Every now and again, a movie comes along that seems so basic but it has one scene of true terror and WTF outrageousness.
Take Pee-wee’s Big Adventure where the titular character takes a ride with a trucker named Large Marge. And she begins to tell a horror story. Then, flashes a gruesome face at him. For some, it was funny. For others, it was horrifying. I was maybe 7-8 and it surprised me. And I remember the horror of seeing a poor man get his heart ripped out in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Even though the first RoboCop was highly violent, the second seemed exploited with having a corrupt cop getting a vivisection. And then the crime lord gets a taste of his own medicine as the plugs are pulled and his brain, eyes and spine are ripped out placed in fluid as he watches doctors hold his skull as they talk.
On the surface, Superman III looked like just another movie. Following the first two which seemed to work as a duology, fans were probably wondering who Supes would take on next now that he’s bested Zod and Lex Luthor. But on May 20, 1981, Richard Pryor appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and said he was a big fan of Superman and was eagerly awaiting seeing the second movie. This was about a year after Pryor had set himself on fire and nearly died.
Now, everyone who could stay up watched Johnny. Of the millions who tuned in each night, Alexander and Ilya Salkind, who still had the rights to Supes, were watching. And then a light bulb went off. Why not put Pryor in Superman III?
Originally, Ilya had written a treatment in December of 1980 on Superman battling with Brainiac and Mister Mxyptlk (with Dudley Moore anticipated for this role), as well as Supergirl. It would have a climax taking place during the Middle Ages as they all time travel back to that era. But Warner Bros. rejected this idea as being too complicated and too costly. The Salkinds then considered selling the rights to producer/medial mogul Dino De Laurentiis.
However, Pryor had a recent success with the prison comedy Stir Crazy which made over $100 million worldwide. And his recent movies like Silver Streak, California Suite, Bustin’ Loose and Some Kind of Hero (which he appeared in with Margot Kidder who he dated briefly) were modest successes in relation to their budgets. So, Pryor was paid $5 million for his role as Augustus “Gus” Gorman, a computer programmer, who lives in Metropolis.
Christopher Reeve donned the red cape for a third time as Supes. Jackie Cooper and Marc McClure have supporting roles as Daily Planet editor Perry White and Jimmy Olsen respectively. However, Gene Hackman wasn’t returning as Luthor and Kidder only appears in two scenes as Lois Lane (one at the beginning and the other at the end.) A rumor began that both Hackman and Kidder were upset over Richard Donner being fired while filming Superman II and didn’t return. Richard Lester was hired to film at least 51 percent of the final footage so he could claim a director credit. Lester is also the director this time.
Both the Salkinds, Hackman and Kidder have denied these rumors. Hackman was doing other movies and projects and there never was any intention of having Luthor appear a third time. Also, with how the relationship with Superman and Lois Lane was explored in the first two movies, they felt it was time to give Clark Kent/Superman another love interest with Lana Lang (Annette O’Toole). Clark and Lana went to high school together. Lana had appeared briefly in the first movie during the Smallville, Kan. sequence where she was portrayed by Diane Sherry.
The script is written by David and Leslie Newman, who had been brought in as writers on the first two Superman movies. They along with Lester made this movie more of a comedy, with not only Pyror’s performance but other characters and scenes. Gavan O’Herlihy plays Brad Wilson, a former sports jock from Smallville who spends his days and nights drinking and reliving his glory days to anyone who will listen. There had been a Brad in the Smallville sequence in the first movie so it’s presumed it’s the same character even though Brad Flock played the role. He also wants to go after Lana since she is a recent divorcee. He’s mostly a bumbling idiot.
Then, there’s a rather amusing Rube Goldberg-style of events that happen in downtown Metropolis over the opening credits which leads to a motorist trapped in his car as water from a broken fire hydrant fills it. This leads to Clark using a photo booth to change into Superman. The main villain this time is Ross “Bubba” Webster (Robert Vaughn), a wealthy industrialist whose assistant, Lorelei Ambrosia (Pamela Stephenson), is a voluptous blonde who acts ditzy. Ross’ sister, Vera (Annie Ross), is his partner in crime. There’s a running joke of people mistaking Vera for Ross’ mother.
With his unemployment insurance ended, Gus finds a job working for Ross’ company as a computer programmer. However, he’s not happy with the take-home after all the deductions. A co-worker tells him of how there are actually fractions of cents that are just being discarded every day through transaction. Gus decides to upload a program that will have all those fractions into a separate account. This is called “salami slicing.” This would later be referenced in Mike Judge’s classic comedy Office Space as it’s actually a real thing people have done and have gotten in trouble for doing.
However, Gus receives a check for over $85,000. Ross fascinated with his abilities to use computer programs decides to blackmail him to assess Vulcan, an American weather satellite, to create a tornado in Colombia, thus destroying their coffee crops, so Ross can corner the market. However, Gus has to travel to Smallville to assess the computers at a subsidy where he bumps into Clark and bribes Brad, who works as a security guard, with a luggage of booze so he can get in.
Clark reconciles with Lana and her son, Ricky (Paul Kaethler), while there. On the way to Smallville, Clark and Jimmy come upon a chemical factory fire that Superman rushes into to help with the water pressure on the fire trucks fail. He freezes the surface of a nearby lake and drops the ice over the factory extinguishing the fire. He also rescue Jimmy who gets too close trying to get action shots.
Later, Clark saves Ricky from being injured or killed by a wheat harvester. It’s never explained by it’s presumed Ricky was playing with his dog in the fields and had an accident knocking him unconscious. For his actions, Lana arranges a community event where the Smallville community honor Superman.
