1980 Week: Willie & Phil

          Given his well-known admiration for the work of Ingmar Bergman, filmmaker Woody Allen left himself open for easy criticism when he made the Bergman-esque psychodrama Interiors (1978), which many people initially dismissed as a weak homage to the work of a master. Time has revealed the depth of that film, though Allen’s debt to Bergman is inescapable when watching Interiors. Paul Mazursky’s romantic dramedy Willie & Phil has some interesting parallels to Interiors, though the indifference that greeted Willie & Phil during its initial release has not yet given way to critical rediscovery.

          Recycling the basic plot elements from François Truffaut’s beloved French New Wave film Jules and Jim (1962), Willie & Phil represents Mazursky’s sexual satire at its least credible. The characterizations have signs of life, but all three leading actors give underwhelming performances, and the echoes of Truffaut’s style are as affected as the forced insertion of ’70s spirituality into the storyline. It’s not as if Mazursky’s considerable powers failed him here, because some scenes have that special immediacy that distinguishes Mazursky’s best work. As a total experience, however, Willie & Phil is forgettable.
          Like Jules and Jim, this picture tracks the way two men become close friends, only to see their bond challenged by the arrival of a woman whom both men find irresistible. The men are Phil D’Amico (Ray Sharkey), a streetwise photographer with a suffocating overabundance of self-confidence, and Willie Kaufman (Michael Ontkean), a high-school teacher with a debilitating shortage of personal direction. They meet in 1960s New York at a screening of a Truffaut movie (wink, wink), then bond over their mutual desire to avoid the Vietnam-era draft. Soon they encounter Jeannette Sutherland (Margot Kidder), a freespirited beauty recently relocated from her home state of Kentucky to Greenwich Village. When she has money trouble, Willie says she can move in with him, and she and Willie become lovers. Thereafter, the story becomes an episodic litany of ’60s and ’70s signifiers. The friends drop acid and have a threesome. Willie gets into yoga. Jeannette joins the film industry. Phil transitions from shooting pictures to making commercials, so he relocates to California around the time Jeannette and Willie get married and have a child together. Later, when Willie’s spiritual questing takes him out of the country, Jeannette moves to California and stays with Phil. And so on.

          About the only thing that gives Willie & Phil shape is the dense narration track, performed by Mazursky and peppered with remarks along the lines of “10 months later, Willie was confused again.” The film is never difficult to follow, but it’s often difficult to enjoy, not because the characters are unpleasant—they’re all fragile in a relatable way—but because the characters and their experiences are so typical of the hippie era. Although Mazursky delivers the story with his customary intelligence and skill, he never defines Willie & Phil as a necessary artistic expansion of Jules and Jim, and he never proves that his characters merit this level of attention.

Willie & Phil: FUNKY

Shoot the Sun Down (1978)

The obscure Western drama Shoot the Sun Down is a downbeat saga featuring the unlikely duo of Margot Kidder and Christopher Walken as desperate people seeking new lives in the sun-baked wilderness. Superficially, the movie delivers—Kidder is sexy, Walken is otherworldly, and the movie’s vibe is as dusty as it is depressing. Beyond surface textures, however, Shoot the Sun Down is a total dud. Neither the characters nor the story make sense, most of the running time comprises lifeless dialogue scenes, and whenever producer/director David Leeds strives for profundity, he gets stuck in the mud of false notes and overreaching metaphors. Set in the American southwest before the Civil War, the picture introduces viewers to The Woman (Kidder), an English beauty who travels with Captain (Bo Brundin), a Scandinavian seaman, and Scalphunter (Geoffrey Lewis), an outlaw. Visiting a small town one day, the group encounters Mr. Rainbow (Walken), a gunslinger. Turns out the Woman is Captain’s indentured servant. The Woman tries to bribe Mr. Rainbow with sex, asking him to kill Captain so she can be free. For some reason, the plot also involves an Indian named Sunbearer (A. Martinez), who stands out in the desert waiting to have ponderous conversations with Mr. Rainbow. Various things happen. Kidder bathes in a wading pool so she can parade around in wet undergarments. Walken gets tied to a rock in the hot sun so he can suffer in a visually interesting way. Through it all, only veteran character actor Lewis seems to have any idea what the hell he’s doing, snarling through bad-guy moments and cheerfully spewing cornpone aphorisms. Kidder is terrible, employing a weak accent and often simply lingering in the backgrounds of scenes because she’s got nothing to do, and Walken seems miscast with his postmodern acting style. Yet most of the blame must fall on Leeds, who also cowrote this incomprehensible mess. Luckily for everyone, this was his first and last movie.

