Company Business (1991)

Director: Nicholas Meyer

Cast: Gene Hackman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Kurtwood Smith, Terry O’Quinn

Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s been like one of those desert mirages in the world of cinema. It appears on a streaming service every once in a while, and then disappears just as quickly. Only I after I practically tripped over it being included in a double feature DVD with No Way Out (1987) was I able to find it on some kind of physical media.

Did I Like It: I’m tempted to say no, as the great master Meyer himself is certainly down on the film. Hackman agreed to the film, and then turned up on location not wanting anything to do with the proceedings, but facing a lawsuit if he backed out at such a late phase of the proceedings.

But Hackman doesn’t feel like the problem. He seems present enough throughout the film, not one of his all-time-best film performances, but I wasn’t struck by him being completely out to lunch. Baryshnikov isn’t at his core a movie actor, and his character breezes through the film with a perpetually confused expression. 

But the story—and it pains me rather greatly to admit it—may be the problem. It never really comes together. Maybe this is a byproduct of an editing process that had to work through a belligerent leading man’s performance to find some sequence of usable takes. Ultimately, though, I think Meyer still hadn’t worked out what he wanted to say about the end of the Cold War. For that, we’d have to wait—less than a year, incidentally—for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) to see his thoughts become more concrete. 

I’m sure a studio executive in 1990 would have blanched at the notion that that the spy movie starring Popeye Doyle would be the less successful movie about the fall of the Berlin Wall than a fifth sequel starring a cast of TV actors nearly ready to start collecting Social Security, but here we are.

No Way Out (1987)

Director: Roger Donaldson

Cast: Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Will Patton, Sean Young

Have I Seen it Before: It lived on cable in the 90s. Most people probably saw the last few minutes—which pretty much negates the need to see the movie at all—before catching an airing of something else.

Did I Like It: The question becomes during a normal screening of the film: Does it earn it’s ending? 

On the tragic vibe it occasionally goes for, I’m going to say no. The relationship between Farrell (Costner), and Atwell (Young) is not so much established as it is preposterous revved from 0-60 in the span of the first reel. I’m not kidding. Scene 1: They Meet and don’t care much for each other. Scene 2: They have sex. Scene 3: They are so ridiculously in love that when she dies, his emotional distress makes more sense…

…except, it doesn’t. It’s all a ruse. Maybe Farrell got in too deep to keep up his cover (last chance for spoilers) as a Soviet agent, but there’s not a hint or an ounce of suspicion that he isn’t who he says he is until his handlers start speaking Russian?

I guess the ending doesn’t really work for me on any front. Even if it were a surprise, it’s too out of left field. As is the sudden shift in motivation when Pritchard (Patton) that allows the movie to swing wildly toward something resembling a resolution to its plot.

There’s at least some of the trappings of an 80s tech-thriller that I’m here for, and the film incorporates location shooting in Washington DC better than most films, but when it’s central reason for existing falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, that should tell us all something, right?

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987)

Director: Sidney J. Furie

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Mariel Hemingway

Have I Seen it Before: A couple of times, mystifyingly.

Did I Like It: Oh, boy... Where to start? Before we get into any of the myriad details, here’s the big, unfortunately reality of this film:

It is worse than the universally reviled Batman & Robin (1997).

Yes, Batman & Robin is a mostly wrong-headed*, somewhat cheap affair, but it is at least a complete film, which undeniably has a point of view and the full support of its studio at the time.

Superman IV isn’t even finished. Some of the most baffling editing choices exist in this film, and the special effects are nearly uniformly awful. There is one shot of Superman (Reeve, doing his best here, but even some of the pristine sense of the borders between Clark Kent and the Man of Steel are gone) flying toward the camera that is used at least ten times. It is such a terribly rendered process shot, made all the worse by the fact that I am reasonably sure it was actually shot for Superman III (1983). 

There have been some disappointing big-franchise films in recent years—Star Wars: Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and Justice League (2017) come to mind—but anyone (including me) who has complained about those films needs to sit through this thing and witness just how far a franchise can fall. In Superman (1978), we believed a man could fly. Here, I still can’t quite bring myself to believe that the studio actually released this in theaters. Fantastic Four (1994) was never intended to be released, and it still has a touch of movie magic to it.

