Superman: the Movie (1978)

You’ll believe a man can fly!

It begins with four notes. A trumpet figure that leaps a perfect fifth and seems, in the leaping, to discover what flight is. John Williams wrote a march that sounds like aerodynamics — it doesn’t march along the ground but lifts from it — and in those opening seconds Richard Donner’s film tells you exactly what kind of film it intends to be. Heroic. Sincere. Mythic. Then it spends two and a half hours fulfilling that promise.

I was a child when I first saw it, and I have never recovered. Jaws, Star Wars, and Superman arrived in the years that formed me. I used to run through my house with my arms outstretched, repeating the tagline — you’ll believe a man can fly — to no one in particular, because the film had given me something I hadn’t found words for. Decades later, sitting down to write about it, I find that the words still strain. The film is larger than its parts and larger than the criticism we have brought to it, and what I want to do here is recognize what it actually accomplished, because almost no one does.

Begin with the score, since the film does. Williams’s main theme is doing something that almost no other piece of film music has ever done: it’s a march that sounds like flight. The harmonic structure rises. The brass leaps in intervals that mimic the physical sensation of lift. You are hearing the laws of motion in the orchestration. And the love theme, Can You Read My Mind, is not romantic in the conventional sense — it is a melody that is suspended. Two people are briefly outside time. It hangs rather than resolves, which is exactly what the flying scene is. Lois lifted out of her own life. The Krypton material plays the planet not as science fiction but as lost antiquity, ethereal choral writing that gives the world a memory before it is destroyed. Williams gave Krypton a soul in seven minutes of music, and that soul carries through the entire film. Anyone who writes off Williams as merely populist is misunderstanding what populist composition costs at that level. The accessibility is the achievement. Reaching everyone is the hardest thing a composer can do.

Donner’s first stroke of genius was casting Marlon Brando as Jor-El. The cost has been written about endlessly, and the controversy is uninteresting. What matters is that in 1978, Brando still walked into a frame of film like royalty. He carried half a century of cinematic gravity in a single body — The Godfather, On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Last Tango in Paris — and Donner needed Krypton to land as a real civilization in a handful of minutes. The way you accomplish that is you cast the most serious actor of the twentieth century as the patriarch and let his presence do the world-building. Brando walks into the frame, and the audience accepts that this is a place with history, with law, with consequence. Susannah York’s Lara stands beside him, and the two of them create the impression of a real marriage, a domestic life, a family. By the time the planet explodes, you understand what is being lost, and you understand whose son this child is. The line that returns at the Fortress of Solitude — they can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be, they only lack the light to show the way — becomes the moral spine of the entire film. Brando spoke it in seven minutes, and Donner built two hours around it.

Then there is the script. Mario Puzo, Robert Benton, the Newmans, and finally Tom Mankiewicz built a screenplay that moves through three completely different genres without a seam — mythological prologue, rural American coming-of-age, urban screwball adventure — and the film changes worlds twice and never breaks. Each section is built on the same emotional throughline: the formation of a man who chooses goodness because of where he came from and what he was taught. Krypton gives him origin. Kansas gives him conscience. Metropolis gives him purpose. Each act is a layer, not a departure. There are two adventure films I would put forward as having the most solid narrative architecture I have ever seen on screen, and they are Superman: The Movie and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Every scene in both films serves the next scene and the whole. There are no detours, no second-unit indulgences, no franchise obligations. Every minute is load-bearing. Raiders does it inside one propulsive genre. Superman does it across three, which is in some ways the greater achievement, because the film must keep convincing you that it is the same film as it changes register. And it does. The Krypton prologue feels like the same movie as the helicopter rescue, because the underlying moral architecture is continuous.

Christopher Reeve walked into a film that took him seriously, which is why his performance still defines the character almost fifty years later. There’s no hedge in the work. He is not winking at us. He is not pre-apologizing for sincerity. He is simply being Superman, and being Clark Kent, and trusting that the audience will accept both as full inhabitations of the same body. Almost no actor since has been allowed that trust by his material. Routh did a Reeve impression, which was respectful but airless. Cavill was asked to play Superman as a brooding demigod in a universe that distrusted him. Only David Corenswet, almost half a century later, has finally been given a script that lets him do what Reeve did, and even there the comparison is instructive — about which more in a separate piece. Reeve’s achievement was to play a god as a gentleman. The mildness of his Clark is not a costume but an extension of the same character, a man so secure in his power that he can afford to be small in a room. That is harder than it looks. Most actors can only do half of it.

Margot Kidder is the other half of why the film breathes. Lois Lane is one of two characters in seventies cinema — Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia is the other — who broke a mold and gave young women on screen permission to be themselves fully. We have largely forgotten how unusual these performances were. The current discourse tends to treat seventies women on screen as proto-versions of something more fully realized later, as if Lois and Leia were rough drafts that the culture eventually polished into the modern strong female lead. The opposite is true. Kidder and Fisher were not drafts. They were peaks. The characters they played had to fight to exist on the page and on the screen, and that fight is in the performances. You can see Kidder thinking. You can see Fisher refusing to be diminished. The friction between the character and the world she is operating in is what gives the performance its charge.