Shoot the Sun Down: LAME

Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970)

          Considering that he collects and sells horse manure for a living, Irishman Quackser Fortune has a bright outlook on life. He makes his own hours, takes a different route every day through the streets of his beloved Dublin, and won’t listen to people who say that horse-drawn delivery carts may soon get replaced by trucks, rendering his profession obsolete. Quackser treats others with affection and respect, expecting nothing but the same in return. Which is why he’s thrown for such a loop when he meets Zazel Pierce, a beautiful but capricious American spending time in Dublin while doing research at Trinity College. Quackser’s instantly attracted to Zazel, and she feels the same way, but their value systems couldn’t be more different. And that’s the beautifully simple premise of Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, a delightful love story featuring what might be Gene Wilder’s most restrained performance.

          Bereft of his usual tics—the bug-eyed reaction shots, the pratfalls, the screaming—Wilder leads with his innate sweetness, and yet he never makes Quackser seem like a rube. Instead, the character comes across as that rarest of animals, a true innocent. Concurrently, Margot Kidder blends sexiness and worldliness to present Zazel as a modern woman who occasionally wants to meet Quackser on his own level, but then loses interest in him whenever something more challenging comes along. In one of the great victories of Gabriel Walsh’s original script, which was rightfully nominated for a WGA Award, Zazel comes across neither as a contrivance or a villain, but rather as a unique person who falls into the orbit of another unique person. This is character work of the best kind.

          And if the rest of the movie fails to hit that same high level, no matter. The world surrounding Quackser is a believable grind of factory work, hot-tempered relatives, and provincial attitudes. Similarly, Zazel’s sphere includes obnoxious people who wear their education and wealth like shields protecting them from the unclean touch of the rabble. Yes, the dichotomy is predicated on stereotypes, but Quackser and Zazel are such interesting creations that the broad-strokes backdrop works. Cinematographer Gilbert Taylor and director Waris Hussein make great use of extensive location photography, transforming Dublin into the magical canvas upon which the sort-of love story between Quackser and Zazel is painted. Meanwhile, the leading actors fill that painting with resplendent colors.

          Often bittersweet, Quackser Fortune is more of a light drama than an outright comedy, which makes Wilder’s presence even more interesting, since he rarely worked outside the comic realm during his heyday. And though the world is a richer place because of the lunacy Wilder created with Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, and other collaborators, Quackser Fortune points to another viable path his career could have taken. His performance is as lovely as the film itself.

Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx: RIGHT ON

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)

          Creepy, provocative, and sexy, this psychological thriller asks what might happen if a rational modern man began to suspect that he was the reincarnation of someone else—and then complicates that central question by implying that the soul haunting the modern man’s body came back to settle some nasty unfinished business. Michael Sarrazin, perfectly cast because his wide eyes and slim build give him an ethereal quality no matter the circumstances, stars as Peter Proud, a West Coast college professor whose life seems perfect. He’s happy, respected, successful, and romantically involved with a beautiful fellow teacher, Nora (Cornelia Sharpe). Yet when Peter starts experiencing disturbing nightmares and phantom pains that doctors can’t explain, he seeks out help from a paranormal researcher, Samuel (Paul Hecht). Samuel suggests that Peter may be reliving memories from a past life.

          Determined to resolve the situation, Peter tracks down the Massachusetts city in which his nightmares/memories take place. Finding the city confirms to Peter that the reincarnation is real. Next, Peter connects with Marcia (Margot Kidder), the widow of Peter’s prior incarnation, and Ann (Jennifer O’Neil), Marcia’s daughter. Peter doesn’t explain to either of these women why he’s in Massachusetts, partially because he doubts they’ll believe him and partially because in the recurring nightmares/memories, Marcia murders Peter’s prior incarnation. Obsessively investigating the past-life mystery damages Peter’s present-day life, because Nora bails on Peter when the going gets weird. Later, things get even worse when Peter’s relationships with Ann and Marcia gain Freudian dimensions.

