Film Plot Summary

The film began with a marquee or theatre curtain opening on a black and white projected film, dated June 1938. A child's hand opened a 10 cents Action Comics book, and in voice-over read the caption: "In the decade of the 1930s, even the great city of Metropolis was not spared the ravages of the world-wide depression. In the times of fear and confusion, the job of informing the public was the responsibility of the Daily Planet, a great metropolitan newspaper, whose reputation for clarity and truth had become a symbol of hope for the city of Metropolis." The image moved forward on the final image on the page, the downtown Daily Planet building, toward the revolving Daily Planet banner on a globe atop it, and then zoomed off into space, as the spectacular 3-D credits played.

The camera sped through space, coming upon another galaxy and solar system, with the reddish dot of a blazing hot sun, and then beyond it the planet Krypton, and the white crystalline mountains of the futuristic city of Kryptonopolis. Inside a domed structure, the voice of white-haired scientist Jor-El (Marlon Brando) dressed in white boomed out from the trial chamber of the Ruling Council. On the chest of his costume was an "S" enclosed by a pentagram. Specific charges of treason and sedition were brought against three accused insurrectionists: General Zod (Terence Stamp), Ursa and Non, trapped within two circular, moving rings of light. Giant projections of the faces of the Council of Elders surrounded the room. The three revolutionaries, led by rebellious traitor Zod who wished to establish a new ruling order with himself as the Supreme Ruler, were found guilty (with Jor-El's vote of guilty the one to make it unanimous), as evil Zod vengefully vowed that Jor-El and his heirs would supplicate to him: "You will bow down before me, Jor-El." As the domed structure swiveled open and the three criminals were held within a column of light, a revolving, two-dimensional, rectangular "eternal void" named the Phantom Zone passed by, enveloped and imprisoned them, and took them out toward space, where they would be isolated and suffer "an eternal living death" in its mirror-like prism.

The respected Jor-El then warned the elders, including First Elder (Trevor Howard), of their own suicidal (or genocidal) fate as a planet - but his cautionary fears were discredited as an "outlandish theory." He stressed: "We must evacuate this planet immediately." His theoretical belief was that their planet, with seismic disturbances and shifting in orbit dangerously close to the Kryptonian sun, would explode in 30 days or maybe even sooner. Jor-El was warned to not spread fear and panic among the people, otherwise he would be accused of insurrection and join the others in the Phantom Zone. He vowed to remain silent (and that neither he nor his wife would leave the planet), but prepared a space-craft in his lab, with the knowledge of his wife Lara (Susannah York), to launch their infant son Kal-El (wrapped in a red, blue, and yellow blanket) toward distant Earth where there was primitive life. Earth's atmosphere would sustain him, and Earth's lifeforms (humans) were identical to Kryptonians - in addition, he would be super-human: "his dense molecular structure will make him strong...fast, virtually invulnerable." The baby was placed in a module, powered and surrounded by crystals (including one green crystal containing the amassed knowledge of Krypton), inserted and sealed into a larger, star-shaped spaceship, and launched. Jor-El's collapsing laboratory, with crystals crashing down and cataclysmic convulsions, shook violently from the approaching sun and Krypton disintegrated, exploded and imploded, as predicted.

During the spaceship's flight to Earth, the baby was wired to support survival, and a computer (with Jor-El's voice) taught the baby, as it grew, about literature, mathematics, history and science from many worlds and galaxies. After entering Earth's atmosphere (later revealed to be the year 1951, three years later), the spaceship crash-landed in a rural farming wheat-field near the US town of Smallville, Kansas, where two middle-aged adults Jonathan Kent (Glenn Ford) and his wife Martha Kent (Phyllis Thaxter) were driving by in a pickup truck when it had a flat rear tire. They noticed the path of charred wheat nearby and the burned wreckage, and saw a naked boy (Aaron Smolinski) in the open module with arms outstretched toward them. The child was an answer to the prayers of the childless couple, who considered raising the child as their own adopted son - as the recently-orphaned child of her North Dakota cousin. They were astonished and stared in disbelief when they discovered that the toddler was holding up the rear bumper of the truck when the jack failed, to protect Jonathan.

