Month: October 2022

  • The Dark Angel (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) As far as big fat melodramatic weepers go, The Dark Angel is quite an example of the form. Featuring Fredric March (great!), Merle Oberon (disappointing) and Herbert Marshall (bland) in a romantic triangle fated by World War I, it has the female lead trying to romantically decide between two mutual friends, a choice initially simplified by the disappearance of one of them during the war, then complicated by his return as a blind man. Well-executed, it’s about as slick as MGM costume dramas of the mid-1930s ever got: Director Sidney A. Franklin directs everything as a high-end stage play and never spares a musical chord to tell audiences when to weep openly. Modern tolerances for this material will vary widely, from unabashed sentimentalism to a prolonged bore.

  • The Unauthorized Full House Story (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) Form versus function is an interesting question, especially when from prevents function—such as in The Unauthorized Full House Story. There are, at a minimum, three good reasons why this is a film that cannot satisfactorily reach its goals: It’s unauthorized, it’s low-budget, and it’s meant for broadcast to a family audience. All three of these constraints keep the film from reaching its potential in telling us about the story of the Full House TV series. The most familiar and least interesting of those is the low budget of a made-for-TV film: of course, the actors aren’t the best (the ones playing Coulier and Stamos only sort of resemble their subjects, although the hair does a lot of heavy lifting), and, of course, the production values are low—meaning reused sets and empty staging. This being said, this low-budget stage-bound film has the advantage of portraying low-budget TV series stage-bound filmmaking—one gets the impression that much of the film’s production values consisted of director Brian K. Roberts pulling the camera further away from the set to show what the camera usually doesn’t, and calling it a day. A more amusing issue is the unauthorized nature of the production: the desire not to infringe on intellectual property explains why the main set of the sitcom is here portrayed flipped right-to-left. Otherwise, the “unauthorized” thing doesn’t really play as big as the neutering required to churn out a family-audience film. One big subplot, for instance, takes a look at the stark contrast between Bob Saget’s foul-mouthed stage persona and his innocuous screen role: But fully exploring this idea would require a much more permissive rating than is the goal of this film: as a result, there’s barely any difference between the two facets of Saget, making this subplot odd even at the best of times. So, yes, The Unauthorized Full House Story is one odd duck, trying to get inside its topic while being held back from fully doing so. It will obviously appeal to fans of the series (or its more recent “Next Generation” revival), but it just may have something interesting for those studying edge cases of production limiting execution.

  • California Suite (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) If you find yourself contemplating California Suite’s showy dialogue, keep in mind that it’s from the pen of Neil Simon, a Broadway playwright who enjoyed crossover Hollywood success from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Simon is clearly in his element in California Suite (for which he got a screenwriting Academy Awards nomination), as he delivers four stories, all taking place at Los Angeles’ fabled Beverly Hills Hotel over Oscars weekend. An actress and her gay husband are visitors from London, dealing ungracefully with the stress of being an awards nominee; two Chicago couples are lively and disaster-prone; a businessman from Philadelphia has to deal with a prostitute in his bed even as his wife suddenly arrives at the hotel; and finally, a visitor from New York turns out to be a workaholic writer bickering with her screenwriting ex-husband about the fate of their daughter. The dialogue (especially between the divorced couple) is showy, but very competent and almost always enjoyable to listen. It helps that a surprisingly good ensemble of actors in on hand to do it justice: Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, Walter Matthau, Maggie Smith, Alan Alda, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Elaine May… and others. The film takes liberties with the source material, intertwining some (but not all) of the stories, taking them well outside the titular hotel suite, and probably playing up the physical comedy of the Chicago segment (with Cosby and Pryor, was there any other choice?)  It works rather well, and fans of Academy Awards trivia will be delighted to find out that Maggie Smith eventually won an Oscar for her portrayal of an actress that doesn’t win an Oscar. Call that one last laugh from a smarter-than-average comedy.

  • A Free Soul (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) There’s a clear Pre-Code deliciousness to the thrilling narrative of A Free Soul that makes it a worthwhile watch, but I suspect that most modern viewers will be more interested in the performances of John Barrymoore and a very young Clark Gable. Barrymore plays an alcoholic defence lawyer who successfully acquits a known mobster (Gable), a success that turns sour when his daughter gets a big crush on the ne’er-do-well despite being already engaged to a law-abiding but dull young man. The melodrama escalates from there, with bits and moments clearly identifying this as a looser, funnier, riskier Pre-Code film. Barrymore got an Academy Award for his performance, while Gable’s roguish charm as the film’s antagonist got him some attention and much bigger roles. Norma Shearer also does rather well as the true protagonist of the film. While A Free Soul is far from being the end-all of Pre-Code films (the pacing issues alone are bothersome), it’s one more example of how vivacious early-1930s Hollywood could be, and why many still think highly of this period of American cinema.

  • Tous les dieux du ciel [All the Gods in the Sky] (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) If you enjoy movies that go violently off the rails during their third act, then—oh boy—have I got something for you: Tous les dieux du ciel, which often seems to go full bore into New French Extremity territory before turning completely bonkers in an overextended coda. Much of the story revolves around a rural brother-sister pair, the sister having been severely handicapped following a firearm accident he caused when they were young. Director Quarxx delights in presenting the uncomfortable as bluntly as possible, a strategy that depends and benefits from an actress (Melanie Gaydos) with a non-traditional body type. But it goes much, much further—the farm on which most of the action takes place is somewhere where anything could happen: delusions, murder or extraterrestrial abduction. It’s all quite creepy, and it gets worse, as the brother seems to be cracking up when authorities start asking questions about what’s going on. It’s weird enough, but there’s a feeling that this is going somewhere… until the crazy stuff really amps up and results not in a climax, but in an entire drawn-out third act that doesn’t have much to say beyond a manufactured reversal of fortunes. Far from ending on a high note, Tous les dieux du ciel disintegrates for a full fifteen minutes before mercifully ending, leaving a film that felt far worse than if it had just stopped minutes before. And that’s not even considering the gratuitous esoterism of the finale, leaving behind the concrete horrors of the film for… something else. It’s not a success, but others will judge by themselves if it’s a failure.

  • Montreal Dead End (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) It’s hard not to like at least the concept of Montreal Dead End—a horror anthology film where different filmmakers pick a neighbourhood of the city as setting for their (very) short films, with an overall wrapping device to make it cohere more than the usual despite 15 different films from 18 directors. It’s low-budget filmmaking, but with modern equipment—meaning that some of the drone-filmed establishing shots are often gorgeous and seem to belong in a much more expensive production. Alas, the low-budget is more often seen in the lack of narrative polish, the sometimes rushed staging, the dodgy special effects, and the varying levels of interest (or tone) in the results. This is a film that can jump from parallel-universe eeriness to zombie romantic comedy to creepy kids to body-switching farce to urban fantasy without skipping a beat, so it’s best to get rid of any assumptions coming in. As a frequent visitor to Montréal, I rather liked it—the personality of the neighbourhoods came through clearly, and the filmmakers did what they could with the means at their disposals. I do have a specific fondness for the Beaubien, Marche Atwater and Vieux Montréal segments, but that may just be me. In any case, the film is freely available online if you’re curious about it.

  • The Phenix City Story (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) While The Phenix City Story often gets lumped, with some justification, in the big film noir category, it’s aiming in a slightly different direction than many of its contemporaries. Inspired by a real story, it’s about wide-scale corruption, both in terms of a city catering to vice and having a leadership associated with crime. While Phenix City is now a small and sleepy town of roughly 39,000, it was known as a den of perdition in the 1940s and 1950s—its proximity to Columbus across state lines, and Fort Benning to the south really not helping. The film often takes a quasi-documentary, quasi-moralistic tone in pushing its story forward, and greatly benefits from on-location shooting at a time when crime was a pervasive problem. It’s all the more amazing that the film openly discusses the corruption of the local government, an organized problem so severe that not all the characters survive to the end. As such, director Phil Karlson’s style approaching fact-based cinema-verité doesn’t always make it a prototypical noir: There is no strong central female character, for instance, and the cruel nature of the historical events described here defied a tidy resolution. (Which didn’t stop Hollywood filmmakers, as they imposed a closure on the film that never happened in reality.)  But what it may lack in genre drama, The Phenix Story makes up in almost documenting a social issue. Some versions of the film (such as the one shown on TCM’s Noir Alley) begin with an impassioned address to the viewers telling them that what they’re about to see is real and dangerous. Using real locations (and local actors) gives an atmosphere that the film would have never matched had it been shot entirely on soundstages. It also allows it more freedom to show things that weren’t all that common in studio films at the time, cutting across depictions of race and violence in a much blunter way. The result may not be purely likable, but it’s interesting and stretches the definition of film noir.

