Movie Review

  • Baby Face (1933)

    Baby Face (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Every time I think I’ve seen enough of the Pre-Code era, TCM unearths another example of the period from its archives and I’m left agog at how good 1930–1934 movies could be. To be fair, Baby Face is an exemplary example of the form (“The Citizen Kane of Pre-Code movies,” as it’s been memorably called), with Barbara Stanwyck playing a young woman who uses sex to climb up the social ladder. Through a series of seductions and some incredible chutzpah whenever danger threatens to bring her down, she spends the film going from success to success. There are clear plot similarities here with Red-Headed Woman, as Warner Brother was trying to outdo MGM in the salaciousness department. But Baby Face still has the power to astonish by its very direct references to the lead characters’ carnality and her utter amorality—it’s no wonder that it’s often mentioned as one of the dozens of movies that specifically caused the Hays Code to be imposed on Hollywood in 1934-35. Now that it has been unearthed from the archives (and even included in the National Film Registry!), it’s a welcome reminder that the “innocent” Hollywood of 1935-60ish was an imposed fabrication rather than a representation of people who didn’t know any better. Stanwyck is remarkable here, although, as usual, her role is strikingly different from any of the other movies she’s known for: he managed to evade pigeonholing, at the expense of developing a consistent screen persona like so many of her contemporaries. Elsewhere in the cast, a young John Wayne shows up as one of the seduced men. I was really enjoying most of the film until the ending—after so much status-seeking depravity, it seems a bit cheap to have the protagonist see the errors of her ways at the very end. But that may be asking a bit too much for even a Pre-Code film: a completely amoral ending that respected the character would have been going too far. Still, the rest of Baby Face is definitely worth a look: Pre-Code Hollywood is special.

  • Across 110th Street (1972)

    Across 110th Street (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) If you’re looking for a dark and grimy 1970s crime drama, Across 110th Street is a better choice than you’d expect. While it doesn’t have the gravitas of contemporary New York City thrillers such as Serpico or Death Wish, it’s considerably lighter on its feet, and its matter-of-fact trashiness is more a reflection of the times and place than a lack of ambition. Largely shot on location in Harlem (which wasn’t just a marketing coup, but somewhat risky at the time), this is a story about criminals hitting an organized crime cash drop, and the police trying to catch the murderers before the retaliation begins. The racial element is an integral part of the story, with a racist veteran cop (Anthony Quinn) paired with a younger black policeman (Yaphet Kotto) in order to get anywhere during the investigation. By modern standards, Across 110th Street is not that good of a movie—many familiar elements, unimpressive action sequences, a hackneyed message on racial reconciliation… nothing we haven’t seen elsewhere. But it does have a remarkably effective period feel, starting with its opening theme song, and it moves with a somewhat impressive pacing. Halfway in (or out) of the blaxploitation movement, it’s a bit more upbeat than most urban crime dramas of the time, and not quite restrained by the intentional aesthetic limitations of exploitation films. As a result, it has aged beautifully as a period piece, clearly of 1972 but enjoyable at other times.

  • Yoidore tenshi [Drunken Angel] (1948)

    Yoidore tenshi [Drunken Angel] (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) As heretical as it may sound, I usually like Akira Kurosawa’s films better when they are set in contemporary times. As much as everyone likes Seven Samurais, Rashomon and Yojimbo, I feel closer to Ikiru and High and Low. Drunken Angel, however, is a bit of a mixed bag. Often hailed as one of the first Yakuza movies, it presents a downtrodden, alcoholic doctor working near an urban swamp who eventually gets involved with a figure in the local organized crime scene. It is the first film to pair up Kurosawa with frequent collaborator Toshiro Mifune, as the later plays the small-time hoodlum who seeks treatment from a doctor who won’t ask too many questions. There’s some ambiguity as to who is the protagonist of the story: While much of the film is told from the doctor’s point of view, the hoodlum arguably has the clearest dramatic journey. Filmed in black-and-white in downtrodden areas, Drunken Angel offers a portrait of postwar Japan (somewhat sanitized by the occupying American authorities) dominated by a stagnant body of water, alcohol, crime and tuberculosis. It’s watchable, although clearly a lesser (or rather: earlier) Kurosawa work. Mifune is already up to his usual standards, but Takashi Shimura is more impressive as a doctor who knows that he’s taken a wrong turn somewhere, and hopes to atone by saving one person at a time. The result is far from the pyrotechnics or emotional impact of Kurosawa’s best, but it does make for watchable enough viewing if you’re in the mood for a quieter experience.

  • Wild in the Streets (1968)

    Wild in the Streets (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) You can often learn more about an era by looking at its middle-grade genre movies than its masterpieces: the id is closer to the surface, and the lack of even trying for timeless relevance can ground the work into the obsessions of the moments. So it is that American Pictures International’s B-grade Wild in the Streets spins one simple but mind-boggling statistic—that in the late 1960s, “52% of the US population was under 25”—into a wild satirical comedy in which a lowering of the voting age leads to the youth taking power. [Note: According to the data I could find, the share of the under-25 as a percentage of the total US population peaked at 45.8 in 1967, with the median age of the US population at an all-time low in 1970 at 28.1 years—in other words, take the film’s central statistic with a grain of salt.] It’s a film that starts out crazy with a capsule demonstration of a rotten family situation, and then wilder and wilder until the end. Clearly made to court the youth audiences, Wild in the Streets is unabashedly crammed with musical numbers, teenage heartthrobs and pointed barbs at older people: Christopher Jones is compelling in the lead role of a teenage rock superstar turned president of the United States, Shelley Winters is thoroughly detestable as the protagonist’s abusive mother, while Hal Holbrook is a likable actor in an ingrate role as a politician (also abusive toward his kids) who gets swept by the youth wave—and Richard Pryor has a small role as a teenage activist! Music is a big part of the film, and for good reason — “14 or Fight” is insanely catchy, far more than the film’s lead anthem “The Shape of Things to Come.” Given the film’s outright satirical aims, it’s no surprise if it ends up taking a real issue (the drive to lower the voting age to 18 across the United States during the late-1960s) and pushing it to extremes. You’re really not supposed to take it seriously: By the film’s last third, anyone over 30 is pushed in mandatory retirement, and sent to re-education camps where they are kept docile with a permanent done of LSD. And then the pre-teen set takes aim at the “older” teenagers… but I’ve said too much. In reflecting a funhouse version of the youth movement that peaked in the alte-1960s, Wild in the Streets does remind us of the incredible demographic forces that were such a strong engine for change in the Sixties—something often buried deep under the headlines and news clips of the era. It does have a good sense of humour about itself (as the coda suggests, the teenagers aren’t getting away with anything here), a really good energy (as per its Academy Award nomination for Best Editing) and enough craziness to make the satire worthwhile. It’s surprisingly fun and teaches us quite a bit about 1968 without the dourness of the then-emerging New Hollywood.

  • Top Secret Affair (1957)

    Top Secret Affair (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) You can often best see the star quality of lead actors in their most mediocre films, and while Kirk Douglas was known for being an incredible leading man, Top Secret Affair will demonstrate it to you as well as his turn in masterpieces like that year’s Paths of Glory. Clearly cast as a superstar, Douglas here plays an American general targeted by a media mogul played by Susan Hayward. She wants to take him down through her outlets, but she hasn’t counted on him being a near-perfect human being, smart and athletic and incorruptible. There’s a lot of fun to be had in seeing Douglas play a character that measures up to his square jaw and impeccable frame—the film feels like a misogynistic throwback, but it does have quite a bit of charm and grace at how it goes about it, and even the way it half-canonizes its military character is a bit of a breather after so many villainous high-ranking officers elsewhere in later Hollywood history. I’m not going to try to convince anyone that Top Secret Affair is a particularly good movie, but it’s an easy watch, and it has its shares of smiles along the way. Plus, you get to see what Douglas was able to do in a movie where he clearly outshines everyone else… including his co-star. Amazingly enough, the film was originally intended to star Bogart and Bacall — that would have been quite a different film.

  • Design Canada (2018)

    Design Canada (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) Considering that you’re reading this review on a web site with its own custom logo and maple leaf in the image header, it won’t be a surprise to learn that I’m an unusually good audience for a movie that specifically examines icons of Canadian design. Design Canada gets a bit blurry around the edges, but it’s a documentary that looks at famous Canadian logos from the Canadian Flag to the Canada Wordmark used by the federal government. With interviews with the designers themselves and peeks at their archives, we get to understand how Canada’s best-known iconography was put together, its meanings and its effectiveness. We get a good look at the making of the CN, Expo67, Canada 1967, CBC and Roots logos. The influence of the Swiss school is clearly explained (with the Roots design philosophy offered as a counter-example—and significantly enough, it’s the only design identity spearheaded by a woman), with plenty of examples offered regarding the advantage of clean crisp logos. There’s quite a bit of discussion about how these logos contributed to the post-1967 sense of Canadian identity: One striking idea being that rather than try to present facets of the Canadian population (through a British union jack, French lily and First Nations leaf), the single-leaf flag promoted a sense of a unique identity in which everyone could see themselves. There’s even a discussion about how corporate identities sometimes get redesigned, often to go back to the original. (The original CBC logo designer is asked about the famous simplified redesign, and his answer is not complimentary.) Design Canada does lose itself at times—rather than maintain the focus on its strengths, it sometimes goes on tangents whose value is only revealed very late, if at all. But the result is nothing short of enthralling for design geeks such as I am—a clear, cogent overview of the symbols that unite a nation and the people who came up with them. I couldn’t stop watching it—and along the way, I learned more about things I thought I knew well.