          As helmed by J. Lee Thompson, who mixes carnality and savagery in this film much as he did in the great Cape Fear (1962), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is efficient, erotic, and evocative—an offbeat mixture of sleazy thrills and thought-provoking concepts. Although the film loses points for its troika of mediocre female performances (Kidder, O’Neill, and Sharpe are each gorgeous but amateurish), Sarrazin’s intensity keeps the piece on track. Written by Max Ehrlich, who adapted his novel of the same name, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud fits into the mid-’70s trend of sensationalistic pseudoscience in popular culture. Furthermore, the writer gives decent lip service to the philosophical and theological implications of Peter’s experience, because—as the story’s paranormal researcher says at one point—the revelation that reincarnation is real could permanently alter the human experience by erasing fear of death. No dummy, Ehrlich delivers all of this heady material in the form of a story filled with sex and violence.

         And while the film’s brutality is fairly minor, the film’s sexuality is quite intense. Both lurid aspects of the picture converge in a climactic scene (no pun intended) featuring Marcia masturbating in a bathtub while recalling the brutal affections of her late husband. This startling vignette was almost certainly the most graphic depiction of female self-pleasure in a mainstream movie until the release of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). Yet the presence of such moments gets to the heart of why The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is so watchable. With strong elements ranging from the disturbing psychosexual connotations of the story to the unnerving score by the great Jerry Goldsmith (love those electronic accents!), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud engages the viewer on myriad levels simultaneously. It’s not high art, per se, but it’s definitely not low art, either.

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud: GROOVY

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)

          Director George Roy Hill was such a fervent airplane enthusiast that he persuaded two of his most acclaimed collaborators, screenwriter William Goldman and star Robert Redford, to join him in making this passion project celebrating the daredevils who flew biplanes at exhibitions across the country during the barnstorming era. (The trio’s previous joint venture, released in 1969, was a little something called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) Set in the 1920s, the picture focuses on Waldo Pepper (Redford), a World War I veteran whose military service was unspectacular. Driven to prove he’s a world-class flyer, Pepper becomes a barnstormer, performing wild stunts for spectacle-hungry crowds that are equally thrilled by crashes and triumphs.

          During this early stretch of the film, when Pepper builds a friendship with fellow flyer Axel Olsson (Bo Svenson) and struggles through a fraught romance with Maude (Margot Kidder)—who hates the risks Waldo takes—Hill achieves two impressive storytelling feats. First and most obviously, he captures the joy of flight with terrific aerial photography. Secondly and more subtly, he captures the lonely quality of men who follow an inner call toward personal achievement. Redford is the perfect actor for communicating this notion; an iconoclast who has spent decades cultivating personal mystique, Redford understands self-definition.

          Considering that Hill could easily have translated his fascination with barnstorming into a lightweight adventure film—in addition to Butch Cassidy, he and Redford made the endearing 1973 romp The Sting (which was not written by Goldman), so frothy entertainment is undoubtedly what audiences expected from this particular paring of actor and star—it’s impressive that Hill elected to go so dark. In fact, some might argue he went too dark. Goldman has often told the story of how a preview audience turned on the movie during a shocking scene involving Pepper and a terrified, wing-walking stuntwoman (Susan Sarandon). Yet viewed beyond the context of its initial release, when audiences wanted Redford to play only golden gods, The Great Waldo Pepper is a nuanced and thoughtful film that unflinchingly depicts the costs of individualism.

          As the story progresses, for instance, Pepper endures a string of accidents that cost him his pilot’s license and force him to pursue work as a movie stuntman under an alias. Goldman’s writing excels in this last movement of the picture, since Goldman has often said the theme that touches him most is “stupid courage”—boldness in the face of certain doom. The Great Waldo Pepper isn’t a perfect picture, with some of its episodes connecting more strongly than others, but it’s a unique celebration of one filmmaker’s romantic visions, seen through the prism of a star and a writer who were eager to help their friend realize his dreams of soaring through the sky, cinematically speaking.

