The FilmNerds Blog

The Movie: Superman III (1983)

Spoiler Level: High (But it’s Superman III, so who cares?)

The Setup: You have three options here, in regards to what you need to know before watching the scene. You can take my plot summary, which will follow below. You could also watch Superman III. Or, you could go listen to Earwolf’s Superman III episode of “How Did This Get Made“, guest-hosted by Damon Lindelof. I’d highly recommend this podcast, and especially this episode. They sum up the folly of this movie, which was the humorous Richard Lester deconstructionist Superman take-down that nobody on planet Earth was asking for.

Basically, up to this point, the film has been a Richard Pryor comedy vehicle that takes place in Superman’s Metropolis. Being some sort of idiot savant computer genius, Pryor’s Gus is helping a megalomaniac corner the world’s coffee markets, and has discovered a way to keep Superman from meddling. By creating a synthetic black kryptonite and HANDING IT to Superman, they give the Man of Steel a kind of viral schizophrenia, as he begins to exhibit signs of a dark side. Succumbing to his evil side, Superman not only makes inappropriate sexual advances towards Lana Lang, but he successfully beds the villain’s girlfriend and gets hammered in a dingy bar.

In this scene, the evil and unshaven Dark Superman is having mental agitation, and escapes to a solitary junk yard to hash it out with… himself?!?

The Scene:  Click Here for Youtube (No Embedding Allowed)

Why It’s Great: Somehow, despite all attempts at letting broad comedy reign supreme in what is ostensibly a children’s film, Richard Lester managed to craft the most weighty, dark, and dramatic fight scene in the entire Superman  movie franchise. That’s right, I find this to be a more harrowing and high-stakes fight than the super-brawl at the end of Superman II. First off, the tone here is deadly serious. Dark Superman lands and gives a primal scream that empties the facility. A minimal score follows, never getting in the way of the creepy conflict at the center of the scene: Clark Kent materializes out from Dark Superman, and the fight begins immediately, with Dark Superman scoffing and beating the snot out of Clark. This might be Christopher Reeve’s high point in the series as well, as he gets the chance to play a cocky maniac and a scrappy underdog all in the same scene. Reeve evokes Michael Keaton’s “You wanna get nuts” freak-out from Batman, and his Dark Superman is unrelenting in his cruelty and malice here.

Full disclosure: I have watched Superman III more than any other Superman film. I suspect my dad got a kick out of the Richard Pryor stuff when I was a kid, so this was the Superman movie he rented most often. That, or it must have been super cheap to syndicate and was on television a lot. Regardless, the rest of the movie always confused and disturbed me, especially the aforementioned super-villainess tryst and a later moment in which a woman is violently turned into a cyborg.

This scene, however, was pure Superman goodness. About four minutes in, after using some creative practical effects and stuntwork to convey Clark’s beat-down, Lester brings things to a head as Clark is horribly crushed in a trash compactor. Everything is silent for a moment as the victorious Dark Superman stumbles away in a drunken haze, before the trash compactor BURSTS open as Clark bench presses the damn thing apart. This is only one of two great moments in which Clark bursts out of a trash compactor. Eventually, Clark overpowers Dark Superman and eventually CHOKES HIM TO DEATH WITH HIS BARE HANDS. The scene culminates at seven minutes as Dark Superman disappears and Clark reclaims his true identity: He stands up, the John Williams score begins, and he rips open his shirt, revealing a pristine Superman logo. With the theme soaring, Superman flies off to save the world.

Too bad everything after that is baffling. However, for one scene, Superman was at his very best: Fighting not only the injustices of the world around him, but his own demons and identity issues. I’m sure Lester was trying to get at some deeper truth here, but assumedly the script, the intent of the producers, and his own disinterest in the material were working against the film. Let’s hope that some day, we’ll get a cinematic Superman that matches the grit and gravitas that Reeves showed us here.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

Comedy is tricky territory when taking on films from another era. While it certainly is possible for comedy to stand the test of time and remain equally funny to subsequent generations, I don’t think it’s necessarily a judgment on a film to say that it doesn’t affect audiences in the same way on the day it’s released as it does 30 years later.

