Movie Review

  • Gabriel Over the White House (1933)

    Gabriel Over the White House (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Considering that I’ll watch almost any movie dealing with the American presidency, having a look at a film called Gabriel Over the White House was a given (or would have been had my DVR properly recorded it the first two times I tried). But it’s fair to say that I really didn’t know what I was getting into with the film. The first half-hour is interesting enough — we’re first shown the presidency in the middle of the Great Depression (itself a drastic change from the trappings of the presidency introduced over the years), with a shockingly cynical president (played by Walter Huston) clearly enjoying his corruption of the office. But one car accident later, the president finds himself between life and death. Visual clues hint at divine intervention in his recovery, especially when, overnight, he becomes a presidential scholar and righteous moral crusader. So far so good if you’re looking for a comforting fantasy of moral redemption in the White House. It’s also a film notable for confronting the issues of the Great Depression at a time when Hollywood tried to avoid the entire issue — we’re reminded of the employment crisis, the prevalence of racketeering, starving farmers, the prohibition and foreclosures. But then—whew—, the film takes a huge right turn into benevolent dictatorship, with armed police forces conducting deadly military raids on racketeers (although that happens after racketeers machine-gun the White House). The film is absolutely supportive of this fascist takeover of the United States, showing how the divinely inspired president’s good ideas (including familiar things such as a federal police or an air force, neither of which existed at the time) lead the world toward utopia, with the villains being summarily executed and the Washington Covenant showing enlightenment to humanity. As director Gregory La Cava’s film ends with a paean to the fascist protagonist, calling him “the greatest man who ever lived,” we’re left blinking in amazement. The relevance of the film today couldn’t be clearer, with Gabriel Over the White House being an amazing demonstration of the traditionally thin line between American politics and Christian crusading. It’s a weird, weird fantasy, the likes of which would now be dead on arrival from any major American studio. It’s frighteningly revelatory about the state of American political thinking in the 1930s, as the United States was not that far away from the overall European slide into authoritarianism that eventually led to World War II — the gulf between this film’s third act and Triumph of the Will is not that large. It does make Gabriel Over the White House a borderline-reprehensible film, but a fascinating object of study even now. As the old misattributed saw goes: “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

  • Criss Cross (1949)

    Criss Cross (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Any list of landmark film noirs will probably include Criss Cross, and for good reason: As a slickly made criminal thriller describing a heist job going badly, it features a striking sense of place for late-1940s Los Angeles, some clever moments, decent-enough direction and a fatalistic ending that exemplifies the core strengths of the genre. Burt Lancaster has one of his first major roles as a man drawn into a dangerous affair and an even more dangerous criminal plot, and if you’re paying attention, you’ll see Tony Curtis for a few brief moments as a dancer in his uncredited screen debut. (Curtis and Lancaster would later reunite on a few other films, including Trapeze and the terrific Sweet Smell of Success.)  Still, the main draw here is a script that doesn’t have any time for niceties or sentimentality. The location shooting in Los Angeles is brief but effective, further reinforced by special-effect work that lowers the difference between studio shooting and exteriors (most notably through some really good rear-screen projection). Director Robert Siodmak helped define what we think of as noir, and he’s purposeful with his material all the way to the dispiriting conclusion. The fog-drenched heist sequence is still a wonderful piece of work even today. See Criss Cross as a precursor to films such as Heat, certainly — or just as a great noir.

  • Government Girl (1943)

    Government Girl (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) One of the facets of Hollywood cinema in the early 1940s that goes underappreciated to modern viewers is how an entire industry shifted almost overnight to become the wartime propaganda arm of the American government, churning out a stream of well-produced movies, each glorifying a separate unit of the armed forces. As Government Girl shows, this even extended to the Washington, DC-based civilian efforts to produce weapons. Of course, such a setting doesn’t necessarily require action and suspense, so Government Girl takes the form of a romantic comedy, as a young woman discovers that the rude man she met the day before is not only her boss, but an engineer put in charge of supervising bomber manufacturing efforts. From the opening moments of the film, acutely concerned with the shortage of housing in DC in the early years of WW2, this is a homefront film with a smile — Many of the romantic comedy conventions are strictly upheld, with our heroine (a slightly-too-bland Olivia de Havilland, gamely following the script’s comic cues but not really showing any specific skills as a comedienne) getting into a romantic triangle that meshes with a lightweight spying subplot and another featuring a congressional investigation into our protagonist’s decisions. There’s even a comic chase sequence filmed outdoors (but apparently not in DC). The film is not perfect: male lead Sonny Tufts is so bland as to appear almost irrelevant, but then again the title of the film is Government Girl, not Government Guy. Other comic touches are overdone to the point of ridiculousness, such as the sequence in which our heroine and her friend sip a glass of champagne and act as if they were under the influence of hard drugs; or the ludicrous ending in which a simple testimony is enough to clear up an entire senate hearing in an instant. Still, I do have some affection for the result, for the charming look at government work during wartime, and how even a silly romantic comedy plays against this very serious backdrop — there’s a nice contrasting irony there, and the film’s shortcomings are not bad enough to erase the chuckles I had while watching the film. Yes, it could have benefited from a rewrite and a lead actress more comfortable with comedy and a leading man who wasn’t such a wooden fixture. But you like what you like — and I note that from a historical perspective, Government Girl was a significant factor in de Havilland filing suit against Warner Brothers for their treatment of her under contract (she really did not enjoy being forced to make the film), which eventually led to the “de Havilland law” limiting studio contracts to seven years, weakening the studio system permanently.