The Great Waldo Pepper: RIGHT ON

The Gravy Train (1974)

Though it possesses many of the qualities shared by the best oddball ’70s movies—brazen tonal shifts, eccentric flourishes, offbeat characterizations—The Gravy Train runs off the tracks very quickly. Among other problems, the film is primarily a comedy but it isn’t funny, and the picture’s main attraction is the buddy-movie dynamic of two characters who aren’t colorful enough to sustain interest, separately or together. So, while it’s very easy to parse the film’s underwhelming content and discern how the material could have been developed into something more worthwhile, the finished picture lacks emotional punch, narrative momentum, and wit; the only real virtues on display are competent technical execution and vigorous acting, but these aren’t enough to justify the chore of watching The Gravy Train. Alternatively titled The Dion Brothers, the movie is about—you guessed it—the Dion brothers, two schemers from West Virginia mining country. Calvin (Stacy Keach) is a flashy chatterbox who has gotten involved with big-city criminals, while Rut (Frederic Forrest) is a slow-witted bumpkin back in the old hometown. When Calvin joins a crew planning a big heist, he talks his employers into letting him bring Rut aboard—but after the heist goes south and the brothers realize they’ve been double-crossed, they seek out the gangster (Barry Primus) who betrayed them. Along the way, the brothers pick up a screechy floozy (Margot Kidder), who accompanies them through various adventures. Co-written by Terrence Malick (under a pseudonym), The Gravy Train is dull and plodding, from its underwhelming opening—Calvin stages one of the lamest take-this-job-and-shove-it tantrums in movie history—to its stupidly downbeat ending. Despite valiant efforts at creating enjoyable characterizations, Forrest, Keach, and Kidder are undercut at every turn by lackluster writing, and it says a lot that the most amusing moment in the picture involves Keach using a live lobster as a weapon.

The Gravy Train: LAME

The Amityville Horror (1979)

          In 1975, the Lutz family moved into a beautiful home in the Amityville neighborhood of Long Island, but the house came with a dark history: A mass murder took place there a year before the Lutzes’ arrival. According to the best-selling book that Jay Anson wrote about this notorious real-life incident, the Lutzes heard, saw, and smelled a variety of unexplained phenomena, leading them to believe their house was possessed. Anson took a lot of heat for presenting the Lutzes’ account as pure fact, and director Stuart Rosenberg’s sensationalistic movie adaptation pushes things even further. The Amityville Horror has some scary moments, but the scenario is so overwrought—it’s as if the Lutzes took a sublet from Satan—that the picture regularly creeps into unintentional comedy.

          The main problem is that George Lutz (James Brolin) and his wife, Kathy (Margot Kidder), seem like the dumbest people ever to cross a movie screen. As soon as they move into their home, they start experiencing weird apparitions and sensations, but instead of gathering their three young children and running for safety, they summon a priest (Rod Steiger) to bless the house. The priest endures a horrific scene while the house traps him in a stifling upstairs room that fills with flies. Yet when the priest tells the Lutzes to vacate the house, they ignore the advice. Just a thought: If the demonic voice in your home says, “Get out,” it’s probably a good idea to comply. But, of course, if the big-screen versions of the Lutzes demonstrated any common sense, the movie would be over very quickly.

          Sandor Stern’s silly screenplay tries to weasel around this unworkable plot contrivance by suggesting that George has lost his will to the evil force occupying the house, and Brolin delivers the concept through a performance of embarrassing excess. In his signature moment, a bug-eyed Brolin howls, “Oh, mother of God, I’m coming apart!” Truth be told, Brolin actually outdoes costar Steiger in the bad-acting department, and that’s saying a lot. (As for Kidder, who should have been building on her sassy performance in the 1978 blockbuster Superman, she’s wasted in a vapid victim role.)

          Exacerbating its other flaws, The Amityville Horror is fairly dull through most of its running time, even though the production values are pretty good (the ooze dripping from the walls is enjoyably icky) and the wacky highlights are memorable. Nonetheless, lackluster storytelling didn’t stop the picture from becoming a major hit. The Amityville Horror earned nearly $90 million at the box office, and it kicked off a cycle of sequels and remakes that has continued well into the 21st century. Apparently, audiences are as reluctant to vacate the house at 112 Ocean Avenue as the Lutzes were.

The Amityville Horror: FUNKY

92 in the Shade (1975)

          Eccentric and flavorful, the sole directorial effort by novelist/screenwriter Thomas McGuane is slight on story but long an atmosphere. The sweaty tale of a conflict between two guide-boat captains in Key West, 92 in the Shade has a quintessentially ’70s cast filled with actors who nail McGuane’s weird dialogue, plus realistic locations that lend credibility. Peter Fonda stars as Tom Skelton, an easygoing young man who decides to become a guide-boat captain squiring tourists around the Everglades. This antagonizes Nichol Dance (Warren Oates), a hair-triggered boat captain working the same area. Undaunted, Tom opens for business. However, because McGuane is more interested in the subtle nuances of offbeat behavior than the predictable rhythms of macho brutality, 92 in the Shade depicts adversaries who don’t really want to hurt each other. As a result, many scenes feature the funny/sad subtext of Nichol begging Tom to back off so things won’t spiral into violence.