There are lots of different ways to make people laugh and one of those ways involves being right on top of a highly relevant social or political issue. Timely comedy is important and can make people laugh by allowing them to make light of something bad going on in the world around them. Timely comedy does, however, have a tough time remaining fresh as the years go by. Looking at the highest-grossing comedy of 1983, John Landis’ Trading Places, it’s clear that in ’83, audiences responded to comedy about the current conditions of the world at the time. Going down the list of our Top 50 countdown, the comedies that stand up best today, by and large, don’t show up very near the top (with the exception of National Lampoon’s Vacation). The highly nostalgic A Christmas Story is quite possibly the most well-known film comedy on this countdown today in 2011 but barely made a blip at the box office in 1983. Others on the list that I think would be particularly well-received today include the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Easy Money and Richard Pryor’s standup comedy film Here and Now, neither of which cracked the Top 25.

Trading Places had quite a lot going for it to help make it the most successful comedy release of the year. For one, the release was perfectly timed by Paramount, opening opposite Superman III and at a time when the rest of the nation’s screens were still being taken up by the behemoth that was Return of the Jedi. The only other comedy released in remote proximity of Trading Places was Steve Martin’s offbeat entry The Man with Two Brains, which despite scoring big with critics didn’t finish in the Top 50 in 1983.

That’s not to say Trading Places succeeded just because it was the only game in town. Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy were easily two of the hottest young names in comedy in 1983. After leaving Saturday Night Live in 1979, Akroyd quickly established himself as a rising film comedy star with The Blue Brothers film in 1980. Murphy meanwhile was still at the height of his popularity on SNL though he too had begun the transition to full-on movie star after the huge success of 48 Hours in 1982.

While the screenplay for Trading Places was initially envisioned as a project for Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, the unavailability of Pryor led to Murphy landing the role of Billy Ray Valentine and out of a desire to avoid looking like he was trying to become “The Next Richard Pryor”, Murphy requested that producers re-cast the part of Louis Winthorpe, the over-privileged white commodities broker. Akroyd has always been notable for his plasticity as a comedy actor, which I’m sure is a big reason he was chosen as one of the founding members of Lorne Michaels’ sketch comedy troupe, and here he showed audiences that the man who played the epitome of cool, calm and collected in The Blues Brothers could just as easily pull off uptight and neurotic.

Murphy was a known quantity by 1983 but still hadn’t quite gotten the message out to mainstream American audiences that he was a man of many faces and voices. Billy Ray as a character is rather similar to the confident, quick-witted Reggie from 48 Hours but here Murphy gets a few opportunities to show off his ability to inhabit multiple roles within the same movie, something he would become known for and indeed something that became expected of him as his career went on. In the scene below, we see Murphy begin to play with the concept of inhabiting alter egos in his film roles and giving the audience not just one but multiple performances to chew on.

The premise of the film is two-fold: the first half of the film is a rather interesting social parable involving two wealthy commodities traders (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) who are having the classic argument about Nature vs. Nurture. To settle the argument, the two decide to swap the life roles of two men, one being their well-bred and wealthy protogé Winthorpe (Akroyd) and the other a street urchin and con-man named Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy). The argument for Nurture seems to win out as Winthorpe falls to pieces without all the advantages of wealth while Billy Ray becomes an overnight success at the commodities firm.

It’s at that point that the film switches gears and becomes a film not about that philosophical argument anymore but essentially about the two heroes getting revenge on the rich old villains who used them as guinea pigs. This half of the film as a premise feels a lot less thoughtful and a lot more geared around rather unoriginal and tired jokes involving bad things happening to the bad guys including, in the case of the right hand man of the two Duke brothers, being violated by a gorilla. Har har.

The movie certainly has its moments, most of them coming from simple performance touches by Murphy and Akroyd. At the absolute low point of Winthorpe’s downfall, Akroyd sneaks his way into the company Christmas party dressed as Santa Claus to plant drugs in Billy Ray’s desk but before he does that he decides to stop by the buffet to grab some much-needed free food. The ensuing scene of Winthorpe drunkenly stuffing smoked salmon through his beard is hilariously pathetic.

