Mill Creek comedy classics #36: "Palooka" (1934)

"And there's where Lupe Velez bought the toilet she drowned in! - John Waters on The Simpsons

The flick: Palooka (An Edward Small/United Artists Picture, 1934) [buy the set]

Current IMDb score: 5.8

Director: Benjamin Stoloff (maker of "B" Westerns and comedy shorts; directed Soup to Nuts, a 1930 film featuring the film debut of the Three Stooges before Curly joined the act)

Lupe Velez

Actors of note: Jimmy Durante ("The Great Schnozzola"; famed musical comedian of radio, film, and vaudeville known for his oversized nose, rumpled hat, gravelly voice, and numerous catchphrases; Smiler Grogan in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and the narrator of TV's Frosty the Snowman), Stuart Erwin (Heading for Heaven), Lupe Velez ("The Mexican Spitfire" of '30s and '40s "B" comedies; married for five years to Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmuller; committed suicide at 36 and inspired a nasty urban legend), Thelma Todd (The Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers and Monkey Business; died mysteriously at the age of 29 the year after this movie came out); Louise Beavers (Never Wave at a WAC; Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus): Fred "Snowflake" Toones (Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington;  Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, much more; mainly a shoe shiner or bootblack in "B" Westerns), Mary Carlisle (Grand Hotel), Marjorie Rambeau (Man of a Thousand Faces), Robert Armstrong (King Kong), Tom Dugan (The Best Years of Our Lives, To Be or Not to Be); William Cagney (lookalike brother of James Cagney; did a little acting in the '30s and producing in the '40s and '50s, including Yankee Doodle Dandy)

A Joe Palooka comic

The gist of it: New York, circa 1914. Boxer Pete Palooka (Armstrong) becomes champ but can't keep away from cheap blondes like Trixie (Todd), so his wife, Broadway singer Mayme Palooka (Rambeau), leaves him and takes their little son, Joey, with her. Twenty years later, Mayme lives on a farm with a now-grown Joe Palooka (Erwin), a dim but likable lug who's dating sweet country girl Anne (Carlisle). Pete, who never actually divorced Mayme, travels around the world on his ship and sends postcards* to the farm occasionally. One day, purely by accident, Joe meets boxing manager Knobby Walsh (Durante) and impresses him by knocking out a professional fighter with one punch. Knobby signs the novice to a contract and promises to turn him into a champ. Knowing his mother is bitterly against the fight game (and with good reason), Joe tells Mayme that Knobby's in the "leather business." The country boy then goes to New York City to follow in his old man's footsteps. Joe's hopeless as a boxer and immediately loses his first match, but his lack of skill lands him a second fight against the obnoxious champ, Al McSwatt (Cagney), whose manager is looking for bums that his man can slaughter. But McSwatt doesn't take the fight seriously and arrives drunk with his mistress, nightclub singer Nina (Velez). Joe manages to beat the inebriated McSwatt for the championship, becomes a highly-paid celebrity overnight, and very quickly acquires a swelled head, while scoring Nina as his new girlfriend. Knowing Joe's no boxer, Knobby pays a series of fighters to take dives against him. But McSwatt tricks him into a rematch, which puts Knobby in a tricky situation. Both of Joe's parents arrive in NYC -- Mom to try to talk him out of it, Dad to train him for the fight. It all builds to an action-packed climax at Madison Square Garden.

* The postcard we see in this film has an uncensored picture of topless native girls on it. The censors were apparently fine with this. I guess it's an example of what Roger Ebert called "the National Geographic exception."

Jimmy Durante's famous profile.

