60 Minutes on: Christopher Reeve as Superman | MZS

First among equals is Christopher Reeve as Superman/Clark Kent, mainly a stage and TV actor when he was originally cast. He beat out countless established stars and delivered the most iconic debut male lead performance since Peter O'Toole in "Lawrence of Arabia.” As Clark Kent and Superman—respectively, a square and a super-square—he held his own with actors who were known, often beloved quantities.

A through-line of unaffected goodness connects Superman's biological parents, Superman's adoptive parents, and Superman himself. Reeve understood that Superman wasn't just a character or a corporate property, he was an idea. And he played the idea in every scene, while still giving you a sense of Superman and Clark Kent as individuals (or the latter as a tamped-down, powerless version of the former). This is a super-being who could've been evil, and would've have easily ruled the world had he been evil.

But he was raised to be good, in honor of his deeply implanted memories of his lost home planet, Krypton; his posthumous nurturing by his birth mother and father, whose lessons he ingested in the form of recordings en route to Earth; and the Kents, who gave Superman/Clark models of ground-level decency to emulate. Once Superman leaves the nest, he continues to choose to be good, honoring both sets of parents. (Ford's "You are here for a reason," followed by his sad/disappointed "Oh, no" as he feels his pulse, is one of the greatest and least-appreciated line readings of that decade: the essence of a man packed into just two words, along with crushing disappointment at the realization that he won't see anything more.) This Superman is a man on a mission to be America's (fantasy) vision of itself; or, perhaps more accurately, the incarnation of its best self; or the ideal it strives toward but rarely achieves. 

I used to think of Reeve's Superman as a man with no emotional interior. But watching it again recently I was embarrassed to realize how wrong I was. Quite the contrary: Reeve's Superman performance is filled with hints that this is a man who knows himself well, such as the way he smiles with amusement and admiration as he looks at and listens to Lois on her terrace, and the moment at the end of that extraordinary sequence ("Can You Read My Mind?") when he flies off into the night, and the camera slowly moves screen left to catch Clark knocking on Lois' door, "embarrassed" about having to ask if she forgot about the date she agreed to have with him that night. Superman doesn't love Lois because he wants to save her. He loves Lois because she doesn't expect anyone to save her, and because she tries to be as good at her job as Superman is at his. Her love for him is evolved lust plus admiration. His love for her comes out of respect. 

Reeve's Superman exerts great discipline to continue to be a person who inspires, and bases his attitude towards others on how hard they are trying to treat everyone else, especially strangers, as if their lives matter. He has might what we might call a "Jesus gaze": he forgives them, for they know not what they do. He's as nice and kind as a super-powered person can be. 

Chris Evans' Captain America, Chadwick Boseman's Black Panther, and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman are the only modern superheroes who get close to the Reeve vibe. They give performances as people who are serene and confident in their goodness. They seem to know that if you can play that kind of energy without winking at the audience to signal that you're not actually square, it'll be as arresting as any villain's scenery-chewing.