Movie Review

  • The Love Parade (1929)

    The Love Parade (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Perhaps the fairest assessment of The Love Parade is that it feels like a prototype for better films by director Ernst Lubitsch and star Maurice Chevalier. It’s certainly not a bad movie: The plot manages to cram a few musical numbers within a story about a man falling in love with a princess, only to discover that the life of a consort is annoying to a man used to taking the lead. Pampered within the palace, he eventually rebels, threatens to walk out… and unconvincingly reconciles five seconds before the end. (It’s reconciliation through submission, which is not nearly as amusing now than then.)  The musical aspect of the film does feel ahead of its time, with nine numbers weaved into the plot (one of the first, if not the first, film to do so rather than adopt the revue approach of other early musicals) and even one duet shown in cross-cutting editing that showed how competent Lubitsch was. The European aspect of The Love Parade is usually described as “sophisticated,” which was a word often used for Lubitsch’s work –an approach that tried to go beyond the obvious. An incredibly young Maurice Chevalier remains the best reason to see the film: his incredible charisma shines event through the production values of the early sound era, and his singing is quite enjoyable as well. Both men would collaborate again on two other pictures, One Hour with You and The Smiling Lieutenant, which would both show improvements, both technical and artistic, on their first film. Still, you can see in The Love Parade all of the building blocks that Lubitsch and Chevalier would use over the next few years: The sexual permissiveness possible in the Pre-Code era, Lubitsch’s knack for high-minded comedy about crass topics, Chevalier’s megawatt charm and the possibilities of sound cinema. As good as The Love Parade remains, it would lead to much better.

  • The Mating Game (1959)

    The Mating Game (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) We don’t usually think of IRS agents as potential leads for romantic comedies, but if there was one actor who could make it work, it was Tony Randall — his strait-laced buttoned-down comic person being ideal for the role he was meant to play in The Mating Game. Here, he finds himself as an accountant sent on the farm of a man who’s never paid income taxes — and, worse, barters for everything he needs. Stuck there to assess how many back-taxes are owed, he can’t help but notice the farmer’s daughter, played by Debbie Reynolds… and there’s the rest of the movie, along with a few tax code shenanigans for comedy. (Yes, really.)  As far as 1950s MGM romantic comedies go, The Mating Game is fine without being particularly great. The rural environment is a change of pace, and the tax comedy angle remains distinctive, but the film seems stuck in this strange zone between a musical and a true comedy: Without songs nor strong jokes, it just comes across as middling. It’s amiable, with Randall and Reynolds being put to good use, but The Mating Game doesn’t get to the next level, where it would be genuinely funny.

  • Grand Central Murder (1942)

    Grand Central Murder (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Oh, what a fun film Grand Central Murder is. The 1930s, and to a lesser extent, the early 1940s (before film noir took over) were big on short silly murder mysteries, usually featuring amateur sleuths taking on investigations in cozy locations. Grand Central Murder is not quite like that, but it’s very much in this lineage. It begins with the murder of a gold-digging actress in a train car inside Grand Central Station, and the film is quick to round up the usual suspects in a small police office, including a private investigator who starts matching wits with the assigned detective. Van Heflin is in fine form as the protagonist, playing a role equally comic and quick-witted. There’s an amusing number of fisticuffs, structural quirks, twists, railroad operational details, snappy dialogue and characterization in the film’s breezy 73 minutes — thanks to director Sylvan Simon, it’s seldom boring. It’s impressive how many characters the script is able to sketch in a few moments, with some credit going to the actors — including the young Betty Wells, whose handful of credited roles doesn’t stop her from doing a great job as “Baby” Delroy. Patricia Dane is quite good as the antagonistic victim (mostly seen in flashbacks), while the ever-beautiful Virginia Grey is largely there for comic relief as the protagonist’s wife looking askance at his flirtatious detecting. The script is more interesting than usual, as the murder investigation takes place in flashbacks, including a flashback immediately contradicted by another character — not quite Rashomon, but more ambitious than many other films. The dialogue is often very funny, and the rapport between the two male leads (Heflin and Tom Conway) is interesting: at one point, they even crack themselves up right before a quick cut. Short and satisfying, Grand Central Murder is the kind of nice little surprise that pops up ever so often on TCM — echoes of a Hollywood system that cranked out hundreds of films per year, with many of them actually being quite entertaining.