  • Earth: One Amazing Day (2017)

    Earth: One Amazing Day (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2021) After years of success and an illustrious pedigree from the BBC Natural History unit reaching back decades, BBC Earth films doesn’t have to prove itself again as a purveyor of fine nature documentaries. Its standards are high, and every release has to contend with illustrious predecessors. Fortunately, Earth: One Amazing Day has enough to distinguish itself even in the shadow of illustrious predecessors. Taking as a conceit the idea of presenting one day on planet Earth, it’s an excuse to string together mini-documentaries and fly from one idea to another. As such, the film is perhaps best discussed as a series of highlights. While the film does hit upon nature film favourites (namely pandas and penguins), there are plenty of other highlights as well: prowling sidewinder snakes (and their jogging lizard prey), field mice hanging precariously from branches, fighting giraffes, swimming sloths, portaging zebras, and vertically hanging whales. The production values are sumptuous, with great cinematography throughout. The sound effects and music are a bit too much at times. Tying it all together is Robert Redford’s warm narration. One Amazing Day amounts to a great wide-ranging nature documentary, well worth seeing even for jaded adults and wide-eyed kids alike.

  • Lullaby of Broadway (1951)

    Lullaby of Broadway (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Oops! Earlier today, I referred to I’ll See You in My Dreams as Doris Day’s most musicalesque musical even as I acknowledged not seeing all of her movies, and I should have kept that in mind because Lullaby of Broadway (from the same year) is the most musicalest of her musicals. It certainly fits under the archetype of the Broadway backstage musical, as characters spend the movie putting together a show, rehearsing musical numbers and the entire film climaxing at the successful premiere. Day herself plays a singer who gets into complications in-between her mom’s deteriorating medical attention, attention from an older man (S. Z. Sakall, in a typically likable performance) being misunderstood by her would-be lover and the older man’s wife, and the making of the show itself. The songs themselves are catchy and the film has a charming quality that is in-line with other musicals of the period. Lullaby of Broadway is not exactly earth-shattering, but it works and it does provide a link between the classic musicals and Day’s career.

  • Strange Bedfellows (1965)

    Strange Bedfellows (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) As I may have mentioned before, there’s a specific tone to 1960s sex comedies that hasn’t, can’t and won’t be successfully replicated. A mixture of naughtiness but no explicitness, mid-period Technicolor cinematography, slightly more permissive audience expectations, stars moulded in the waning studio system and the optimistic exhilaration of the decade as everything was changing. Strange Bedfellows may not be a classic, but it is an illustration of that specific subgenre and the fun it can have. Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida star — Lollobrigida is a good fit for the part of a flighty artist who gets married to Hudson’s suave account executive. Hudson himself is not bad, although the more I see of his performances, the more I can’t help but compare them to what Cary Grant would have done better — both, after all, looked the part of handsome leading men, but Grant had a self-deprecating streak that made his comic performances almost perfect. Hudson doesn’t quite have that, so while his performance is enjoyable, it doesn’t quite have that extra spark necessary for this kind of comedy. (To face the obvious question whenever we have a Hudson romantic comedy: Strange Bedfellows does have a surprising number of very ironic moments knowing that Hudson was gay — clearly the filmmakers knew what they were doing.)  There’s some jet-setting charm to the way the film goes from London to New York. The tone of the film shifts a bit too much toward absurdity in its last act — not that I don’t like zany humour, but it could have been zanier from the start. There are better 1960s comedies out there, but even an imperfect vehicle, such as Strange Bedfellows, is worth a few chuckles. If you like that style, you’ll like the film.

