An unlicensed roller skater slips suddenly out of control, shoving a hot dog stand and interrupting three concurrent telephone conversations. Robot penguins, freshly sentient, see their chance for escape at last, and make a break for the open road. A woman is scattered across the sidewalk, surrounded by dented groceries. There’s mustard on Jimmy Olsen’s lapel.

In other words, downtown Calgary is a mess, and it’s no wonder Superman is a little choosy about which disaster he feels like addressing. I don’t know why we even came to this cursed burg in the first place.

The clearest sign of utter disarray is the ski-masked bank robber making a getaway while holding a bag marked METROPOLIS CITY BANK, which is adorable, although the building clearly says Century Savings Bank so I don’t know why they bothered. Nobody reads bags anyway.

The bank robber makes for the great open spaces, using a passing credit for Robert Vaughn as cover, as police fire wildly into the lunch hour crowd.

Miraculously, nobody is hurt, including the bank robber, who scurries around the corner, pursued by a bear. But the stray bullets cause a minor traffic incident, which results in one of those roadside drownings you hear about.

This is a clever answer to the question of how they get Clark Kent to change into Superman and do something interesting and heroic at the top of the picture. They want something that Superman can do out on the street in the middle of a crowd, and the idea of somebody driving over a broken hydrant and filling up the car with water is a rather ingenious little trick.

It’s silly, of course, and I don’t believe in it, because it feels like the kind of thing you could fix yourself by opening the car door. Still, I can see how they got here.

They undercut the scene a bit by sticking another gag in the middle of the rescue, with Superman changing in a photo booth, which takes four pictures of the transformation from Clark to Superman. An inquisitive little kid tries to grab the film, but Superman — scanning the column of pictures — rips off the Clark photos and hands the kid the final photo of him in Superman costume.

This is legitimately funny and a nice character moment, but we’ve already seen two shots of the driver clearly drowning, and this takes twenty-three seconds and distracts the audience from the dramatically urgent situation still in progress.

But here he is, our majestic airborne angel, flying boldly across the road to get to the other side.

So the question is: does this work as the opening of a Superman film?

It’s got the basic elements: Clark sees a dramatic situation, changes into Superman, flies into action and rescues a helpless citizen. Unfortunately, this may be the shortest and cheapest rescue that he could possibly make.

I mean, the opening stunt in the last movie involved Clark flying four thousand miles to save Lois from being blown up by a nuclear bomb while falling down the Eiffel Tower, which had its own problems as a sequence, but was undeniably spectacular. This time, they’re hooking Chris Reeve to a flying rig and lifting him across the street, using some uncalled-for visual blurring at the top of the screen to disguise the obvious wires.

And then there’s a little crowd of spectators, just standing there watching the stunt and politely clapping when it’s over. These citizens are looking at a caped wonder, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and I hate to say it, but they look a little bored. They’re glad that the man in the car was saved, but this isn’t the awe-struck crowd watching a miracle unfold in the skies above them, like in the first movie. We don’t even get any individual reaction shots from the crowd. It’s just one medium shot of Superman lifting the guy out of the car, and that’s the entire sequence.

Honestly, the main problem is that it doesn’t look expensive enough. This is a June 1983 audience watching this film, and Return of the Jedi came out three weeks ago. We’ve seen E.T., and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Superman II, for that matter, and we’ve got expectations around what a thrilling opening sequence is supposed to look like. This looks cheap and small, and it sets the tone for how we receive the rest of the movie.

And if it seems like Christopher Reeve is kind of going through the motions, then maybe he is. He just came off shooting a film called Monsignor, which he considered an important film that would establish him as a serious dramatic actor. Reeve didn’t sign for Superman III until he read the script, and he decided to do it on the strength of the “Dark Superman” parts, which would give him the opportunity to do something new with the character.

“I’ve played the part three times now,” he told a reporter, “and it’s become easy for me, although it was very hard to do when I began.”

This sequence is the kind of thing that’s old hat for Chris Reeve, and for us too; that miraculous burst of excitement that we got from the first two movies seems unlikely this time. He doesn’t even catch the bank robbers, who must be halfway to Bearspaw by now.

This weekend:
A weekend popcorn post about Black Adam!
Black Adam 98.1: We’re the Justice Society

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Footnotes:

I’ve got a lot of nerdy little facts about this sequence, and if you like that kind of thing, then here they are:

The kid outside the photo booth is Aaron Smolinski, who played Clark as a toddler in Superman: The Movie. He also had a little cameo as a Communications Officer in 2013’s Man of Steel.

The “Man in Cap” who features a lot in the sequence and ends up with pie on his face is played by Gordon Rollings, who was the fisherman in Superman II who saw the villains make landfall at the lake.

They use the same shot of the driver in the car filling up with water from two different angles. The first shot of the driver shows him looking around and finally screaming for help, and it’s followed immediately by the second shot, which is the same reaction from the side.

The stunt man playing the driver is Roy Alon. He was equipped with a breathing apparatus if he needed it, but he managed to do all the takes while holding his breath.

The car is a 1975 Plymouth Valiant, which I’m only mentioning because I love the fact that the Internet Movie Cars Database exists.

And, because I enjoy this kind of thing, here’s all the other actors in the scene that I can identify:

Penguin Man: Harry Woolf
Roller Skater: Tracey Eddon
People in phone booths, from left to right: Wendy Leech, Clive Curtis, Billy Horrigan
Blind Man: Graham Stark
Bank Robber: Peter Wear
Guy who breaks the door handle trying to rescue the driver: Paul Weston
Dignified Gent: Bob Todd
Mime: Justin Case
Applauding Man: Stan Edmonds
Delivery Man: Terry Camilleri

I’d expect the hot dog vendor to be credited, but he isn’t. And that’s about it for nerdy facts today.

This weekend:
A weekend popcorn post about Black Adam!
Black Adam 98.1: We’re the Justice Society

Chapters

— Danny Horn