(Apologies for the low quality clip – it’s the best I could find)

The film concludes with a rather confusing scene involving Winthorpe and Billy Ray somehow tricking the Duke brothers into losing millions of dollars in the frozen concentrated orange juice market. It’s still unclear to me as to what is actually happening (even Murphy has admitted in interviews that he didn’t understand what he was supposed to be doing in the scene) but I guess it’s sufficient to know that the Duke’s lost money in the end and the heroes got their revenge.

The film was overwhelmingly praised by critics in 1983, including a glowing review from Roger Ebert as well as high praise from Janet Maslin of The New York Times who called Trading Places the film that Preston Sturges might have made “if he’d had a little less inspiration and a lot more money.” That’s extremely high praise for John Landis as a director but also for writers Timohy Harris and Herschel Weingrod who went on to co-write such mega-successful comedies as Brewster’s Millions, and Kindergarten Cop in the years that followed.

It’s clear that Trading Places was an undisputed comedy hit in its day and that it remains so in the minds of many who saw it then. Watching it now, I find it to be light on laughs in comparison to what most audiences today expect of their film comedies. That’s not to say it’s not a smart film or a film with no laughs – just to say that if you showed this film in 2011 to an audience full of people who had never seen it before, I don’t believe the laughs would be very frequent, at least not as frequent as you’d hear in a typical contemporary comedy hit. That probably says a lot more about the way comedies are made today than it does about the quality of Trading Places as a film but it’s still worth noting. As I mentioned at the start of this review, I believe comedy is a very temporal and fast-moving animal and it’s rare to ever find a comedy that remains funny to audiences more than a few decades separated from it. Trading Places is a good movie but I’m not totally sure the laughs hit as hard today as they did in 1983.

DOWNLOAD: Back to the Movies Podcast – Trading Places (with guest Jason Roche)

Next Up: Jennifer Beals and Cynthia Rhodes star in the iconic dance movie Flashdance.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

Like most people born in 1983, I’ve never felt particularly connected to the Superman movie franchise. By the time I was old enough to watch and appreciate movies, the Superman movie franchise founded by producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind had devolved into a parody of itself with movies like Supergirl and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace becoming cinematic punch-lines rather than box office heroes like their predecessors. On top of that, the only other silver screen impression I have of Superman in my lifetime is Bryan Singer’s bland misfire Superman Returns, a movie that aspired to make you believe a man can fly…and still be uninteresting.

Many comic book enthusiasts (a group which does not include yours truly) hold Superman up as one of the truly great, if not the greatest, superhero characters in the history of the medium but it’s a character that’s had a hard time finding success in movie form, even during the 21st Century boom of comic book movies. I can’t speak to the comic books themselves, only to the character’s existence in the world of movies, but personally I’ve never felt Superman is a terribly interesting character and I think his lack of dimension has really held back DC and Warner Brothers from moving forward with a Superman film that can capture the attention of audiences in the 21st Century. I’m sure I’ll get some argument on this point from Superman fans and comic book enthusiasts of all kinds but I think the problem with Superman lies with the fact that he can do absolutely anything and has only one weakness, which itself is a rather uninteresting and all-too-convenient MacGuffin. Many writers will tell you that restrictions and boundaries are what lead to true creativity and the problem with Superman is that the boundaries are far too broadly drawn. There’s no problem Superman can’t solve, except of course Kryptonite and the problem there is that Kryptonite just is what it is and has no interesting properties or characteristics other than being “the stuff that kills Superman”.

Roger Ebert was skeptical at the very idea of making superhero stories into films even after the success of the first two Superman films. In his 1983 review, Ebert said “What’s amazing is that the first two Superman movies avoided that description, creating a fantasy with a certain charm. They could have been manipulative special-effects movies, but they were a great deal more. With this third one, maybe they’ve finally run out of inspiration.”