Kidder’s Lois specifically is an extraordinary piece of acting. She plays a woman who is professionally serious, romantically open, intellectually quick, slightly chaotic, and entirely uninterested in being managed. The flying scene works because Kidder grounds the swooning in a specific person who has been established for ninety minutes as a working journalist with her own life. The scene is not romantic because the music is romantic. It is romantic because this woman, whom we know, is letting herself be vulnerable for once. There is a critical observation here that almost no one is willing to make in print: when a position is fought for, the fight itself produces depth. The character has to be smart, capable, layered, in the act of justifying her presence. When the position is assumed, the character can be written with the same shortcuts as her male counterparts — quippy, competent, narratively effective, and totally interior-less. The capability is no longer load-bearing. It is decorative. A generation of female leads have arrived who are nominally powerful and substantively flat, because the writers know they do not have to do the work that Kidder and Fisher did to make their power believable.

Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor is the third pillar. He is, before anything else, a person who is fun to be around. The film keeps cutting back to him because his presence is its own pleasure. He is vain, theatrical, snide, weirdly domestic with Otis and Eve, simultaneously a megalomaniac and a man complaining about the wallpaper. Donner gave Hackman the room to build a complete sensibility, and Hackman filled every inch of it. We watch the lair scenes not because we need plot information but because we want to spend more time with him. That is the test of a great villain performance, and it is a test most superhero movies have stopped even attempting. The famous exchange — when I was a young man, do you know what my father said to me? Get out? No, before that — is one of the great two-line jokes in any superhero film. It works because Donner trusted Hackman with the leisure of an actual scene, and Hackman built a Luthor whose vanity could be punctured by his own employee. That is the texture of a real relationship. Two people who have been in a room together for years.

Valerie Perrine’s Eve Teschmacher is structurally essential, not decorative, and the film’s deepest moral idea is housed with her. A villain needs a witness. Someone close enough to see who he really is, complicit enough to be culpable, but human enough to retain a moral compass the audience can use as a measuring stick. Eve is that measuring stick. The scene where she removes Superman’s kryptonite chains in exchange for his promise to save her mother in New Jersey is operating in a register contemporary blockbusters have lost the vocabulary for. The language has aged in places — when she asks why she can never get it on with the good guys, you can feel the seventies in the line — but the idea underneath is permanent. Goodness is contagious. Superman’s existence in the world has reached even into Lex’s lair and turned his accomplice. I am not embarrassed to say I get goosebumps thinking about that scene. That kind of purity is where film belongs. I don’t need a film to be realistic, so long as I believe it while I am watching it. And I believed the 1978 film.

And then there’s the flying. There are three shots in this film that no one has ever surpassed. The first is Superman’s initial liftoff. He stands, and the air seems to gather under him, and he rises with the deliberate weight of an aircraft taking off from a runway. You feel the displacement and the mass. The second is the cat rescue. He doesn’t land on the branch — he settles. There is a deceleration, a moment of equilibrium, and then he is simply standing there as if he had always been. The third is the balcony. He descends to meet Lois, and the cape settles a beat after his body does. Every shot is a study in how a 220-pound man would actually move through the atmosphere if he could.

These shots haven’t been equaled in fifty years. We’ve become extraordinary at particle execution — dust kicks up properly, fabric crinkles, light scatters convincingly — and sometimes the result is genuinely satisfying. But we’ve lost weight. The thing Donner and his team had, working with Roy Field and Zoran Perisic on what they called the Zoptic process, was the willingness to choreograph a single shot for months. Reeve was on wires, on pitch-and-yaw rigs, against rear-projected plates moving at calibrated speeds, while the camera itself zoomed in coordination with the projection so that perspective stayed honest. The shots were solved as physics, not painted in afterward. Now an entire flying sequence is built in a week of previs and three months of comp, and the result is a character who can do anything, weighs nothing, and means nothing. Mass on screen is a function of patience. Donner possessed that patience. The industry that followed him doesn’t.

The kryptonite-breaking moment in Luthor’s lair is its own kind of miracle, and I still can’t fully explain how they accomplished it. They diffused the background, pushed light through smoke and gauze, and let Reeve’s face and chest carry the dramatic load in tight focus. It’s almost a religious image — the body emerging from suffering into power. They earned it because they had spent two hours establishing him as a physical presence with mass, and so the moment of him reasserting that mass against gravity reads as genuine triumph.

What this film accomplished, finally, is something the genre has never recovered. It established that a comic book character could be filmed with full sincerity, full mythic weight, and full skill, and that this sincerity was itself the special effect. Everything from Burton’s Batman to Raimi’s Spider-Man to the entire Marvel project is downstream of Donner’s bet that the audience would meet the material if you met it first. He was right. The audience did meet it. They are still meeting it. A child running through a house with his arms outstretched in 1979 became an adult writing this sentence in 2026, and the four notes still do what they did then. They lift.

You’ll believe a man can fly was not a tagline about effects. It was a thesis about sincerity. Donner’s film is the proof.