  • Who’s Harry Crumb? (1989)

    Who’s Harry Crumb? (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2021) John Candy doesn’t step all that far away from his screen persona in Who’s Harry Crumb?, playing a bumbling private detective who eventually rises to the occasion in the face of adversity. It’s strictly on rails as far as John Candy comedies of the era go, an impression reinforced by obvious casting (Annie Potts looking amazing? Jeffrey Jones as a villain? Who could have seen that coming?)  Candy’s character loves to dress up as part of the job, which is a perfect excuse for movie-quality costumes and quirky accents. The similarities with Fletch are there, but it’s somewhat more slap-sticky than the Chevy Chase films. The result is not bad — even if your appreciation of the result will depend quite a bit on how you feel about John Candy’s roles in general, this one is enjoyable on its own terms, and the advantage of a bumbling-gets-better comic arc is that it ends on a moment of triumph that compensates for quite a bit of exasperating buffoonery. (It would have been better if his character had been consistently clever throughout the film, but those are the conventions of the subgenre.)  Some lines of dialogue are surprisingly good in a film mostly concerned about physical comedy. While nowhere near a classic, Who’s Harry Crumb? still works reasonably well even in the crowded bumbling-detective subgenre.

  • I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951)

    I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Songwriter biographies were a staple of Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s, and I’ll See You in My Dreams, about Gus Kahn, fits the profile of most of them — cleaning up the ethnic origins of its subject, playing up his struggles against alcoholism, streamlining the romance with his wife. Doris Day stars alongside Danny Thomas, and while I haven’t seen all of Day’s films so far, this strikes me as one of the most conventional musicals in her career: the tone is very much in-line with the Golden Age of musicals, with explicit musical numbers (most of them sung by her) punctuating the biographical scenes (of him). Audiences in the 2020s won’t have the same attachment as 1950s audiences did to the songs sung here, although “Makin’ Whoopee” still has some cultural currency (in my case, thanks to a Newsradio parody of a scene from The Fabulous Baker Boys). There’s not much of a criticism to offer about I’ll See You in My Dreams but neither is there all that much praise: it’s an average example of its subgenre, perhaps most noteworthy for featuring Day having plenty of occasions to showcase her singing talents.

  • H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)

    H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) I have now seen just enough of King Vidor’s movies to expect more than the usual Hollywood formula from him, and in this regard H. M. Pulham, Esq. does not disappoint: The story of a middle-aged businessman trying to reconnect with a former flame, it’s a film that defies the usual conventions of romance, settling for wistful drama instead. While Robert Young is a rock in the lead role, there’s perhaps more to appreciate in the performance of Van Heflin as a friend, and especially Hedy Lamarr as the former flame of the protagonist, a free-spirited woman who offers an alluring distraction from his conservative lifestyle. Lamarr has more to do here than in many of her other movies, and she delivers an interesting character in the middle of an unusual story. As with other romances in which the characters recognize that they cannot have a happy ending together, it’s a film that plays in minor chords — interesting but not spectacular, quiet rather than bombastic. Even the ending, giving some solace to the main character, is a small victory rather than an outright triumph. It makes sense that H. M. Pulham, Esq. may be fondly remembered among the connoisseurs but a bit too esoteric to be a crowd favourite — it’s in this area that Vidor excelled, rather than trying to make outright crowd-pleasers.

  • Sons of the Desert (1933)

    Sons of the Desert (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, March 2021) I remain fascinated by the difference between the idea of a well-known star when contrasted against the idea of a great film starring them. A surprising number of stars had few great movies to their names, meaning that their persona is far more important than specific works. (Brigitte Bardot, for instance — widely known as a sex-symbol even if few people can name Et Dieu créa la femme or Le Mépris as her best films, let alone any of the other 45 ones in her filmography.)  Such it is with the Laurel and Hardy comedy duo — their personas are far better known than any of their movies. If my notes are correct, Sons of the Desert is the second of their films that I’ve seen, but often mentioned as their finest. The comic premise is simple (two men lie to their wives about attending a lodge convention for recreational purposes), but the fun of the film is in seeing the lies of the premise escalate to an unsustainable level, and especially how the two lead characters react under pressure. Clocking in at a mere 68 minutes, Sons of the Desert doesn’t have a lot of room for flab — the film quickly gets going and keeps escalating the domestic frictions to the extreme. The film isn’t all slapstick — there’s plenty of verbal comedy, and perhaps the film’s best sequence has the wives watching their husbands hamming it up through newsreel footage. But it does clearly show the interplay between Laurel and Hardy at its finest, with impeccable comic timing and unspoken back-and-forth between the two performers. The look at life in suburban Los Angeles in the early-1930s is interesting and remains relatable. What hasn’t aged so well are the sexist stereotypes and wife-on-husband domestic violence toward the end of the film — even playing the dual standard for laughs isn’t much of a relief, although the viewers find refuge in the other couple that maintain that honesty is the best policy. Still, Sons of the Desert remains a strong showcase of Laurel and Hardy’s talents at feature length, and a funny movie even for those who aren’t familiar with their routine.

