Supergirl (1984)

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Cast: Helen Slater, Faye Dunaway, Hart Bochner, Peter O’Toole

Have I Seen it Before: During a summer day in 1997 I went to an Albertsons, got a dozen pieces of fried chicken, and rented all five of the Super-movies for ten dollars. It was a simpler time. They had good chicken.

Did I Like It: I remembered shockingly little of the film, aside from the fact that Christopher Reeve is resolutely not in it, aside from one photograph. I’d say his wisdom was on track avoiding the movie, but then he went ahead and got involved with Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), but that’s a discussion for a different time. His conspicuous, awkward absence from the entirety of the film automatically hamstrings the affair. Even if the other elements of the film had been immaculate, there would be an illegitimacy to the whole thing without he who first made us believe a man could fly.

Honestly, it’s reputation is probably unearned, and sort of like Superman III (1983), the film was reviled in its time, but is the beneficiary of comparisons with the last film in the Reeve-series. 

Sure, it is a little hung up with painting Kara Zor-El (Slater) as a doe-eyed innocent in the mold of a Disney movie, where her cousin would always seem like he was in control of the situation, even, when he was pretending to be Clark Kent. And yet, somehow and inexplicably, there is no transition from arriving on Earth to being Supergirl fully-formed. 

Great (O’Toole) and mostly okay actors (Dunaway) are clearly slumming their way through a script so weighed down by preposterous sci-fi talk that the story, such as it is, even managed to lose me in the early minutes.

There is plenty to complain about in the film. The Salkinds display once again that the more direct control they have over the fate of the super-franchise, the more disappointing things become. But, the movie is a real movie, and the money spent makes its way to the screen. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is one of the few super-scores that doesn’t feel the need to slavishly worship at the altar of John Williams. For several sustained moments, I do believe a girl can fly. And if that weren’t enough, I was legitimately craving Popeye’s Chicken after the run time. If that doesn’t make the film at least a partial success, I don’t know what would.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Director: Arthur Penn

Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know. I’m behind.

Did I Like It: There’s a problem with coming up in a generation outside the film that in many ways defines it. When it premiered, Bonnie and Clyde was the vanguard of a new Hollywood. It shocked sensibilities and redefined not just the content in films, but what films could be…

Then, ten years later Star Wars (1977) came out and we all decided to go in a completely different direction. It feels like that might be a point for a different review, but Star Wars is the movie that defined my generation’ sensibilities, like it or not. there’s a debate to be had as to whether or not that’s a good bad thing, but here I feel lost. The movie is so tame. 

It is violent, and in what I can only imagine is a realistic manner, but not nearly as violent as anything Quentin Tarantino would come up with in subsequent years. 

It is, I suppose, brazen about sex for its time, but not in any way more scintillating than what you would find on a primetime network procedural now.

It strives to take the sheen off of Hollywood phoniness. The performances are largely naturalistic, but you can blindly stab at your Netflix queue to find films that toil in its shadow, and for all of its grittiness, it’s hard to believe people that look like Beatty and Dunaway are anything other than movie stars.

All of this is not the film’s fault, aside from the fact that I am expected to do the work of imagining what a visceral experience it must have been fifty years ago. I just wish I had seen it when it felt like the beginning of something new, not when it had long since become something quaint.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max von Sydow

Have I Seen it Before: Inexplicably, no.

Did I Like It: This first thought is going to sound like a complaint, but it isn’t. Maybe, it’s a foolish sense of optimism, but I think that the Times did publish whatever Joe Turner/Condor gave to them, shedding light on the shadow CIA propped up by Higgins (Robertson) and others at the company.

Although that probably makes the movie more similar to a television pilot than a traditional movie with a contained story. Again, that’s not a problem. I want to follow Condor as he tries to take down the people that double-crossed him. I want it to take six years, and I want the last shot of such a series fade away from Turner finally re-uniting with Kathy (Dunaway) in favor of Wabash (John Houseman), back at headquarters contemplating either spending the rest of his days in prison while his enemies claim victory, or hiring Joubert (von Sydow) to offer him the only clemency he can hope for.

I want more of it, is what I’m saying.

This movie fits snugly within the wrinkles of my brain. Between the now ancient computers accomplishing tasks we now take for granted, typewriters in every home and on every office desk in all of creation, and the only good guy in town is the one who’s read the most books, I don’t only want to watch this movie again, I want to live in it. Which, as I’m typing, I realize is an odd reaction to the movie.

It’s so unusual to watch one of your new favorite movies for the first time, much less have that movie be waiting for you to find it for over forty years. I honestly don’t understand how this movie—which wasn’t exactly hiding in Faye Dunaway’s apartment—slipped by me for so long. It may just supplant Die Hard (1988) as my favorite Christmas movie. Fight me.

EDIT: Turns out a Condor series was released last year on AT&T’s fledgling streaming service, Audience. All things I wasn’t previously aware existed, but somehow have already been paying for all this time. What a time to be alive, I think.