All that said, the Salkind’s first attempt at a Superman film in 1978 remains a fantastically entertaining and successful movie as does Superman II, in spite of some of the most chaotic behind-the-scenes activity in movie history. Director Richard Donner was hired by the Salkinds to direct Superman and Superman II simultaneously, an ambitious production idea that ended with Donner being fired after completing about 75 percent of the second film. The Salkinds hired Richard Lester (who directed the Salkind-produced Three Musketeer films in the ’70s) to complete Superman II and after seeing that film rocket to financial success once again, decided to keep Lester on for a third Superman film.

The problem was that although the Salkinds were extremely happy with their move to replace Donner with Lester, nearly everyone else involved in the production of the first two films were less enthusiastic. Gene Hackman, who many would argue was the most popular star from the cast of the first two films, refused to reprise the role of Lex Luthor following Donner’s dismissal. Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, who was hired by Donner to rewrite what he thought were rather silly screenplays for the first two films, also refused to participate in the franchise without Donner and while she denies it, many believe that public comments by Margot Kidder regarding his displeasure with the move led to Lois Lane’s role in the third movie being reduced to a laughably small cameo.

In my opinion, the loss of Mankiewicz may have ended up being perhaps the single-biggest loss that came from the fallout of the Donner-to-Lester move. That’s because the screenplay for Superman III, written by David and Leslie Newman, is so utterly ridiculous and unnatural feeling that no director, whether it be Lester or Donner, stood a chance of adapting it into a decent movie. Ilya Salkind’s original idea for Superman III involved Superman returning to the world of Krypton, facing off against cosmic supervillain Brainiac and teaming up with fellow Kryptonian Supergirl but Warner Bros. quickly shied away from what probably sounded like a special effects budget of unparalleled proportions.

Instead Warner Bros. came back to the Salkinds with their own idea. I imagine the pitch went something like this:

“Hey guys, listen that idea about Superman in space fighting evil aliens and teaming up with a super-hot girl version of himself – yeah that all sounds great. But what about this instead: Richard Pryor plays a computer geek who uses kryptonite to turn Superman evil! It’ll be cool AND hilarious at the same time!”

Frankly, however the idea was pitched it’s hard to believe that any adult with half a brain who was in the room thought it sounded like a good idea. Why turn Superman into a comedy? Why turn the ultimate good guy into a bad guy? I guess I can see some of the appeal of putting Richard Pryor into what’s supposed to be a fun, summer action movie. Pryor had already proven to be a major box office draw and he was tremendously fun to watch, the kind of actor you can just let roam around in a movie and he’ll find a way to be funny.

With Hackman and Kidder out, I also see some of the logic behind bringing Robert Vaughn in as the villain and Annette O’Toole as love interest Lana Lang. Vaughn’s villainous Ross Webster is clearly the same type of villain as Lex Luthor, a smarmy and clever corporate thief for whom greed is the only superpower. He’s a comedic villain and Vaughn does a great job of making his ridiculous and highly expository dialogue still palatable. O’Toole strikes me as fairly goofy at the beginning of the movie (the running joke of her being completely misunderstood by Clark gets old pretty fast) but actually starts to grow on me as the film goes on. She’s definitely not a conventional beauty and her chemistry with Reeve is nowhere near what we saw with Kidder in the first two films but she’s still ultimately pretty likable.

I really can’t complain about the cast much. I’d say given the dreadful screenplay they had to work with, I’d say they did a pretty good job. The story, which involves Richard Pryor being recruited by the evil Ross Webster to hack into satellites and change the weather, is so muddled and absurd that it’s not even worth fully recapping here. There’s also a somewhat controversial element to the story that involves Superman turning evil after being exposed to small amounts of, you guessed it, kryptonite. This “evil Superman” storyline really isn’t ever given any kind of explanation and has no consequences on the rest of the story elements. It’s mainly just a chance for the producers to film a scene in which Clark Kent fights with Superman (whether this is an actual physical split of Superman’s being or just a psychological battle being creatively expressed on screen is never actually made clear).

Probably my favorite moment of the “evil Superman” sequence (and by favorite I mean the moment that made me laugh the hardest at its utter absurdity) is a scene that almost perfectly expresses the complete lack of self-awareness or irony that Superman III has. It features a wonderfully stereotypical Italian man who is doing what all stereotypical Italian men do – selling statues of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s a joke that gets another callback at the end of the movie, where it actually made me laugh even harder the second time despite the fact that I knew it was coming.