However, Ross is upset that Superman was able to quell the storms in Colombia so he orders Gus to find the components of Kryptonite which will harm Superman. Gus manages to assess them but it’s revealed that 0.57 percent is unknown. Looking at his cigarette pack, he substitutes tar thinking it won’t make a difference. Gus and Vera show up impersonating military officers and give Superman the manufactured Kryptonite as an award.
Yet, Gus and Vera are surprised when it doesn’t weaken him immediately. However, Superman begins to act weird and a little lethargic. His personality changes. He tries to hit on Lana and isn’t quick to respond when told a truck driver is in need of help at a nearby bridge. Overtime, Superman turns into a jerk, moving to the Tower of Pisa so it doesn’t lean. Then, he goes to the Olympics where he blows out the torch in the opening ceremony.
Superman turning into a dick is actually one of the better moments as Reeve seems to have a ball playing the Man of Steel as a total asshole. And in a strange change of tone, Lorelei offers up sex if Superman stops an oil tanker on its way to Metropolis. All other oil tankers have been diverted to the middled of the Atlantic Ocean thanks to a supercomputer Gus used.
Even though it’s not shown in the theatrical version, an extended TV version has Vera upset because she can hear Supes and Lorelei bumping uglies in the next room. I can imagine a lot of parents having to explain to their children in 1983 what Superman and Lorelei were doing. Superman II had Supes and Lois lying in bed implying they had just had sex. But watching the movie later, you wonder if Superman had to practice tantric sex to avoid his sperm being dangerous.
Later in the movie, as the Kryptonite makes him more aggressive, Superman gets drunk in a bar and flicks the beer nuts at the liquor bottles causing them to break. If a flick of small nut can turn into a bullet, imagine what happens when Supes busts a nut into someone or even on them. Yeah, I know it’s something they never really thought about as Stan Lee mentioned in Mallrats. But some things are hard to think about because Superman has always been portrayed in the comics as an Eagle Scout from Outer Space.
This leads to Evil Superman going nuts himself and splitting in two with the Clark Kent alter ego facing off against Evil Superman in a scrap metal junkyard. It’s actually one of the movie’s biggest highlights as seeing Reeve play a bad guy shows you he had a lot of range as an actor. I mean he studied at Julliard under a lot of famous actors and was besties with Robin Williams.
However, the scrap yard scene also has some disturbing elements as Clark is knocked into a pool of boiling acid. I know safety regulations have changed a lot in the last 40 years, but the notion that this pool has no guards or rails to stop people from falling into says something. But it’s worse that Evil Superman decides to place a knocked out Clark on a conveyor belt to be chopped up in a metal crusher. Remember there was no PG-13 rating in 1983. I can imagine some people thinking it’s bad that Superman is going to be ground up into millions of pieces.
Yet, remember, this is Superman pretending to Clark Kent. Nothing on Earth can harm him and he defeats Evil Superman by choking him. I wish the movie had explored the concept of Kal-El as is his birth name dealing with the fine line between good and bad. James Gunn, who is helming the next Superman live-action movie, took on this subject with his script, Brightburn. But it also focuses on that Superman can’t be everywhere at all the time and save everyone as he hesitates to save the truck driver as people expect him to leave once he’s made aware of it. Even first responders can’t bend space and time to get to emergencies.
Eventually Superman, now pure and good again, tracks down Ross, Vera, Lorelei and Gus in the desert where they have constructed a megacomputer to battle him. Many filmmakers and writers have explored the idea of what happens when computers and robots get too self-aware. Vaughn, himself, provided the voice for Proteus IV, in the 1977 movie Demon Seed in which Julie Christie plays someone who is forcibly imprisoned and even impregnated by an artificial computer. And the megacomputer actually becomes self aware after Gus tries to pull the microchip as they have constructed a kryptonite ray that can kill Superman.
This would lead to the scene that would forever scare and scar a generation as Vera is sucked into the computer’s mainframe and turned into a cyborg.
The effects look cheesy by today’s comparison, but it was disturbing to think it could happen. It makes you wonder if filmmakers haven’t been warning decades ago. The Newmans have since based away and Lester is 92 and long retired. Yet this left a long impact on a generation especially for what was supposed to be a silly superhero movie which had the green walk and red stop men of a street signal getting into a fight where it does appear the green man beats the red man unconscious.
The movie as a whole is a muddled mess. You can see elements of what was going to be a good movie before it would fall into the same problems which would affects superhero movies from then on out. There’s too many characters, too many subplots and not enough screen time. If you’re going to make a superhero movie two-and-a-half to three hours long, it better be good like The Dark Knight or Avengers: Endgame. Otherwise, you get something like Eternals.
There’s so much spent on building Brad Wilson up as an antagonist and he basically disappears in the second half except for two minor scenes. And also you can tell making Ross and Vera the bad guys is a commentary on the growing hostility of corporations and their greed in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, Ross is basically another version of Lex Luthor while Lorelei is a version of Valerie Perrine’s Miss Teschmacher. Pryor who would spend most of the 1980s in what In Living Color would call a Scared For No Reason mode is basically another version of Ned Beatty’s Otis except he’s given more screen time.
The movie got bad reviews while still a modest success earning about $80 million against a $39 million budget. Pryor managed to get a good movie deal out of Columbia Pictures, who distributed the movie internationally, but Reeve said the movie’s failure led to him being typecast for years that he had to heavily audition for roles.
A few years later, when the rights were sold to the Cannon Group, who had the rights to the Spider-Man movie at the time, Reeve only appeared for a fourth movie if the studio would finance his pet project Street Smart. Yet, a character actor named Morgan Freeman would get praise over Reeve for that movie.
Of all the movies I’ve been to at a theater, this is the only one in which the movie projector broke down. Maybe the projector became self-aware of what a bad movie it was showing and tried to spare us.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 