Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) While my favourite kind of cinema is heavily plot-centric, fast-paced, funny and imaginative, there’s plenty of space out there for a different kind of cinema that breaks the rules. For instance, I’ve been mulling over the perfection of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as a title for its film. It’s long, it’s memorable despite its utter blandness, it’s innately domestic considering that it’s a name and address and it often acts as a plot summary. You’ve never seen a film like this even nearly half a century later. For most of its deliberately punishing three-hour-and-twenty-minute duration, it’s about a middle-aged housewife going about her domestic business. She cooks, she cleans, she runs chores and the camera never blinks. Her conversations with her teenage son during suppertime are terrifyingly mundane and stilted (something that doesn’t come across in subtitles is how unrealistic their speech cadence is), which serves to submerge the kernels of interest into a morass of ordinary details. Why do men visit her apartment during the day? And why is the carefully observed routine of her first day degenerating during the second and third days depicted in the film? It all leads to a shocker of a conclusion that wouldn’t be nearly so effective has viewers not been lulled into complacency, then unease as small details accumulate. Now, let’s be honest: I may admire what writer-director Chantal Akerman has done here as a pure piece of unconventional cinema… but I can’t imagine sitting through this one again. I remain convinced that it would have been just as effective as a 75-minute film: 200 minutes is pushing it way past the point of diminishing returns. The plot can fit on a napkin and for the film’s vaunted naturalism, there’s no denying the deliberate stylishness of the acting. But I’ll rally to the majority opinion: this is one weird and wonderfully unique film. Still, you may want to consider watching it at double speed until the last five minutes. [December 2022: A quick comment about Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles being named “the greatest film of all time” in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll—it makes no sense. While a striking and important film, it’s also something that works because it’s not like other movies: in other words, it depends on other films to make its mark, and that’s a lousy pick as “the greatest film of all time” considering that it does not stand on its own. But the respondents to the poll were making their own individual point by picking the film, and this being 2022 that’s what we end up with, until next decade. Meanwhile, I’m still in the Citizen Kane camp.]

  • The Gospel According to André (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) The only good thing about the January 2022 death of fashion authority André Leon Talley is how it led to a brief and well-deserved uptick of interest in his life and achievements, including the rebroadcasting of The Gospel According to André, a 2017 look at the man’s life and his achievements. Set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, it’s a look back at his life bolstered with archival footage, as well as candid interviews with him and his friends. The term “grander than life” seems unusually apt to describe Talley and his life—a big and tall man cutting an unusual figure on the worldwide fashion scene, Talley came from North Carolina with a degree in French literature and a fluent understanding of the language that helped him when he ended up in Paris (by way of New York) as a roving reporter beloved by fashion designers. His mystique grew over a nearly forty-year period when he was active in the industry, helped along with a grandiose sense of personal style that included numerous capes. The Gospel According to André may presume that its viewers are convinced about the importance of fashion, but it does a rather good job positioning Talley and what made him such a remarkable figure. It’s not without shortcuts and unsaid material (seeing him compliment the fashion sense of the newest First Lady in 2017 would be more interesting if the film remembered to point out how he served as her fashion consultant years before), but as a quick primer and reflection on the character, it’s entertaining enough. There’s a palpable sense, watching the documentary after his death, that the world is a little duller, a little less colourful without him—and that’s the best epitaph he could have hoped for.

  • The Last Horror Film aka Fanatic (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) It’s weird to compliment a 1980s slasher film for its atmosphere—most of them were visually indistinguishable, existing in a bland universe made up of college campuses or suburban houses that didn’t do much to impress. But if The Last Horror Film has one distinction, it’s how it’s unabashedly set at the Cannes Festival, where a serial killer is targeting victims connected to a scream-queen (Caroline Munro) on location to promote her newest film. The plot and structure are familiar, but the real treat is setting it against real footage of the 1981 festival—complete with posters and promotions of the movie presented at the time! Anti-heartthrob Joe Spinell is the protagonist, a dangerously obsessed fan and wannabe-director who would normally be a creep stalking a young actress… if it wasn’t for the even-worse murderer having himself on a rampage. Writer-director David Winters’ playful approach to its material means that there’s quite a bit of blurring of the edges between reality, publicity and fiction, teasing that the protagonist is a killer and then taking a headlong plunge into metafiction. I usually despise slasher films and am certainly not a Spinell fan, but there’s something more interesting than usual in The Last Horror Film that does catch even a jaded viewer’s attention—a slightly comedic approach (such as suggesting a scream queen could have a shot at the Academy Awards) and conscious intention to set it somewhere unusual that helps distinguish it from countless other VHS offerings. Call it one of the least awful examples of the genre and you’ll get where I’m coming from.