  • Spoorloos [The Vanishing] (1988)

    Spoorloos [The Vanishing] (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I really, truly dislike movies that give me the impression of having wasted my time, and there are few surer paths to that feeling than a nihilistic script that seems to delight into the worst of what humanity has to offer. The Vanishing is an ugly, pointless, disturbing film. It’s a procedural psychopathic killing film, one that uses an unusual structure to overexplain the details of a heinous murder, and doesn’t spare the protagonist trying to understand how his girlfriend could vanish in plain daylight. The premise has a couple of tourists stopping at a French rest stop and the woman being kidnapped. When the film picks up three years later, her boyfriend has been nearly driven mad by the lack of answers—and then the killer toys with him. Thanks to flashbacks, we spend a lot of time with the psychopathic antagonist, seeing his exemplary family life and deliberate preparations for the act. Much of the film’s third act is a lengthy discussion between the protagonist and antagonist, but you won’t like where it’s headed, with curiosity killing the cat in a particularly brutal fashion. This is a film that aims to make you feel unsettled and it succeeds—perhaps too well, because by the end of it I was actively disliking the film and vowing never ever to see it again or recommend that others do so. Every so often, there are movies that remind me that it’s fine not to be an overly jaded cynic—that’s it’s perfectly fine to hate a film for its bleakness, for having no further idea on its mind that “evil exists.” I will take any bland happy ending over where The Vanishing ends up.

  • Body Melt (1993)

    Body Melt (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) I was unable to find an artistic intention in Body Melt other than “using practical effects to make bodies explode in increasingly gruesome ways,” and that’s fine—there’s a place for plotless splatterpunk horror, I suppose, even though I would like it to be as far from me as possible. What does help make it all palatable is the strong undercurrent of comedy running through the film: rather than go for a dark nihilistic tone, Body Melt is supposed to be funny (for very subjective values of funny) in the vignettes it showcases, with the grotesque effects adding another layer of unreality. The excuse for all of the body explosions is something about new health supplements being tested on a neighbourhood, but that’s about it for plot: much of the film is a series of sketches in which the characters take vitamins and then explode (or melt, or grow appendages) in various creative ways. There’s nudity. There’s more gore than you can possibly imagine. Coming from Australia, it does feel somewhat similar to the wave of super-gory horror coming out of New Zealand at the time, or even the Ozploistation movement from the previous decade. It clearly qualifies as a melt movie (a subgenre of horror about which I was blissfully unaware until a few weeks ago thanks to Street Trash), and that makes any recommendation subject to an asteroid-sized asterisk—it’s certainly an experience, but it’s not that much of a good horror film—even in the subgenre, Braindead is clearly superior.

  • Mexican Spitfire Out West (1940)

    Mexican Spitfire Out West (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I concluded my review of Mexican Spitfire by stating that there was a definite danger in seeing too many of that series’ entries in too-close proximity, and I was right—watching Mexican Spitfire Out West barely two weeks later simply laid bare how similar the films of the series felt. At some point, films of a too-consistent series can feel like episodes of a TV show, and this third-of-eight Lupe Velez vehicle is pretty much a rerun of Mexican Spitfire, with dual roles being overused, Velez’s temper tantrums being more irritating than amusing (at this point, you have to wonder why the husband doesn’t simply grant the divorce she’s asking for, and walk away to a more peaceful life) and there’s very little variations from the previous film’s antics in structure or individual jokes. Despite the series heading out to Reno, it still feels as if just changing the previous film’s Mexico for another western locale. (A later instalment, taking the Mexican Spitfire at Sea, would at least have the advantage of a very different environment.) It’s still decently amusing if you’re in for Leon Errol’s dual-role shtick or if you happen to like Velez’s stereotypical fiery Latina persona, but my advice still stands—space those viewings by more than a few weeks.