          McGuane also devotes lots of screen time to tasty subplots, like the domestic travails of another boat captain, Carter (Harry Dean Stanton), and his frustrated wife, Jeannie (Elizabeth Ashley); Carter’s a working slob trying to pay the bills, but Jeannie’s a former majorette eager to enjoy the lifestyle to which she anticipates becoming accustomed. Another thread involves Tom’s ailing father (William Hickey), who sits outdoors in a mosquito net while he bickers with Tom’s grandfather (Burgess Meredith), a lawyer who relishes his small amount of regional influence. As Hickey whines in a typically ornate McGuane turn of phrase, “Your grandfather’s Huey Long complex has finally put him beyond communication.”

          In fact, McGuane’s dialogue is the best reason to watch the movie. Oates gets to spew some of the most peculiar lines, whether explaining his fantasy of becoming Arnold Palmer’s caddy or issuing confounding declarations like, “I’m the kinda guy who’d fuck a brush pile if I thought there was a snake in there.” Whether the line actually means anything is beside the point, because Oates is so good at incarnating rural misfits that the medium becomes the message. The only cast member who isn’t given interesting material is leading lady Margot Kidder, but one suspects she wasn’t hired for her acting chops, since she spends the movie strutting around in miniscule tops that—well, let’s just say Kidder had ample ventilation while shooting in humid locations. 92 in the Shade has more texture than substance, but for those who dig this particular period in character-driven cinema, it’s an enjoyable lark filled with enthusiastic performances.

92 in the Shade: GROOVY

Sisters (1973)

          After cutting his teeth with a series of irreverent comedies that received marginal releases, director Brian De Palma found his calling as a fearmaker—and his first significant box-office success—by merging his lurid fixations with a cinematic style borrowed from Hollywood’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. An unnerving thriller about a reporter who believes she’s discovered that her docile neighbor has a homicidal twin sister, Sisters owes a huge debt to Hitch (right down to the use of composer Bernard Hermann), but it’s also an impressive demonstration of De Palma’s storytelling gifts. As the author of the film’s original story and the co-writer of its script, De Palma has his fingerprints all over this movie, and Sisters sets the template for his many subsequent sexually charged suspense flicks.

          The story is simple: Staten Island-based investigative reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) happens to look across the street during a frenzied murder in the apartment of French-Canadian model Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder). Collier calls the police, but after a skeptical cop (Dolph Sweet) fails to discover any evidence, Collier enlists a private detective (Charles Durning) to continue the investigation. The deeper Collier goes down the rabbit hole of her neighbor’s strange world, however, the more danger Collier invites. As in all of De Palma’s suspense flicks, the story is less important than mood and theme. With Hermann’s effectively bombastic score creating uncomfortable degrees of tension, De Palma sketches a world of biological abnormalities, dysfunctional sexuality, and rampant conspiracies; he also carefully sets the stage so Collier exists in a milieu of logic and rationality until circumstances quite literally land her in an insane asylum.

          Produced for drive-in suppliers American International, Sisters is brisk and sensationalistic, with plenty of gore and a smattering of nudity, yet it’s also finely crafted inasmuch as De Palma designs each frame with an architect’s precision. Despite dodgy cinematography and set decoration (De Palma later benefited from larger budgets and longer shooting schedules), editor Paul Hirsch’s wonderfully methodical pacing makes the most of the footage. So even though De Palma’s later suspense pictures are more visually impressive, few of them can match the no-nonsense economy of Sisters.