  • Jag är nyfiken—en film i gult [I Am Curious—Yellow] (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) It’s amazing how pop culture can fixate on small yet distinctive things. For people of a certain age, there are traces of I am Curious — Yellow scattered all across jokey references from The Simpsons to Mad Men. The film itself, after a brief flurry of interest in the late 1960s, was forgotten, whereas later combination of “curious” and “yellow” could be used for a cheap laugh. Seeing the film itself make a short appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s self-novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reminded me that there was a movie to watch there, and having TCM oblige by showing the film uncut and unabridged helped satisfy my curiosity. What gets forgotten fifty-five years later is that, by the standards of 1960s movie distribution, this was a filthy, filthy art-house import. Coming from Sweden, where it pushed even the loose Scandinavian decency standards, the film has more nudity by itself than decades of cumulative Hollywood film until then. It became a reference because it was quasi-pornography at a time when audiences were eager but not used to it, and that should explain why it left such a reverberating (if dwindling) mark in corners of American culture. The film itself is certainly arthouse — a blurry narrative talking about an affair between a young promiscuous woman and her 24th partner (she documents them) with more casual nudity than even the trashiest of 1980s sex comedies. Not that it is a comedy — Writer-director Vilgot Sjöman does get a few laughs here as he increasingly blurs the barrier between documentary, fiction and metafiction but the film has bewildering moments of documentary cinema-vérité (including a startling apparition by Martin Luther King, Jr. himself), languorous digressions, an intense argument between two nude lovers and a shift from fiction to fiction-about-fiction that’s as wild as anything else. Half of I Am Curious — Yellow is boring, but the other half still has the power to surprise and puzzle. (It’s apparently a companion piece to I Am Curious — Blue, but that one never gets punny pop-culture references.)  I am convinced that more references have been made to I am Curious — Yellow than people have seen it, so it’s something of a revelation to open up the much-referenced title and find what’s in there.

  • Electra Glide in Blue (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) If I was to take all of the reasons why I generally dislike the New Hollywood of the 1970s and package them up in a single film, I’m not sure I could do better than Electra Glide in Blue. Coming from one of the darkest periods in film history, it’s a dirty, dispiriting film that finds no heroes in either police or hippies and manages to pull a tragedy out of a murder mystery in its last thirty seconds. Much of the film’s plot has to do with a murder investigation, with an ambitious patrolman looking to be transferred over to homicide and working with a partner to investigate a shotgun death. But this isn’t your usual police thriller, and soon enough the defeats accumulate more quickly than progress in identifying the killer. Everyone is morally dirty here, and there are no refuges. Splendid Arizona exterior cinematography is met with 1970s-dark-and-ugly interior shots, with the characters not coming across as timeless. While Robert Blake does quite well as a short-statured good cop punching above his height, the rest of the film isn’t always as interesting, and the gut-punch of a conclusion is an undeniable downer. But those were the early 1970s in cinema—no wonder Hollywood war roaring to go back to popular crowd-pleasers before the end of the decade.

  • Madea Goes to Jail (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) I’m not going to seriously claim that Madea Goes to Jail isn’t truth in titling (because she does indeed go to jail), but it approaches misrepresentation when about two thirds of the film isn’t about Madea’s imprisonment, but rather an adjacent story about a likable District Attorney: one of his ex-flame is in serious trouble and his current girlfriend is proving herself to be a terrible person. I’m not blaming writer-director Tyler Perry, though: As a title, Madea Goes to Jail is infinitely catchier than anything else, and keeping her as a comic supporting character is a wise choice given how much space she takes in any story. Still, the bait-and-switch does hint at the film’s biggest issue and an ongoing problem in Tyler’s filmography: the wild swerves between tones that are a constant feature of his work. Madea is an out-and-out comic character: grander than life, caricatural in conception and not necessarily able to sustain the weight of a dramatic story. Meanwhile, we’ve got a story of characters suffering from drug addiction, past guilt, being trapped in prostitution and eventually being carelessly thrown under by the judicial system. But such things are to be expected in Tyler Perry’s films—you get the pathos and the laughs and never mind the transitions. It doesn’t quite work in totality, but it does have moments. Tyler, as a director, is unremarkable—but as a writer he relies on blunt force and occasionally succeeds: even if you can wish for the experience to be smoother, he ultimately gets his goal. In Madea Goes to Jail, it means that the female protagonist is portrayed with sympathy and layers, while the female antagonist is a caricaturally terrible person with no redeeming qualities beyond her looks. Ah well—but as the title suggests, the film’s most interesting moments come from Madea as she unleashes righteous fury on people who annoy her or threaten her friends. (One of them, a serial killer, is played by a pre-stardom Sofia Vergara.)  As, once again, the very specific title suggests, this is a film for those willing to forgo the flaws in Perry’s films and enjoy the high points.