  • The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) Good casting can make a trifle of a film enjoyable for ages, and that’s the point of The Bride Came C.O.D.: A fun but hardly ambitious romantic comedy elevated by having James Cagney and Bette Davis have some fun for a change. In the lagging tradition of 1930s screwball comedies (the influence of It Happened One Night is obvious), here we have an heiress (Davis) being kidnapped by a rogue pilot (Cagney) on the orders of her father, who wants to prevent her from marrying an unsuitable prospect. The inevitable eventually happens, and the rest is a foregone conclusion—but the fun here is seeing Davis and Cagney bicker all the way to a happy ending. This being said, there’s a limit to what casting can go to shore up a lacklustre script, and if The Bride Came C.O.D. is watchable enough, there’s a sense that it misses a few opportunities along the way, even when it portrays semi-crazy rich people and daredevil flyers from the heroic age of aviation. In a pattern that would repeat throughout film history, this easy audience-pleaser was tepidly met by reviewers yet went on to do good box-office business, and even today it’s obvious why.

  • Sometimes a Great Notion (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) Sometimes a great scene sneaks into an otherwise humdrum movie, and you won’t find many better cases of this than Sometimes a Great Notion. This rough-and-tough drama about a union-busting logging family is a generally middle-of-the-road affair for most of its running time. Paul Newman (who also directs) and Henry Fonda occasionally raise the level of the production through their charm, along with credible cinematography to portray the reality of circa-1970 logging in the Pacific Northwest. (I was reminded of Howard Hawks’s Come and Get it.)  Adapted from a novel by Ken Kesey, the story is often episodic—the lives and loves of a tight-knit family up against the work. I still can’t square how Newman and Fonda, both of them known for left-leaning politics, would go along with anti-union protagonists, but never mind—the showcase sequence in the film is a nightmarish drawn-out death sequence that is engineered to make you believe that it will end well in extremis, but merely prolongs the agony of a character stuck in a horrifyingly deadly predicament. The scene doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the film, but it’s easily the one reason (along with another earlier sequence showing the lumberjacks at work) that the film is worth a watch… if you can handle the intensity of the material. Otherwise, the film often finds refuge in facile “rugged heroes against incompetent enemies” shtick, with the film’s last moments being a crude and macabre illustration of that credo. Classic Hollywood fans will appreciate two late-career turns for Fonda and Lee Remick, even if the rest of the film is pure audience-alienating New Hollywood. I’m not that impressed by Sometimes a Great Notion, but it’s not often that I watch a scene and go” Yeah, this is going to stick in mind longer than I’d want.”

  • Pote tin Kyriaki [Never on Sunday] (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) My preoccupation with movie list-checking is going to get me in trouble, or at least into a comatose state of boredom. Now that I’ve seen the big guns of the film canon, I’m down to lesser-known pockets of cinema and I don’t always like where this takes me. Never on Sunday takes us to Greece during the Cold War, in black-and-white cinematography highlighting the simplicity of the plot. Famed expatriate writer-director Jules Dassin also has a rare leading role here as an American tourist who meets a prostitute—with much of the film describing how they change each other. It’s a romantic comedy, but hold off on the “comedy” here: it’s more joie-de-vivre stuff than outright gags. The film remains notable for being incredibly sympathetic to the female lead played by Melina Mercouri and depicting her not necessarily as a fallen angel, but someone living life on her own terms. There’s some charming stuff here and there, but the age of the film shows, and, unfortunately, it never quite clicked for me. Never on Sunday takes on an added dimension if you’re roughly aware of Dassin’s career at the time—self-exiled from the United States due to the anti-Communist witch-hunts, establishing himself in Europe, where he’d spend the rest of his life. But as for the film itself—I recognize its qualities, but it’s best appreciated by others.

