Author: Christian Sauvé

  • The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

    The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) Some movies just can’t quite reach their potential, even when that potential is modest. Considering that The Ultimate Warrior is a dystopian 1970s thriller featuring Yul Brynner as the titular character and Max von Sydow as the leader of a band in post-apocalyptic Manhattan, you could at least expect something. The Ultimate Warrior came after the high-energy first wave of blaxploitation movies where action started being shot relatively well, even the idea of a modest exploitation thriller promises a lot more than what this film is able to offer. Seemingly shot on a mixture of a dirtied backlot and dusty subway interiors, the film is a chore to watch—uninteresting, trite and meaningless. Writer-director Robert Clouse (who did direct action landmark Enter the Dragon!) can’t get much out of the normally solid Brynner with his threadbare plot and indifferent direction. The Ultimate Warrior was somehow selected by the Criterion Streaming folks as representative of dystopian 1970s Science Fiction, but absolutely not essential.

  • Blade of Grass (1971)

    Blade of Grass (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) I have a budding thesis that Hollywood SF grew up roughly at the same time as American civilization became aware of its mortality. It’s probably nonsense, but movies like Blade of Grass almost make the case for me (even if it’s a British movie)—as environmentalism became mainstream thanks to a string of horrifying events like Love Canal and, oh, rivers catching on fire, you also had movies considering the possibility of dystopian environmental collapse. Films like Blade of Grass go all-out on the catastrophe, to the point where humans are fated to extinction on a planet without any living plants left. The narrative has a band of survivors making their way from London to a possibly mythical farm out in the northern part of the country. Multiple deadly events occur before the ending, in an all-dancing parade of downbeat plotting, violence and humans being terrible to each other. This is clearly not fun viewing for the entire family, and my opening thesis may have been born out of sheer desperation in trying to escape the nightmarish world of the film. Still, there may be something to it—the post-WW2 years were characterized by the adult themes of noir, war movies emerged from the Vietnam defeat with a far more war-is-hell attitude, and while the 1970s saw SF become more than a genre for kids right about the time that prophecies of doom became commonplace thanks to the environmentalism espoused by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the gloomy overpopulation predictions of the Club of Rome (1968). Doesn’t it also hold true for people as well? Maybe you grow up when you realize that you’re going to die.

  • Rollerball (1975)

    Rollerball (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) For viewers like me, raised on the notion that Rollerball was just this dumb dystopian movie about some fantasy sports, actually watching the film is in order. Not the remake: The original one, with James Caan somehow playing an elite world-famous athlete. Because there’s a lot more in the margins of the film than you’d ever expect: Darkly funny, perceptive stuff that adds so much depth to it that you’ll regret ever thinking it was a silly film. (But that’s OK: You can blame the remake.) With chameleonic director Norman Jewison at the helm, how could it be silly? Jewison has done many movies, and if some of them weren’t as good as others, none were stupid. So it is that Rollerball, beyond the brutal roller-skate sport, quickly starts sketching the bread-and-game nature of the event in a society dedicated to social control. The film draws a merciless portrait of the rich (down to them burning down a tree for fun) and of information control—one of the best throwaway lines has an entire century having been accidentally deleted from the computer memory banks now holding all knowledge. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily want to portray Rollerball as this underrated classic—it’s got more depth than you may expect from the marketing, but it’s no masterpiece of dystopia. Even the more generous commentators won’t be too sure whether the added material is just fluff around the Rollerball raison d’être of the movie, or if the Rollerball is the hook to talk about the then-fashionable idea of a dystopian future. But I was surprised—I wasn’t expecting much, and got something somewhat better than expected. The final tally is a Science Fiction film of the mid-1970s that’s not quite as depressing or childish as many of its contemporaries. That’s already not too bad—see it with Soylent Green for a change of pace.

    (Second viewing, Criterion Streaming, June 2020) I’m not sure why I returned to Rollerball after only a few months, but here we are, and the film does hold up to a fresh revisit. Much of it isn’t as satirical as it must have been intended at the time: corporate anthems and violent manufactured sports are a thing of reality, and it’s enough to make anyone wonder why we’re not seeing as many science fiction films actually attempting to anticipate a future (either as satire or realism) these days. What is worth a look is the film’s pre-Star Wars approach to SF in a 1970s context: The OCR computer font is a dead giveaway, but so are the social issues tackled here. It’s also not shy at all about its social themes—they’re explicitly discussed in the film by the characters themselves, and reinforced by the decadent aristocracy changing the rules on whims advantaging them. The blend of such commentary with action sequences is the film’s notable trait (and Jewison’s direction certainly changes during the rollerball scenes), although it may weaken the film is other ways, the flash outshining the substance. Rollerball could have been better, but it’s still surprisingly good.

  • Kes (1969)

    Kes (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) Ugh, the curse of being a cinema completist. It means watching widely acclaimed films, such as this perennial mention in longer “best of all time” lists that completely fails at creating empathy, interest, entertainment or affection. That’s Kes for you—a neorealist examination of a poor young boy and his pet bird of prey. Coming from writer-director Ken Loach in the very late “kitchen sink” realism period of British film, it’s about as grimy, miserable and unromanticized as one can expect. Its saving grace (if you have the patience) is some profound social content taking aim at the ways the British lower class was being held down by the system, and everything related to that (but especially the public education system). An uplifting story about a boy and his pet this is most emphatically not—the ending is not meant to comfort you. So is Kes a good movie? Yes! Is it a great one? Probably! Did I want to escape its misery at every moment? For sure!

  • The Allnighter (1987)

    The Allnighter (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2020) I’m about this close to declaring a critical forfeit about The Allnighter, my reasoning being that this is really a movie produced for someone else entirely—female twentysomethings of the mid-1980s… and what do I really know about that? I ogled them at the time, and I suppose that I can still appreciate the big curly hair today. There have been silly movies for teens for decades and there will still be many of them in other decades as well—this just happens to be time-stamped 1987. As such, The Allnighter is a curiously tame “sex comedy” from the point of view of college girls as they go out to have the best night of their lives. There are a few references for celebrity trivia fans: Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs stars in a film directed by her mother, with a young Joan Cusack as a co-lead, and Pam Grier as a police officer in the inglorious phase of her career. It’s all more amiable than funny, and I think that this is one of those films enhanced by time rather than damaged by it: It’s a bubble-headed comedy, but it now has the atmosphere, colour and fashions of the 1980s going for it. The Allnighter is not essential viewing by any means, but not that objectionable either.

  • Sea of Love (1989)

    Sea of Love (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Prime-era Al Pacino is always a treat, and seeing him at work in a neo-noir thriller like Sea of Love is even better. It was a significant film in his career: the first after a four-year hiatus following a significant box-office bomb, it also set the stage for the grander-than-life hoo-ha Pacino streak that was further developed in his next few movies, lasted for the next ten-fifteen years and is still what we think about when we think about Pacino. As far as narrative goes, Sea of Love is simple, nearly archetypical stuff, what with Pacino playing a cop tracking down a serial killer preying on men posting Lonely Hearts classified ads, and then falling for the primary suspect. Violence and lust, with a bit of an unexpected ending to shake things up. Pacino’s quite good here—not quite as intense as later movies, and slightly forlorn around the edges by looking for love in all the wrong places. Ellen Barkin is surprisingly attractive here—and even looks like Helen Hunt at times. John Goodman is not bad in a supporting role, and there are a few more known names in the roster. While I’ll maintain that the 1990s were a golden age of sorts for mid-scale thrillers, you can see Sea of Love pointing the way, and bridging the gap between the 1980s neo-noir movement (plus the reactionary “killer women” streak of the late 1980s) and the later surge of suspense films. Sea of Love is not the best at anything, but it’s certainly watchable without effort, and as I said—Pacino plus neo-noir is a great mixture.

  • Without Love (1945)

    Without Love (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) While Without Love may not be Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s finest comedy, it’s not without its share of high points. As a story of two bachelors who marry out of convenience and patriotic duty then truly begin to fall in love, this is not exactly the sharpest premise in the book. But all is in the details, and the pleasantness is largely to be found in small moments, lines of dialogue and seeing both Hepburn and Tracy play off each other. (One very funny scene has Hepburn sneezing in a diver’s helmet.) The setting is hopelessly dated in many ways: much of the plotting is propelled by World War II concerns, something the film inherits from its theatrical origins. For science nerds and theatre geeks in the audience, the film does throw in a few jokes about distracted scientists (which Tracy’s character is), and pre-famous Lucille Ball does show up in an early supporting role. Anyone who champions Hepburn as a sex-symbol should watch Without Love if only for the brief scene in which she turns up with loose curly hair. As for everyone else: the film is fun, funny and ping-pongs between characters who think they’re too intellectual to fall in love, then spend much of the film trying to deny it’s happening. The very abrupt ending is a bit of a surprise—it ends well, but an additional scene may not have hurt. On the other hand, that’s how they often wrapped things up back then—cut to the trailers, and on to the next short comedy.

  • Robin and Marian (1976)

    Robin and Marian (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) There is a strong streak of melancholy running through Robin and Marian, a story about the last days of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. A romantic drama blended with a bit of medieval thrills, it’s a film about heroic icons aging into legend—he is back from a punishing crusade; she is now a nun. It’s also, perhaps more significantly for film buffs, a strange and intriguing paring between two screen legends: Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn (in her first film in nine years). Connery looks like himself with the graying beard, but there’s something truly uncanny in seeing Hepburn with curly hair (and I say this as someone who usually finds nothing wrong at all with curly hair). But none of it is as surprising as a tragic climax that ties in merciful death for nearly everyone—this is meant as romantic tragedy, capping one last passionate moment between two characters that never made it work. As such, it does feel like the kind of film that could only be made in the New Hollywood era—a film that takes a chainsaw to a myth with one final tragic story. I didn’t like Robin and Marian all that much—but I have to admire its audacity.

  • Tom Sawyer (1973)

    Tom Sawyer (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) There’s a straight correlation between the crash of the movie musical in the 1970s and that decade’s insistence in adapting known properties as downbeat musicals. This being said, I’m not sure that Tom Sawyer is worth my usual eyerolls and criticism of 1970s musicals—in adapting the classic Mark Twain novel as a musical comedy largely shot on location, it avoids becoming an overly reverent stuffy take on the source material, and keeps its tone as a pleasantly mild comedy. It’s not that distinguished, but it’s not terrible either and things could get much, much worse in 1970s musicals. Amusingly produced by none other than Reader’s Digest magazine, the film hops from one episode to another in adapting the novel, and strings along the upbeat songs to go with the narrative. Jodie Foster shows up in one of her earliest roles. This version of Tom Sawyer is not something that you’ll remember for a long time, but it’s still an interesting take on one of the most sacred novels in American literature.

  • The Arrival (1996)

    The Arrival (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On TV, January 2020) A perennial fixture on “underrated science fiction films of the 1990s” lists, The Arrival is still quite good a quarter of a century later. Charlie Sheen, yes, plays a goateed astrophysicist, double yes, who stumbles into a grand conspiracy after catching a radio signal from outer space… and then another one from Earth. It’s handled as a paranoid thriller, but with some real invention to it, and it features good set pieces, whether intellectual (building a listening network out of consumer satellite dishes) or action-driven (collapsing radio telescope!) I’m also quite fond of the opening shot and how it ties into the ultimate plot, which has aliens deliberately causing global warming in order to terraform Earth for their purposes—a little hook that seems even more interesting as of 2020. It’s all executed with slick competent assurance, with what now feels like a patina of mid-1990s era technology and filmmaking techniques. One day, we’ll need to figure out why writer-director David Twohy never became a more popular or prolific filmmaker. The first half of The Arrival, dominated by SF elements, is more intellectually interesting than the more conventional thriller-dominated second half — but the entire film still plays very well today. I first saw it when it was freshly out on video, but I’m very happy with a belated second viewing: it’s about as good as I remembered it.

  • Naughty Marietta (1935)

    Naughty Marietta (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) While largely forgotten today, Jeanette MacDonald was a major musical star in the 1930s, and she made no less than eight films with co-star Nelson Eddy, the most memorable of those (for all sorts of bad reasons) being Rose-Marie. But their collaboration began with Naughty Marietta, a competent musical that sees her play a French princess fleeing an arranged marriage and trying to begin anew in New Orleans, with many adventures prior and during that flight to the United States. MacDonald’s specialty was operetta signing, and this film definitely plays into that strength with a number of musical scenes tailored for her vocal register. It’s all unobjectionable—a lot of music, of mushy French, of frilly costumes and some chemistry between MacDonald and Eddy. Naughty Marietta was a hit at the time (being nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award) and was more recently selected as part of the National Film Registry. But it’s not particularly distinctive or interesting—the better-than-average moments don’t really stand out, and they’re widely spaced between some very conventional material. Still, MacDonald can sing, that’s for sure.

  • Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

    Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I unintentionally built myself a hippies-as-seen-from-1968 double feature while watching I Love You Alice B. Toklas and Coogan’s Bluff back-to-back. My favourite is an easy pick—not only is Coogan’s Bluff far less annoying than the first film in this double bill, but it’s an interesting bridge between Clint Eastwood’s western roles and his Dirty Harry tough-guy persona. The transition from one to the other is nearly literal, as he plays an Arizona rural lawman travelling to Manhattan to extradite a fugitive. The film plays quite a bit with the clash of culture that this implies, with the staid and conservative protagonist confronting Manhattan as a den of crime and perversion, discovering the hippie subculture along the way. But Coogan’s Bluff is not so much a sociological study as a crime thriller, with Eastwood chasing down the escaped fugitive with detectorial savvy and two-fisted vigour. As a portrait of late-1960s New York City, it’s not bad—more clean-cut than the blaxploitation films that would pop up soon afterward, but still evocative at the street level. For Eastwood fans and film historians, Coogan’s Bluff is most notable for being the first collaboration between Eastwood (an actor often quick to tell directors what to do) and director Don Siegel, which would turn out to be the first of five films they would do together. It also definitely feels like a first draft of the kinds of characters that Eastwood would adopt as persona over the following two decades, and exactly the kind of meaner-tougher film that would dominate the 1970s. It still plays rather well now (although watch out for the blunt sexism), and gives viewers a prime-era Eastwood in late-1960s Manhattan.

    (Second viewing, On TV, November 2020) There are two things that I find interesting about Coogan’s Bluff, a contemporary crime thriller featuring Clint Eastwood as a tough Arizona lawman sent to New York City in order to capture a fugitive. The first being that this is a film that combines a very familiar Eastwood character (the laconic western gunslinger) with the late-sixties trend of trying to figure out the new shape of the society that changed during the decade. So it is that we have a typical Eastwood character taken out of westerns in order to figure out what to do with those punks, hippies, city slickers and women abusers. If you’re thinking that Eastwood revisited similar territory later on in later archetypical movies such as Dirty Harry, that brings us to the second interesting thing about Coogan’s bluff: that it was directed by Don Siegel. Siegel, of course, was one of the very few directors that Eastwood ever tolerated well, leading to four subsequent collaborations, including—you guessed it—the 1971 urban thriller exemplar Dirty Harry. There’s a city-mouse-in-the-city quality to Eastwood’s squinty trip to the decadent Big Apple that clearly plays on stereotypes that would grow even stronger in the gritty 1970s, and if Coogan’s Bluff keeps things a bit less dark than many of its imitators, it still plays on what would later become well-known tropes. But perhaps more significantly, it does appear like a crucial turning point for Eastwood, bridging two phases of his career as an actor, literally taking his persona from the Wild West to the Big City.

