Superman Returns, and so do I

I've heard such conflicting testimony regarding Superman Returns that I don't know what to expect. God knows I'm put off by the truncating of his famous motto, his vow to fight for "Truth, justice, and the American way." This slogan, now delivered by Perry White as "Truth, justice . . . and all that stuff," is so perfectly awful I almost thought to boycott the movie on principle.

But I'll probably see it. I'll probably see on the basis of the John Williams score, which occupies (I've read) the first ten minutes of the movie, before turning the music over to the newest tyro. What the music, the plot, the notion of Superman brought me back to, was the emblematic experience of Superman, which was the apotheosis of one of the pleasure of my early life, which was going to the movies wth my brothers.

We grew up in Phoenix. In Phoenix, in the summer, there were only two things to do: swim, or go to the movies in an air-conditioned theatre. My first full summer in Phoenix (1973) some organization--the school district or the city or something--had a summer movie session, ten movies for a five-dollar subscription, during which I was exposed to some of the most memorable films of my young life. Support Your Local Sheriff; Guns of the Magnificent Seven; Around the World in Eighty Days; It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World; Yours, Mine and Ours; My Side of the Mountain: these were movies I remembered to this day, all screened at the Cine Capri, the only theatre in Phoenix to attain legendary status. Starting the following summer, the series went straight to crap, offering one Don Knotts atrocity after another, and--on my mom's advice--we bowed out.

From that point on, we picked our movies one at a time. Occasionally, when my father would take my brothers to out-of-town swim meets (both my brothers swam competitively, and rather well), my mother would take me something on a Saturday night. The Goodbye Girl was something I remember well, and The One and Only, Henry Winkler's second unsuccessful stab to 1) break into film as a leading man, and 2) transcend the Fonz. My mother's wishes (whether conscious or not) were to make us as independent as possible and to expose us to as much of the world as she could without harming us. So it had been, earlier in Massachusetts, that her oldest six-year-old son and her middle three-year-old son would be sent on errands to the market with six inches of snow on the ground: down our street, across the school yard, then along the next street to the corner. And so it was that she took me, at eleven, and my youngest brother, at six, to see Saturday Night Fever, with its stories of sex and drugs, maybe half of which I understood. (To be fair, we were weeks from turning twelve and seven, respectively).

My other movie-going memories involved those brothers of mine. Such was our suburban situation that, until I reached age of twelve, there were no theatres even within bike-riding distance. The only theatres reasonably reachable by bus were Metrocenter, on the West side, or the Palms Theatre, which was down Central Avenue. the Palms--one of those stand-alones pushed out by higher rent and the multiplexes, was good for the re-rlease of The Sting and the so-called "special edition" of Close Encounters. Metrocenter, which featured three theatres, a large main one and two smaller ones I remember as being the first theatre to charge more than a buck for a children's matinee: $1.25 to be exact, which seemed ruinous at the time. I always remember Metrocenter as the theatre where it was easiest to sneak into an R-rated movie. The bathroom was on a second floor, near the projector booths, but reachable by two separate stairways, a very public one by the concession stands, and an isolated one near the main theatre. To sneak in, provided the R-rated film played in the large theatre, one walked up the public stairway, through the hallway, done the isolated stairway, and into the theatre. Ushers were a lot more vigilant then.

Occasionally my mother could be hectored into driving us to the Cris-Town Mall and its wider selection. Cris-Town featured two theatres: a stand-alone along 19th Avenue, four screens (more later), including the second-best screen in the city, after the Cine Capri; it came complete with comfy velvet chairs. Inside the mall was the UA Cinema Six, a half-dozen screens accessible by escalator and perched like a treehouse above the rest of the mall. (I had no idea where the "United Artists" name came from. First I thought it only showed UA films, but that didn't pan out. Then I assumed UA was paying the rent, but in college was taught in Drew Casper's Intro to Film class that the studios had been required in the 1950s to sell their theatre interests. So, to this day, I don't know.) My mother, presented with the opportunity to rid herself of three boys on a summer's afternoon, would drive us on one condition: we either needed to see a double feature, or else sit through our film twice. (Funny thing: it never occurred to us to simply sneak into another film after our first. As I wrote, ushers used to be more vigilant, and all six theatres could be seen at once.) Occasionally, as far as my mother was concerned, we'd hit the jackpot, and enjoy the first film so much that we'd watch it a second time, thus giving our mother seven or so hours of peace and quiet. This was true of Race With the Devil, which played on the same bill with the third release of Butch Cassidy.

(Funny thing, that. The last movie I saw in re-release was ten years ago this summer, Taxi Driver. I love DVDs, which essentially replaced the re-release, but something has been lost.)

Movies are often about disappointments, often as not, the way that baseball is ultimately about losing. My brother Robbie and I went to Escape to Athena expecting a socko action picture and were disappointed. The Cheap Detective was a no-miss, with Peter Falk and a cast of dozens, except it wasn't funny. What kept my brothers and me coming back was the thought that we might experience the sublime, might see something we'd remember our entire lives.

Superman was such a moment. To be specific: the first ten minutes of Superman reached such a level of transcendence that the remaining hundred minutes served as little more than an anti-climax. Starting with the boy reading the comic book, leading to the pan up to the Daily Planet tower, then to the moon, then into the journey to Krypton, accompanied by the John Williams score which, as with Jaws and Star Wars, was perfectly suited to the moment, the sequence was pitch-perfect.

The peak of the film was the trial of General Zod (Terence Stamp), Zod's plea for his life with Jor-El (Marlon Brando), then his threat ("No matter that it takes an eternity! You will bow down before me! Both you, and then some day, your heirs!"); folllowed by the destruction of Krypton. In the same way that Apocalypse Now fell off the table after Robert Duvall's helicopter attack, aka the greatest battle scene ever filmed, Superman went from an epic to a comic book in the journey back from Krypton to Earth.

Still, the epic remains. My brother John and I have such an attachment to that first segment that we've seen it a hundred different times in a dozen different ways. John once filmed the first segment on my Super-8 camera, then screened the film: essentially, a film of a TV broadcast of a film. I taped my brother's LP soundtrack of the movie for my Walkman, straight through to Marlon Brando's first line ("This is no fantasy!"). When I visited my brother and sister-in-law two years ago, I noticed he had the Superman DVD and begged him to screen it for me. Prince that he is, he did. All I really wanted to see was the first part, but we saw it through, and wondered for the hundredth time: how the hell does Superman turn back time by reversing the earth's orbit? Just how did that work?

One other thing. My brothers and I have similar senses of humor, and John and I laughed in two different spots--and now we laugh to this day, remembering them. When Superman saves the girl's cat, and the girl runs in and says that a man came out of the sky, and gets slapped for telling lies--man, I'm laughing now. And when Perry White (Jackie Cooper) asks of Superman, "What's his favorite ball team?" and Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) makes as if to answer--people, I'm talking funny.

I was late to the original Superman. When I saw it, John had already seen it. We sat in the plush chairs of the big theatre at Chris-Town, and when it was over, and the credits ran, I stood up to go, and he said, "Hang on." So the credits ran some more, and again I got up, and he said, "Hang on." And we got to the end of the credits, and I saw the words: "Coming next year: Superman II." I asked him, "You kept me here to see that?" And he said, "Sure."

Then we biked home. There was never a theatre built closer to our house. It was that we just grew old enough to pedal to Cris-Town ourselves.