There’s a temptation to say that the story might be able to rise above the production shortcomings, but I don’t buy that argument much. Reeve’s passion for nuclear disarmament fitfully comes through in a couple of scenes, but the rest of the film is wall-to-wall b-movie cliche, punctuated by two of the singularly most baffling moments in cinematic history.

The film spends a sequence trying to recreate the magic of Superman and Lois Lane’s (Margot Kidder, walking through the film in a daze, which makes her seem like the only person in the production who knows whats going on) fly through the air in the original film. To do so, the film retcons the “memory-wipe kiss” from Superman II (1980) (admittedly, one of the weaker parts of that film), indicating the memory-wipe didn’t work and says Lois just chose not to say anything about her knowledge of Superman’s identity. They fly. Can You Read My Mind? The whole bit. Although it is, obviously, much worse. They land. Then Superman kisses her and wipes her memory again. It’s a staggeringly bad choice, and I have a hard time believing that at least some version of this fumble-to-end-all-fumbles didn’t appear in the script.

This all culminates in Superman’s final battle with Nuclear Man (voiced by Gene Hackman, who you can begin to sense is starting his fifteen year journey to not wanting to be a movie actor anymore, but physically performed by Mark Pillow, who I believe was never heard from again) where they play a little tug of war in outer space with seemingly mortal human Lacy Warfield (Mariel Hemingway). She breathes fine during the whole event, after which Superman takes her... somewhere in the vicinity of the planet Earth, after which the character is never heard from again. Ed Wood would have stopped that thinking in its tracks.

But then again, that scene could be related to the editing. Maybe the space sequences were meant to take place within Earth’s atmosphere, and more lost background plates are at play here...

You know it’s a bad film when you can never quite tell whether the script or the complete lack of production values are what is completely obliterating the experience. In some reviews for films I didn’t care for, I try to look for some bright spot, or at least some worse film to compare it to and put everything in perspective. Unfortunately, the film I often reach for in those comparisons is Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. It is, without a doubt, the worst superhero film ever made.

*It is often unfairly maligned as a gay movie, and if that weren’t unfair to begin with, but I’ve had a revelation recently that it has been more formative for LGBTQ people of my generation growing up than I ever would have thought.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Terrence Stamp

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. 

Did I Like It: I’ve taken my fair share of potshots at Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) but I legitimately think the framework for this long-lost director’s cut of a DC superhero movie would have been a better outcome for that more recent situation. Out of necessity (decades passing, and a number of the key players passing away), the cut is cobbled together from the material already available. Some sequences key sequences are built from rough footage and screen tests. Had they just released the disparate footage that Zack Snyder had shot—and not shot a lot of extraneous nonsense with Martian Manhunter.

Does that cobbled together quality detract from the experience? Does it somehow make the more polished theatrical cut of the film a better film?

The answer is a resounding no on both fronts. The rough edges only make the film more fascinating. That they were able to make a watchable film out of forgotten film canisters which were—at that point—thirty years old is something of a small miracle. The wobbliest example is the scene where Lois Lane (Kidder) finally proves that Clark Kent (Reeve) is the Man of Steel is actually taken from their final audition for the roles, and to hear Donner tell the tale, you can actually see the moment where Reeve earned himself the job and the definitive on-screen portrayal of the character was born. The fact that that moment is given some context, and isn’t just b-roll on a behind-the-scenes featurette is nearly reason enough for this new version of the film to exist.  

And ultimately, I think this is the better version of the film pound for pound. The weird moment in the theatrical film where Superman throws what appears to be a cellophane version of his emblem at one of the villains (a moment so silly, I doubted it actually existed for a moment, and had to google to confirm) is gone. Gone too is the super-kiss which wiped Lois’ memory and set everything back to zero. Those are already some fundamental improvements to an experience which was, admittedly, pretty good to begin with.

In it’s place is a re-setting of the “spinning time into reverse” trick, which works even less than it does in Superman (1978). Jackie Cooper’s toothpaste returning into its tube is a neat gag, but the only time when “everything that happened in the movie you just watched didn’t really happen” worked, it was The Wizard of Oz (1939). Maybe Inception (2010). It’s clear that Donner and company never really had their ending worked out, and all the sudden influx of cash from Warner Bros. after the fact wasn’t going to fix that.