  • Speak Easily (1932)

    Speak Easily (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) The more I see of Buster Keaton’s MGM movies, the more I understand why generations of critics haven’t been so kind to them. It’s not as if he’s not funny—you can reliably count on Keaton to get laughs in a split second (such as when he frantically tries to stuff a coat hanger in a suitcase—a split-second gag in a busy scene, and all the more effective for it), through facial expressions or simple physical gestures in the middle of otherwise ordinary sequences. But there’s a feeling, especially in Speak Easily, that he was being forced into a comedy straightjacket that really constrained what he was capable of doing. Much of the initial lack of sparks from Speak Easily comes from the premise—playing a sheltered academic doesn’t quite get Keaton to the kind of comedy that he understood best, and it takes much of the film to get to the point where we get the classic Keaton anarchistic physical comedy… even if Jimmy Durante is there to help shoulder the comic load. Keaton’s passage to the sound era was easier than most—his voice is pleasant and he could deal with dialogue decently enough, but the spark of silent movie years was gone. It doesn’t help that he seems to be playing a character of an ingrate age—his silent films as a young man are very funny and I really enjoyed his cantankerous persona in the last decade of his career, but here he seems in an awkward stage ill-fitting his persona. I still liked Speak Easily—the look at the tribulations of a travelling troupe of comedians is something that I always find interesting—but it really is a shadow of Keaton’s best work.

  • Night Flight (1933)

    Night Flight (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) The most interesting things about Night Flight are all about the movie than in the movie itself. Taken at face value, it’s a decent-enough adventure film about the heroic age of aviation in South America, featuring efforts by a company led by an American to establish trade routes through the treacherous Andes, especially when life-saving medication is involved. The technical quality of the film is rough by contemporary standards, reflecting Pre-Code era films’ limited ability to portray complex adventure stories. It’s interesting, and the cast (John Barrymore, Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Myrna Loy and Helen Hayes) is amazing enough… but it’s hard to watch it without pining for Only Angel Have Wings, a very similar 1939 film with much better direction, script and production values. It’s when you start digging into the film’s production history that the most fascinating aspects of the film appear: Based on an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novel, the author did not like the film and, through contractual shenanigans, had MGM take the film out of circulation in 1942… until 2011, when Warner Bros struck a deal with Saint-Exupéry’s estate to have the film shown again. That’s kind of amazing in itself—that a somewhat popular film starring well-known actors could disappear for nearly seventy years and become available once more to twenty-first century cinephiles, while their parents and grandparents would not have been able to see the film. The movie itself may not warrant that much devotion, but as an illustration of how contemporary film buffs have it much better than any previous generation of movie fans, it’s almost unparalleled.

  • The Dark Horse (1932)

    The Dark Horse (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) As I sat down to watch The Dark Horse, a Pre-Code political comedy featuring a simpleton being groomed for high office, the United States is experiencing the last drawn-out spasm of an incompetent federal administration led by another kind of simpleton. My tolerance for fictive portraits of such people put in position of power is at an all-time low considering the excess mortality rates south of the border during a worldwide pandemic, and I wasn’t sure I was going to like the result all that much. Happily, the film often exceeded my expectations. It certainly helps that the candidate at the heart of The Dark Horse is an amiable, harmless kind of simpleton—not the kind of person you’d want as a governor, but not the kind of spiteful, destructive idiot found in reality. It also helps that the dull character is not at the centre of the film: that honour would go to a sharp politician operative dealing with grooming his charge, while also managing his ex-wife and new flame during the election period. Bette Davis co-stars as his would-be second wife, but it’s Warren Williams who grabs most of the spotlight as a genius-level political operative. Some of the script is a bit blunt and repetitive, but there are a handful of very funny moments, and a third act that keeps escalating out of control even from the protagonist’s capable mind. You can see in The Dark Horse the somewhat freewheeling attitude toward marriage and divorce that characterized many 1930s romantic comedies (something that would ironically grow even bolder after the imposition of the Code), but you will especially recognize the timeless nature of political campaigns, even despite very different tools at the disposal of campaigns. The Dark Horse thus finds a place in the very, very long list of American movies about American politics, often being far more idealistic than reality, even despite their comic cynicism.