My take: I was looking forward to Palooka for a number of reasons. First, it was based on a comic strip, Ham Fisher's phenomenally successful Joe Palooka, which lasted from 1930 to 1984. Fisher himself only lasted until 1955, when failing health caused him to take an intentional overdose of medication and die. He'd been through a bizarre and bitter feud with fellow cartoonist Al Capp, whose Lil' Abner also became the basis for a movie in this series! Just as Skippy is mostly remembered for inspiring a brand of peanut butter and Buster Brown a line of shoes, Joe Palooka's lasting contribution to our culture was making the word "palooka" a synonym for "boxer" or, more generally, any big, dumb bruiser. Hitman John Travolta uses it to express his utter contempt for washed-up fighter Bruce Willis in the bar scene from Pulp Fiction. In his heyday, Joe appeared in newspapers and comic books, plus a number of feature films and a radio show, while inspiring all kinds of merchandise from board games to watches. I was curious to see what the fuss was all about. It's a little hard to tell from this film, which is very similar plotwise to The Milky Way, the Harold Lloyd flick I reviewed just five days ago. Even more enticing than the franchise was the cast. I already knew amiable lunkhead Stuart Erwin, who's passable if not too exciting as the title character, from Heading for Heaven, but I was much more intrigued by the presence of Jimmy Durante and Lupe Velez, two performers whose outsized personalities are actually much more famous than the films they made. A bundle of energy, Durante is the engine driving this movie. Imagine his character, Knobby, as a sort of deranged, joke-cracking version of Burgess Meredith from the Rocky series. He doesn't show up for the first few minutes of this film, and the opening suffers for it. I mentioned being disappointed by the workaday nature of the crooks in The Nut Farm. Well, this film finally offered me the desperate, shameless, half-genius, half-lunatic kind of conman I wanted in the form of Knobby Walsh, a manager so unethical he makes Don King* look like a choirboy yet who has such a zest for life that we can't possibly dislike him. (Though one scene in which he high-pressures Nina may make contemporary women uncomfortable. The expression "no means no" hadn't been invented yet.) If I mention Durante's name, you probably think of the song "Inka Dinka Doo." Well, he performs his signature ditty in one gratuitous but entertaining scene which has him break a store window while in a drunken stupor and serenade a mannequin. If that's not enough "Inka Dinka Doo" for you, the song plays as an instrumental in the background at least three more times. If you want one of Durante's other catchphrases -- "Hot cha cha cha cha!" -- you'll have to wait until the very end. I'll warn you, though, that the context for that line in this movie is particularly disturbing and might cause you nightmares. (Hint: then- 41-year-old Durante, who looks 60 at least, is dressed as a baby when he says it.) Much more aesthetically pleasing is Ms. Lupe Velez, a very sexy Mexican-American actress whose film career has possibly been overshadowed by a lurid story about her which avant-garde-filmmaker-turned-gossip-monger Kenneth Anger included his infamous and frequently-banned book Hollywood Babylon (1965). Fans of that book and of old-school Hollywood scandal in general will also be intrigued by the presence of Thelma Todd in this film. Thelma's death -- possibly murder, possibly suicide -- is one of those stories perfect for speculative basic-cable documentaries.

*Oddly, Al McSwatt's loss to Joe Palooka was echoed in real life by Mike Tyson's unexpected defeat at the hands of flash-in-the-pan Buster Douglas.

Is it funny: For a long stretch in the middle, yes! And that's mostly thanks to Durante, though Lupe Velez gets in a few good lines and Marjorie Rambeau is fun as Joe's mother, a broad who's been around the block a few times and who brooks no nonsense. The big Velez-Rambeau confrontation is a highlight of Palooka. As I mentioned earlier, the movie gets off to kind of a sluggish start but is given a jolt by the addition of Knobby Walsh. Joe Palooka himself is kind of an empty vessel. It's sort of fun to watch him become an arrogant and free-spending jerk (the scene in which he poses for ads is another high point), but a better actor than Erwin might have gotten a bit more comedic mileage out of this. The climactic fight between Al McSwatt and Joe Palooka starts as comedy, but then becomes action/suspense and ends as drama. The movie's tone is downbeat for quite a bit, and it has the effect of letting the air out of the tires right when the humor should be building. When the film tries to shift back into "comedy mode" for the last few minutes, it all falls a little flat. I suppose that's appropriate, since our titular pugilist spends a fair amount of time falling flat himself.

My grade: B



P.S. - Yes, I'm still looking for racial stereotypes in these films. Louise Beavers plays yet another domestic, this time on Ma Palooka's farm. Her role is not terribly demeaning, though, and again Beavers' talent and humanity shine through the cliched part. At one point, though, she says that the only rooster she wants to see is "a black one strutting down Lenox Avenue." (Evidently, she worked for Mayme back in the New York days.) Fred Toones, billed only as "Snowflake," has a good amount of screen time as some kind of assistant to Knobby or Joe, but I don't think he speaks a solitary word. In the opening credits, Beavers and Toones share the screen when their names appear, but they don't have any scenes together in the movie. It's debatable whether Lupe Velez's character constitutes a negative Mexican stereotype. She seems to have made a career of her ethnicity and definitely exaggerates the accent for comic effect. The movie treats her as kind of a slut, the "bad girl" to Mary Carlisle's blonde-haired "good girl." For balance, though, the movie also has a blonde slut character. Progress!