  • Ugetsu monogatari [Tales of Ugetsu] (1953)

    Ugetsu monogatari [Tales of Ugetsu] (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, March 2021) With apologies to any fan of the form, my interest for historical samurai film is almost completely non-existent, especially after seeing the best of what the genre had to offer from Akira Kurosawa. Ugetsu is often mentioned in the same breath as those classics — it hails from the same period as Rashomon and Seven Samurai, had a roughly similar impact on creating interest in Japanese films in the West, and clearly plays along similar lines. You can find it in the Criterion collection and a few best-of lists. (Roger Ebert notably loved it, ranking it as one of his Great Movies.)  Alas, I tend to watch those films with a sense of obligation and list-checking rather than expecting any enjoyment out of the result. Director Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu slightly surpassed those low expectations by throwing slightly more into the mix than I expected — it eventually becomes a supernatural ghost story about love and grief, wrapped into decent visual style. I’m still not all that bowled over by the result, but in this subgenre, anything that ranks as “interesting” is a small victory of sorts.

  • Wai dor lei ah yat ho [Dream Home] (2010)

    Wai dor lei ah yat ho [Dream Home] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) There’s a very specific failure mode of horror movies in which nominally thematic or comic intentions are drowned in so much gore and blood that the entire thing starts feeling like the work of a psychopath with no recognizable humanity. So it is that Dream Home may have worked as a cautionary tale against the murderous impact of real estate inflation, but in execution often ends up feeling like the blood-soaked manifesto of a serial killer. There are, to be fair, a few interesting things here: the protagonist (played by Josie Ho) is a murderous young woman dead-set on buying her may in a prestige high-rise, and it’s an unusually accessible Hong Kong production that applies typically Western horror methods to its local setting. Alas, it’s also a horror film clearly made for horror fans: far more care is spent detailing the gory deaths than the overall plot, and the gruesome humour far more often feels disgusting than entertaining. As our protagonist goes on a rampage inside the high-rise, she tests everyone’s sympathies by taking out stoners, policemen, a rutting couple and, unforgivably, a pregnant woman. The result is a film that falls significantly short of its potential — a far more interesting film could have been made without the extreme gore, reinforcing the satire without obsessing over the scenes made for the gorehounds. Horror is often misused this way — while the best movies of the genre use horror as a way to talk about other issues, the lesser films think that horror itself is the main driver. Dream Home is unusually frustrating in that it had what it takes to use horror as a way to discuss contemporary issues, but chose to focus on blood and guts instead. The result cuts itself off from a much wider audience that could have enjoyed the macabre take on socioeconomic issues, but not necessarily the exposed viscera and dubious humour that the horror sequences build up.

  • It’s a Great Feeling (1949)

