm. At high school, the teenage Clark (Jeff East) is capable, but has to hide his powers, but when Jonathan has a stroke and dies, a mysterious green crystal calls to him in the family barn and sends him north to where he throws the crystal into the Arctic sea. A crystallised Fortress of Solitude is built and it is here that he reconnects with Jor-El, a life entity embedded in the crystals sent along with him.
Twelve years later, Clark (Christopher Reeve) is in Metropolis and works as a reporter for the Daily Planet, where he meets Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), but soon his real identity is revealed in a series of near misses.
However, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) is planning a dastardly plan to gain control of real estate with the help of a couple of nuclear rockets on test….
Even today – and even with the spectacle of the recent Marvel Comics Universe big-screen billionaire club with the likes of AVENGERS and others – SUPERMAN is still one of the all-time great entertainments, with some terrific action and moments, with Reeve still the definitive big-screen Superman (the helicopter rescue sequence is still a jaw-dropping cliff-hanger of a moment with old style physical and visual effects pre-CGI)
Oh – and composer legend John Williams did a stunning job on the music, which can be purchased here: