Word: heroicizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These scenes carry hints that Redford wants to update some classic movie parables. Milagro could be Chinatown, with its diverted water supply and political-industrial intrigue. Or Silkwood, with a heroic loner fatally bucking the system. Or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with the greedy Anglos outsmarted by wily Hispanic outlaws who snort, "We don't need no stinkin' condos...
...heroic scenario: the explosion of the doomed planet Krypton, the miraculous escape of the infant son of a Kryptonian scientist, the discovery of the baby's spaceship by an elderly couple near the Midwestern town of Smallville. And the gradual revelations of the child's superhuman strength, the foster parents' exhortation that he "must use it to assist humanity," the youth's adoption of a dual identity -- the mild-mannered, blue-suited newspaper reporter, Clark Kent, and the red-caped, blue-haired Superman, the man of steel. And Lois Lane, the toothsome fellow reporter who attached herself to the Superman...
...qualities in that nebulous thing known as the American character. He is honest, he tells the truth, he is idealistic and optimistic, he helps people in need. He not only fights criminals but is indifferent to those vices that so often lead the rest of us astray. Despite his heroic abilities, he is not vain. He is not greedy. He is not an operator, a manipulator, not an inside trader. He does not lust after power. And not only is he good, he is also innocent, in a kind and guileless way that Americans have sometimes been but more often...
Then came, out of nowhere, nostalgia -- including nostalgia for things the nostalgia lovers were too young to know. That mood gave rise to the first of the feature films in 1978, and suddenly Superman was soaring again. And this time, when Christopher Reeve waved his arms and pointed his heroic chin upward, he really seemed to take off over Metropolis. "Honest to God, I was disappointed by the flying," Reeve says of the TV version that he had seen as a boy. "I remember thinking, 'He's got to be lying on a glass table.' I wanted him to really...
Reeves, a rather lardy figure, had serious acting aspirations (he had been one of the Tarleton twins in Gone With the Wind), and he felt that Superman was somehow beneath his dignity. He also disliked the need to diet for the role. He once referred to his heroic tights and cape as a "monkey suit." After growing famous as Superman, Reeves encountered great difficulty in finding work as anything else (the same problem ended the careers of Alyn and Noel Neill, who played a perky Lois Lane in both the serial and TV show). When ; he did get a minor...