Screen

...He includes, for instance, an episode not from Siegel's film where Matthew discovers a sort of factory-greenhouse in which the pods are being grown...

...and there is "fluid participation" in the decision-making structure...

...By having McCarthy appear in this film, as well as casting Don Siegel himself in another bit part, Kaufman clearly acknowledges his debt to Siegel's film...

...The same thing happens to Superman that happens to a lot of big jocks...

...Even professors might vote to sell the library to raise salaries--chopping down the Tree of Knowledge to get the fruit...

...Either way, though, Kaufman shows a promising ability to make his influence his own...

...Never have I seen a place as dazzling as Krypton, particularly the clothes...

...A scene of everyday life that also occurs early in the film is made to appear peculiar because we can only see the character's feet from where Kaufman has placed his camera...

...But I think his new film also owes a lot to The Exorcist...

...In Phillip Kaufman's new version, however, the distinction seems less clear...

...On the other hand, though, while Superman is presumably a projec2 February 1979:53 tion into the near future, he is someone from the past as well...

...has an undeveloped technology...

...The student countered by entering in evidence the inscription from Columbia's buildings referring to sapientia and sophia...

...It's hard to do so when'you work for super-producer Alexander Salkind, since he tends to take the footage you shoot and divide it up into several movies...

...As a result he has spent many months researching hitherto classified records of the military in Vietnam...

...Semi-arbitrary judgments are made in order to balance the budgets, but these decisions win only minimal acceptance since the institution participates in no common goal...

...Every immigrant group needs a trade--coffee shops or tailoring or whatever--and that can be theirs...

...If Columbia wasn't offering sophia, why was it advertising it on every architrave...

...His first assignment, as an apprentice, was on Cleopatra...

...Everyone spends so much time finding out what the problems are that there is no time for solving any of them--and besides those problems are already history...

...The investment being so large, producers of spectaculars don't want to risk everything on the imagination of one man...

...Despite this firm stand Lewy concedes that "American policy-makers not only exaggerated the geopolitical importance of Vietnam . . . but more importantly, their decisions were overtaken by important changes in the character of world Communism, which gradually undermined the premises on which U.S...

...This bit part is played by Kevin McCarthy, who did the same thing near the end of the original, in which he starred...

...If Barry's sets fl)r Krypton are equally dazzling, however, his set for the underground hideout of Superman's nemesis, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), is even better...

...Anarchy is a luxury of affluence...

...Superman is, after all, our Odysseus, a hero from our Golden Age whose remembrance is supposed to buck us up today...

...He peaks too soon...

...Columbia, a student sued Columbia University on the ground that the institution had not provided him with wisdom...

...But then, that's often all a spectacular like this is in the first place...

...He is, like Odysseus, someone made wiser by having to disguise himself as an ordinary man...

...One of the most common faculty comments about the Yeshiva case is that they don't "feel" that they make decisions about the university...

...policy in Southeast Asia was based...

...Labor law is written with the assumption that there is some sort of distinction, however delicate, between worker and manager, but the facts of much of higher education would argue that management is harder to find than employees...

...His appeal to kids may be fantasy, but his appeal to adults, who must also see the film if it is to return its investment, is nostalgia...

...In fact, before the invasion even reaches this stage, it has already begun in the form of a peculiarly jellified water so indistinguishable from ordinary rain that no one (except us) notices it at all...

...While the infant Superman is being evacuated from the planet Krypton and growing up on earth, the film is engaging...

...This view of the war, Lewy feels, "has contributed significantly to the impairment of national pride and self-confidence that has beset this country since the fall of Vietnam...

...Guenther Lewy, a distinguished professor at the University of Massachusetts and author of The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, makes clear his position: "The American attempt to prevent a Communist domination [of Vietnam] . . . was not without moral justification...

...The common plaint of college presidents when they gather is that they can't really do anything on their campuses...

...Collective bargaining becomes the alternative to collective vision...

...He has to live in a world where an individual can make a difference--a world where a s.uper cop-on-the-beat could actually cope with the crime problem...

...This is a great premise for a comic book, where the whole idea is for the characters not to change from one issue to another and for the adventures to occur in unconnected installments...

...The import of this new insidiousness which the invasion has in Kaufman's film would seem to be that it is not really an invasion, but a part of the natural evolution of things...

...Finally, in the modern era of participatory decision-making, the important university committees will have new students every six months, new faculty every year, and even presidents only last an average of four and a half years...

...He did this with the Musketeer films a few years ago, and I don't doubt that he has the sequel to Superman in the can already, too, compiled from the out-takes of Superman, itself...

...Barry's career has built up to Superman the way a piece of theme music builds up to a cymbal clash...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Later we will see whole gangs of trooping feet that suggest the uniformity and anonymity of the pod people...