  • The French Line (1953)

    The French Line (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There have always been Hollywood star vehicles designed to feature specific actresses’ ample assets, but The French Line’s dedication to showcasing the great Jane Russell is exceptional by any standards. Produced by Howard Hugues, this is a film that explicitly set out to capitalize on Russell’s considerable sex appeal. Not only is it a film that revolves around her character, not only is it a film that shows her off in surprisingly skimpy outfits during dance numbers, this is a movie that was shot in 3D mainly to show off her curves to a thirsty public. (“J.R. in 3D—Need we say more?” bluntly goes the poster.) Legend goes that Hugues had a very personal interest in Russell, and designed many of the film’s outfits. He arguably overstepped—the film was judged so salacious that it was refused a production code seal of approval, earned scathing ratings from the era’s moral guardians, was banned from a few cities/countries and had to have an entire musical number trimmed before being shown in other territories. Today, of course, it’s quite tame—you can see more revealing numbers in PG-13 films. And once absent the titillation element, The French Line becomes another ordinary musical, once whose similarities to the previous year’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes become a handicap more than a selling point. Oh, it’s watchable enough: Jane Russell became a sex-symbol for good reasons, and they go far beyond skimpy outfits. She gets a few good numbers as a Texan oil magnate looking for love at sea and abroad—While the infamous final number “Looking for Trouble” gets most of the attention, I really enjoyed “Any Gal from Texas.” The tone is amiable, and there’s enough going on around the edges of the supporting characters to be interesting: Mary McCarthy looks good, and Arthur Hunnicutt gets his fair share of smiles thanks to a grander-than-life Texan character. Still, there’s no denying that The French Line is about Jane Russell and little else: it’s her film, curves and all.

  • Executive Action (1973)

    Executive Action (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) As far as JFK assassination conspiracy fantasies go, nearly everyone remembers Oliver Stone’s bravura 1991 masterpiece JFK, but 1973’s Executive Action has faded from memory. I’m not necessarily saddened by that—As I’m editing this review in early 2021, the United States is experiencing an alarming tribal epistemology crisis, with truth taking a distant second place to political affiliations. (And lest you think that I’m making a “both sides” argument, let me set you straight: The right wing’s acceptance of nonsensical conspiracy theories has little equivalency on the other side of the aisle.) The result is thousands of excess mortalities in a national pandemic, an attempted political coup (incompetent because fantasy-based, but a coup nonetheless), a disturbing dismissal of norms and significant damage to American institutions. So, you may excuse me if my tolerance is nonexistent for such intentional blurring between fact and fantasy for political gains. At another time, I probably would have enjoyed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s skillful blend of fact and fiction, describing a shadowy cabal planning the assassination of JFK and subsequent coverup: the film is a masterclass in dramatization of a wild conspiracy theory, playing on universal fears and prejudice to tell all about men in control rather than a lone nut sending everything in chaos. From the opening narrative scroll to the final error-filled one, Executive Action is about sowing doubt, blocking objections and suspending disbelief. It can rely on strong actors such as Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, a sober execution and a surprisingly modern kaleidoscopic approach to its subject. In other words, it’s quite intriguing from a technical perspective and in its execution. But I simply cannot, right now, bring myself to feel any sympathy for its goals. I’ve had it up to there with conspiracy fiction now that I see it blend in the real world with people unable to make the difference between truth and politically motivated manipulation. Maybe I would have been more sympathetic five years ago. Hopefully, I will be able to be in five years.

  • The Passionate Plumber (1932)

    The Passionate Plumber (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Buster Keaton heads to France in The Passionate Plumber, one of the less-than-impressive movies he did at MGM in the sound film phase of his career. This period is not usually well regarded by film critics, and the step down from his silent era movies is clear. Most of the blame for Keaton’s decline during these years is usually attributed to studio interference—Keaton couldn’t get as much creative freedom working in the MGM system, and his comic setpieces are clearly less ambitious. This being said, you could still see remnants of Keaton’s creative genius even in the MGM films, and The Passionate Plumber does have its shares of flashes.  Taking place in France (but suffering from near-unintelligible French dialogue), the film takes longer than expected to accumulate the comic elements of its climax: Keaton plays an American inventor who runs into another American played by none other than Jimmy Durante, and you can see the film split the comedy between the two: Durante gets the verbal material, whereas Keaton gets the physical—and most of the time, it works: Even in throwaway gestures, Keaton remains supremely gifted in getting laughs out of nothing (including repeatedly slapping people with a glove)… and that’s not even getting into the bigger set-pieces of the film. There’s a really good shot in which he is pursued by a crowd of men going up a staircase, and it somehow resolves by him reversing course and running away downstairs. It’s in those moments that you can still recognize the silent-era Keaton, despite the heavier demands of the inconsequential plot and the lack of opportunity for him to guide the entire film’s comic choreography. I still liked The Passionate Plumber—it’s got its moments despite not being up to Keaton’s silent films. But it’s one of the movies where you most clearly see the missed opportunities in Keaton’s MGM years.