  • I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

    I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) One of the advantages of watching movies, taking notes, but coming back to edit those notes into a coherent review months (even years!) later is that in that way you get a perspective that just wouldn’t apply for a review written immediately after. So it is that I can tell you with confidence, four years after the fact, that the title song of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is a formidable earworm — I can still hum the chorus despite not having heard it since watching the film. I didn’t say it’s a good song—just a memorable one, and that stands for the film as well. It’s representative of an era, obviously — Peter Sellers (ugh) plays a straight-laced lawyer who ends up discovering the hippie subculture through a free-spirited girl, and that’s how we get a near-documentary take on how America perceived hippies in the late 1960s. It’s sort-of-interesting from an anthropological point of view, but again that doesn’t make it good. While I don’t like Sellers all that much, he’s more tolerable than usual here as the disaffected young man who leaves his staid life behind to explore what the counterculture has to offer. Tellingly, the film has him eventually reject the hippie lifestyle, but not necessarily going back to his own personal conservatism. The comic setpiece of the film is an early variation on the now-cliché “unsuspecting people eat drug-laced brownies” trope — I’m not sure it’s the earliest such scene, but it’s played in such a straight way that it feels like it. But my problem with I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is that, well, it’s that it’s an annoying film. It doesn’t quite glorify hippies (one of the protagonist’s third-act epiphanies is that the free-spirited girl is quite shallow) but it does look at them from a gawking point of view, and the character arc feels very conventional. It probably aged a bit better than it could have had the script been worse, but it has aged, and it has aged worse than other movies at the time that were either more serious or wilder about their approach to the counterculture. But the most annoying thing may be the earworm title song, which pops up far more often than you’d think, driving itself into your brain and becoming more inane every time. It’s annoying, and it transfers its annoyance to the film itself. In the end, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is best recommended to Sellers completists (those poor souls) and anyone curious about contemporary depictions of the hippie movement.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, November 2020) I may have liked Peters Sellers at some point, but that was quickly damaged by his exasperating son-screen showboating, and then extinguished by the two biographies I have read/seen about him. Nearly every movie of his I see now carries the baggage of knowing far too much about him and the rampaging egomaniac that he was. For I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, it doesn’t help that the film has aged poorly and ends on a conclusion fit to frustrate anyone. Sellers here plays a straight-laced Los Angeles lawyer who, inevitably enough, comes to be seduced by the wild, drug-taking, free-loving hippie subculture. Considering the date of the film, that should not be a big surprise—soon he dumps his fiancée at the altar, lets his hair grow long, opens his house to all sorts of groovy people and awaits the epiphany that he’s gone too far. But while the film presents thesis and antithesis, it skips out on the synthesis as it (as a product of its time), opines that the truth is somewhere else and ends at that point, irresponsibly letting his fiancée at the altar for a second time (where, one hopes, she’ll catch her final clue). Sellers once again indulges far too much on the creepy aging lothario angle, although he does keep the funny voices in check for once. While the look at 1960s counterculture can be intriguing, there really isn’t much in the film that feels particularly insightful or new—although comedy historians may note an early example of the “brownies eaten by unsuspecting straight-laced people” trope. It feels equally suffocating both in showing the mainstream and the counterculture, which I suppose is the point but at least could have outlined something else rather than quitting midway through. Plus, well, I don’t like Sellers in either short or long hair, leaving little else to say about the film. The title tune is admittedly catchy, although it remains to be seen whether it’s really catchy or simply drilled into our heads through endless repetition.

  • Idi i smotri [Come and See] (1985)

    Idi i smotri [Come and See] (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) A regular title on Top-100 movie lists, Come and See is unabashedly about the horrors of war, specifically as seen through the eyes of kids forced to grow up too soon. Set during World War II, it follows a Soviet boy as he picks up a rifle and becomes a resistance fighter against the invading Nazis. One of the biggest ironies of the film is that while it’s hard to imagine a more justifiable scenario in which to fight than resisting Nazis, the film pulls absolutely no punches in highlighting that war is hell even in the most understandable of circumstances. What could have been a propaganda film turns into a resolutely anti-war statement. Writer-director Elem Klimov doesn’t flinch and barely provides release in the downbeat arc of the narrative: This brutal film steadily gets grimmer at every passing minute. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s quite an achievement— Come and See ends on a reverse-montage sequence that is still hailed as a landmark. Indeed, the film is such a definitive statement that Klimov never made another movie after this one. You can see why it ends up on so many best-movies lists. You should definitely see it. But maybe just once.

  • Night of the Lepus (1972)

    Night of the Lepus (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I’ve been waiting to see Night of the Lepus for the past twenty years, ever since a snippet of it was featured in The Matrix. Predictably, it doesn’t live up to the hype—unless you’re expecting a B-grade midnight-movie kind of thing, in which case it definitely has its moments. Riffing on very early-1970s ideas about overpopulation, director William F. Claxton’s film presents as evil antagonists nothing but… gigantic cuddly rabbits. It’s really amazing what a bit of ominously slow-motion macrography can do, although you’ll have to either reluctantly suspend your disbelief or just revel in the sheer absurdity of it all. Alas, rabbits aside (although there is really no Night of the Lepus with “rabbits aside”), the film isn’t that good. The first half is a bit dull, while the second half becomes only slightly more enjoyable on a pure camp level. Even today, you can imagine the midnight-movie crowd whooping it up at some of the most over-the-top sequences. Janet Leigh stars in this MGM production, which clearly fits it in the “Classic Hollywood stars stuck in 1970s B-grade horror movies from the studios’ dying gasps” genre. Despite its weaknesses, I almost recommend seeing Night of the Lepus—it’s gloriously stupid enough to offset most of its most lifeless moments. This being said, you almost have to know how to watch bad B-movies before tackling this one, because there’s no way it’s good in a traditional sense.