Some years later in the mid-1960s, teenaged high school aged son Clark (Jeff East), shy and reserved, was the football team's equipment manager. He was frustrated when left alone after being humiliated in front of other students, especially friend Lana Lang (Diane Sherry). In anger, he revealed his extraordinary powers -- he punted a football into space, and as he returned home, he outran a speeding freight train, to the astonishment of young train passenger Lois Lane, who told her disbelieving parents (Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill, both of whom had played Superman and Lois Lane in various early serials and films): "Golly, I saw a boy out there run as fast as the train. Faster even!" Smirking about how fast he had run, Clark spoke to his understanding but concerned adoptive father about his hidden abilities that he wanted to 'show-off' as a star, claiming: "Is a bird showing off when it flies?" His father reminded him: "You are here for a reason. I don't know whose reason, or whatever the reason is, you know, maybe it's because (pause) -- I don't know...But I do know one thing, it's not to score touchdowns." On a short race up the road to the barn with Clark, Jonathan collapsed and died of a heart attack. At his father's gravesite after the funeral, Clark anguished and mourned his father's death: "All those things I can do, all those powers and I couldn't even save him." In the middle of the night, when he turned 18, Clark was awakened and went to the farm's barn, where he uncovered a burlap-covered mound of hay, under which was the throbbing, glowing green crystal in a round pit. He picked up the object that appeared to be calling to him to go on a pilgrimage. The next morning, Clark's mother unexpectedly found him standing motionless in a distant wheat field - the location of the spaceship crash. He told her: "I have to leave." She replied: "I knew this time would come. We both knew it from the day we found you." Clark said he was compelled to travel "North," and he embraced his saddened mother, who asked for him to: "Always remember us."

Clark trudged through frozen, snow-covered landscapes with floating blocks of small icebergs (within the Arctic), with only a backpack (with the green glowing crystal and his red/blue/yellow blanket) and a plaid winter coat. He took the crystal from the pack and tossed the crystal into the distance, where it sank through the snow and ice into the frigid water, and began to produce bursts of energy. A massive crystalline Krypton-like structure rose up and was formed with angled and jutting columns - the Fortress of Solitude. Inside was a control panel with complicated memory crystal energy banks, into which Clark placed the green crystal - and suddenly, a bright vision appeared. It was the face of his father Jor-El, who greeted him: "My son," and told his 18 year-old boy in recordings that he had been dead for many thousands of Earth years. He stated that they were to work together to find answers to important questions. Clark was told his original name was Kal-El, and that he was the sole survivor of the planet Krypton, with great powers that far exceeded those of "mortal man." He was taken on a trip through time and space, and told not to interfere with human history, but to lead others. Kal-El was also told about the fragile human heart, and shown that the source of his "strength and nourishment" was the red Krypton sun. He would be educated about the concepts of immortality, and study the crystals to learn about the accumulated knowledge of 28 known galaxies. After completing his education, he would return to the "confines of your galaxy." After 12 years passed, 30 year-old Kal-El was told that it was time to "rejoin your new world and serve its collective humanity," and determine where his strength and power were needed. He was sent by Jor-El, as his only son, to live among the Earth people as one of them, and to show them the way. Mature and wise, Superman emerged on an icy slope, wearing his classic red-blue-and yellow outfit, and gracefully flew off with his red cape fluttering behind him, straight into and then over the camera.

The next scene was set in Metropolis, a busy street scene outside the offices of the Daily Planet newspaper, and then inside where frenetic activity was occurring among reporters, editors, and office staff. Seated at a typewriter was spelling-challenged, brash brunette beat reporter Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), and idolizing young photographer and cub reporter Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure). She delivered her most recent story on the East Side murder case to bossy Editor Perry White (Jackie Cooper) in his office, where she was introduced to polite, shy, conservative-looking, "mild-mannered" Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) with thick-rimmed glasses, who was newly-hired to work on the city beat. When Lois learned that he would be sending half of his paycheck to his mother, she asked: "Any more at home like you?", and later she was taken aback when he used the word: "Swell" to describe his first day on the job. On the sidewalk outside as they passed an alleyway, they were accosted by a mugger who attempted to steal Lois' purse - Clark cleverly used his superpowers to catch a fired bullet in the palm of his hand, while pretending to faint, and without revealing anything to Lois.