Also, the story of Superman’s sacrifice of his powers in favor of his love for Lois doesn’t quite make sense. It’s improved with the restoration of recordings of Brando as Jor-El into the cut, as the weird bald Kryptonian bald guy in the theatrical cut and Superman’s mom never quite fit. The film is still never quite able to earn both the power of the sacrifice itself, and the speed with which it is reversed so Superman can propel himself into the third act, where he has to do final battle with General Zod (Stamp) and his cronies.

But both of those complaints are going to be present in some form of the theatrical cut, so I can’t really fault this film when it improves somethings, if it never quite fixes some other insurmountable things.

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.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Danny Glover, Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray

Have I Seen It Before?: Any time I talk about one of my books, I inevitably say something with the syntax of, “Everyone knows (blank) did (blank). What this book presupposes is: Maybe he didn’t?” There were a number of years where I wanted to make films like Wes Anderson makes them.

Yeah, I saw this one on opening weekend.

Did I like it?: Clearly yes. I’ve probably seen the movie a dozen times over the last twenty years, and each time I’m floored by those opposing paintings of a gang of maniacs on dirt bikes. It’s that funny. The rest of the movie is, too.

On this viewing, however, I dug a little deeper. I actually had the screenplay open in front of me, and read along with what played out on the screen. I don’t really recommend doing that, especially if this would be your first viewing of the film. But it was an illuminating way to see it. For all of his well-earned reputation as a visual stylist, Wes Anderson (still working here with Owen Wilson, who really should be writing more, if these early Anderson films were any indication) is also an immaculate writer. It’s hard to conceive of a film where Bill Murray’s improvisational skills don’t make up the lion’s share of his screen time, but I can attest that Raleigh St. Clair appears almost entirely as he does on the page.

The story is pristine as well. There are few movies that truck with voice over narration as much as this one does and still feels like a movie and not an audio book. I was struck by how my memory seemed to think that Alec Baldwin’s narration was spread throughout the film, but really only appears in the first half an hour and then in the last few minutes. The screenplay makes the case for its characters so cogently, that even if I wasn’t giggling throughout, it would have been a film that stuck with me.

Anderson may be the only kind of director who can get away with that.

Superman (1978)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder

Have I Seen It Before?: Any number of times. It is, incidentally, the only film that I’ve owned two copies of at the same time. I have it on blu-ray, along with the Donner cut of Superman II (1980, although that cut was released in 2006). I also have a DVD set that includes the theatrical cuts of all four films in the Reeve series. I keep that set only for completions sake to have the theatrical cut of II, and Superman III (1983) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Thus, I have the first movie in the same version twice, simply because I can’t bring myself to buy another copy of The Quest For Peace in another format.

Is anyone still reading after all of that?

Did I like it?: On paper, this movie is the perfect alchemy of everything that made big studio films great in the 1970s. Marlon Brando “stars,” but really makes enough money for the rest of his life for a couple days’ worth of work. John Williams’ score finishes the one-two punch he started with Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). And much of the same production team and facility that made the Roger Moore era of Bond movies the pure cinematic confections that they were is on full display here. It is big budget entertainment done perfect. It certainly goes on the list of movies I regret watching for the first time via a VHS copy.

And much of the intangibles justifiably recommend the film, and unfortunately inspire a spiral of increasingly icky sequels to come. Christopher Reeve so thoroughly inhabits the role (and yet somehow, third-billing) of the Last Son of Krypton that everyone else who has attempted has been varying degrees of pale imitations, from the likable if slight Brandon Routh in Superman Returns (2006) to, well Dean Cain. The less said about Dean Cain, the better off we all are. Including Dean Cain. Gene Hackman cuts a deliciously roguish figure as Lex Luthor, especially when stacked up against the woefully mis-cast Jesse Eisenberg, and the completely unwatchable Kevin Spacey. Margot Kidder is the right type of performer for Lois Lane, but ever since the DVD/Blu Ray documentaries put into my head that Stockard Channing was in contention for the role, I can’t help but think they may have missed the mark ever so slightly.

But there are some things that work on the nerves, despite the film’s legendary status. Some of the miniature work is obviously miniature work, which serves to undercut the epic scope of the movie, but that the film delivers on its promise to make one believe a man can fly tends to forgive any technical details which may have aged more aggressively.

And still, that sequence where Lois performs “Can You Read My Mind?” as a poem recitation while she and Superman are in mid-flight sets my teeth on edge every time I watch it. It might be hyperbole to say it is my least favorite thing that has ever been in a movie I otherwise like, but it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration.