Movie Review

  • The Little Foxes (1941)

    The Little Foxes (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) If you want to understand why Bette Davis is still acclaimed even decades after her heyday, you can take a look at, well, nearly her entire body of work — but The Litte Foxes serves as an exemplar. Going far past ingenue roles, she here plays a deliciously evil schemer intent on riches without ethical concerns. It’s a remarkable and yet typical kind of role for her, and it hints at the force of character she displayed throughout her career and in the famously troubled making of this specific movie, to tell studio heads and directors that she would not compromise on playing a despicable character. She is by far the best thing about The Little Foxes, an overwrought drama with a solid core that nonetheless drags on quite awhile before finding its footing well into the third act. The various shenanigans played by Davis’s character eventually become deadly, as her intentions are clear and so are the lengths to which she will go to in order to get what she wants. In many ways, The Little Foxes is also an exemplar of a specific kind of circa-1941 cinema—the rich literary/theatrical adaptation, brought to the big screen by a small salaried army of talented craftsmen and taking a poke (within the confines of the Production Code) at a dark odd corner of American society filled with well-mannered psychopaths and greedy arrivistes. But it took someone with Bette Davis to make audiences believe in it.

  • The Lion in Winter (1968)

    The Lion in Winter (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) Film historians and Katharine Hepburn fans can agree on one thing: She became a much better actress as she aged—from a cute funny ingenue in the 1930s, she switched to a matronly appearance throughout the 1940s and became increasingly adept at dramatic roles throughout the 1950s. The Lion in Winter is, in many ways, the apogee of her acting talents. (Significantly, she won her third Best Actress Academy Award for this film.) The film itself seems designed to let actors display how capable they could be—it’s a complex story of court politics and family intrigue set against the Henry II era (1183) and the kind of film that actors and the Academy both love. Casting-wise, there are highlights from several generations here—Hepburn, obviously, but also Peter O’Toole as Henry II, and much more modern notables as Anthony Hopkins (in his first big movie role) and Timothy Dalton. (This is one handy movie in any Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, as you can use it to skip from the 2020s to the 1930s quite easily.) As for its impact, well, it’s all quite more interesting than its Dark Ages setting would suggest—I suspect that anyone who was fascinated by Game of Thrones’ exploration of the perils of hereditary succession will also enjoy this one. It has aged, though: in filmmaking techniques, the 1960s feel increasingly artificial, and some of the values of the time have been imposed on the 1183 setting in not-so-elegant fashion. But that does add a layer of interest that wasn’t in the film when it was first released. At least Hepburn is timeless.

  • Soy Cuba [I Am Cuba] (1964)

    Soy Cuba [I Am Cuba] (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) There’s a reason why I am Cuba shows up on lists of movies with great cinematography—even today, it’s hard not to be impressed by some of the camera work on display here, even if the film itself is a blunt piece of Soviet-produced anti-American propaganda. A co-production between the USSR and Cuba, it’s a set of four connected stories showing the factors leading to and through the Cuban revolution of 1959. The script can be arbitrary, blunt and grotesque at times—the Batista-era American-run casino is portrayed as a malevolent force perverting the locals, and the “Americans” in the film all speak with exaggerated bombastic accents that feel like a parody. But it does have the merit of presenting the Cuban side of the events. As with all movies designed to whip up revolutionary fervour, it’s not subtle about sacrificing its characters to the cause—and keep in mind that this film was released merely five years after the events. But I Am Cuba is not a film to take in narratively—it’s far more interesting to watch it for the moment-to-moment decisions taken by director Mikhail Kalatozov as he comes up with insane camera movements, unusual ways to portray familiar material and emerging from the water, passing through buildings or going down several storeys as part of continuous long shots. It’s all quite amazing enough to make anyone wonder, “how did they do that?”—my favourite shot has the camera dropping down several metres to follow someone going from a casino rooftop to a pool on a lower plane. There’s an additional interest in considering that this piece of pure cinema essentially disappeared for thirty years: Never shown in the United States for obvious reasons and quickly forgotten in the USSR for being insufficiently supportive of the two regimes. It took until the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, until it was rediscovered, restored (thank you Martin Scorsese) and broadcast to a wider audience. Today, film buffs can feast on I Am Cuba as a fascinating historical artifact, and as a virtuoso display of film technique.

  • The Palm Beach Story (1942)

    The Palm Beach Story (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) It’s not often that a classic Hollywood movie has me blinking in confusion, rewinding and starting again to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything, but then again very few Hollywood movies have as fast-paced an opening as writer-director Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, which crams a film’s worth of romantic comedy hijinks into a three-minute-long summary (if that), then proceeds to tell the sequel to that non-existing first film. (Pay attention, though, because there are a lot of clues in that opening flash to foreshadow the otherwise confounding last minute of the film.) Not that things get any sedate after that, considering that our happily married couple at the end of that film summary find themselves out of cash to develop an invention. In the finest screwball tradition, they have a flash of inspiration—why not divorce, let her find a rich husband, and allow that new guy to finance the development of the invention? If you think that’s insane, you haven’t met the other characters of the tale—including a shooting-obsessed hunting club eager to transform a train car into a shooting gallery. Part of Sturges’ miraculous first years, The Palm Beach Story is very, very funny from beginning to end. It’s filled with characters acting in ways we’d consider crazy, good lines of dialogue and plenty of screwball sequences—and it doesn’t skimp on a very romantic and satisfying ending. This is all enlivened by a charming throwback view of the 1930s as seen from the upper-class, from nighttime trains to fancy yachts and elaborate aristocratic entanglements. Claudette Colbert is utterly adorable in the lead role here, with Joel McRae providing good support as a nominally less-crazy husband. I know a lot of viewers have their favourites in Sturges’ filmography—either The Lady Eve or Sullivan’s Travels or maybe even The Big McGuinty. I’ll have to re-watch all of them to make up my mind, but for now I’m putting up The Palm Beach Story as my favourite by a nose—perhaps, unlike the better-known others, because it came out of nowhere and hooked me so quickly.

  • Dead End Drive-In (1986)

    Dead End Drive-In (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) There’s a memorable 1988 Joe Lansdale novel called “The Drive-In” that features teenagers trapped in an eternal night at the drive-in, with the only source of food being the concession stand. It’s gruesome and weird and terrifying and you’ve got to wonder if there’s any filiation between that and director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s earlier film Dead End Drive-In, in which teenagers are trapped in a drive-in repurposed to be a concentration camp in future dystopian Australia. As a proud ozploitation film, it seems to blend a bit of Mad Max and another bit of The Cars that Ate Paris into something not quite like its inspirations. There’s a lot of social commentary here, the social microcosm inside the drive-reflecting the world at large. It’s stylishly executed too—1980s new wave punk fashion for the characters, and audacious low-budget filmmaking elsewhere. It’s got very much the strengths and weaknesses of its subgenre: Quirky, in-your-face and willing to say things not mentioned in polite company, but also unpolished, difficult to take seriously and more allegorical than credible. Still, Dead End Drive-In is not a bad watch, especially if your expectations are low.

  • Annie Get Your Gun (1950)

    Annie Get Your Gun (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) As a white male superficially undistinguishable from previous generations of film buffs, I have a significant privilege in watching Classical Hollywood movies—these were movies made by people like me, often for people like me and I can usually manage to overlook the less admirable elements of sexism, racism and other characteristics often found in older movies. But that privilege is not absolute immunity, and some movies still manage to raise my hackles even when considering the historical context. Which leads me to this: I love a third of Annie Get Your Gun, I like another third of it, and I loathe the remaining third. The part I love is that it’s an exuberant, expensive musical in the grand MGM tradition: expansively staged, with a higher-than-average number of great songs and a brassy lead performance by Betty Hutton. Inspired by the life of real-life Annie Oakley, it’s about a sharpshooting rural girl who gets swept away in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and then into a romance. If that was all there was to it, I could still count it as a really good musical: Terrific musical numbers (“Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” and the classic “There’s No Business Like Show Business”), fair filler, and one great lead performance. Sadly, though, the film goes the extra mile to offend with outdated sexism and even worse racism. Even by the coarse sensibilities of the 1950s, Annie Get Your Gun is embarrassingly dismissive of its Native American characters, portraying them with a mortifying succession of simple-minded clichés and reinforcement of their otherness. As a consequence, sequences of the film are actively difficult to watch, such as the disturbing “I’m an Indian too.” That’s bad enough to overshadow the dodgy way Oakley’s character is treated as someone who can only be completed by submitting to a romantic partner, somewhat undermining (by twenty-first century standards) the portrait of a strong self-reliant protagonist. Annie Get Your Gun is tough enough to recommend on the surface, but the more you know about its production history (with Judy Garland replaced during the shoot after developing severe mental health issues, and being replaced by Hutton) the more you get to the conclusion that this film might have been best unmade. If you do watch it, consider fast-forwarding past the worst moments—except that there are many of them, and they’re not all separate from the musical numbers. Maybe line up the three or four best songs and call it a day.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, May 2021) After a disappointed first viewing, I decided to give another chance to Annie Get Your Gun for two reasons. For one thing, it’s freshly restored from a 4K-grade effort, meaning that it’s never looked better. For another, I was curious to see if I’d feel as strongly about the film’s mortifying depiction of Native Americans the second time around. The basics of the film remain the same: This is Betty Hutton’s best-in-career show as the legendarily brassy sharpshooter Anne Oakley. This highly fanciful musical comedy, adapted from a Broadway stage play, doesn’t really care about historical accuracy when there are musical numbers, some romance, cheap gags and pure Americana to play with. The film may best be remembered for two memorable tunes: “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Anything You Can Do” still work really well. I still quite like Louis Calhern’s mellifluous performance as William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. But results from this second viewing turn out to be… mixed. While Annie Get Your Gun has indeed never looked better with sharp images and rich vivid colours (and this is a film with plenty of vivid colours!), it also underscores the studio-set artificiality of many sequences in the film, especially the faker-than-ever backdrop to “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly.”  Then there’s the whole depiction of Native Americans, which goes deep into iconography and stereotypes. It’s a vexing blight on the film, but the only reason why it’s not more than an annoyance is that it’s done in a warm comedic tone fit for a musical – unlike other low points of Native Indian representativeness in Hollywood (ugh, that Peter Pan scene), the character of Sitting Bull is allowed a few good comic lines and more depth than simply portraying an icon. Still, I would hope that no modern production of the film would include anything as tone-deaf as “I’m an Indian Too,” especially considering that the number is practically an explicit paean to cultural appropriation. While I’m warmer to some moments of Annie Get Your Gun (and considering the tumultuous production history of the film, with Hutton replacing Judy Garland at the beginning of the shoot, it’s nearly a miracle that the film ended up reasonably good), I’m just as annoyed at other moments of it.

  • Cedar Rapids (2011)

    Cedar Rapids (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2020) I wasn’t expecting much from this cable-TV schedule-filler, but Cedar Rapids is a bit of a pleasant surprise—nice cast, fine production values and funnier gags than expected. Much of the plot takes after a mild form of Midwestern gawking, as the story takes place at an insurance salesmen’s regional convention in the unremarkable depths of Iowa. Our hero, a naïve insurance agent, arrives on the scene with idealistic ideas about his peers and mentors, and much of the next few days is a belated comic coming-of-age story in which his good sweet intentions triumph over everyone else’s R-rated cynicism. Much of the episodic story is really about the protagonist assembling friends that will help him triumph over the final crisis. Cedar Rapids may not sound all that interesting on paper, but on the screen it’s surprisingly easy to watch thanks to a cast of familiar comedians that includes Ed Helms as the naïf protagonist, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche (looking unusually attractive), Stephen Root and others—plus a cameo from Sigourney Weaver. While not a gut-buster, Cedar Rapids is amiable enough, has some good characterization, and director Miguel Arteta keeps the amiable chaos going at a steady pace. For something grabbed randomly from a late-night Cable TV filler lineup, my expectations for Cedar Rapids were exceeded.

  • Sub Zero (2005)

    Sub Zero (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2020) There are some solid theories about attachment that state that exposure is a bigger contributor to relationships than shared interests. Maybe there’s something similar at work in determining whether you’re likely to watch a movie: Will you make an extraordinary effort to watch an acclaimed masterpiece, or will you settle for what’s right there on the Cable TV schedule? I’m mentioning this because, on purely rational grounds, there are no reasons whatsoever to watch Sub Zero. It’s a low-budget made-for-DVD Canadian thriller that shamelessly rips off better films (Cliffhanger, Vertical Limit, etc.) and doesn’t have a single original thought or line of dialogue. You can gather most of this from the TV Guide logline, and a look at the film’s trailer will only confirm it with bombast. But here’s the thing: It’s a Canadian production, which means that it is a reliable filler for any Cable TV channel eager to meet those Canadian Content minimum requirements. I must have resisted seeing Sub Zero for months or even years before it ground me down and I finally gave in to my nagging curiosity. While the result is noticeably worse than the big-budget thrillers that inspired it, Sub Zero is actually… better than you’d expect from a cut-rate mockbuster. The plot is serviceable (if wildly contrived), there’s some style to the directing and while the CGI is 2005-rough, the production values are surprisingly decent for a straight-to-video film of its era. (I suspect that shooting in British Columbia and grabbing tons of stock footage did help.) Director Jim Wynorski is a veteran of the low-budget exploitation genre, and it shows both in the efficient use of resources and in the somewhat unambitious way the film is delivered. Now, I can’t be too sure about my own assessment here—watching the film felt like giving in to a particularly annoying kid constantly asking for attention, and so saying something like “eh, not bad” also feels like the price to pay to make it go away. But one thing is for sure: I’ve seen worse than Sub Zero as CanCon filler.

  • Johnny Belinda (1948)

    Johnny Belinda (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) The depiction of disability in Hollywood has changed quite a bit over the years, and Johnny Belinda squarely belongs to the old school inspirational category… with a few complications. There’s no going around how an able-bodied doctor ends up being the salvation of a deaf-mute woman. But there’s more to this film than just a so-noble story of a disabled person overcoming obstacles: as Johnny Belinda unspools, there’s an entire story about rape, rumour and eventually murder. The film is set in quiet bucolic seaside Nova Scotia—but shot in California. You can see how it was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, considering how much it sounds like an Oscar-bait film. Still, Johnny Belinda is not bad: the criminal subplot adds a lot to the film, and Jane Wyman turns out a convincing performance in the lead role, along with Lew Ayres as the doctor helping her. There are a bunch of issues in having an able-bodied man being the saviour, but the overall portrait is very sympathetic, especially for a 1940s film.

  • Entangled aka Multiverse (2019)

    Entangled aka Multiverse (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) There are at least two low-budget 2019 films called Entangled—this one is the Canadian Science Fiction thriller featuring four students of “anomalous science” who end up creating a strange quantum entanglement phenomenon that eventually comes to haunt them after an untimely death. Obviously shot in Sudbury (which is quickly emerging as a Canadian Science Fiction film powerhouse—I’m coining Sudburypunk right now), it’s a low-budget, small-cast, limited-scope kind of science fiction film, rather charming in dealing with its own limitations. The film’s colour palette most often seems to be shades of dour blue, which applies to the plot as well: Our amateur mad scientists are not all sane, and when strange events (which we quickly deduct to be parallel universe doppelgangers) start happening, it’s clear that they’re not all going to react rationally. This is probably the weakest part of the story—there was quite enough here in the premise without throwing in a human antagonist as well, but that’s how the script goes. Entangled does a bit better on the execution front—the cinematography reinforces its themes of duplication by making heavy use of mirrors. I’m paying attention to director Gaurav Seth: After the rather good Prisoner X and now Entangled, he seems to be emerging as a significant talent for Canadian genre cinema. Marlee Matlin shows up in a small role as the mother of one character, with her deafness weaved into the story. I’m not entirely happy with the ending that feels both obvious in some ways and willfully obtuse in others, but the result is more interesting than most movies in the Science Fiction genre these days, and I’m not going to be overly critical of a low-budget Canadian feature shot in my area of the continent. It will appeal to fans of more cerebral SF, along the lines of the comparable Radius, Time Freak, I’ll Follow You Down, Volition or James vs his Future Self—many of them also shot in Sudbury. Sudburypunk!

  • Shaft (2019)

    Shaft (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) Having seen the original 1970s Shaft not too long ago and the 2000 sequel/remake in theatres, my expectations for this newest instalment were calibrated just right. As much as it may irk some, the best thing about the original movie remains the title song—nearly everything else has been handled much better in other blaxploitation films. The 2000 film was an uninteresting follow up, so how much worse could another reboot be? As it turns out, this latest instalment feels like the most entertaining film of the trilogy. By explicitly setting itself up as a third film in an ongoing once-a-generation series and having both Richard Roundtree and Samuel L. Jackson play older versions of their own characters, this Shaft opens itself up to a new audience while paying a more respectful homage to the previous generations. The film clearly draws upon 2010s scripting techniques by blending comedy with action, adopting a fast pace thanks to director Tim Story and relying a bit too much on established stereotypes even as it decries doing so. Much of the story has to do with the newest, youngest Shaft (played by Jessie T. Usher), son and grandson of previous ones. He’s a data analyst with the FBI, who dislikes guns (while still being pretty good at them, as shown in one of the film’s best scenes) but is forced to team up with his elders in order to resolve the murder of a friend. The story isn’t as important as seeing a twenty-first century Shaft argue about approaches and techniques with his rougher elders, each coming from a slightly different era of blaxploitation. Jackson is particularly funny as a man out of time, but everyone has their chance to shine along the way. Alexandra Shipp makes for a rather lovely companion to the younger Shaft, while Regina Hall also makes an impression as an ex-flame of Jackson’s Shaft. Some of the humour is predictably directed at younger generation clichés, but it all reaches a polished climax high atop a villain’s lair. I liked Shaft quite a bit more than I expected, even though I suspect that it may not age particularly well… but then again neither has its predecessors. Not as much as you’d like to think.

  • Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

    Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2020) Whenever anyone complains about Hollywood taking on the silliest premises in the name of profit, remind them that dubious high-concepts have been in the film industry’s DNA for a very, very long time. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein is not the first nor the worst example, but it’s wild enough to be remembered. By 1946, Universal had been in the Monster Movie business for a decade and a half—long enough to look for ways to spice it up, and the one they picked was melding it with their Abbott and Costello comedy franchise. Crossovers: They’re not new! Despite the title, it’s a comic companion to the big three of the Universal Monster roster, as Dracula and the Wolf Man join Frankenstein for the fun. And fun it is—hitting several comedy registers (physical, verbal, conceptual), this is a film with something for everyone, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome at 83 minutes. The brain transplant comic premise is funny enough, and Lenore Aubert is very cute in the lead female role. Acting-wise, though, Lon Chaney Jr. looks like a terrific actor next to Abbott and Costello. Universal clearly threw everything they had in store at the time: the live-action also features special effects and animation. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein certainly wasn’t meant as great cinema, but a counterbalance of sorts to the seriousness of the Universal Monster movies… and it still works.

  • The Champ (1931)

    The Champ (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) I’m slowly but surely discovering my appreciation for King Vidor, an early filmmaker whose successes remain impressive. After familiarizing myself with silent-era movies such as The Big Parade and The Crowd, here is The Champ—a film whose profile remains heightened due to its 1979 remake. The remake, which I don’t recall seeing but probably did, probably accounts for the familiar nature of the premise—an aging boxer trying to take care of his son despite self-destructive bouts of alcoholism and gambling. The ending can be felt coming from a mile away, but it remains heartbreaking. While there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done afterward, the film does feel hard-hitting by 1931 standards—noticeably willing to confront issues related to debilitating alcoholism, for one thing, and with an ending that does everything necessary to make audiences cry. The Champ is not exactly my cup of tea, but it’s well done in its genre.

  • 3:10 to Yuma (1957)

    3:10 to Yuma (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) There aren’t that many westerns that could be adapted as one-room theatrical production, but 3:10 to Yuma fits the bill. While the film’s first half is filled with the usual Western thrills, the film finds its true purpose as two men—a criminal and an everyman—settle down in a hotel room while waiting for the train that will escort the criminal to jail, away from a small town. They talk, argue, and try to convince the other of their viewpoint and hash out other things in-between four walls. It’s not strictly a conceptual piece—there’s too much time spent outside that room—but it’s an unusual focus on a single location for a long time. The black-and-white cinematography is quite good and so is the period recreation. Still, it’s the verbal confrontation that sticks in mind at the end of the film, far more than the usual Western shootouts. Glenn Ford does well in an out-of-persona role as the villain—it’s true that the film needed an almost-heroic figure as its antagonist for his charm to have any meaning. Clean, simple and effective, 3:10 to Yuma remains a decent western even a few decades later — and a 2007 remake, executed in maximalist fashion but decent in its own right.

  • A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

    A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) The more I discover the Powell/Pressburger filmography, the more I’m impressed by their sense of style, humour and capacity to create sustained narrative interest. A Matter of Life and Death is the fifth of their films that I’ve seen and liked, and as it explores the afterlife as an aviator unexplainably survives a fatal crash, it’s probably the most ambitious of them. Filled with fantastic imagination, it’s also a surprisingly funny film, as the aviator continues to live and gets embroiled in a celestial court case to decide his fate. The interplay between reality and fantasy is very well done, and David Niven is terrific in the lead role (Marius Goring is not too far behind as a Frenchman trying to help the protagonist through his afterlife). A Matter of Life and Death is quite an impressive piece of fantasy filmmaking both from a visual and a narrative standpoint, and it remains somewhat original even decades later. The special effects are rough, but the script definitely has its moments.