Warner Archive Collection / Extended Cut & Special Edition

Superman: The Movie Blu-ray Review

Too Much Man of Steel?

Reviewed by Michael Reuben, October 3, 2017

Superman is as joyous and affirming a blockbuster adventure as the latest Pirates of the Caribbean is dispiriting and bland. Nowadays, it's hard to imagine a time when comic-book movies didn't dominate the theatrical landscape, but it was Donner who legitimized the genre in ways no one had imagined. . . . Donner's true masterstroke [was] casting a young, virtually unknown Christopher Reeve as adult Clark Kent/Superman. . . . We're looking at a movie star, period, and the definitive live-action interpretation of the character.

Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie exists in multiple versions. The version released to theaters in December 1978 was the result of a production process riven by conflict that would eventually lead to Donner being fired from Superman II by producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind. This 143-minute theatrical cut remained the version most widely seen for the remainder of the 20th Century. It was released on home video in multiple forms and grew more beloved with each passing year, despite some rough edges. These included hastily completed effects, a rough sound mix and inconsistent color timing that made the Man of Steel an unintentional chameleon, with a uniform that changed shades and hues from one shot to the next. Sometimes it was blue; sometimes it was almost green.In 2000, Donner and Warner Brothers collaborated on a director's cut of Superman, utilizing then-new digital technology to address many of the film's shortcomingsbut they also incurred the wrath of long-time fans for whom the original's flaws had become old friends. Especially controversial was the new 5.1 sound mix with newly recorded effects and a surround field far more active than anything of which 1978 stereo was capable.Donner also added back numerous deleted scenes, some of which extended the story while others were nods to franchise afficionados, like the appearance of a childhood Lois Lane with her mother played by Noel Neill, who was Lois in the Fifties Superman TV series. (Donner also reinserted his own cameo as a passerby who tells Christopher Reeve's Clark Kent: "That'll be the day, when a man can fly!") Despite the protests of theatrical cut loyalists, Donner's director's cut (a/k/a the "Special Edition") has been treated as the standard version of Superman ever since. It was the version that Warner released on Blu-ray in 2006 at the dawn of the format and has been reissued in multiple forms since then. Warner did eventually make the theatrical cut available on Blu-ray, but only as part of the Superman Motion Picture Anthology released in 2011. (The anthology is scheduled for re-release this month as part of a wave of DC reissues promoting the upcoming Justice League .)But there's another, even longer version of Superman that has attained legendary proportions, mostly because of its rarity. In the early Eighties, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind created an "Extended Cut" for TV, adding back every available trim and outtake and charging broadcasters around the world by the minute to extract maximum revenue from the property. ABC ran a 182-minute version of the film in 1982, split in half as a two-night event. International stations ran the Salkinds' full 188-minute cut, and it eventually played on station KCOP in Los Angeles. Tapings of these broadcasts have circulated for years in bootleg videotaped copies, commanding high prices from fans eager to enjoy every available minute of Superman footage.For many years, it was assumed that the Salkinds' Extended Cut existed only in the form of a pan-and-scan 1.33:1 standard definition video master prepared for broadcast. But then one of those surprise discoveries occurred that sometimes happens in a massive archive like Warner's: a complete film source of the Extended Cut in Superman's original widescreen aspect ratio. (More on that in the "Video" section below.) After a substantial restoration effort, this long-sought-after version of the film is being released on Blu-ray by the Warner Archive Collection, paired with a copy of Richard Donner's Special Edition. The Special Edition is the remastered disc first seen in the 2011 Superman Motion Picture Anthology Feature discussions of Superman can be found in the site's original 2006 review by Greg Maltz as well as the Anthology review by Kenneth Brown. My colleague Josh Katz provides a suitable introduction in his weekly column , observing that:The Salkind's Extended Cut is 45 minutes longer than Superman's original cut, but that figure is misleading, because about a third of the new material has already appeared with Donner's Special Edition. The Special Edition Blu-ray helpfully assembles all of the scenes that Donner added back in an extra captioned "Restored Scenes", and it includes another extra called "Additional Scenes" with a deleted subplot depicting the pit of wild animals kept by Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor in his underground lair. An early scene shows Ned Beatty's hapless henchman, Otis, fearfully feeding the beasts (which are never shown), and a later one has Luthor preparing to feed them his mistress, Miss Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine), after her betrayal has foiled his plans. She is saved by Superman, just before he takes Lex and Otis to jail, whereas in the theatrical cut and the Special Edition, we go straight from Superman flying away from Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) in the desert to his depositing Lex and Otis in the penitentiary yard. Donner chose not to add back this subplot, but the Extended Cut includes it.The footage beyond the scenes excerpted in the Special Edition's extras is spread throughout the Extended Cut. A scene by scene accounting is beyond the scope of this review, but the following example will serve as an illustration. In the sequence where Lex and his cohorts intercept and reprogram the first of two nuclear-tipped ICBMs, they divert the military convoy by crashing a remote-controlled car. In both the theatrical cut and the Special Edition, Lex is the only one operating the controls, but the Extended Cut starts the scene with Otis manning the remote ineptly so that the car weaves all over the highway, until Lex seizes control. ("Are you in England?" he sneers at Otis. "Why are you driving on the left side?"). Miss Teschmacher joins them, and further dialog ensues. After the convoy stops and the soldiers cluster around Miss Teschmacher lying on the ground faking injury, Lex pulls up in an ambulance and asks: "Somebody hurt?" The scene used to end there, but the Extended Cut continues with further exchanges between Lex and the soldiers and then between Lex and his mistress on the ground. Finally, when Otis rejoins the gang in the ambulance and realizes that he entered the wrong coordinates, the scene used to end with Lex jumping into the back seat to attack him. In the Extended Cut, the attack continues with Lex pounding on Otis while Miss Teschmacher screams, grabs the wheel and hustles into the driver's seat. Later, Otis is seen with his face badly bruised, as the team pauses to recover.Note that none of these extensions add anything new to the plot. Depending on one's inclinations, they could be viewed as an entertaining expansion of the comic byplay among the film's villains or as narrative bloat at a point where the story needs to progress as fast as possible. Original editor Stuart Baird obviously took the latter approach, as did the team that worked with Donner on the Special Edition. The Salkinds chose differently.Scene extensions of this nature occur throughout the film, and opinions will vary on whether each one is an improvement or a distraction. But it's hard to dispute that the cumulative effect is to slow the pacing to a crawl, which is a risky proposition in a film already straining under a massive weight of back story. Superman remains a charming and memorable entertainment, but it's also one of the longest prologues in film history. So much is devoted to setting up Superman II's romance with Lois and its battle with Terence Stamp's General Zod that the first film barely has room for its own self-contained tale. The additional scenes in the Extended Cut don't add to that story; they just make it take longer.Blu-ray.com's previous reviews ranked Superman: The Movie at 4/5. I agree with that score and have retained it, despite my belief that the Extended Cut would deserve a lower rating if it were evaluated on its own merits. But that would be a meaningless evaluation. Whatever its flaws or virtues, the Extended Cut can't exist in a vacuum. Think of it as a three-hour "extra" to a classic whose merits have long since been well established.