    It’s a Great Feeling (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) As much as I’ll take any occasion to recommend classic Hollywood movies to everyone, there are a few movies that are best seen once you’re a few hundred titles deep in the Golden-Age Hollywood back-catalogue. Many of them are films that are best classified as parodies, satires or ensemble comedies poking fun at the other movies churned out by Hollywood at that time. It’s a Great Feeling is a crystal-clear example of that form, as it tells viewers a tall tale about a young actress being discovered by a studio that becomes eager to feature her on the big screen. The point of the film, however, isn’t as much the plot as selling, in colour!, the fantasy of the studio system at the end of the 1940s, and more specifically Warner Brothers’ stable of contract actors. Doris Day, in one of her earlier, more free-wheeling roles, plays a cafeteria girl with big dreams who tries to make nice with the director and lead actor of an upcoming prestige production… but things soon turn awry when they have to get studio head approval. Nearly everyone here plays themselves, at the exception of Day, the studio executive and a few character roles. From the first moments of It’s a Great Feeling (featuring directors Vidor, Curtiz and Walsh turning down a project), there are many, many cameos and finding them funny is a litmus test on your knowledge of circa-1949 Hollywood. The best of those cameos has to be Joan Crawford, throwing a hissy fit as the protagonists because that’s what she does in every film. Also funny is Edward G. Robinson convincing a security guard to play up his image as a tough guy. More conventional comedy segments (such as a still-funny series of technical mishaps sabotaging a screen test) are interspaced between a few musical numbers to showcase Day’s singing talents. The clever script, written by frequent Billy Wilder collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, spoofs Hollywood without quite criticizing it (polishing its mythology in doing so) but keeps its most iconoclastic joke for the end, as Hollywood life isn’t for our protagonist… and then immediately flips that joke on its head with a quick final cameo that may or may not work as a comedy capstone depending on whether you recognize Clark Gable. In some ways, it does feel like a backlot-budget version of other better musicals of that time, but the style of comedy here is very specific and quite specifically dated to 1949. These days, It’s a Great Feeling works best as an inside joke for classic Hollywood fans — spot the celebrities, bask in the idyllic portrait of studio contracts and smile at the not-too-satirical take on something that was intensely familiar to everyone involved in the film’s production.

  • De Lift [The Lift] (1983)

    De Lift [The Lift] (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) I wasn’t expecting much from De Lift, and while it’s an exaggeration to say that I was pleasantly surprised, the result is more interesting than I expected from a “killer elevator” horror film. Hailing from the Netherlands, this film takes on the cold tones of an Amsterdam mixed-used building having elevator troubles — fatal elevator troubles, as many sequences painstakingly show: As people are suffocated, fall to their death, get stuck in doors then decapitated, or simply burn for no explainable reason, it becomes clear to our repairman protagonist that something’s not right with the building’s elevators. Working with a journalist, he eventually discovers the reason behind the evil elevators, and surprisingly, it’s one that sends the film in unusually contemporary science-fiction territory: The elevator’s electronics rely on brand-new organic components that (to get back to more familiar and dumber territory) went crazy and turned evil. Still, the time spent in the techno-thriller genre is a bit unusual for a horror film that could have gone for demonic possession (such as 2010’s Devil), a building built upon a graveyard or other explanations from the usual playbook. I’m not going to pretend that the entire film is credible — In fact, it gets progressively crazier (such as with an ill-fitting domestic arc that has the wife screaming divorce at the most innocuous event) and crazier (ending with a CEO personally shooting a gun at the bio-computer, and the elevator taking revenge by somehow spitting out a cable to hang its killer) as it goes on. The early-1980s period feel is now an advantage, and so is the matter-of-fact European setting. Writer-director Dick Maas isn’t strong either in writing or visual presentation (well, save for featuring bright red elevator doors in the middle of a blue-tinged film.), but De Lift isn’t as silly as one could imagine from the obvious “killer elevator” pitch.

  • D.O.A. (1949)

    D.O.A. (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) The premise of D.O.A. remains a classic — a man walks into a police station (a long shot unexplainably framed by rows of doors as he makes his way to the end of a corridor) in order to report a murder: his own. That the rest of the film cannot measure up to that premise is almost a given, but the ride to the foregone conclusion is not bad. As a small-town accountant vacationing in San Francisco must unravel the clues that led to his fatal (and ongoing) poisoning, we’re thrown into a sordid classic film noir universe of gangsters, affairs, merciless death and urban underworld. It’s all quite comfy yet unusually involving—the elements are familiar, but the added element of the protagonist’s incoming death adds a nice sheen of existential suspense to the entire film—the irony being that our hero spends his last week living life more fully than ever before. Otherwise, it’s the logical conclusion of a classic film noir trope — the innocent man doomed for no other reason than having been involved in the wrong thing at the wrong time. That D.O.A. is a minor film noir classic is all the more remarkable in that, save for lead Edmond O’Brien (who turns in quite a good performance), the film sports few recognizable names among cast or crew — it’s a genre success without the trappings of Hollywood filmography completionism. Still, there’s plenty to like here: Pamela Britton provides a sounding board to the protagonist, while Laurette Luez is captivating as a supporting character. The glimpses at San Francisco (or rather — Los Angeles playing SF) are an intriguing throwback to the time’s urban atmosphere, and the ticking-clock component of the narrative has seldom been so strongly felt. Accidentally placed in the public domain, D.O.A. can be viewed even from its Wikipedia page. Now I’m curious to see if I can get my hands on the 1988 remake… because nothing spells high-concept like Hollywood being willing to re-do it again forty years later.