Superman (1978) Analysis: Truth, Justice & the American Way
The author of The Godfather wrote the first draft of Superman: The Movie. In Mario Puzo’s 1975 version, Clark Kent anchors the television news, Lex Luthor is off stealing the Peacock Throne in Iran, and Lois Lane daydreams of thrashing a circus strongman who wears Luthor’s face. Almost none of it survived to the screen, and the distance between what Puzo wrote and what Richard Donner filmed is where this analysis begins.
It reads the film against its primary sources: four surviving screenplay drafts, a subtitle track timed to the frame, and the on-record accounts of the people who made it. That method settles some long-repeated claims and overturns others. The filmmakers really did lift the time-reversal ending from the planned Superman II; the camp the film is blamed for did not begin with Puzo. Every finding below carries a page or minute citation, so the reader can check it directly.
What that scrutiny turns up is a film more deliberate than its reputation suggests. Richard Donner’s governing word was “verisimilitude” — absolute belief in the scenario and the character, no mugging to camera, no wink that signals the material is beneath everyone. The tagline promised “You’ll believe a man can fly,” and the promise was structural, not just optical. The script spends nearly fifty minutes on Kal-El and Clark before the cape appears, so that when it does, flight reads as release rather than spectacle. That patience is the engine of everything that works here.
Three movies that shouldn’t fit together
Donner described his own design as almost three films in one, linked by the single thread of the Kal-El/Clark/Superman journey. Krypton is avant-garde and strange. Smallville is Norman Rockwell shot through with longing. Metropolis is a wisecracking cartoon of New York, alive to possibility. Each movement carries its own genre, palette, and tempo.
The seams are visible, and they are the film’s most contested feature. The Krypton prologue plays as solemn science-fiction opera; the Metropolis sequences slide into screwball comedy the moment Luthor’s operation appears. Some viewers have always found the Luthor material tonally imported from a lighter picture, arriving as if beamed in from another movie. That reaction is fair, and the structure invites it. What holds the three registers together is not consistency of tone but consistency of belief: the film never treats Superman himself as a joke, even when the world around him turns comic. Christopher Reeve plays the center absolutely straight, and the straightness is load-bearing.
For a writer, the lesson is in the risk itself. A multi-tonal epic survives its tonal shifts only if one element stays fixed. Here it is the hero’s sincerity. Loosen that, and the three movies fly apart.
The prestige hire: what Puzo wrote, and what survived
Hiring Mario Puzo was a statement. The studio brought the author of The Godfather, fresh off Academy Awards for its screenplays, on for a reported $600,000, and the message to the industry and the public was plain: they would treat a man in a cape as serious material, not a Saturday-morning lark. What Puzo delivered in his July 1975 first draft is startling to read now, because almost none of its plot reached the screen. The seriousness survived. The story did not.
Inside Puzo’s draft
The differences are not cosmetic. In Puzo’s draft, Clark Kent is not a print reporter at the Daily Planet but a television anchorman at Galaxy Communications, working under Morgan Edge (Puzo draft, PDF p. 39) — the comics continuity of the mid-1970s. Lois Lane is no oblivious foil: she suspects Clark is Superman and moves to expose him (PDF p. 116), and the draft hands her a stylized fantasy sequence in which she pictures herself as a costumed “Superwoman” fending off a circus strongman who wears Luthor’s own face (PDF pp. 180–181).
Luthor’s scheme is no California land grab but a globe-trotting caper — a Peacock Throne heist staged in Iran, folded into a nuclear-extortion plot that demands a hundred million dollars in gold (PDF pp. 97, 187). And Puzo does not hold the villains in reserve. Four Phantom Zone criminals — Jax-Ur, Kru-El, General Zod, and Professor Vakox (PDF p. 2) — dominate from the first page. It opens on credits rolling over Krypton’s destruction, not the comic-book prologue the finished film is known for.
From draft to screen
| Element | Puzo (July 1975) | Finished film (1978) |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | Credits over Krypton’s destruction; the four Phantom Zone criminals | 1938 comic-book prologue into the Daily Planet globe |
| Clark’s job | TV anchorman, Galaxy Communications, under Morgan Edge | Print reporter, the Daily Planet, under Perry White |
| Lois | Suspects Clark, moves to expose him; a “Superwoman” fantasy | Charmed but oblivious; the irony triangle depends on it |
| Luthor’s plot | Peacock Throne heist in Iran; nuclear extortion for gold | A California real-estate swindle via the San Andreas Fault |
| Villains | Four Phantom Zone criminals, central to the first film | Zod, Ursa, and Non held back for Superman II |
| Kryptonite | A belt Luthor straps on Superman to immobilize him | The necklace Luthor drapes on him in the lair |
| Tone and close | Heavy, philosophical, and sprawling; a bleak “supermen can’t save us” ending | Sincere and romantic; the time-reversal for love |
What survived Puzo is not his plot but his register: the mythic weight, the willingness to treat a comic-book hero as an epic subject, the two-film architecture, and — credited to him in the production accounts — the seed of the time-reversal ending. The prestige hire bought seriousness and scale. The writers who followed rebuilt the story inside them.