On a nearby street, two undercover police officers trailed Otis (Ned Beatty), crime boss Lex Luthor's (Gene Hackman) incompetent, buffoonish right-hand man, into Metropolis' main train station, where he evaded them by entering an indentation/door in the track wall to approach Luthor's underground Lair 200 feet below Park Avenue (a half-flooded, subterranean train station), but the pursuing officer lost his life when Luthor reversed the piston-driven indentation and pushed him into the path of an oncoming train. Sadistically twisted, egotistical and evil Luthor told his busty, bimbo moll Eve Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine) that he was planning the "crime of the century," claiming he possessed "the greatest criminal mind of our time" and was the "most brilliantly diabolical leader of our time." The headlines of the latest Daily Planet regarding the US Government's "TWIN NUCLEAR MISSILES TEST CONFIRMED," was part of Luthor's plan - "the greatest real-estate swindle of all time."

After work one evening, Clark - now smitten by and developing a romantic interest for workaholic Lois, invited her to dinner, but she turned him down, and he was dejected. On that windy night, she was booked to take a Daily Planet helicopter to the Metropolis airport to meet Air Force One for an interview. As the copter rose up from the rooftop, one of the floodlight cables became inadvertently hooked around one of the copter skids, and they couldn't achieve lift-off. They lost motor control and crashed into the glass-sided, roof-top waiting room, knocking the pilot unconscious and leaving the copter precariously dangling half-off the side of the building - and Lois hanging out the door above the street, precariously held there only by her seatbelt. A crowd formed below, where Clark noticed the predicament. He raced for a corner phone booth, but found only a half-sized one, so he changed into his Superman outfit with the family 'S' crest (under his street clothes) inside a revolving door, and flew up into the night sky. He caught Lois in mid-air as she was dropping, assuring her politely: "Easy miss, I've got you." She responded unbelievingly: "You've got me. Who's got you?" With his other free hand, Superman grabbed the falling helicopter and lifted it back to the roof. With her mouth gaping open, she asked: "Who are you?" He replied calmly: "A friend," before soaring off - and she promptly fainted.

On the outside windows of a skyscraper, Superman also foiled the robbery attempt of a cat-burglar, by standing at a right-angle off the side of the building above the jewel-crook, defying gravity, and asking: "Something wrong with the elevator?" As the criminal fell to the sidewalk when his suction cups pulled loose, Superman caught him and turned him over to an incredulous law-enforcement officer. He also assisted police who were in pursuit of hoods at a riverside pier where they attempted to escape in a cabin cruiser. The red-caped Superman was hit from behind with a crowbar, but unaffected as he asked the recoiled, spasming man: "Bad vibrations?" His first public demonstrations of crime-fighting were difficult to understand (later, one doubting crowd passer-by commented: "That'll be the day when a guy can fly, huh?"), and a few officers thought they were seeing things. He rescued a little girl's scared cat from a tree, although her mother didn't believe her: "Haven't I told you to stop telling lies?" As Air Force One prepared to land at Metropolis Airport, one of its engines was struck by lightning, and it radioed a Mayday signal for an emergency landing. Superman grabbed ahold of the structure surrounding the missing outboard engine and leveled off the crippled plane to allow it to land safely.

Superman had to answer for all his heroic exploits to his displeased father, back within the Fortress of Solitude. He admitted that he "enjoyed it" and was carried away by "how good it felt." Now, Jor-El's son had been "revealed to the world" -- but he was cautioned to keep his "secret identity" for two reasons: he couldn't serve humanity 24 hours a day, and because his enemies would discover that the only way to hurt him would be by "hurting the people you care for." Jor-El also advised: "Do not punish yourself with your feelings of vanity. Simply learn to control them. It is an affliction common to all, even on Krypton. Our destruction could have been avoided but for the vanity of some who considered us indestructible."