...Salkind began with Mario Puzo, and then fired successively more talented people as he went along...

...But at the same time, making the station an abandoned ruin where it would be possible for Luthor to live suggests that he does so sometime in the future--probably, as in the rest of Superman, the very near future...

...In my judgment Lewy has not demonstrated the accuracy of his contention and.has in fact turned up abundant new material to prove the opposite...

...What is needed is not faculty unionization as much as stable participation by duly authorized faculty in the basic decision structures of the university...

...While three producers and two designers get their pictures in the overpriced program sold at Superman, none of the writers does, which gives you some idea of what priority plot, character and the other details supplied by writers got in the making of this film...

...He puts it this way: "It is the reasoned conclusion of this study . . . that the sense of guilt created by the Vietnam War in the minds of many Americans is not warranted and that the charges of officially condoned [the emphasis is Lewy's] illegal and grossly immoral conduct are without substance...

...It is the job ol imagining the world in which the hero lives that often falls to the production designer, especially on a spectacular...

...It's so much more profound to be influenced by old box-office failures than recent successes...

...Surely someone should organize against that state of affairs...

...Should Superman ever decide to send for his relatives, they can all get jobs here in detergent commercials...

...We know it's Grand Central because the marble corridors and lettering painted over the archways are all familiar, and we know it's a ruin because here and there a balustrade is just a row of uneven marble stumps...

...In his very first Hollywood assignment, a Western called The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Kaufman showed the same inventiveness and ability to create atmospheres that he shows in the early sequences here...

...This aspect of the legend the film also takes into account by beginning with the pages of the original DC comic where Superman appeared in 1938...

...Colleges are very low technology affairs (excepting science research) so that the level of tending is often not far above cleaning the chalk boards...

...In their own eyes they seem as powerless as the most oppressed untenured instructor...

...Most of the changes in the new film seem to have been made to bring Invasion into line with this current wisdom...

...It may well have been Barry who thought of setting the scene and tone for Superman with shots of the original comic book...

...In interviews Kaufman prefers to talk about the influence which thefilms noirs of...

...If everybody involved had worked as whimsically as Barry, Superman could have been another Star Wars...

...The hero, Matthew (Donald Sutherland), is a public health officer in San FranCommonweal: 52 cisco instead of a doctor in a small town...

...The implication is that "they" are just part of the same eco-system...

...R ICHARD DONNER, who directed Superman, couldn't even make the movie his own...

...In Jacobsen vs...

...and a general distrust of facts and figures issued by the American Government...

...They therefore like to hire directors with as little imagination as possible, a qualification Donner proved he had as director of The Omen...

...This difference is striking because the new film otherwise follows the plot of the old closely...

...The three marks of an anarchy are: the institution lacks any clear definition of ends...

...This allows us to feel better about being on the planet earth ourselves...

...On the one hand, Superman is science fiction, an aspect of his legend to which the movie pays special attention by telling the story of his escape from the planet Krypton...

...They're here...

...It, too, succeeded by making the seams between natural and supernatural invisible, and by ultimately making familiar pain, like a hypodermic injection, more awful than the otherness of "them...

...University officials protested that Columbia had never promised so grand a result...

...As such, Krypton looks as if it were a civilization more advanced than ours, yet also more primeval--an ultra-technology in the midst of an Ice Age...

...Certainly in other places, where the responsibility was clearly his, the movie shows him to have been astute about Superman's Janus character as both future and past...

...Lewy is very troubled about the "national trauma" left by Vietnam and what he feels is a "major credibility gap...

...Shrinking finances force choices--one falls back on the bottom line...

...At the same time, a balance is needed in the whole apparatus (the administration and/or the Board) to guard against original sin...

...the '40s have had on him...

...Lewy claims that "the picCommonweal: 54...

...There is no point in the original at which the alien vegetation, the pods, are mistaken for a plant species native to earth...

...Robert F. Drlnan So where does a meticulous scholar like Lewy finally come out...

...No one asks about the ultimate goals of a plastics plant since it takes so many fixed decisions to keep the technology in operation...

...The problem with these goal statements is that they are so transcendent that no one knows quite what they mean or how they are to be attained...

...And his first couple of outings in his get-up are campy and fun too...

...But a movie should be able to transcend such a premise, or at least leap over it at a single bound, and Superman doesn't do this...

...Faculty will prove no more canny than administrators, I am sure, in solving the basic financial straits of higher education, but at least the problem of allocating resources will be addressed by an authoritative voice...

...But by the time he gets around to the finale where he rescues the whole state of California, we couldn't care less...

...Many enterprises are governed by the facts of their technology...

...They present a kind of collective governance for which we tlave no ready models...

...Even then he knew...