The stakes of powerlessness
The film’s structural masterstroke arrives at 33 minutes. Jonathan Kent (Glenn Ford) dies of a heart attack in the field, minutes after telling teenage Clark that he is “here for a reason” (31m). Clark — who has just outrun a train and could bend steel — can do nothing. Standing at the grave he says, “All those things I can do, all those powers, and I couldn’t even save him” (33m).
That line is the emotional foundation of the entire picture. Clark can outrun a train and bend steel, and none of it counts against a failing heart. The film establishes, early and irreversibly, that power has a hard limit against biology — some losses no amount of strength can reverse. An overpowered hero becomes dramatically inert unless the audience first sees what he cannot do, and Superman plants that failure before it grants a single victory.
The technique generalizes cleanly. Delay the full power reveal with a sequence of what the hero can’t do — grief, restraint, secrecy — and every subsequent victory lands with weight it would otherwise lack.
The dual-mentor design, and where it comes from
Two fathers give Clark two incompatible instructions. Jor-El (Marlon Brando), speaking from the crystal, warns that “it is forbidden for you to interfere with human history” (45m) — the Kryptonian ethic of detached non-interference. Jonathan Kent teaches the opposite: active, hands-on goodness, the conviction that Clark is here for a reason (31m). The film stages a slow collision between these two ideas.
The design is not a critic’s overlay. The climax makes it literal. As Superman decides whether to reverse time, the soundtrack stacks three voices in under twenty seconds (131m). Jor-El: “It is forbidden.” Jonathan: “You are here for a reason.” Clark himself: “all those powers, and I couldn’t even save him.” The film does not imply the dual-mentor conflict; it plays the conflict out loud, an audio montage at the decisive moment.
The primary sources add a layer the film keeps invisible. Jor-El’s prohibition is not a late invention. It appears in Mario Puzo’s first draft, dated July 8, 1975. There, Jor-El instructs the infant never to reverse Earth’s history or play God (Puzo draft, PDF p. 25). Puzo set the moral architecture the ending finally violates down at the very beginning of the writing process. That is why the violation reads as a resolution rather than a stunt: the film establishes the rule it breaks roughly two hours and one screenplay lineage earlier.
Verisimilitude: anchoring the fantasy
Donner’s realism is most audible in the Daily Planet at 49 minutes — overlapping dialogue, deadline pressure, a newsroom that behaves like a workplace rather than a set. The film drops a hero who cannot lie into a world of spin and cynicism, and the contrast is the point. The grounded environment makes the extraordinary intrusion feel disruptive and real.
The most instructive example of that discipline is a shot the audience never quite notices. After the night flight, Superman drops Lois on her balcony, waves, and steps off; seconds later Clark appears at her door, in different clothes, and the camera never cuts. Donner has explained how he pulled it off without computers. The crew split the balcony in two and built part of it at a separate studio. They front-projected Reeve’s flight footage behind Margot Kidder. Then they freed the live camera from its rig and slid it with her to the door on a dolly. By Donner’s account, no one had tried the move that way before.
The point of the difficulty was emotional as much as technical. By Donner’s own account, the crew could have managed the unbroken take with cuts, but a cut would not have carried the same feeling. Showing Clark and Superman as one continuous person, in one shot, does work a cut cannot. The craft exists to sell the relationship, which is the film’s whole method in miniature.
The dramatic-irony triangle and the utility of the secret identity
The romance is a triangle drawn with two people. Lois loves Superman and overlooks Clark, never suspecting they are the same man. The audience holds the knowledge she lacks, and that gap powers the humor, the romance, and the tension through the film’s slower stretches.
Reeve is the mechanism that makes the gap believable. As Clark he channels a note of Cary Grant comedy, all stammer and downward glance; as Superman he removes personality almost entirely and plays a fact rather than a character. Roger Ebert read Clark’s performance as a sustained wink to an audience that is in on the secret, and the double meaning runs through most of his Clark dialogue. The secret identity, in this reading, is not merely protective cover. It is emotional armor — Clark is his own romantic rival — and the source of the film’s sharpest irony.
The helicopter rescue
The public debut at 69 minutes crystallizes the whole approach. Superman catches Lois from a falling helicopter and reassures her: “Easy, miss. I’ve got you.” She looks down at the street far below and asks, “You’ve got me? Who’s got you?” (69m). The film plays the exchange for peril, comedy, and wonder at once, and it resolves on a single word when she asks who he is: “A friend” (70m). The film’s thesis about the character fits in that word.