  • Exposé aka Trauma (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) I was intrigued by Exposé’s plot summary, as it announced a writer going to a rural retreat to find inspiration and meet two beautiful women—now that’s my kind of film. Alas, what I had missed is that Exposé is a low-budget exploitation film from the mid-1970s, and as such is truly unpleasant even when it’s not spilling blood and gut on the screen: the dark cinematography creates an atmosphere of foreboding malice, and that’s before the sexual assaults, feverish paranoia and concluding murders. There’s a lot of nudity (considerably more than expected, even for porno-chic-era exploitation), but the film will make you pay dearly for it in a shower of violence and nastiness. Exposé was part of the Video Nasties list of films prosecuted for obscenity in the UK, and while I’m not a fan of censorship, reviewing the list of Exposé’s contemporaries doesn’t reveal a lot of films that I’d rescue for the trash can. (The Evil Dead, Foxy Brown, The Thing, Phantasm, Dawn of the Dead, Suspiria, yes—but the rest is an avalanche of trash.)  But anyway, back to Exposé—the buildup to the final barrage of violence is more gradual and duller than you’d expect: While the film remains an exploitation thriller, it has some pretension at being a psychological thriller. That doesn’t make it better, though—but it does give Udo Kier (in one of his earliest roles) something to do while the special effects technicians prepare the spurting blood. Still, it’s not enough: the characters aren’t likable, the settings are limited to a claustrophobic house and a nearby field where even more terrible things happen, and the point of it all is nowhere to be seen. I’m sure there’s a fun movie to be made about a writer going mad in a secluded house also occupied by two beautiful women. But this isn’t it.

  • Kim Bok-nam salinsageonui jeonmal [Bedevilled] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) South Korean cinema still doesn’t quite make sense to me. I’m not saying this pejoratively—I think it’s great that there’s a strong film industry there, and it has clearly shown that it has the means and the ability to go head-to-head with much of Hollywood. But when I start looking at individual films from a North American perspective, I often notice odds pacing issues, structural problems, character incoherencies and narrative shortcomings—South Korean cinema often looks good, but with vexing issues underneath. Take Bedevilled, for instance, which is apparently about a detestable young woman heading to an isolated island where she grew up, and encountering various horrors over there. When the action gets cracking, she’s not even the protagonist of the story: another woman, her old childhood friend, cracks up under the constant abuse she gets from others on the island and goes on a gory murderous spree. Once that’s resolved, the story goes back to our initial protagonist to (unconvincingly) show us her personal growth from the ordeal. Bedevilled, it should be noted, is an out-and-out horror film, and South Koreans don’t mess around when it comes to blood sprays and aberrant psychopathy—as such, I’m not on firm ground in talking about a national cinema based on my problems with a single genre. (Although I’ll note that Bedevilled collected two armfuls of awards, both in South Korea and overseas, so it can’t be that off brand.) But still: there’s an awkwardness to storytelling here that I find curious and can’t quite pin on cultural factors. Director Jang Cheol-soo creates maybe half of the effect I was expecting in his depiction of an isolated island filled with dysfunctional people, and the script doesn’t dig into the areas I would have found most interesting. Everything seems geared to prepare and react to the sudden burst of violence that wipes an island’s population off the map, and I’m not sure I’ve got the patience for such nihilism anymore. Of course, there’s a difference between Bedevilled-the-film-from-a-decade-ago and a larger report on contemporary South Korean cinema, but this isn’t the first time I’m noticing something weird, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

  • Scarecrow (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) The 1973 Scarecrow is probably the only scarecrow-titled film in the history of cinema that’s not actually a horror film. What it is, instead, is a grimy downbeat New Hollywood drama featuring no less than Al Pacino and Gene Hackman when they were the toast of the town as hungry, angry young(er) actors blowing people away with their performances. Scarecrow was filmed soon after Academy Awards nominations for both of them, and so expectations ran high then and maybe even now. (They didn’t get along, though, as the film’s production history tells us that the two actors clashed on their approaches despite admiring and respecting each other.)  For twenty-first century viewers, Scarecrow is less an acting showcase than yet another one of those endless New Hollywood dramas. We follow our two protagonists’ hitch-hiking odyssey throughout the western United States, going from roads to prison to bars along the way. It’s not means to be entertaining or uplifting—one character gets severe brain damage from a beating along the way, and their self-destructiveness remains a constant overt theme throughout. In the end, those who like that kind of stuff will like that kind of stuff—but Scarecrow, perhaps even more so than many of its better-known contemporaries, best exemplifies what I dislike about the New Hollywood era: going overboard on post-Production Code permissiveness and disdain for the audience, no longer caring about narrative or resolution. So, no, Scarecrow is not a horror film—but it’s just as depressing.