...Barry has conceived of the hideout, a sort of elaborate bunker like Hitler's, as being built in ruins of the lower level of Grand Central Station...

...To many readers this thesis will sound preposterous...

...As long as presidents had ample funds to allocate they could permit institutions to ride off in all directions at the same time...

...In some more enlightened age one could hope that more of society's institutions would move toward collective governance in which "workers" will participate in "management...

...Even a break in the windshield of Matthew's car, which forces us to look at the world through a network of cracks, reminds us of the root systems we saw the pods putting out in their flower stage...

...The ends for higher education are among the loftiest conjured by the mind of man...

...The trickiness of bringing Superman to the screen was that its materi',d is at the same time both futuristic and old-fashioned...

...It will not bring that future nearer if we insist that one of the few extant collectively governed institutions adopt the adversarial model of competing social classes...

...But he again has a girlfriend, Elizabeth (Brooke Adams), who is his ally against the invasion, and who falls fatally asleep in the end like the original heroine...

...It needs no deep draught of cynicism to confirm that characterization of almost all colleges and universities...

...Our hero (Christopher Reeve) is really just a super cop-on-thebeat, foiling a robbery one minute, rescuing somebody from an accident the next, etc...

...The scene is very reminiscent of one in a recent film called Soylent Green where Charlton Heston discovers at a similar factory that the processed food everyone eats is made from human corpses...

...It is Barry's piece de resistance in this movie...

...but in the new movie, the invasion begins with the appearance of a beautiful parasitic flower which people innocently pick to wear in their hair or put in bud vases...

...Books: TRIAL BY SECRET DOCUMENT T HIS is the first serious book to raise the question that haunts both the doves and the hawks on Vietnam: how could America have so misconceived the realities involved in the one war which America has lost...

...1 would suggest that both presidents and professors are equally and mutually tyrannized by the anarchic character of the university...

...In sum: no one in particular seems to be deciding what imprecise tools should be used to approach unknown goals...

...The title is really a misnomer since what "they" snatch, always while you sleep, is your mind rather than your body...

...This outmoded landmark of an outmoded city is the perfect place for Luthor, himself an outmoded type of villain, to live...

...Since the director, writers and actors make little contribution to Superman, all that's left is the productiun...

...But the background objective which Professor Lewy sets forth deserves our attention first...

...They" supply the body, a duplicate of your own which, in both movies, pops out of the pod as if it were one of those self-inflating rubber dinghies filling with air...

...This is why the invasion blends so imperceptibly with conditions on earth...

...This makes us mindful that we benefit Superman as much as he benefits us...

...This is what the sci fi we see today more typically proposes: that we are doomed to be the victims not of some invader from outer space, but of ourselves...

...Even the episodes are largely the same in the new film, as when Matthew and Elizabeth are besieged in their car by some lunatic yelling, "They're here...

...He has some hope that a "searching and disinterested study" can change this state of things...

...Barry is the one collaborator on the film who managed to figure out how to deal with this...

...The result is that, as a story, Superman goes nowhere...

...I Screen CLONING AROUND INVASION OF SUPERMAN I N THE original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel in 1956, there is a clear distinction between Them and Us...

...One of these places is in his set for the planet Krypton, which he imagines to be a colossal snowball hurtling through space...

...He notes that for countless Americans "the Vietnam War represents not only a political mistake and national defeat, but also a major moral failure...

...The way Barry envisions Krypton, we can only suppose that coming to earth is a heart-warming experience for Superman...

...However aimless Superman may be in other ways, as a production it is worth watching because of the talents of its designer, John Barry...

...In an absolutely sober argument, Michael Cohen and James March have argued that colleges cannot be regarded as being managed at all...

...The anarchic state of the universities is of relatively recent date, but what has brought matters to the point of collective bargaining is the financial crunch...

...There were so many, they had to split infinitives between them...

...But Kaufman has picked up a few tricks from the sci fi made since the "50s, too...

...The faculty are probably correct in feeling "powerless," but the proper understanding of that sense of frustration is not assisted by reconstructing the university on the labor/ management model offered by NLRB...

...The ultra-violet light Matthew uses to inspect a fancy restaurant's kitchen, looking for virulent foreign cultures, eerily anticipates a similar light given off by one of the fleurs du real Elizabeth picks...

...The best part of Invasion is in early scenes where Kaufman establishes this...

...They are "organized anarchies...

...Also adding to the divisiveness on Superman was the endless division of labor among the writers, each of whom left after a wrangle...

...Colleges and universities are not properly labor/ management institutions...

...ANEBICA IN YlETNAN Guenther Lewy Oxford University Press, $19.95 [540 pp...

...The conclusion is that they must be "tyrannized" by somebody, e.g., the administration...