  • The Onion Field (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Hailing from the heyday of gritty dark depressing movies, 1970s exemplar The Onion Field is the kind of film that Hollywood explicitly rejected when it rejuvenated itself in the 1980s—a slow, uneasy crime drama based on a true story of a cop killer and the destruction left in the wake of a murder. Interminably paced, the film does pick up whenever a very young James Wood, apparently doing a Richard Widmark impression, shows up as the charismatic antagonist. Mindful of showing everything before and after its pivotal murder, The Onion Field (written by crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, adapting his own true-crime book) takes care to set up its characters, the elements leading up to the murder, the ensuing judicial and personal trials that follow, and barely ends as characters, years later, come to grips with what happened. It’s certainly not meant as a tidy genre story of crime and punishment—it doesn’t help that much of the story chronicles how the murderers played the legal system afterward to escape the initial punishment. That does build some frustration in the film’s goals—this is not a comforting viewing and viewers may want to set their expectations as such. But so it went with movies during the 1970s, especially as they strayed from simple genre formulas.

  • In the Earth (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There are movies that I like better once I figure out where they’re coming from, and In the Earth is one of them. I still don’t like it after learning its full story, but at least I can now understand the achievement in making it happen. In a few words: In the Earth is a quick-and-dirty project for writer-director Ben Wheatley, who shot the entire thing in fifteen days in-between his work on the far bigger Rebecca and Tomb Raider 2. Wheatley may be a big-budget director working with comprehensible plots these days, but his first few movies were far less accessible low-budget horror with esoteric components, and even his first few “big” movies, like Free Fire or High Rise, were unusual pieces of work. In the Earth goes back to those roots as it follows hiking scientists when they enter a mysterious forest and meet some very strange people. Going for folk horror, body mutilation and psychedelic experiences, In the Earth is clearly a quick-and-low-budget effort: the cinematography benefits from the forested surroundings, but remains gritty and almost accidental. A few savvily-used special effects (and an impeccable sense of design aping Penguin classics for the credits) help raise the visual polish of the production. The handful of characters is easy to manage, and the film regularly goes for occult imagery to create unease. It doesn’t amount to much, though: strange spooky stuff, forest spirit, and homicidal humans. So what? The ending doesn’t satisfy much. But contextualizing this as a 15-day production in the middle of a pandemic between two bigger projects does make it slightly more sympathetic. Most filmmakers would have enjoyed a few weeks off—but Wheatley heads into the forest and makes a movie. I have to admire that, even if the result itself leaves me cold. In the Earth will appeal most to those looking for a specific flavour of British occult horror—there are plenty of parallels to make here with Wheatley’s earlier A Field in England.