  • The Alphabet Murders (1965)

    The Alphabet Murders (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Tony Randall is best remembered for strait-laced comedic foil roles, but as a leading man he could (and did) break out of that persona in various ways. 7 Faces of Dr. Lao is a case in point, but there’s a similar case to be made about The Alphabet Murders, which stars Randall in an overtly parodic take on Hercules Poirot, spouting bon mots and doing a bit of slapstick in service of a comedy that stops just short of cartoonish gags. Loosely adapted from Agatha Christie (who reportedly had issues with early version of the script), it transforms Poirot into a brilliant bumbler à la Clouzot, which was a hot property at the time. Randall’s French accent is far more tolerable, though. What’s more hit-and-miss is the comedy: It starts firmly in metafictional territory with Tony Randall introducing himself to the camera as Poirot, but the rest of the film is more hit-or-miss, sometime absurd and sometimes not. Director Frank Tashlin (who also led Randall in the much funnier Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) does try his best to keep things interesting, but he can’t quite patch up a lacklustre script. I’m not sure Randall’s the best choice either — he does better than you could expect from many of his other films, but to be blunt about it, Peter Ustinov was almost funnier than Randall in his turn in Murder on the Orient Express. Still, The Alphabet Murders isn’t a bad watch, especially for murder mystery fans… even if it doesn’t quite nail the absurdity of what could have been.

  • Avalanche Express (1979)

    Avalanche Express (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) It’s fun to go back to Cold War thrillers and experience the paranoia of the time. The era is rife with movies in which the heroes are clearly Americans and the villains are clearly Soviets, with no less than a credible nuclear war hanging in the balance. Seldom have the spy-versus-spy tropes been so complex and variations so elaborate. In Avalanche Express, a familiar starting point veers into a somewhat original premise, as an important defector is put on a transcontinental train going to western Europe, and the Soviet empire targets the train to eliminate the defector by all means necessary, all the way to causing an avalanche. The existence of such a train is nonsense, and so is much of the plot — but it’s the thrills that count. Accordingly, there are a few good elements at play here: The premise has juice, the cast is led by Lee Marvin’s exemplary tough-guy persona, and you can see here the elements that could have been used for a strong film. Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t quite match the early expectations. Once past the necessary bits of plotting required to get everyone aboard the train or in pursuit of it, the joy very quickly goes out of Avalanche Express. Some of the incoherence comes from production issues: both director Mark Robson and star Robert Shaw died during the making of the film, and we can only imagine what impact that must have had on the production. Other issues, though, are more fundamental to the screenplay: There’s a useless romance, for instance, that gums up the pacing of the film. The various incidents across the train trip are not very well structured, and for all of the good-for-their-time special effects used for the avalanche sequence (which is, surprisingly, not the climax of the film), the sequence itself isn’t particularly exciting. Of course, we’re looking at this from the perspective of audiences used to decades of technical refinements — a modern version of Avalanche Express (not a bad idea!) would use digital effects and time-tested structure. But even contemporary films did better with similar elements — I’m specifically thinking of Von Ryan’s Express, from the same director fifteen years earlier, which crammed a lot more characterization and action out of a train-bound journey. Even the final shootout seems curiously anticlimactic, visually flat and dramatically inert. Too bad — I think that there’s a better movie trying to get out of Avalanche Express. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t get it.