This clip almost perfectly sums up the overall tone of Superman III, a movie that doesn’t ask to be taken as seriously as the first two Superman films and certainly succeeds at accomplishing that. It’s OK to have fun with a classic hero and it’s even OK to parody that hero outright (see the James Bond spoof Casino Royale for a great example) but if you’re going to do that, the rules of action/adventure film no longer apply. You are in the realm of comedy and if Superman III is to be judged as a comedy, it’s not a particularly funny or original one.

Next Up: The Griswold family makes its screen debut in National Lampoon’s Vacation.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

I’ve been away for quite sometime from this project and I’ll admit that part of the reason that it took so long to post this latest installment has to do with the subject matter. I consider myself a film lover but that doesn’t mean that all formats and genres work for me. If there’s one subcategory of film that just hasn’t ever been able to keep my attention, it’s the concert film. They’re like documentaries but with no point of view and no guidance from a director. They are simply documents of a performance shown from a few different angles and are almost always a forgettable filmgoing experience for me.

Richard Pryor: Here and Now fits into a subcategory of a subcategory, the stand-up comedy concert film. With the exception of a short interview with Pryor at the film’s opening in which the comedian explains that he’s been sober for seven months heading into the show, the film is simply a filmed record of a stand-up performance he gave in New Orleans in August of 1983 (the film was released that November).

We’ve already seen one concert film in this blog, but Cheech & Chong Still Smokin’ at least made an attempt to structure the performance clips around a narrative, albeit a weak one. This film plays more like raw footage, which I admire in principle but am bored by in actuality. I’m a big fan of stand-up comedy. You might even call me a student of stand-up comedy. I spend a lot of time around aspiring stand-ups here in my hometown of Birmingham and I always enjoy hearing them break down their performances and their jokes. It’s a science and an art and something that I have tremendous admiration for. But at the same time, I always recognize that stand-up comedy, more so than any other medium for comedy, relies on capturing the spirit of the moment. For stand-up comedy to work, the comedian has to have a complete understanding of his audience, what makes them tick, what rings true to them.

It’s clear that when this film was made, Richard Pryor was in tune with his audience. This was his third concert film and his first since undergoing a major life transformation following the incident in which he nearly killed himself while free-basing cocaine. He was a man who clearly had taken control of his life and had recommitted himself to his craft. The audience in New Orleans is outrageous to behold today with a nearly non-stop stream of shouts from the audience, not necessarily hecklers just people who desperately want to participate in the show. Pryor is totally unfazed by the noise and distractions and chooses just the right times to respond to a shouted comment.

You can probably tell there’s a big BUT coming. The issue is this: if stand-up comedy is about understanding the mindset of the audience you are performing in front of, where does that leave us as audience members 27 years later? A lot of my stand-up comedian friends would disagree but I feel that stand-up material simply doesn’t age well, precisely because its success is based on it being relevant to a very specific audience in a specific place and time. Some material doesn’t even work if you aren’t in the same room as the comedian – how could it work if you aren’t in the same decade?

What does work particularly well from Pryor’s 90-minute set are the longer character-based bits. One of Pryor’s more well-known bits was playing a character called “Mudbone”, essentially an elderly, uneducated black man rambling on to various members of the audience as if he’d known them since their childhood. Another particularly impressive bit finds Pryor playing a crack addict in the midst of shooting up, a bit that as Roger Ebert puts it “comes closer to tragedy than it does to comedy.” It’s an impressive little piece of performance art that is made even more impressive by the fact that Pryor performed it in front of what can only be described as an unsophisticated audience.

While I can certainly appreciate Pryor’s skills on stage, Here and Now doesn’t do any better job of keeping me interested than any other concert film I’ve ever seen. The Original Kings of Comedy is probably one of the only concert films I’ve ever seen that clearly worked for me and kept me interested but will it have the same affect on some kid who goes back to watch it 27 years later? I’m guessing it won’t.

Next Up: Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone starring Molly Ringwald.