  • Week End (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) I don’t have a charitable soul, so I won’t blunt it: Writer-director Jean-Luc Godard went insane during the 1960s, becoming increasingly political, eccentric, experimental and hermetic. None of those things are necessarily bad, but taken together, they made him unable to turn in a conventional film that got to the point in a way that others could follow. He wasn’t completely crazy by 1967, so Week End still contains a few striking moments of cinema—most notably a very, very, very long travelling shot depicting characters moving alongside a prodigious traffic jam on a rural road, the punchline being an incredibly gory car accident causing the holdup. That kicker carries to the rest of the film, which becomes increasingly graphic and unpleasant le longer it goes on, the unacceptability threshold crossed with the on-camera slaughter on an animal in the third act. No longer interested in doing anything but lambaste the film, I’ll point out that while 1967 Godard could still put together a scene, he was no longer able to tell a story: the film posits a background of social decay leading to widespread violence and anarchy. Within that framework, though? An ill-defined couple drives around and gets murdered, the end. There’s rape, immolation and cannibalism as well. There is dark humour (in the surrealist tradition) throughout the film, as well as an intentional interest in breaking down the barriers of narrative cinema—for instance in showing actors preparing for a shot and getting out-of-character once the director yells cut. But the only interpretation of the film that makes sense to me is that this is the film that documents Godard’s cinematic breakdown, his smarter-than-thou lassitude with the mechanics of filmmaking becoming outright hostility for his audience. Self-indulgence doesn’t even begin to explain what he’s up to here, simply throwing stuff up on the screen because he can, not because it makes sense. By the end of Week End, I’m not amused or charmed at the tweaking of cinema convention—I’m furious that an animal was killed for it, that the film revels in pointless violence and that a jester’s funny instincts are presented in such an incoherent fashion. If Week End had been the last of Godard’s movies, there would be an extra oomph to it—but no, not only did he spend another decade throwing up increasingly hermetic political screeds, but he would then return to commercial filmmaking, perhaps as a retirement fund. One thing remains obvious: Godard was one crazy coocoo, and he certainly wasn’t punk enough to stand by his rebellion.

  • Agatha (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) As a number of commentators have noted, the mystery of Agatha Christie’s eleven-day disappearance isn’t much of a mystery. After being told of her philandering husband’s intention to divorce her, she (to use a technical term) freaked out, crashed her car as a possible suicide attempt, found refuge at a hotel designed for relaxation, lived as someone else for a few days, mulled over her marriage and, when she was inevitably discovered, was so embarrassed by the whole thing that she pretexted a convenient bout of amnesia. While unusual, this sequence of events is not that extraordinary for a woman with her means and social standing. What ludicrous thriller Agatha does, however, is not merely tell that story—it imagines Christie (Vanessa Redgrave, quite good) plotting revenge to kill her husband’s lover, investigating the hotel’s electrical equipment and hydrotherapy tools to concoct a perfect murder. Fortunately, there’s an American (Dustin Hoffman?!?) to tempt her with an affair of her own and prevent her from going from writer to murderess. The historical re-creation is convincing and Redgrave makes for a dignified Christie, but I’m tempted to side with the Christie estate when they claim that the film was character assassination. I’m really not sure about what Hoffman is doing there, either for him as an actor or his character in general. In rushing to make Christie a would-be murderess, director Michael Apted seems unable to capture a more subtle story of betrayal and defiance—I’m almost certain that a modern take, possibly from a female writer and director, would have been far more interesting without necessarily cranking the dial all the way up to genre thriller. I mean: there’s enough of a story there to tell without inventing things out of pure pulp speculation.