Movie Review

  • Billy Rose’s Jumbo (1962)

    Billy Rose’s Jumbo (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Musicals had practically gone out of vogue by the early 1960s and genre epicentre MGM was clearly looking to recapture some of their past glory with Billy Rose’s Jumbo, a wide-scale musical set in the colourful world of the circus. Film scholars tell us that the project was in development for decades, starting in the 1930s, before the studio greenlit the film. The result is clearly meant to be expansive—with its succession of numbers taking advantage of circus iconography (Busby Berkeley was involved, in what I believe was his last film project), it’s meant to be a throwback to the glory days of MGM musicals. The result is not bad—especially for the 1960s, where the quality of musicals generally took a nosedive—but it does take a while to build up some interest. Doris Day stars as the daughter of the circus owner, with none other than Jimmy Durante playing her father. (There’s even a recreation of his classic “What elephant?’ gag.)  Both have impressive solo circus numbers, but I’m not smart enough to guess what part of their performances was theirs and what (if anything) was done by a double. Billy Rose’s Jumbo is watchable enough from a twenty-first century perspective, but if anyone tried to guess its production year, they’d probably peg it as a mid-1950s film—which explains why it wasn’t a box-office success and why it did not reignite the MGM musical era. That’s too bad for the filmmakers and studio, but, on the other hand, it has produced a musical for the ages, a bright colourful take on the circus world that you can very well pair with the more serious The Greatest Show on Earth for a double-shot of 1950s circuses.

  • Il gatto a nove code [Cat O’ Nine Tails] (1971)

    Il gatto a nove code [Cat O’ Nine Tails] (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) Once again in a giallo film, we have an innocent man getting drawn into investigating a lurid string of murders, in a film elevating an already-wild screenplay with stylish composition, colour, cinematography and musical choices. That Cat o’ Nine Tails is coming from giallo grandmaster Dario Argento only makes it further essential viewing in its subgenre. Here, the big wrinkle is a blind protagonist, and pseudo-scientific nonsense about the XYY gene turning people into killers or something. Of course, the fun of the film is in the ride more than the destination, with stylistic fillips that feel more modern than its early 1970s era of filmmaking. It’s more interesting than a strictly realistic take on the same topic would have been, although there are clear limits to this kind of material. I’d probably have more to say about Cat O’ Nine Tails if I hadn’t seen something like half a dozen similar movies in the past week (thank a giallo movie marathon for that jadedness), but that’s kind of the point: if you like giallo, it’s a stylistic genre more than a narrative one, so there’s a good chance that you’ll like one more.

  • That Touch of Mink (1962)

    That Touch of Mink (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Film scholars are quick to note that That Touch of Mink really wasn’t Cary Grant’s favourite film. By that time in his career, thirty years in the business, Grant felt that his best years were behind him: he was getting more difficult to sell as a romantic lead (something that would be apparent in the following year’s Charade, otherwise a high point of his career), his favourite directors were slowing down or retiring, and American society was changing in unpredictable ways. Having formed his own production company, he backed That Touch of Mink as a good commercial prospect and was proven right when the film finished fourth at the 1962 box office. Thematically, the film fits squarely with the low-key, somewhat quaintly charming sex comedies of the early 1960s—playing with the idea of more permissive social mores without quite bringing itself to embrace the thought. As a result, the film occasionally feels like a throwback to earlier movies, as Grant and Doris Day engage in a whirlwind romance punctuated by the question of “will they or won’t they?” There are quite a few engaging period details here, from an extended sequence in an automat, baseball legend cameos, a scene set inside a Univac computer room and a funny supporting role from Gig Young as an academic acting as Grant’s conscience. Unfortunately, it also comes with a side order of homophobic panic, a less than impressive ending and a first act that, with slight variations, plays like a humourless take on the opening for Written on the Wind. Then there’s the age of the leads: Grant was a seasoned 58-year-old, while Day herself was 38, playing a character easily fifteen years younger. That Touch of Mink is watchable, even amusing and certainly charming for fans of Grant or Day… but really not a career high point for anyone.

  • Class of 1984 (1982)

    Class of 1984 (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) Taking the Bad Seed cliché up a few notches, Class of 1984 has a teacher running afoul of a few teenage sociopaths in a high school seemingly jaded to a heightened level of violence. (As the date of production suggests, it’s meant as a near-future satire, but it feels like depressing reality forty years later.) Perry King stars as the meek music teacher, with some assistance from Timothy Van Patten as the irremediable antagonist, Roddy MacDowall as an even meeker teacher and none other than a very, very young Michael J. Fox as a bullied student. The film is very cleanly structured around the lines of a gritty 1970s revenge fantasy, with the teacher getting an increasing amount of aggravation and violence, and then bodies eventually piling up as no one seems willing to acknowledge the evil of the teenage antagonists. As manipulative as it may feel, Class of 1984 is executed with a fair amount of skill—it’s violently over the top, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I got a little spark of satisfaction at the very final and predictable death of the infuriating villain. Otherwise, it’s a serviceable 1980s thriller, a cut above most contemporary slashers but not great cinema by any means. At best, you can tie it to the growing anxieties about the Echo teenagers coming of age in the early 1980s and the horrors to come in terms of high school violence. But don’t read too much into it: it’s really an excuse to see violent provocation being answered by even more violent retribution. What else could we expect from exploitation cinema?