  • Hyde Park on Hudson (2012)

    Hyde Park on Hudson (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) As much as I can determine, nine years after its release, Hyde Park on Hudson’s most enduring claim to fame is that this is the film in which American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, played by Bill Murry, gets a delicately-implied handjob from a (distant) cousin played by Laura Linney. (Nearly every review mentions it, so this one won’t be any exception.)  This happens early enough in the film to be counted as an establishing moment, especially as their family relationship is once again underlined right after his climax. That scene is a very, very curious choice because it leads viewers to expect paths that the subsequent film isn’t ready to follow. It’s not a comedy, not much of a romance, certainly not an attempt at historical realism and this fuzziness ends up being one of the defining characteristics of the film. Following FDR’s summer retreat of 1939 and the tangled web of relationships (marital or otherwise) surrounding him, it’s a film that struggles to justify its existence. Much like the equally-annoying Sunrise at Campobello, it relies on FDR worship, but unlike other films, it seems half-heartedly determined to undermine the historical character as well. The film obsesses about the president’s affairs and British royalty eating hot dogs but — a reminder — it isn’t a comedy. Murray’s not bad when he’s not portrayed as receiving sexual favours, but his very presence as a comedian contributes to the film’s problems, like not quite knowing what it’s about. In other words, Hyde Park on Hudson is a weird film with entirely self-inflicted problems. If it was meant as an Oscar contender, it certainly didn’t succeed: the Academy Awards ignored it, like most audiences did. It’s hard to fault them. Although there is a very funny film to be made about FDR, horndog president…

  • The Story of Will Rogers (1952)

    The Story of Will Rogers (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) There is a paradox in biographical movies made to cash in on well-known celebrities that eventually become a way for future audiences to discover forgotten figures. Yes, I knew about Will Rogers before seeing The Story of Will Rogers — or at least I was aware of his better-known witticisms. But, as the film takes pain to highlight, Rogers was not a usual hero: he was a cowboy who became a humorist, and then a folk philosopher dabbling in newspaper columns, Hollywood acting and political activism. He was one of the foremost celebrities of the early 1930s, but few people remember him today, aside from political pundits looking for bon mots. The Story of Will Rogers is a biography very much of its time — it’s clearly maximized for dramatic impact over historical accuracy, is a bit in awe of its subject, and touches very lightly on things that the audience then knew but modern audiences don’t always. (The utmost example being the end of the film, which obliquely alludes to Rogers’ 1935 death by plane crash without quite saying it.)  The figure of Will Rogers is played by none other than his son Will Rogers Jr. — adding authenticity, but perhaps not exceptional acting abilities. Still, from our perspective, the film can become a really good excuse to go and read more about Rogers — he comes across here, as much as the film will allow, as a decent, caring, funny man able to comment on humanity’s follies while being sympathetic to all. The Story of Will Rogers is an enjoyable film, even if not an exceptional one: its biggest asset is Rogers himself and rifling through the copious trove of material he left behind.

  • In the Same Breath (2021)

    In the Same Breath (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Here we are now — almost exactly a year and a half in these pandemic times, and merely starting to understand what is going on. Documentary feature In the Same Breath audaciously takes us back to the very beginning — those first few months of 2020, at Ground Zero Wuhan. Writer-director Nanfu Wang, drawing upon her own experience being in Wuhan at the time, assembles footage shot by a guerilla crew of associates for a look at the situation that exposes the differences between what they saw and the rhetoric issued from the Chinese government. Wang can be merciless in showing how news reports were manipulated and orchestrated to present a misleading portrait — and then compares the lack of Chinese freedom with the excesses of American freedom. This isn’t just a “both sides” thing — it’s a surprisingly cogent argument about the failings of both systems, each seemingly different but not completely dissimilar. (I’m not completely on-board with her centralization argument, but then again, I’m Canadian.)  Even for those who overdosed early on COVID news, In the Same Breath offers a fascinating look at where it all began, with some very effective editing of news reporting (all repeating the same points)) along the way. It spans the political and the personal, and offers plenty of lessons. Surprisingly good cinematography also helps. Making the point that politicization ruins everything isn’t the biggest of insights, but the way Wang goes about showing it may catch you off-guard.

  • Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956)

    Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2021) I’ve seen at least one mention of Fire Maidens from Outer Space as being the worst movie even made and that’s nonsense — yes, it’s terrible and cheap and ludicrous and exploitative by 1950s standards. A made-in-Britain science fiction adventure in which astronauts going to Jupiter discover an Earth-like planet (as in: we’re filming in our backyard) inhabited by seven lusty maidens, one mad scientist and a monster. It’s as primitive a science fiction concept as possible. The plot threads are naïve, the dialogue banal and the special effects cribbed together from spare parts. But, as usual, hyperbole destroys everything — there are far worse films out there, whereas Fire Maidens from Outer Space does have a plot of sorts, some baffling watchability and some scene-to-scene momentum. One thing that I found surprisingly charming about the result (thus giving it at least one star of interest) is how, by today’s standards, writer-director-producer Cy Roth quaintly dances around its exploitative premise. The girls are cute, curvy and in short skirts, but the film (coming from the prudish 1950s) winks and nudges at its audience (a planet with five men and sixteen women, eh, eh, eeeh) in ways that seem almost wholesome by twenty-first century standards. At 78 minutes, it barely outstays its welcome. You can (and should!) compare it to near-contemporary Queen of Outer Space, then skip over to Barbarella and other 1960s naughty space movies. In the so-bad-it’s-good realm, Fire Maidens from Outer Space is… there.

  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960)

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) I tried staying interested in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I did. But as much as the original novel has become a respectable part of American culture (being old and a childhood favourite of previous generations), this adaptation is aiming to be as unremarkable as possible. It doesn’t do anything wrong: the period atmosphere is credibly re-created, and the film’s lavish colour cinematography clearly marks it as a prestige project for MGM and director Michael Curtiz. The Mississippi River remains an imposing presence, and the actors help tie the episodic nature of the novel into a coherent whole. On the other hand, well, the film feels perhaps more educational than entertaining — it’s there, it’s meant to translate the novel to the screen and it does exactly that. Enthusiasm is not necessarily supplied. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could have been worse, of course, but it’s not as if the result is gripping.

  • These Wilder Years (1956)

    These Wilder Years (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) It’s curious that, considering their lengthy careers spanning roughly the same decades, there is only one screen pairing of James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck—These Wilder Years, a straightforward drama that barely makes use of their most distinctive skills. Oh, it’s not bad and it does start with a strong scene, as a steel magnate advises his board of directors that he’s taking an indefinite leave of absence and will go as far as the moon if he needs to. The mystery is soon cleared up — having given up his son for adoption twenty years earlier, he’s out to find him and reunite. This being the 1950s, there are considerable obstacles in his way, most of them incarnated by a steely orphanage administrator (Stanwyck) who will simply not allow him to bribe, bully or force his way in their files. A romance develops, although that’s really not the end of the story. As a drama, it’s surprisingly compelling — the plotting is straightforward, and there are a few intriguing last-film twists. Cagney sells the remorseful business tycoon characters, and Stanwyck is in fine determined form in a late-career role. Still, there isn’t much here to make their roles suited to their screen persona — it’s a script that could have been handed to any pair of actors without too much trouble. Still, it is fun to see those screen veterans in antagonistic/romantic roles, prodding at each other in ways that add depth to the words on the page. Make no mistake: These Wilder Years would be almost instantly forgettable if it wasn’t for those two leads. But given that it does offer the sight of Cagney and Stanwyck sharing the screen, I’m glad it exists.

  • Rats—Notte di terrore [Rats: Night of Terror] (1984)

    Rats—Notte di terrore [Rats: Night of Terror] (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) Often mentioned as one of those so-bad-it’s-good cult favourites, Rats: Night of Terror is actually more fun than expected, albeit for narrow definitions of “fun.”  The film’s opening half-minute slams you in the face with paragraphs of narrated exposition boiling down to: this is a post-apocalyptic film. The following ten minutes are dedicated to introducing (in a fuzzy sense) the rather unlikable characters of the ensemble film: stylishly-dressed bikers stumbling into a bar that has some food and basement hydroponics, and then fighting off an unusually large number of flesh-eating rats. Like: bucketful of rats thrown at the actors, many of them (the actors) screaming senselessly. None of this makes sense, from the redundant exposition to the actress getting eaten to death by a single rat in a sleeping bag. It’s certainly not good, but it can be entertaining in wacky ways: watch the ineptness of writer-director Bruno Mattei, laugh at the absurd death scenes, leer at the pretty actresses (no, I can’t pick between Geretta Geretta or Moune Duvivier either), scream at the lousy seen-it-from-a-mile ending, gasp at the awfulness of the special effects or shrug at the endless pacing issues of a film that barely makes it to 97 minutes. Here’s the thing: it may not be good, but it is rather fun, and that’s not always obvious when discussing bad movies — too bad and no one’s having fun. Rats: Night of Terror has just enough to it (oh boy, that “computer” scene) to be entertaining.