  • False Positive (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There’s something incredibly primal about making horror movies about pregnancy, and while that can provide a strong narrative hook, exploitation always looms. False Positive definitely has a few strong moments, but it ultimately falters on its blend of delusion and reality, an underwhelming conclusion and a sense that it’s not doing the extra work to go beyond obviousness. Writer-star Ilana Glazer makes the jump from comedy to serious drama in an effective fashion—she’s rarely less than likable at first, and then a heroine that we’re willing to follow to the end of the film even as her fantasies become more unhinged. (Pierce Brosnan is also quite fun as the out-and-out villain of the piece.)  The slow but growing sense of unease is built effectively, and False Positive rarely holds anything back as it seeks to disturb viewers—first with unpalatable choices then with outright gore. But two or three things harm the film in its ending stretch. I’m not going to be overly critical of the film’s “all men are garbage” stance, because that’s fairly standard material for the current crop of women-focused horror films (even more so with pregnancy-focused films) and we can postpone having a discussion about that unexamined assumption for a while longer. I’m more concerned by the story settling on a trite resolution that essentially apes daytime-TV specials with more gore and horror. (Yes, I know that fertility doctors impregnating their patients is a real and terrible thing—but that plot has been done many times already as Lifetime movies of the week, and False Positive only differs in tone, not story.)   The other problem is that False Positive flirts with something better but does not commit to it: in showing the protagonist’s descent into pregnancy delusions, it sets up a shaky sense of what’s-real-and-what’s-not that is scarcely capitalized upon in the end. A much punchier ending is held back by writer-director John Lee’s refusal to go further in literalizing the protagonist’s craziness. Let’s commit to her being the surrogate mother for her garbage husband and her evil doctor. Let’s go to the end of her imagining a magical holistic doctor. Let’s uncover a eugenics conspiracy by evil white men and committing infanticide as a result. But no—Maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not, maybe I just don’t care after being jerked around. Messing around with primal matters carries with it a responsibility to do justice to the material, and this is where False Positive falls flat.

  • The Rat Pack (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) In my continuing exploration of Hollywood history, I keep going back to the Rat Pack as something of a high point—which is really strange, because there’s not much in the Vegas lifestyle espoused by the Ratpackers—gambling, booze, womanizing—that I find admirable: they would have kicked me out of their group with no hesitation. But over the years, the idea of a few performers forming their own close-knit friendship does have its appeal: Circa-1960 Las Vegas is vintage these days, and the sins of past generations don’t appear so degenerate. It does help that the Rat Pack still exemplifies an appealing idea of cool: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin are still references when it comes to looking good and being terrific performers. So, a fictionalized take on the Rat Pack was a can’t-miss proposition, even if the film itself is a made-for-cable biopic that overboils its subject matter to the point of almost missing the point of it. Largely focusing on the 1960 presidential campaign as a flashpoint, The Rat Pack is an interesting but often disappointing way to fictionalize a never-ending evening of song, game, drinks and women. The Rat Packers came together to party, and there’s a limit to how much of that you can fit into frame (although there’s a brilliant montage to “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” showing the Rat Packers in various bedroom activities). No, much of the film is dedicated to the Rat Pack’s attempt to get into politics, and how the two worlds ultimately didn’t mix—the racism affecting Davis, the mob connections affecting Sinatra, and Dean Martin maybe being above it all. The biopic condenses years of events into a much shorter period and ultimately focuses on Sinatra (as the Chairman of the Board) far more than the others. It works in fits and spurts—I came away from it understanding a little bit more how Sinatra could have been seen as having mob ties (essentially: “I was a performer in their clubs; they helped me out”) and why he could have had aspirations to being involved in Kennedy-era politics. On the other hand, there’s so much dramatization going on that it’s difficult to trust the film on details. Ray Liotta has too-big shoes to fill as Sinatra and Joe Mantegna is limited by Martin’s low-key approach, but Don Cheadle is nothing short of terrific as Davis. Other actors get their chance to play past celebrities (perhaps the next-best being Deborah Kara Unger as Ava Gardner) and there’s some undeniable fun in seeing Hollywood turn the spotlight on itself like that. Director Rob Cohen was near the top of his career at the time, and that translates into a made-for-TV film that is slightly more ambitious than usual, and also held back by its limited budget. As a narrative, The Rat Pack ends up being less interesting than the myth, the stories and the fantasy of partying with the group in a more innocent Vegas.