You know what? I feel like doing a new "Zomby," so here's that.

Mill Creek comedy classics #13: "The Animal Kingdom" (1932)

Considering he's married to someone else, Leslie Howard is awfully cozy with Ann Harding in The Animal Kingdom.

The flick: The Animal Kingdom (RKO Radio Pictures, 1932) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.5

Director: Edward H. Griffith (The Sky's the Limit, No More Ladies) with an uncredited assist from George Cukor (My Fair Lady, The Philadelphia Story, and further uncredited work on The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind)

Actors of note: Ann Harding (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit), Leslie Howard (Gone with the Wind, Pygmalion, Of Human Bondage), Myrna Loy (The Best Years of Our Lives, the Thin Man series) , William Gargan (The Bells of St. Mary's, You Only Live Once), Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon on the Batman TV series, Tarzan and His Mate), Ilka Chase (Ocean's Eleven [the original], Now, Voyager, frequent answer in the crossword puzzles I do on the train every day)

The gist of it: Writer Tom Collier (Howard) leaves behind his soulmate -- and friend with benefits -- artist Daisy (Harding) in order to marry respectable society girl Cecelia (Loy), a match which pleases Tom's wealthy, traditional father but seems to make everyone else pretty miserable. Cecelia's old beau, lawyer Owen (Hamilton), for instance, is none too thrilled by this out-of-the-blue union. Tom tries to convince himself he's happy with Cecelia, but he just can't stay away from Daisy. What's a poor little rich boy to do?

Neil Hamilton, once a male ingenue, on Batman.

My take: I said in my last review that the hero of a romantic comedy will never marry the snooty girl he's engaged to at the beginning of the story. So how to account for the fact that Leslie Howard does marry Myrna Loy in The Animal Kingdom? Simple -- this film is a drama, not a comedy. Oh, there are a few witty lines here and there -- usually from bohemian Daisy ("A foolish virgin me. Oh, foolish anyway.") -- and a bit of comic relief provided by Tom's butler, ex-boxer "Red" Regan (Gargan) who's cheerfully hopeless as a majordomo. But Daisy has an aura of wistful tragedy around her after Tom throws her over for Cecelia, and even Regan's subplot takes some poignant, dramatic turns when it develops that he pines for his former life and doesn't get along with Cecelia at all. The Animal Kingdom is surprisingly heavy stuff. It's based on a stage play and feels it. There are long, stationary dialogue scenes in living rooms and drawing rooms with the actors parked on couches and only a few brief moments when the characters are out of doors. It's the 1930s, of course, so everyone smokes and drinks up a storm in every scene. The protagonist's name, Tom Collier, even sounds like the name of a cocktail. It's clear from the first few minutes that Tom belongs with Daisy and Cecelia with Owen. I thought there'd be some wacky misunderstandings with playful music on the soundtrack, and everyone would wind up happy at the end. But this movie doesn't quite play out that way. The decidedly-not-playful score is by one of the all-time legends of the biz, Max Steiner, of Gone with the Wind, King Kong, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and so much more. And the movie is more complex and shaded than I would have guessed. Myrna Loy's character, for instance, is not really such a bad woman, though the script treats her as one, especially towards the end when her materialism takes over her personality. In all honesty, Tom never should have married her in the first place, but the movie goes pretty easy on his character. As I see it, the young writer (who is perfectly willing to sell out and write trashy books for the money, by the way) selfishly strings along two perfectly viable life partners. He definitely needs to hear that Lovin' Spoonful song, "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?"  Too bad it wouldn't be released until 20 years after Leslie Howard's death. (Shot down during WWII, sadly.) She's unlucky in love in this movie, but Myrna Loy earned a nice, permanent place in pop culture history as Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies, where her sophistication and boozing were assets instead of character flaws. And her spurned suitor, Neil Hamilton, used his natural blandness and wooden acting style to great advantage as the hilariously useless Commissioner Gordon on Batman (1966-1967). Top-billed Ann Harding never really broke through, though she worked in film and TV for 30+ years. She definitely has a certain je ne sais quois. I can understand why Leslie Howard couldn't turn her loose.

Is it funny: Nah, not really. I laughed out loud at a couple of Daisy's bon mots, but that was about it. The central story in The Animal Kingdom is pretty sober, so much so that William Gargan's somewhat broadly-played boozing, incompetent butler character seems a little out of place. Again, I don't really consider this film much of a comedy, so this section is largely irrelevant to the film's overall quality.

My grade: (as drama) B+; (as comedy) Incomplete



P.S. - Nothing so distasteful as a racist stereotype in this classy picture. The lazy, inept butler in this story is (mercifully) Caucasian.

Mill Creek comedy classics #11: "Hollywood and Vine" (1945)

Hollywood and Vine: You've seen the intersection, now see the movie!

The flick: Hollywood and Vine (PRC Pictures, Inc., 1945)

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Alexis Thurn-Taxis (A Night for Crime, The Yanks Are Coming)

Actors of note: James Ellison (I Walked with a Zombie), Wanda McKay (The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty), Franklin Pangborn (All Over Town, Now Voyager, The Bank Dick), Ralph Morgan (The Life of Emil Zola, first president of the Screen Actors Guild), Prince Michael Romanoff (restaurateur and "professional impostor"), Daisy (twenty-seven Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950), Emmett "Pappy" Lynn (Night of the Hunter, The Ten Commandments)

Intersections of note: Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA 90028, today the location of a sushi restaurant, an Irish pub, a parking lot, and an empty retail space.

The gist of it: Martha (McKay), a pretty young lass on her way to Hollywood, stops for lunch at a little hamburger stand operated by the eccentric and talkative Pop Barkley (Lynn). There, she attracts the attention of successful playwright Larry Winters (Ellison), who follows her to Tinseltown, where he's working on the adaptation of his Broadway hit, Grandfather's Follies. Thinking it belongs to Martha, Larry brings along a talented little stray dog (Daisy) whom he dubs Emperor after Strauss' Emperor Waltz, which was playing on Pop's jukebox when he and Martha met. Martha eventually does reconnect with Larry, who passes himself off as a newcomer named "Larry Summers" and takes up residence in a modest bungalow near Martha's. Soon, Larry's bosses and his snooty fiancee are searching frantically for him. Meanwhile, Emperor becomes a big Hollywood star whose overnight success leads to a zany custody battle involving most of the other characters.

"Uncle Carl."

My take: I wonder when Hollywood started turning its cameras back at the movie business, realizing its own industry was as bizarre and fascinating as any scenario a writer could dream up. One of the little joys of this movie is the chance to see a now rather quaint-looking version of Hollywood, a place where people still went to the Brown Derby and the Trocadero. Watching this movie in 2013 was like seeing the innocent first draft of Barton Fink or Mulholland Drive with all the surrealism and seediness taken out. The "pretending to be poor" thing, too, seems like a harbinger of John Landis' Coming to America. While he's pretending to be a pauper, Larry takes a job at a drugstore, where he works for fussbudget Franklin Pangborn who does his trademark "prissy queen" routine again. The movie never comes out and says it, but I'd like to think that the place is Schwab's Pharmacy. The studio in the film is called Lavish Pictures, where the members of the Lavish family all have phony-baloney jobs (like "Assistant to the Assistant Story Editor") and phony-baloney offices (with numbers such as "7 and 3/8ths"). I'd imagine this was a swipe at the Laemmle clan, whose founder inspired this famous quip from Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle." Sharp-eyed MST3K fans will note that this film was released by the poverty row studio called PRC Pictures, which stands for "Producers Releasing Corporation" and not "Penile Replacement Corporation," as Tom Servo had it. By the way, I wonder if any scenes from Hollywood and Vine wound up on the cutting room floor because there are some subplots which never get wrapped up. One running gag, for instance, has tough-looking gangster types come into the drugstore and cryptically request a "banana surprise," which makes Franklin Pangborn very nervous. Nothing ever comes of this, though. And there's a wraparound story in which Pop Barkley tells some reporters how he came to be enormously wealthy, but I don't think this was adequately explained either.

Daisy the dog, the actual star of this movie.

Is it funny: Occasionally. As a satire of the motion picture business, Hollywood and Vine is fairy toothless. Studio chiefs are penny-pinching blowhards who keep their whole family on the payroll. Romances are manufactured for the benefit of the press. Directors are temperamental divas. Aspiring actors are likely to end up working in drug stores. I knew most of that. Because of Daisy, Hollywood and Vine has plenty of bark, but the script has no bite. The movie lavishes much more attention on the dog than it does on the rather dull human love story supposedly at the center of the plot. I guess it's funny watching the talented pooch roll over, play dead, bark on command, close doors, and hide objects when necessary, but it's obvious that the animal is waiting for cues from a handler who is just off-camera. At the time, Daisy was in the middle of a very hot movie career, playing the role of the Bumsteads' dog in a series of cheap-but-popular comedies based on the Blondie comic strip. What's really funny in this film is the "star treatment" lavished on Daisy/Emperor, including lawsuits and charges of tax evasion. I chuckled quite a bit during the Empreror Goes Hollywood montage. After all, like Elvis Costello once said, "You're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard." Or a bitch, so to speak. Ellison and McKay play their parts straight down the middle, so most of the comedic dialogue in the film is given to the supporting players like "Pappy" Lynn, whose crazy old coot character quickly wore on my nerves. I did like the way his character wound up figuring into the film's longest-running gag at the very end, though.

My grade: B-



P.S. - Not a Negro stereotype in sight here. No minorities of any kind, in fact.

A new Superman for a Batman world

Men of Steel: Henry Cavill and Christopher Reeve portray Superman, 35 years apart.

"He's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now." 

- Commissioner Gordon describing Batman in The Dark Knight

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mary McGrory is credited with one of the all-time great quotes about sports: "Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become." History has more than vindicated Ms. McGrory's statement. The ratings for the 2012-2013 television season have just recently been tabulated, and the leader -- by a wide margin -- was NBC's Sunday night NFL telecast. A mere eight years before my own birth, there was no such thing as the Super Bowl. Now it's a de facto Holy Day of Obligation. Football has long since blitzed past baseball to become America's true national pastime, and I think the reason for that has a lot to do with a gradual shift in the collective American psyche over the last few decades. In short, we've become more cynical, more technical and less optimistic in recent times. In the years since 9/11 especially, we've become a paranoid, anxious nation, thirsty for blood and hungry for flesh. Football is the sport, more than any other, which fuels our aggregate psychosis. It's a dark game for dark times. Baseball, meanwhile, seems fairly musty in comparison. It's not even a contact sport, for crying out loud! George Carlin famously explained the differences between these two sports better than I ever could, so I think I'll let him do so now.




So what does any of this have to do with Superman? Well, it's like this, citizens: Superman is the baseball of superheroes. He's corny. He's old-fashioned. He's pastoral -- the very term George Carlin used to describe baseball. Though born on the far-off, doomed planet of Krypton, Superman grew up as Clark Kent amid the pastures of Smallville, the isolated cowtown where his adoptive parents, Ma and Pa Kent, raised him with the good Christian values of the Middle West. Superman's origin story has often been interpreted as a variation on the Nativity with Clark as an all-American version of the Christ child. Even the Kents' first names -- John and Martha -- are reminiscent of Joseph and Mary. Little wonder, then, that Superman has often been portrayed as the ultimate square, a goody-two-shoes as wholesome as a glass of milk and just about as interesting. Meanwhile, poor Supes has been eclipsed in the minds (if not hearts) of the public by Batman, a fellow DC hero and frequent teammate. Batman's origin is rooted in urban violence: he saw his own parents gunned down by a mugger and ultimately decided to avenge their deaths by becoming a costumed vigilante. The famed "Caped Crusader" has been portrayed in wildly diverse ways and with greatly varying degrees of seriousness since his debut  in the fateful year of 1939, but for the last quarter-century or so, Batman has largely been depicted as a deeply troubled, morally conflicted loner who has chosen to fight crime for reasons which are far from healthy. This is the character America has embraced, and I think his ascendancy mirrors that of professional football. Batman is a flawed, gloomy pseudo-savior for these sick times of ours. No wonder we love him.