Sisters: GROOVY

Black Christmas (1974)

          Somewhat interesting as a footnote in the history of horror films because it bridges the suspenseful storytelling of Hitchcock thrillers and the gruesome excesses of slasher flicks, Black Christmas is a low-budget Canadian flick about a psychopath stalking the residents of a sorority house. Oddly, however, the film isn’t as lurid as the premise might suggest, because there’s very little gore and almost zero sexual content; instead, director Bob Clark focuses on colorful character details. Clark, whose strange career included everything from the juvenile T&A of Porky’s (1982) to the nostalgic sweetness of A Christmas Story (1983), demonstrates his ability to let actors form distinctive characters, but also displays his inability to maintain consistent tone. The movie begins with a POV shot of a heavy-breathing nutjob slipping into the attic of the sorority house, then trudges through lengthy soap-opera scenes involving the residents, interspersed with gruesome murder vignettes in which the killer exits the attic to kill the girls one at a time. The killer also places obscene phone calls to the house, most of which are answered by supposedly sophisticated coed Jess (Olivia Hussey).
          The story is predicated on everyone overlooking the obvious, so while the idea of a killer hiding several floors above his victims is creepy, the conceit strains credibility to a ridiculous degree. Furthermore, the premise strangles suspense: Since the “big secret” is revealed in the first scene, all viewers can do is wait for characters to stop being stupid, which they never do. Still, interesting things happen along the way. Hussey, the classically pretty female lead of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), is stiff and unconvincing, so Margot Kidder steals the show as a drunk, foul-mouthed coed named Barb, displaying the sexy vivacity that later won her the role of Lois Lane in Superman (1978). B-movie stalwart John Saxon lends solid comic and dramatic support as a cop investigating the strange goings-on at the sorority house, and Marian Waldman scores cheap laughs with a Shelley Winters-type performance as the sorority’s lush housemother.
          Black Christmas isn’t scary, but it goes to unexpected places and it conjures genuine menace whenever Clark employs long traveling shots exploring spaces where horrible things are about to happen. As for the Christmas angle, that’s a minor element of the story hyped for marketing purposes; other than carolers, decorations, and snow, the holiday setting doesn’t have any significance.

Black Christmas: FUNKY

Superman (1978)

          Hard as it may be to imagine, now that seemingly every Spandex-clad character who ever fought crime has been featured in movies, reboots, sequels, and spinoffs, there was a time when the idea of turning a comic-book hero into a movie character seemed preposterous. In the early 1970s, when Superman was conceived, audiences mostly knew caped crusaders from campy TV series like The Adventures of Superman (1952-1957) and Batman (1966-1968). As one colorful story from the development process goes, Warren Beatty was approached to play the Man of Steel, so he slipped on a Superman costume and walked around his backyard trying to decide if he could get over feeling ridiculous. He couldn’t, and neither could any of the other big names offered the role. And that was just one of myriad behind-the-scenes dramas.

          Original scripter Mario Puzo delivered an unwieldy draft running 500 pages. Millions were spent on test footage for flying effects. Christopher Reeve was so scrawny when he was cast that English bodybuilder David Prowse (Darth Vader in the original Star Wars flicks) was recruited to help the Son of Krypton add bulk. Marlon Brando, hired to play Superman’s dad, was an overpaid diva, trying to convince the producers he didn’t need to appear onscreen. A plan to shoot the film and its sequel back-to-back fell apart, with production on the sequel halted halfway through. But amazingly, offscreen mishegoss translated to onscreen magic.

          As helmed by director Richard Donner, Superman treats the superhero’s origin story like a great piece of cornpone Americana. The movie proper begins with a long prologue on Krypton, where trippy costumes and grandiose production design give the movie a snazzy sci-fi jolt. The next major passage is a lengthy tenure in Smallville, anchored by Glenn Ford’s touching appearance as Superman’s surrogate father. Finally the movie shifts to Metropolis, where Gene Hackman has a blast playing amiable psychotic Lex Luthor. The plot is wonderfully overstuffed, with long detours for things like Luthor’s elaborate theft of two nuclear missiles, and the narrative voluptuousness works in the movie’s favor: Everything is Super-sized. John Williams, on a major roll after Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), contributes a perfect score loaded with orchestral grandeur, while cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth gives the picture a dreamlike glow. (The Smallville sequence is especially beautiful, with luxurious tracking shots of wheat fields.) And though the effects have lost their ability to astonish, they’re still pictorially elegant.

          The heart of the movie, however, is the love story between sweet Clark/Superman and salty Lois Lane. That memorable romance is brought to life by Reeve, balancing sly humor with square-jawed earnestness, and Margot Kidder, simultaneously sexy and abrasive. Not everything in the movie works; the “Can You Read My Mind” scene was rightly cited in a recent book titled Creepiosity: A Hilarious Guide to the Unintentionally Creepy. But in terms of treating a comic-book story with just the right mix of irony and respect, nothing came remotely close to Superman until along came a Spider-Man more than two decades later.

Superman: RIGHT ON