  • Don’t Look Up (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, January 2022) Sometimes, the situation is just so horrible that all that remains to do is laugh. That, in a nutshell, seems to be Don’t Look Up’s approach to jet dark comedy, as it shows a comet heading to earth for an extinction-level event, and humanity is unable to agree that there is an issue, let alone how to stop it. Post-truth degeneration, government capture by corporate interests and inability to distinguish substance for entertainment are only three of the planks on which the film builds its acid sarcasm. From the opening moment, where scientists having discovered the impending event are rushed to the White House… only to wait endlessly for a dismissive President, the film announces its viciously cynical approach to the material. Originally written in response to inaction on climate change but executed during the Covid pandemic, Don’t Look Up manages to hit its targets, often too precisely: it often gets difficult to laugh at the film, considering the uneasy knowledge that much of it could indeed play as stupidly in reality as the film’s most sarcastic musings. Leonardo DiCaprio is rather good in the lead role, even if Jennifer Lawrence is not always well-used. Among the supporting actors, Mark Rylance is an infuriating highlight playing an evil corporate version of Mister Rogers, while Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill are convincing to the point of being despicable as the film’s delusional villains. The uniqueness of the film’s approach suggests that the transition of writer-director Adam MacKay from silly comedies to politically-charged satire over his last few films (the best of which remains The Big Short) culminates into something special here—a big-budget primal cry. But while it’s easy to agree with Don’t Look Up in its informed depiction of human stupidity, the film’s execution is disappointing. The uneven comedy levels of the film are one thing, but they’re not as damaging as the curious lulls and weird pacing—the first half-hour doesn’t quite match the rest of the film in temporal terms, and the film can’t quite land on a secondary comedic approach beyond dark cynicism. I’m not going to hit the film too hard on its scientific mistake (never mind that comets are dirty snowballs with few precious metals; or that suddenly spotting a comet from the middle of a light-polluted city is more contrived than plausible), but there’s a lingering impression that the screenwriters were so happy with their central metaphor that they didn’t invest more time in smoothing out the details. In many ways, Don’t Look Up is one of the films that best encapsulates the oppressive absurdity of 2021—and I hope that it will soon be perceived as dated and hysteric rather than dated and made naïve by later events.

  • Eternals (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney+ Streaming, January 2022) I’ve been having a not-so-good time with the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the wrap-up in Endgame, and it’s not simply a feeling of having to begin again after a big climactic event—the movies themselves have been underwhelming. Black Widow and Shang-Chi were mediocre at best, with a few tepid ideas drowned into overly familiar execution. Eternals doesn’t have the same problems, but it does remain underwhelming. Striving to add another cosmic chapter to the MCU, it runs aground on many of the same issues that plagued the first two Thor films: It all makes less and less sense the longer you think about it, and this conceptual hollowness is not exactly mitigated by overlong execution. It’s certainly not a flop—the ensemble cast is a schematically diverse group of likable actors, and letting go of the Avengers continuity does allow the story to go hard on team dynamics that would be unthinkable with the mainline heroes. Adding a writer-director like Chloe Zhao at the helm means that the film can be more dramatically ambitious, but other than some nice visuals, a globe-trotting narrative and some character moments (many of them overlong), Eternals flails for a long time before finding its groove. I did like most of the cast: Led by the ever-likable Gemma Chan, bolstered by people such as Kumail Nanjiani and Lauren Ridloff, it’s a nice mix of people even if the insistent diversity can feel forced. (Meanwhile, veterans such as Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie look a bit lost.)  There are some nice images along the way, notably in an earth-shattering final act. But the execution sputters: endless action scenes, intrusive exposition, and dialogue that run the ragged edge of pretentiousness, and while the serious execution aspires for cinematic weight, it often forgets the zippy core values of what brought audiences flocking back to MCU films. Perhaps the worst consequence of its leaden execution is that it allows audiences ample time to take apart the nonsense passing itself off as ideas—a supposedly humanistic film undermining humanity by claiming some of its most impressive achievements for its godlike characters (“the Manhattan project—yeah, I did that” except “oh no, we never interfere with human history”), and an awkward expansion of the MCU mythology trying to cram more ill-fitting cosmic and historical directions. The overall plot barely makes sense, and offers a surprisingly unconvincing case of anthropocentrism where the mythological characters are captured by their charges. (Which leads us back to the nonsensical nature of the overall plot—don’t give amnesia to your characters if you don’t want them to go native and work against you.)  Generally speaking, I have a feeling that the MCU is having issues that directly stem from its intention to get closer to the comics: all the stupidities and incoherencies of the serial comic-book format that were papered over so effectively during the first two phases of the MCU (less effectively in Phase Three) are now roaring back in this fourth phase and they take centre stage while we’re waiting for the overall plot to take hold. It’s worth noting that the next few films in the series are straight-up sequels to well-received instalments, with returning directors—embracing a measure of comfort after three experiments in a row. As for Eternals itself, it all boils down to a persistent feeling that it should be more than it is—more fun, more spectacular, more satisfying. But it sputters and swerves so much (and so languidly) along the way that it can’t match its own expectations.

