Movie Review

  • Broken Arrow (1950)

    Broken Arrow (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) There are movies that play well both on a surface and a metatextual level, and The Rare Breed feels like one of them if you’ve been paying attention to the history of the representation of Native American culture in Hollywood. I don’t have the knowledge to say for sure that Broken Arrow was the first film to portray a reconciliation between white settlers and Native Americans. But in the grand sweep of the western genre, it feels like a front-runner to the changing attitudes toward Native Americans during the 1950s and even more so the 1960s—often used by Classic Hollywood as caricatural villains and nothing more, it took a long time for Native Americans to establish themselves as real characters. With Broken Arrow, Hollywood takes a big step toward better representation. Here we have the all-American everyman James Stewart playing the part of a man seeking peace with Cochise—first, by learning the language, then by negotiating a carefully worded agreement to leave the mail carriers alone. It’s not a painless process for him—white people regard him with suspicion, as do most of the Native Americans. Romance blooms, and tragedy strikes—this is a dramatic western, after all, and great sacrifice make for great drama. Still, the film feels like a tentative reconciliation by itself: it would take many more decades before getting to a sufficiently accurate depiction of Native Americans in westerns (some say we’re not even there yet) but intermediate steps are important. Broken Arrow still stars a white actor as Cochise (although Geronimo is portrayed by a Mohawk actor) and fictionalizes quite a bit of material, but the Native American characters are developed; they speak in conversational English (as highlighted by the film’s opening narration) and are seen as people with valid grievances. As a result, it’s a film that has aged far better than contemporary knee-jerk depictions of Natives as pure antagonists that still filled up most of the pre-1950s westerns.

  • You’re Soaking in It (2017)

    You’re Soaking in It (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) There’s something deeply ironic and maybe even surreal in watching a documentary about the state-of-the-art in advertising on TV, and it being interrupted by low-end commercials. The cheap come-ons look almost laughable compared to the insidious techniques described in You’re Soaking in It. Making copious references to Mad Men and the early era of mass advertising, this is a documentary that sums up a lot of scattered thinking about the modern approach to selling things. As the world has moved away from monolithic audiences and gathering spaces, so has advertising—in one of the best sequences of the documentary, we’re told how advertising on the web now targets you and only you, running auctions to determine which advertisement will earn a spot in the commercial spot of the page you’re requesting. “Mad men have been replaced by math men,” says the film. But advertising can take even more diffuse forms as well, and one of the film’s most uncomfortable moments comes when it chats with a YouTuber who seems oblivious to the way her “authentic” channel has been coopted like a cheap billboard. I don’t think there’s anything in You’re Soaking in It that isn’t already well known or well discussed—if you’ve been paying attention. But there’s considerable value in it being brought together in a coherent whole, and a consideration of the various side issues that come with it. (I wish that writer-director Scott Harper would have highlighted that one of the weaknesses of all-pervasive advertisement infrastructure is that it is unusually weak to being blocked—but we do get discussion of the infrastructure and discussion of the blocking, so that’s not bad.) There is even a sobering climax to the film in which the advertisers themselves ponder if what they’re doing is really working: despite an incredibly sophisticated arms race between individuals and those trying to chip away at that individuality by convincing them to take specific actions, such as buying products or voting for an individual, individuals are becoming more sophisticated as well, and able to resist yesterday’s come-on even as tomorrow’s pitches are being developed. Documentaries such as You’re Soaking in It are a welcome addition to that awareness and capacity to resist.

  • Stripped to Kill (1987)

    Stripped to Kill (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) It makes perfect sense that Roger Corman’s name is listed as executive producer to Stripped to Kill: After all, there hasn’t been a single exploitation angle that Corman hasn’t liked, and setting a crime thriller inside a strip club seems like a perfect idea. (Strip-club culture would later explode into the mainstream, but it was still something transgressive in 1987.) The plot summary is simple, silly but clever, as a policewoman infiltrates a strip club to catch a serial killer. There’s quite a bit of nudity (most of it dull) and a number of serial killings (also dull), hitting most of the essential high points of a sexploitation film. Alas, there isn’t much here to care about: the serial killer’s identity is crazy in the kind of over-the-top way that 1980s slashers settled into, and there isn’t much to the lead performances by Kay Lenz and Greg Evigan. Katt Shea’s direction (in her first film) is fine—as much of Stripped to Kill can be summarized as such. It’s gory but not overly so, filled with nudity but not crossing the line into harder material, and with a story just good enough to keep going but not to leave any lasting impression. In other words, it could have been much worse and isn’t—not high praise, but sufficient for a film that was designed to titillate more than anything else.

  • Men Are Such Fools (1938)

    Men Are Such Fools (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) One of the ways a screenwriter can sabotage a script is in unintentionally make their lead character wholly unlikable. Oh, there are plenty of opportunities for anti-heroes, magnificent cads and tortured protagonists… but since the point is a lighthearted romantic comedy, you should make sure that the heroine is, at least, likable—otherwise, many viewers will just wonder why the bother. Such is nearly the case in Men Are Such Fools, a story meant to show the corporate and romantic success of a plucky girl played by Priscilla Lane. Except that the pluckiness gets overdone: after leaving her husband to strike out on her own for suspiciously thin reasons (further evidence of a script being manipulated toward an ending, rather than evolving organically), we’re left to wonder why he even bothers chasing after her. An ending that rewards this pursuit doesn’t leave a triumphant taste, largely because (to reiterate the point), the heroine is simply too unlikable to be considered a goal. This being said, any Humphrey Bogart fan should miss this one: Here Bogart seems unusually ill at ease playing an executive cad, hitting upon the heroine in an office environment when he has no business doing so, and being almost entirely characterized by those actions. I also enjoyed some of the dialogue, although not really the story it’s in service to. Men Are Such Fool has maybe half of what it needs to succeed on its own as a romantic comedy, but it mishandles those elements so blatantly that it ends up backfiring upon itself.

  • Les palmes de M. Schutz (1997)

    Les palmes de M. Schutz (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) Unfairly enough, I couldn’t help but compare Les palmes de M. Schutz to 1943’s Hollywood biography Marie Curie with Greer Garson. The comparison isn’t without cause, considering that both are films about the discovery of radium by Marie Curie and her husband Pierre. Curiously enough, I don’t have a clear favourite: the 1943 film is reasonably exact despite having been made in the 1940s, whereas this newest French offering is less faithful to fact, but often funnier, more dramatically diverse, and benefits from switching its focus from the Curies to their academic sponsor, the titular Mr. Schutz. On top of the Curies’ scientific quest (adequately vulgarized through a supporting character), there’s Schutz’s thirst for recognition, even as his own scientific skills are slight—there’s a curiously sympathetic side to his efforts at recognizing, fostering and sheltering talent here that would warm any middle manager’s heart. It does help that none other than Phillipe Noiret plays Schutz, bringing considerable warmth and sympathy to the character. Otherwise, Les palmes de M. Schutz is a very likable film—it’s filled with gentle humour, covers a lot of ground both scientific and personal, and actually gives anyone the impression that they’ve learned a lesson or two about the history of radium. It’s worth a look if science on-screen is the kind of thing that interests you.

  • Comet Over Broadway (1938)

    Comet Over Broadway (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Some films make history, and others, well, not so much. I find it hilarious that about three-quarter of the narrative Wikipedia entry for Comet Over Broadway is about Bette Davis’ refusal to star in the film (leading to her infamous suspension of contract — movie history!), so slight and meaningless is the final result. As far as showbiz movies go, it’s a melodramatic blend of scarcely believable plot elements thrown in a blender in a way to make us loathe the heroine and despise the screenwriter. It has to do with an ambitious small-town girl who ends up having her husband kill someone and get sent to prison, gives her infant daughter up to another woman and then goes on to major showbiz success. Kay Francis is stuck in the lead role, all the way to an ending that means practically nothing. The film is meant to make audiences cry, but it’s so far-fetched that it can’t even sustain basic scrutiny, leading to a reaction quite unlike the one designed from the get-go. I’m usually a good and forgiving audience for showbiz films. But Comet Over Broadway doesn’t click. At best, I’ll dismiss it as a conventional weepy big on plot contrivances. But I’m not liking it.

  • 13 Frightened Girls (1963)

    13 Frightened Girls (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) With a crew that includes the legendary William Castle as producer-director and a title like 13 Frightened Girls echoing Castle’s classic 13 Ghosts, anyone could be forgiven for expecting a horror film out of the deal. Surprisingly enough, though, what we get is a cold-war comedy, featuring an elite boarding school student who, out of a crush on an older man (ick), becomes an international spy by simply eavesdropping on her classmates, all from the multicultural London diplomatic set. The mixture of genres between teenybopper comedy and espionage thrills isn’t always successful: there are a few moments of unsettling violence in between the antics of our young protagonist, and I really could have dispensed with the schoolgirl-crush-on-a-grown-man angle. Still, there’s a characteristic early-1960s feel to the comedy that makes it feel all the more intriguing despite the curiously undisciplined script. There are many ways in which 13 Frightened Girls could have been better, but it’s quirky enough to be interesting as-is.

  • Dead Man’s Hand (2007)

    Dead Man’s Hand (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s something halfway interesting about low-budget horror film Dead Man’s Hand, with a young man inheriting a run-down casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas. As a setting, it’s intriguingly creepy—while Vegas is about the glitz and the fancy destination hotels, there’s something unnerving about the unseen, unlucky, unglamorous underbelly of the city filled with (as the expression goes) broken dreams and bankruptcies. But there I go finding far too much promise in a premise, because Dead Man’s Hand quickly takes a turn for far more conventional material. As our young protagonists get to the casino, we don’t get much more than a take on the haunted house theme: There are vengeful spirits in the casino, and they take aim at anyone who steps in. (Never mind their flimsy motivations or tenuous connection to the protagonist and even more so his friends.) Perfunctory characterization isn’t enough to get us to care, and the schematic nature of the film quickly betrays the limited creative ambitions of shlockmaster director Charles Band. Feeling long even at somewhere around 80 minutes, Dead Man’s Hand is a generic horror product, fleetingly interesting and not even competent enough to be scary. Connoisseurs know that nothing good now carries the Full Moon production label, and this is no exception.

  • The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

    The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Some movies come with impressive pedigrees, and so The Snows of Kilimanjaro can boast of being based on a Hemingway short story. It’s certainly in the grand dramatic tradition of other Hemingway adaptations: The framing device has Gregory Peck playing a writer dying on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and flashing back to earlier episodes of his life. You can see here an early attempt at the kind of epic film that would come to dominate the later half of the decade: going through decades of history and many foreign locations (although much of the film is visibly shot in the studio), it’s meant as a grand tragic statement, a sweeping romance and a summing-up-a-life kind of film. The effect is slightly ruined by the unexpectedly happy ending invented for the film, although it does end the film on a more positive note than you’d expect. Some of the resonances with other Hemingway stories get predictable (oh no, another love interest killed while working in ambulances during the Spanish Civil War!), but that only counts if you’re familiar with the Hemingway-Hollywood corpus. Otherwise, The Snows of Kilimanjaro is very close to what we think of when we picture “old-school Hollywood romantic drama” for better or for worse—I found it a bit long, a bit predictable, a bit dull and a bit overdone. But so it goes.

  • The Honeymoon Machine (1961)

    The Honeymoon Machine (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) We don’t naturally associate Steve MacQueen with comedy, but The Honeymoon Machine does offer him a good showcase for his persona in a more lighthearted context. Here, he plays a hustler-type US Navy sailor who sees an opportunity when his ship, equipped with a super-powerful computer, docks at a fantasy version of Venice complete with a casino and a luxurious hotel suite. Dragging fellow crewmembers into his burgeoning scheme, he rents the suite, gets the cooperation of the computer expert, brings in the necessary equipment to communicate with the ship and finds a way to crack the probabilities of roulette. Things get funnier and more complicated when the admiral’s daughter stumbles into the suite, when the computer operator’s old flame resurfaces, when the admiral launches an investigation into unauthorized ship-to-shore communications and when even the Russians grow concerned about what’s happening with the Americans. Before long, The Honeymoon Machine (adapted from a Broadway play) has several spinning plates all crashing into each other in comic complications. MacQueen is his usual cool and likable self, except playing for farce this time around and being good at it—even if he reportedly walked out on the film’s sneak preview. Meanwhile, Paula Prentiss looks gorgeous in her character’s thick-rimmed glasses, even with the film making a few jokes about it. The Honeymoon Machine is not a good movie, but it’s a fun one—it’s very much in-line with a stage-bound farcical tradition and is well worth rediscovering from Hollywood’s archives. Plus, there’s a MacQueen in a rare comedy role, which isn’t the least of the film’s charms.

  • Maria Chapdelaine (1934)

    Maria Chapdelaine (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) The 1934 version of Maria Chapdelaine opens on the worse possible note. The story of Maria Chapdelaine is a French-Canadian classic for a few reasons, but keep in mind a few things: The original novel on which the film was based was written by a French immigrant, describing a rural Québec largely for European audiences. (In a twist of fate, he died before the novel became a runaway success.) This 1934 film was made by French filmmakers who came to Québec to shoot the film. (There was no significant French-Canadian film industry before the 1950s and even that is stretching the truth quite a bit.) The film was also made for French-European audiences, something that its opening scrawls underline heavily: first, it feels compelled to point out that despite the film’s rural setting, Québec also had bustling cities; second, it felt compelled to point out that the filmmakers toned down the “rough” Québec accent for intelligibility. With an incredibly patronizing opening text like that, anyone would be justified in expecting a condescending grab bag of cultural appropriation and dismissiveness. Fortunately, the film does much better once it gets going. It clearly relishes the colourful French-Canadian patois, with dialogue clearly showcasing rural expressions without repetition. The non-Québecois mid-Atlantic accent actually works in the film’s favour, clearly letting the words speak for themselves rather than the inflection—after a while, you simply stop noticing it. The film works even better visually: a lot of work was invested in capturing images of rural Québec at a time where very few filmmakers did, and the result is an amazing document of 1930s Québec looking like the 1910s. There’s a lot of enthusiasm and not as much condescension in how rural Québec is presented: the soundtrack of the film is crammed with traditional French-Canadian songs, images of farms and logging camps, and delightful turns of phrase that are impossible to translate in any other language (or any other French dialect). From mild loathing, I actually grew to like the result quite a bit, and see it as a very worthy precursor to Québec’s own film industry. Keep in mind that this Maris Chapdelaine was made before Québec’s secular Révolution tranquille and that it predates the turbulent history of Québec’s separatist movement, lending it a different quality than later versions meant to promote Québec’s rural roots. Also keep in mind that Maria Chapdelaine has been shot four times: this 1930s French version, a 1950s French version, a (rather good) 1983 version made in Québec and, as I write these lines, is slated to be Québec’s next homegrown blockbuster. The universal nature of the story (which features three suitors to a beautiful young woman, each of them representing a facet of the French-Canadian experience) and terroir appeal make it a natural for generational reinterpretation. I frankly think that we all lucked out with the 1930s version: opening scrawl aside, it’s about as good an adaptation that could be made at the time.

  • Murder by Decree (1979)

    Murder by Decree (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) The idea of pairing Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper has a long history—it’s a natural matchup from a chronological perspective, and an irresistible one from a dramatic viewpoint. Murder by Decree is far from being the first work of fiction to explore the pairing (even in limiting ourselves to movies, A Study in Terror did it a decade earlier), but you don’t have to be the first to be influential—It was decently successful at the box office and so I wonder how many of the later works of fiction combining the two have been influenced by this one. The plot is very much focused on the royal conspiracy angle, almost de rigueur as a way to make the stakes as high as they could possibly go in London. Depending on how you feel about whether Jack the Ripper story should adhere to the historical record, this will either be interesting or far-fetched. Still, the point of Murder by Decree isn’t as much the story as the concept, plus the rather engrossing atmosphere. Fully playing with the idea of 1800s London being a fog-shrouded city and spending a good chunk of money on period detail, director Bob Clark makes Murder by Decree notable for its iconography. There’s also a nice amount of acting talent involved: Christopher Plummer and none other than James Mason (who looks much older but sounds the same) star as, respectively, Holmes and Watson, with Donald Sutherland and Genevieve Bujold in supporting roles. It all wraps up in a package slightly too long (especially in the ending stretch, drunk on its own conspiracy fantasies) but remains enjoyable despite the gory subject matter.

  • This Woman Is Dangerous (1952)

    This Woman Is Dangerous (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I don’t particularly like Joan Crawford-the-person, but as an actress she could have her moments in even the most average films, and it’s a quirk of characterization that makes her the star of This Woman is Dangerous. Trying out permutations on a familiar theme of a gangster eyeing a mundane life, the script makes showcases a woman as the head of a crime gang, and Crawford tears into the role with relish, living up to the title of the film before settling down with a tale of progressive blindness and falling in love with her surgeon. The complications come up when her ex-lover comes back to get her, although the interest of the film diminishes the closer it gets back to a standard crime thriller. By far the best part of the film is the opening, during which Crawford barks orders to her gang and proves that she is not to be trifled with. Her character softens and becomes less interesting as it goes by, although as a quasi-noir crime film, This Woman is Dangerous does have basic watchability.

  • Rich Kids (1979)

    Rich Kids (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I wasn’t looking forward to watching Rich Kids—tales of divorce as seen from the eyes of children (well, young teenagers) are almost too sad to contemplate, and I wasn’t sure I was up for it. But the film turns out to be easier to take than I expected—funnier, more optimistic, not quite as centred on the kid characters (although it’s a gradual process) and somewhat wittier than the usual drama on the topic. While the “rich kids” of the title are played by debut actors Trini Alvarado (who went on to have a significant career) and one-time actor Jeremy Levy, the parents of the female lead are played with Kathryn Walker and John Lithgow. The territory here is familiar from many other films—rich intellectual New Yorkers splitting up and kids making sense of it. But compared to the dreariness of (say) The Squid and the Whale, Rich Kids is far more entertaining to watch: The kids are admittedly written as precocious sages (as per the “here’s how your parents are going to announce their divorce to you… pick a restaurant you don’t like” scene), but their wisdom continually decreases throughout the film until the parents race to their rescue later on. Plenty of amusing secondary subplots and details enliven things, especially when it comes to how the parents are facing their divorce—the film opens with an elaborate charade by the protagonist’s father that doesn’t even fool the intended audience, and eventually paints a nightmarish portrait of another man in the throes of a stereotypical midlife crisis. It all amounts to a moderately good comic drama that exceeds expectations: much easier to watch than I expected, and not without its share of darker comedy.

  • Family Plot (1976)

    Family Plot (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Considering a career that spanned slightly more than half a century, there are some really weird things in Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography that are seldom mentioned in the same breath as his acknowledged classics. I have a really soft spot for his 1941 screwball comedy of remarriage Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but his final feature film Family Plot is no less quirky. A comedy thriller pitting two teams of criminals against each other thanks to clashing schemes, it almost works as an apology for the unbearable bleakness of his previous film Frenzy. I’m not suggesting that Family Plot is a barrel of laughs: it’s often surprisingly long, hits a few very dramatic notes late in the third act, and often seems confused about where it’s going. But its dark sense of humour seems far more befitting of earlier Hitchcock films à la The Trouble with Harry, and feels like a minor but ironic coda to a storied career. The comic caper may feel loose at first, but it does tighten up quite a bit toward the end, and the ending is a release of tension as effective as many of his previous films. The 1970s period detail adds an interesting patina to the film, and the result is an entertaining but definitely second-tier Hitchcock film.