Some reporters questioned whether Superman's exploits were a "fantastic hoax," or a "miracle or fraud." The Post reported: "IT FLIES!", while the News headlined: "LOOK MA - NO WIRES!", the Times: "BLUE BOMB BUZZES METROPOLIS," and the Planet: "CAPED WONDER STUNS CITY." Planet's editor Perry White wanted an exclusive scoop on "the story of the century" - "the single most important interview since God talked to Moses." He demanded that his reporters get "the inside dope on this guy. Has he got a family? Where does he live? What does the 'S' stand for?...Where does he come from? Does he have a girlfriend?" Lois received a note from her "FRIEND" - to meet her at her apartment at 8 pm that evening, and she awaited his arrival wearing a gorgeous, light blue evening gown on her penthouse's outdoor terrace. Superman swooped down and greeted her: "Good evening, Miss Lane," apologizing: "Sorry to drop in on you like this..." He allowed her to exclusively interview him - she first asked (while she took notes) about his "vital statistics - Are you married?" She also flirtatiously questioned whether he had a girlfriend, his age ("over 21"), height ("about 6'4""), and weight ("around 225"), and whether he could "see through anything" and if he was "impervious to pain." He couldn't tell her the color of her underwear when she stood behind a lead planter (he shouted out "Pink!" when she moved) - and he explained his weakness: "I sort of have a problem seeing through lead." He then told her about his origins from another galaxy, the planet Krypton, and stated why he was on Earth: "I'm here to fight for truth and justice and the American way." He also asserted that he never lied. To find out how fast he flew, he proposed taking a flight over the city ("Take a ride with me"), and they soared together over the lights of the city and past the Statue of Liberty, but when she foolishly let go (believing that she could fly on her own), he swooped down and caught her in his arms. In her mushy thoughts as she engaged in an internal love-struck, infatuated monologue (voice-over), she told him:

"Can you read my mind? Do you know what it is that you do to me? I don't know who you are. Just a friend from another star. Here I am like a kid out of school. Holding hands with a god. I'm a fool. Will you look at me? Quivering. Like a little girl shivering. You can see right through me. Can you read my mind? Can you picture the things I'm thinking of? Wondering why you are all the wonderful things you are. You can fly! You belong in the sky. You and I could belong to each other. If you need a friend, I'm the one to fly to. If you need to be loved, here I am. Read my mind."

He gently deposited her back on her terrace, where she had a dumbstruck look on her face. As he pushed off into the night, she remarked to herself about his name: "What a super man! Superman!" - and officially named the new hero. Fussily angry, Clark was found knocking at Lois' front door only a minute later - arriving late for their date. However, she was lost in her thoughts about Superman when Clark nervously promised to show her the time of her life - proposing to go get a hamburger. For a moment, he considered revealing that he was Superman, but then reverted to his Clark Kent role.

The banner headlines of the next day's Daily Planet read: "I SPENT THE NIGHT WITH SUPERMAN" - An Exclusive Interview by Lois Lane. In Luthor's Lair, Eve scanned the article with criminal mastermind Luthor and Otis, remarking: "It's too good to be true. He's 6'4", has black hair, blue eyes, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and tells the truth." Luthor was interested in other details of the story - he learned that the planet Krypton exploded in 1948, and it took three years for the rocketship to reach Earth. He then assumed that debris fragments of the planet as green-colored Kryptonite meteorites were propelled into outer space and drifted to Earth, such as those that landed in Addis Ababa (seen in a picture in a copy of National Geographic magazine). They were valuable to him, because they would be radioactively "lethal" to anyone from the planet, hence disastrous to Superman.