  • Talk Radio (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) One of writer-director Oliver Stone’s lesser-known 1980s efforts, Talk Radio takes us inside a recording studio while a shock-jock (or at least the 1980s’ version of a shock jock) goes through a few pivotal shows. His Dallas-based show is about to open nationally in syndication, but that’s happening as he deals with a number of crises, the understanding that he’s a prisoner of his confrontational attitude, and he’s inextricably linked to an audience that he despises. Eric Bogosian is magnificent in the lead role, as he adapts his own script and performance in the original play. While Talk Radio’s theatrical origins are best seen in how it stays in the recording studio where much of the action takes place, the film does expand the reach of the action slightly to cover the days in-between those shows, and expand on the various relationships that illustrate the character study. The self-loathing protagonist is not a simple character, as his rapid-fire delivery flits from one unorthodox view to another, haranguing his callers and being a difficult person to live with. It’s quite a performance, and much of the entertainment of the film consists in sitting back and letting Bogosian do his love-it-or-hate-it thing. As the callers multiply, however, the script also switches genres—comedy, tragedy, and drama all combine here. Stone keeps things moving forward and find ways of making even a radio studio feel exciting. I’m not so fond of the rather obvious ending, but it does bring some kind of closure to the film, and it’s perhaps the audio epilogue that gives meaning to the climax more than the climax’s events themselves. While Talk Radio has an air of timelessness, it seems fated to become a period piece: today’s shock-jocks are less likely to be whip-smart provocateurs than partisan rabble-rousers promoting dangerous conspiracy theories and madcap pseudo-scientific nonsense, and that breed of professional nutjobs wouldn’t make as interesting a character to follow.

  • The Power and the Prize (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) It takes a very, very long time for The Power and the Prize to find its way, as this blend of boardroom drama and straightforward romance has to wait until its third act before the tension really rises to the occasion. Robert Taylor stars as an upwardly-mobile executive, engaged to the boss’ daughter and widely expected to succeed him at the helm of a large company. Except that his plans for the future are derailed when he’s asked to fly over to London for a bit of corporate skullduggery and instead falls in love with a woman with a troubled past. After an hour of patient plot assembly, it all finally reaches a climax, as the love affair threatens his career and the twin strands of the plot finally cohere. It doesn’t leave such a bad impression (going back to the classic “Love and integrity conquers everything” does help, as does a typically likable performance from Burl Ives) but it does take a while to get there. The dynamics of 1950s corporate America are more timeless than we’d expect (even if thoroughly Hollywoodized) and there’s an intriguing cloud of then-recent WW2 history hanging over some of the main characters that was not often portrayed in films of the time. The Power and the Prize doesn’t impress during its first hour, but it does redeem itself in time to become good enough by the end. Not bad—but it could have been better. (Unrelated, but: If you’re looking for a wildly unrelated triple bill, schedule The Power, The Prize and The Power and the Prize.)

  • Gloria (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) I’m not a big fan of the gritty 1970s style of filmmaking, but it is an integral part of Gloria, and you can almost see in the film a transition from the doom-and-gloom of the 1970s to the more hopeful 1980s. The titular Gloria (a terrific performance from Gena Rowland) is a tough and sullen middle-aged woman with an intimate history with the Manhattan organized crime underworld. But she’s not prepared when she’s asked to protect a boy when his parents are gunned down for informing. On the run, she gets to befriend the boy, keep ahead of the mob and grow up along the way. This is all handled against the dispiriting backdrop of Manhattan during some of its worst years, with the mob being powerful enough to prevent them from leaving the island. Fortunately, the protagonist is up to the task—picking off mob enforcers every time they get too close, and eventually confronting them in their den. Writer-director John Cassavetes was working to order when he wrote the script (the assignment: a star vehicle for a child actor, then a good role for his wife) and almost accidentally ended up with one of his most accessible films in the process. Despite the familiar nature of the story, Gloria fights hard for its happy ending—it’s a film best taken in as a series of moments anchored by Rowland’s strong performance. Not quite as bleak as the NYC mob stories of the 1970, you can retrospectively see in Gloria the way the New Hollywood was re-aligning itself for broader commercial appeal by the time the 1980s rolled in—not necessarily a victory for proponents of that movement, but something that has aged rather well for everyone else.