  • El Dorado (1966)

    El Dorado (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, August 2021) When watching classic western films, I often have the impression of déjà vu, and that’s even more pronounced for El Dorado considering that it seems built from many of the same elements as director Howard Hawks’ previous Rio Bravo. Once again, John Wayne is presented as a hero, as he assembles a group of helpers to help fend off the film’s antagonist. It’s an interesting crew, though: In-between the protagonist (Wayne) being subject to bouts of paralysis due to an injury, he’s joined by an alcoholic sheriff played by Robert Mitchum, an unbelievably young James Caan as a naïve gunslinger and Arthur Hunnicutt playing one of his usually grizzled mentors. That four-man crew is the focus of the various action sequences, occasionally enlivened by a good supporting cast — perhaps the most remarkable being Michele Carey’s eye-catching turn as a vengeful daughter. It’s all conventional, sure, but rather well-executed. If it takes too long for the crew to get together, El Dorado really starts working once they are, and there are a few modest twists on the formula to keep things entertaining. I’m not that enthusiastic about the result, but it steadily gets better as it goes on, and does manage to wrap everything up in a satisfying fashion. I doubt I’ll remember much more than Carey within a few days, though.

  • Love, Romance & Chocolate (2019)

    Love, Romance & Chocolate (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) Straight from the Hallmark romantic movie factory comes Love, Romance & Chocolate, with an utterly unremarkable narrative that manages to benefit from being set in Bruges and focusing on generous helping of chocolate. Lacey Chabert stars as an accountant with serious kitchen skills travelling to Belgium and getting involved with a chocolatier as he aims to win a contest organized by Belgian royalty. The romantic plot is, as usual, completely formulaic — Hallmark wouldn’t have it otherwise. But as it happens on their better movies, the setting and details do manage to make it more compelling. Generous depictions of chocolate-making pepper the entire film, clearly aiming for a chocoholic audience. The added appeal of the Belgian surroundings also does help — for once, we’re out of the typical Midwestern small-town setting and that works to Love, Romance & Chocolate. No, it’s not great art: the blandness of the dialogue and the familiarity of the plot limit the film’s effectiveness. But within these restrictions, it does manage to distinguish itself better than many of its Hallmark equivalents.

  • Scared Stiff (1987)

    Scared Stiff (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) The more I learn about movie history, the more I develop mental shorthands—and one of those is the feeling I get once I combine “decade+genre.” For instance, 1930s comedy is far more fun than 1970s drama, but not all combinations are equally significant. One of the most potent ones is 1980s horror — once you strip away the slashers from the corpus, that decade’s horror has a very definite flavour, and they quite literally don’t make them like that any more. Scared Stiff, in most ways, is an utterly ordinary product of a genre that was reborn during the first decade of mass-market home video: It uses a generic premise (a small family moves into a house possessed by the spirit of its evil previous owner) as an excuse to throw in as many weird, gross or cliché sequences it can fit. Little of it makes sense even before the film tries a cheap, “was she crazy after all?” twist — in-between the racist slave-owner ancestor, ancient artifacts, computer graphics escaping in the real, numerous gore effects and such, the film goes wonderfully crazy in its home stretch. The production values are low, but not so low as to avoid numerous special effects and zigzagging events. (There’s even a car crash, albeit not a very well edited one.)  Yes, the result is a mess and not always an enjoyable one — it takes a long time for all the stops to be pulled. But in a way very characteristic of 1980s horror, Scared Stiff can be fun to watch, not for its horrific potential but for writer-director Richard Friedman just having fun with his budget and seeing what he could pull off during the shoot. That’s not quite a recommendation, but you already know if that’s the kind of thing you like.