Meanwhile, on a country road, a nuclear XK-101 rocket missile was being transported on a flat-bed truck, accompanied by military security police in a convoy. They came upon a 'car-crash' trap set by Lex Luthor - it was a faked injury to driver Eve (his accomplice in a slinky and revealing dress) lying on the payment from an overturned drone car accident. As the US Army soldiers attended to her and Luthor impersonated an ambulance driver arriving to transport her away, dim-witted Otis fiddled with the missile's control panel, resetting the vector headings to numbers written on his arm: the first to 38, the second to 67, and the third to 117. However, there were supposed to be four settings (the last two were 11 and 7) - he had accidentally redirected the rocket to the wrong place with the wrong launch vectors. Then, on another country road, a second missile convoy identical to the first one, supervised by the US Navy, was also sabotaged by Luthor, who was driving a truck and blocking the road with an oversized house on a flatbed 18-wheeler. This time, Eve reset the vector headings correctly while the naval military guards were distracted. The two nuclear rocket missiles were to be launched simultaneously, by the US Army and Navy.

Luthor's daring plan was to anonymously purchase thousands of acres of "worthless" western desert land at "incredible prices" - it was a "land-fraud deal" story being covered near Hoover Dam by Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane and photographer Jimmy Olsen on his first assignment. Lois was interviewing a native American who had just sold a large area of desert land at incredible prices. [In his office, Perry White also informed Clark that a museum in Addis Ababa had been broken into, and thieves stole "a worthless piece of meteorite."] A piercing, supersonic message from Lex Luthor sent from a high-frequency transmitter, and only heard by Superman with his sensitive hearing, announced the criminal's cunning plan to create a disaster: "In approximately five minutes, a poisoned gas pellet containing propane lithium compound will be released through thousands of air ducts in this city, effectively annihilating half the population of Metropolis." {This ultimately turned out to be a bogus threat.) Clark backed out of the office and quickly transformed himself into Superman as he dove from a Daily Planet window and soared toward the direction of the sound waves. He bore a circular hole through a portion of city sidewalk by rapidly spinning himself, and found himself in Luthor's hideout - booby-trapped with various tests. In his viewing theatre, Luthor opened gun panels and activated machine gun barrels to spray Superman with bullets, but they bounced off harmlessly. Two other attempts to kill Superman with flaming gas jets of fire and an artificial blizzard of ice also failed, but Luthor had successfully lured Superman to his underground lair, his primary goal. At the same time, the two missiles were launched from their pads, but their original trajectories malfunctioned, and they were observed to be off-course and flying toward their new programmed destinations. It was impossible to abort the launches or to knock them down.

Luthor described how he was planning to divert one Naval nuclear rocket (a 500 megaton bomb) to strike the San Andreas Fault in California, thereby destroying the western portion of the state (as it fell into the sea), and making Luthor's desert real-estate (owned by Lex Luthor Incorporated) to the east more valuable - and the new West Coast of the US (with new coastal cities including: "Costa Del Lex, Luthorville, Marina Del Lex, Otisburg"). Luthor had planned "double jeopardy" with the two missiles: one was to strike the west, and the other was sent in the opposite direction, knowing that Superman, even with his great speed, couldn't stop both impacts. He fooled Superman into opening a lead-encased box supposedly containing a detonator to blow up the missiles - but inside was the stolen, glowing piece of Kryptonite attached to a necklace - a substance that could slowly weaken and immobilize Superman's power and lead to his death. As Superman's strength waned with the meteorite draped around his neck, and he was thrown into a pool, Luthor told him the destination of the second Army missile - Hackensack, New Jersey.

Ms. Teschmacher was deeply troubled, because her mother lived there, but Luthor was uncaring. Desperate, Superman begged her to help rescue him to save the lives of millions of innocent people. She bargained: "If I help you, would you promise to save my mother first?" and he agreed to disarm the eastbound missile first. She stole a kiss from him, and then removed the kryptonite necklace, and threw it directly into the lead piped sewer of Metropolis. She asked: "Why is it I can't get it on with the good guys?" Superman raced at supersonic speed to the Army missile headed eastward, finally caught up to it, tilted it upward, and sent it off-course into the stratosphere. However, there were only 15 seconds until impact for the second missile, which detonated at the San Andreas Faultline in the desert of California and caused a massive earthquake, with a cavalcade of disasters following:

• a buckling Golden Gate Bridge with a school bus dangling off the edge (Superman saved it from falling)
• a collapsing HOLLYWOOD sign in Los Angeles
• a potential train derailment (Superman connected the broken track with his own body)
• and the bursting of Hoover Dam (Superman saved Jimmy Olsen from dying in the path of the ruptured dam

Superman rolled a huge boulder and other rocks into place to save a nearby valley town from a cascade of water. He also resealed the San Andreas Fault by boring underground, pushing plates of land back together, and damming up and redirecting a flow of onrushing lava.