For a writer, the takeaway is that a knowledge gap between characters is a renewable engine. It sustains engagement when the action dips and layers emotional stakes across shifts in tone.
Luthor and the comedy question
Here the sources correct a claim that appears in nearly every account of the film, including earlier versions of this site’s own analysis: that Puzo’s script was campy and that later hands sobered it. The picture is more layered, and more interesting, than that.
Puzo’s draft: heavy and overstuffed at once
Puzo’s 1975 draft was not the source of the film’s buffoonery, but it was not sober either. Ilya Salkind later called it a “Greek tragedy,” and its spine bears that out: Puzo introduces his villain (“Luthor Lux”) as saturnine, witty, and philosophical, a scientist with a worked-out argument for doing evil (Puzo draft, PDF p. 53), and the draft closes on a downbeat meditation — Clark’s voice-over playing over news of a nuclear test and a study of ecological ruin, landing on the thought that no number of supermen can save humanity from itself (PDF p. 224).
At the same time, the making-of accounts describe that same 220-page two-film draft as overstuffed and self-aware: goofy dialogue, wacky imagery, a Superwoman fantasy, a globe-trotting sprawl, Clark rewritten as a television anchor — dense enough that the producers judged it nearly unfilmable. Puzo’s draft was tonally maximalist, tragic and comic-book-excessive at once, and too much of both to shoot.
Where the camp actually came from
The comedy audiences remember from the finished film is not in those pages. Otis and Miss Teschmacher — the buffoon-henchman engine — do not appear in Puzo’s draft at all; Otis surfaces only in the later, shooting-era drafts, where he recurs well past a hundred times, and in the finished film. The parody peaked after Puzo, not with him: the Newman and Benton rewrite of 1976 pushed the tone further toward comedy, to the point of scripting a cameo for Telly Savalas as his Kojak character.
Donner inherited that version, disliked its camp, and had Tom Mankiewicz rewrite toward sincerity. Mankiewicz later said barely a word of Puzo’s script survived — true enough of the dialogue and plot, though the architecture underneath, as this piece keeps finding, is another matter. What the primary text can prove is narrow and firm: the buffoon comedy is absent in Puzo and present in the shooting script. The production record fills in the rest — the parody was a mid-decade amplification, and Donner’s team pulled it back rather than invented it, though the finished film keeps Otis broad enough that the comedy never fully recedes.
The blend on screen
On screen, the finished Luthor holds both registers at once. Gene Hackman gives him real menace — asked whether he gets his kicks plotting the deaths of innocent people, he corrects the premise: “No, by causing the death of innocent people” (108m). Around that menace sits the comedy of Otisburg and Miss Teschmacher’s real-estate patter (110m).
Reception has always split on whether the comic register enriches the villain or fractures the tone; the critic Neal Gabler faulted the finished films for shallow comedy and wished they had held to the heavier spirit of Puzo’s script. The evidence does not settle that debate — it clarifies its terms. The philosophical menace is largely Puzo’s; the broad parody is not; Puzo’s own draft ran heavier and stranger than the film that emerged; and Donner’s cut runs a tempered blend of both. Whether that blend is a flaw or a deliberate tonal gamble is the reader’s to decide.
The ending: breaking time for love
The most argued-over ninety seconds in the film are the time-reversal. After Lois dies in the earthquake fissure, Superman orbits the Earth at impossible speed, spins the planet backward, undoes her death, and jails Luthor. Detractors have called it a deus ex machina since 1978, and the objection is easy to state: if he can reverse time, he can solve anything, and the stakes evaporate.
What the drafts show
The drafts explain why the sequence feels grafted on — because it was grafted on. In the combined later draft, the spinning-Earth reversal sits under a header reading “SUPERMAN II 31/3/77,” on script page 450 (PDF p. 246), and it undoes the destruction the Kryptonian villains cause rather than an earthquake. The Washington Monument un-crumbles; a calendar page flies backward; toothpaste returns to the tube. The set-piece belonged to the second film’s climax.
The production history says the same from the outside. The crew had already shot most of the sequel when the producers halted it to finish the first film. They shuffled its planned ending forward to close the original instead. That ending — Superman reversing time to bring Lois back — now reattached to her death in the earthquake.
Puzo’s first draft confirms the shape of that history from the other side. It carries the theme — Jor-El’s warning against reversing Earth’s history (PDF p. 25) — but the located climax of Puzo’s own pages is different: Superman intercepts a laser-guided aircraft aimed at Metropolis (PDF p. 195), and the draft closes on a bleak voice-over rather than a resurrection. The staged spinning-Earth sequence belongs to the Superman II material. The idea underneath it, though, traces to Puzo — the making-of accounts credit him with the notion of undoing Lois’s death by turning back time — and he had already written the becoming-mortal mechanism the sequel’s love story would use (PDF p. 130). The two-film architecture, and the seed of its most argued-over ending, were his.