Five summers ago, the most lauded of the studio blockbusters was Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. The most ridiculed was Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Is it sacrilege to say that I had more fun at the latter than the former? I emerged from The Dark Knight feeling woozy and a little depressed, while at least I came out of Crystal Skull feeling like I'd seen an adventure yarn, which is what I'd paid for. I think the real problem with Spielberg's film is that Indiana Jones was simply the wrong man for the audiences of 2008. It's difficult to imagine him brooding as he stares into a hopeless gray sky. Certainly, Crystal Skull is absurd and cheesy. But what audiences forgot (or ignored) was the fact that absurdity and cheesiness were in the character's DNA from the very beginning of the franchise. After you've found the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, where else is there to go but aliens from outer space? Fans howled at the improbability of Professor Jones surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator, but is this really any more ridiculous than the melting Nazis of the first film or the invisible bridge of the third? While the online community was grumbling about how preposterous Crystal Skull was, they were also rhapsodizing about the supposed realism of The Dark Knight. This argument struck me as baffling for several reasons. First, Nolan's film is in no way realistic. Insane, impossible events happen throughout the entire running time. This is not mere conjecture on my part, either. It's scientific fact. If Bruce Wayne really put on that rubber bat suit, he'd barely be able to walk around, let alone win any fights. And if he tried that gliding technique with his cape, he'd soon wind up as an omelette on the sidewalks of Gotham City. But beyond that is a more troubling question: why would we even want a superhero movie to be realistic? Perhaps our imaginations have been defeated or deflated by years of reality television and grim headlines. Figuratively speaking, we have sequestered ourselves in one dismal little room while great halls remain cordoned off and unexplored. Kind of sad, really, but understandable and perhaps inevitable.

This is the world Superman now enters in 2013. A football world. A Batman world. The character's latest cinematic reincarnation, Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, faces critics and audiences on June 14, 2013. The presence of Christopher Nolan as a producer suggests that the film will take a darker, grittier, more reality-bound approach to the character. These suspicions are confirmed by the film's trailer, in which Clark Kent/Superman appears to be dour and humorless, his powers as much a burden as a blessing. For a while in the 1970s and 1980s, Christopher Reeve managed to find a manageable middle ground with the character. His Superman had a sense of humor, certainly, but was not a cartoonish clown or a novelty act. Furthermore, he had a touch of old-fashioned romance but did not sacrifice his masculinity in the process. Best of all, he made it look like being Superman -- while occasionally a trial -- was a hell of a lot of fun. To my mind, Reeve is the only actor to truly understand the character and play the role properly. Every other actor has either been too stiff and serious (Brandon Routh in Superman Returns) or too much of a lightweight to be a credible action hero (Dean Cain in Lois & Clark). I plan on seeing Man of Steel, but I worry that the character has lost something essential in the process of being remade for the audiences of 2013. More than anything in the plot or dialogue, I am concerned about the movie's appearance. Superman comes from comics, an entirely visual medium, and has been transplanted to film, a primarily visual medium. A movie, more than anything else, is a Thing To Look At. So what has Zack Snyder provided us to see here? Obviously, in any Superman movie, the main point of visual interest is Superman himself. I was struck by how different Henry Cavill's 2013 uniform was from the one worn by Christopher Reeve in 1978. Here's a color chart breakdown of the two:

A color chart comparing the Superman uniforms of 1978 and 2013. Notice a difference?

Captain Kirk and his bumpy new uniform

The top row represents the Reeves version: cheerful and bold shades of blue, yellow, and red, similar to the hues seen in a four-color comic book. The bottom row represents the updated Cavill version of the famous suit. The colors are grungier and more nebulous now, reflecting perhaps that we live in a less-certain world. Red and blue have been usurped by reddish and blueish. If you study the picture at the beginning of this article, in addition to the color change, you'll also notice a change in the texture of the material. Whereas Reeve's leotard was smooth and seamless, Cavill's outfit is ridged and porous. This emphasis on hyper-accurate detail, perhaps an outgrowth of high-definition television and digital theater projection, is not exclusive to Superman. The trend began, I believe, with Spider-Man about a decade ago. Now, every fantasy hero -- including Captain Kirk -- has to wear such an outfit. Again, I am a little wary of this. Screen heroes should, in some sense, be abstract and mysterious. The new fabric makes these characters more plausible, perhaps, but it also takes away some of the fun because it subtly drags them down to the level of practical reality. I have plenty of practical reality all around me. Why do I need more of it in a superhero movie?

At the end of Oliver Stone's biopic Nixon, the disgraced politician  -- a pessimist saint if ever there was one -- looks up at a portrait of his one-time rival, John F. Kennedy and says, sadly: "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are." Can't we say the same about our movie heroes? Superman is who we want to be (or used to want to be), and Batman is who we are (or fear we are). We used to look to the silver screen to see characters who were impossibly idealized and embodied our fondest hopes and dreams. Now, I suppose, we want to look up there and see at least something of ourselves -- our flawed, fallible selves -- projected on the wall. In a few weeks, we'll see how well Man of Steel accomplishes that.