He failed to save Lois from a sink-hole or crevasse that swallowed her car during an after-shock, as he was busy saving the lives of many others. Her car filled with dirt and debris and she suffocated to death. Distraught by her death, he ignored his father's cautionary warning about interfering with human history and instead took the advice of his earthly step-father ("You are here for a reason"). He flew high above the planet Earth and turned back time by circumnavigating the globe at lightspeed in an east-to-west direction. The flood receded, the dam reassembled, and Lois's car reappeared from the sinkhole. He then returned the planet to its original orbital direction. Although completely implausible, it was enough to alter the timeline so that Lois never experienced the aftershock that buried her car. Not knowing what had really happened, Lois complained to him: "I was almost killed." He apologized: "I've been kind of busy for awhile," and flew off - as Lois contemplated her future with the superhero: "Some day, if he's lucky..."

In the film's short epilogue, Superman accomplished one more task -- he personally delivered Otis and Luthor (shown to be bald under his hair wig), hauling them by the scruff of their jackets to a prison recreation yard (and jail cell). He told the Warden: "I think these two men should be safe here with you now 'til they can get a fair trial." The admiring Warden thanked Superman: "This country is safe again, Superman, thanks to you," who graciously returned the thanks: "No sir, don't thank me, Warden. We're all part of the same team. Good night."

Film Notables (Awards, Facts, etc.)

This was the first of four epic, superhero films featuring comic-book hero Superman derived from the 1938 Action Comics character - not counting the latest film remakes. It was followed by three sequels - Superman II (1980), Superman III (1983) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987).

Four co-screenwriters (Robert Benton, David and Leslie Newman, and Mario Puzo) were responsible for the script.

Director Richard Donner filmed both Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980) simultaneously, when Richard Lester was called upon to replace Donner and finish the second film.

The film was preceded by Fleischer Studios' and Paramount's 17-episode Superman animated shorts in the early 1940s (1941-43), two serials: the 15-episode Superman (1948) - one of the most successful serials of all time, and Atom-Man vs. Superman (1950) both starring Kirk Alyn, and the low-budget feature film Superman and the Mole Men (1951) with George Reeves, as well as the TV series The Adventures of Superman (1952-1958) also with George Reeves, the Superman Broadway play It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman (1966), the spin-off Supergirl (1984) starring Helen Slater as Superman's cousin, the TV series Superboy (1988-1992), and another animated TV series (1996-2000).

With a production budget of $55 million, and box-office gross receipts of $134 million (domestic) and $300 million (worldwide).

With three Academy Awards Oscar nominations: Best Film Editing, Best Score and Best Sound. The recipient of a Special Achievement Award for the film's Visual Effects. The film used a new in-camera, inventive special effects, front-projection process called the Zoptic Process, that realistically combined foreground action (flying Christopher Reeve as Superman) with pre-filmed background footage.

Christopher Reeve was paid a salary of $250,000, plus $25,000 a week -- it was one of the highest salaries paid to an unknown actor for a major feature film.

Marlon Brando broke the $3 million mark for an actor's earnings, when he was reportedly paid a world-record salary of $3.7 million and over 11 percent of the gross (his total earnings were $14 million) for his 10-minute cameo appearance (shot over 12 days) as Jor-El, the title character's father in the blockbuster Superman: The Movie. He also received top-billing (with Gene Hackman) over Christopher Reeve.

The plot scheme of blowing up the San Andreas Fault with a nuclear device, to flood California and send it into the ocean, was also the premise of the 14th Bond film A View to a Kill (1985).

Many actors were considered for the lead role: James Caan, Sylvester Stallone, Warren Beatty, Nick Nolte, Jon Voight, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, even Olympic star Bruce Jenner.