Does it earn the break?
So the “cheat” is real as a mechanical objection, and the “it feels imported” instinct is literally correct — the filmmakers imported the sequence from the next movie. What the film does to earn it anyway is the dual-mentor montage at 131 minutes: the film presents the reversal not as a physics trick but as Clark choosing Jonathan’s active compassion over Jor-El’s detached prohibition, with both fathers’ voices in his ears. The rule-break resolves the film’s central argument in a single act. Readers will disagree about whether that thematic payoff outweighs the logical hole. Both halves of the disagreement rest on what is actually on the page and in the drafts.
The beat sheet: loss, wonder, collapse, choice
Minute markers are timed to the movie. The four blocks below follow the film’s arc, with Act II split into the Wanderer (promise and wonder) and the Warrior (complications and collapse) — the seam where the tonal turn lives.
Act I — Setup (min 1–40)
The first act spends its time on loss. Two inheritances die — Krypton in cosmic spectacle, Jonathan Kent in a Kansas field — and the second death sets the film’s emotional floor: power that cannot save the man who raised him (33m). Everything the hero later wins is measured against that failure.
| Beat | Minute | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|
| Opening Image | 1m | Comic-strip prologue and the Kryptonian tribunal establish cosmic justice. |
| Set-up | 6–30m | Two dying inheritances: Krypton’s fall and Smallville’s warmth. |
| Catalyst | 33m | Jonathan dies; power meets its hard limit — “I couldn’t even save him.” |
| Debate | 34–40m | Clark finds the crystal and weighs his destiny. |
Act IIa — The Wanderer (min 41–90)
The Wanderer half of Act II is ascent. The Fortress completes Clark’s education, where Jor-El names the mission: a grateful humanity “only lack the light to show the way” (47m). Superman then steps into public life through the helicopter rescue, the debut, and the night flight. The register is promise and wonder, and the flight with Lois is the false peak, the romance cresting before the plot turns.
| Beat | Minute | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|
| Break Into Two | 41–44m | The Fortress rises; Clark emerges as Superman. |
| Theme Stated | 47m | Jor-El: “They only lack the light to show the way.” |
| B Story | 49m | The Daily Planet; the Lois/Clark/Superman triangle begins. |
| Fun and Games | 69–90m | Helicopter, debut, Air Force One, the night flight. |
| Midpoint | 90m | The flight with Lois — false victory as the romance peaks. |
Act IIb — The Warrior (min 91–131)
The Warrior half turns that wonder against him. Luthor’s kryptonite trap finds the one weakness, the twin missiles force an impossible split, and one save costs the other — Lois dies in the earthquake despite everything strength can do (~126m). The act closes where the film began, on power useless against death.
| Beat | Minute | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|
| Bad Guys Close In | 108–112m | Kryptonite trap; the dual missiles launch (“Double jeopardy”). |
| All Is Lost | ~126m | The earthquake; Lois dies despite the saves. |
| Dark Night | 131m | The scream — power useless against grief. |
Act III — Resolution (min 131–end)
Act III is decision. With both fathers’ voices in his ears, Clark breaks Jor-El’s prohibition and reverses time, settling the film’s central argument in a single act (131m), then jails Luthor and returns to the sky. The resolution pays off the loss the opening established: this time, strength is allowed to win.
| Beat | Minute | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|
| Break Into Three | 131m | Both fathers’ voices; Clark defies Jor-El to reverse time. |
| Finale | 132–135m | Time reversed, missiles stopped, Luthor jailed. |
| Final Image | 136+m | Superman soars over the Earth — the two worlds bridged. |
Why it still matters for writers
Superman solves the problem every writer of near-omnipotent heroes runs into: how to make an invincible character carry stakes. It does not solve it by weakening him. It solves it with emotional grounding, moral choice, and structure — the fifty-minute delay before the cape, the early irreversible failure, the secret identity that doubles as vulnerability, the two-father argument that the ending finally settles.
Its sincerity is the durable lesson. “Truth, justice, and the American way” plays as real aspiration, not as a punchline, in a film that arrived when cynicism was the default register of American movies. The three-movie structure is a workable blueprint for multi-tonal epics, and the dramatic-irony triangle is a template for sustaining tension through quieter passages.
The time-reversal, whatever one concludes about it, is a case study in the one rule for audacious mechanics: they survive only when they resolve a character’s arc rather than serve convenience. The drafts show the seams. The finished film shows the craft that stitched over most of them. Both are worth studying.