  • Cosa avete fatto a Solange? [What Have You Done to Solange?] (1972)

    Cosa avete fatto a Solange? [What Have You Done to Solange?] (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) Aside from any qualities the film itself may hold, I have to admit that What Have You Done to Solange? Is a terrific, quote-worthy title appropriate to a surprising number of situations. What have you done to her, indeed? The film, of course, is far less funny—stemming from the giallo subgenre, it presents a serial murder narrative in typically expressive style, bringing a great deal of sometimes-misguided vigour to the dull slasher genre. The ending packs a bit of a twist, but the film, in keeping with its subgenre, is more about the moment-to-moment thrills and chills than the convolutions of the plot. It generally works—the atmosphere of a college gripped by the serial slaying of young women is right out of the slasher cliché handbook, but it’s executed in a slightly more stylish fashion by director Massimo Dallamano and holds together at the end, which is not necessarily a given for the subgenre. I wasn’t expecting much, but the result is better than what I was bracing myself for.

  • She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952)

    She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) The 1950s were a little bit racier than most people are willing to give it credit for, and you could point at movies such as She’s Working Her Way Through College as an example. In many ways, it’s a bog-standard movie musical representative of the times, as it features a small-town college putting together a show and movie viewers seeing the bits and pieces of the musical through the rehearsal process. But it also features Virginia Mayo as a burlesque star going straight as a college student with literary ambitions. For post-1980 viewers, much of the film’s notoriety would come from seeing Ronald Reagan play an academic (!) who, in a drunken stupor (!!), ineffectually tries to punch another man he suspects of hobnobbing with his wife. Later on, we also have Reagan delivering a speech of tolerance in the face of a burlesque star in their midst, which will strike some as mildly tolerant and others as a bit hypocritical. Anyway—Mayo is great, the tone is amiable, the comedy has its moments and later presidential history has made the film a bit weightier than it used to be. Worth a look, frankly, if only for a combination of Mayo’s achievements and Reagan’s somewhat memorable role.

  • Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (1942)

    Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) If I repeat myself in reviews of the Mexican Spitfire series, it’s because the movies themselves are almost carbon copies of each other. In Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, Lupe Vélez once again plays the titular spitfire, ready to unleash torrents of Spanish invectives and threats of divorce at the slightest opportunity, while Leon Errol gets most of the laughs once again by dual-playing a likable uncle and a less likable (but funnier) British lord. The convolutions of the plot, involving hidden bandits, business dealings and the usual intentional blurring of identities of Errol’s characters, are once again at the forefront to fairly good effect. But as usual, the fun is more in the scenes and details than the grander plot. One of the film’s highlights, for instance, is seeing Vélez dressed up as a maid, and screeching loudly as a “Mexican wildcat” in trying to convince a dog to come from underneath some furniture—it’s much funnier than it sounds. Of course, there’s a great blend of sexiness and wackiness at play whenever Vélez shows up in the series: combined with Errol’s very game comedic performances, it makes the series a somewhat consistent experience. The ending is a bit of an explosive puzzler, but it’s not as if anyone cares when the next instalment of the series was there six months later. Film historians infamously remember Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost as the top bill of a double-header that featured no less than Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons in the least desirable spot: mind-boggling but true!

  • Una lucertola con la pelle di donna [A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin] (1971)

    Una lucertola con la pelle di donna [A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin] (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) A big flash of bright colour and crazy imagery, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is classic giallo, bright red blood and subjective unreality boosting an already twisted script of murder and insanity. That probably sounds like praise, but anyone’s reaction is likely to vary considerably: while the result can be more interesting than staider thrillers of the time, it’s not hard to feel as if this is writer-director Lucio Fulci simply throwing as much crazy stuff at the screen (including gutted dogs) in the hope that something will stick no matter if it makes sense. Of course, giallo works more on senses than sense: it’s about the experience of watching a film far more than the intellectual aspect of ensuring that all of the parts fit together from a narrative and logical standpoint. In this light, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is exactly what the viewers ordered: a hallucinatory nightmare of dread and suspense, leading up to a twisty (or maybe anti-twisty) finale. Giallo fans will love it, while non-fans may only appreciate it—but the result is decidedly representative of its subgenre.

  • Sunday in New York (1963)

    Sunday in New York (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) The more I explore early-1960s Hollywood movies, the more I’m seeing—especially in silly sex comedies—the rumblings of the social changes that went on during the decade. Hollywood was not well equipped, especially pre-New Hollywood, to do justice to these changes. Hampered by the inertia of the Production Code, hesitant to challenge audiences that were also used to a certain kind of Hollywood, the major studios poked and prodded (especially in jest) at the social changes but tried to keep some decorum about it. That’s how you end up with the quaintly charming subgenre of 1960s sex comedies that nodded toward greater liberalization, while not giving in to any uncharacteristic crassness. Sunday in New York clearly plays by those rules. It makes a fuss of discussing premarital sex (even the poster cheekily states that the film is “dedicated to the proposition that every girl gets… sooner or later”) and complicating the romantic situation of its heroine, but it ends up very traditional in its conclusions. The execution, working from a fast-paced script based on a theatrical play, benefits from some serious acting talent: Jane Fonda is terrific (and sexy) in the lead role, while she’s surrounded by none other than Rod Taylor, Cliff Robertson and Robert Culp as brothers and suitors. The jet-setting lifestyle that was so hip in the 1960s is showcased as a vision of life in then-Manhattan. As a farce, Sunday in New York is more successful than not: even if it has been outdone in raciness several times over by generations of spiritual inheritors, it remains a fun fine comedy with a bit more class than many of the similar sex comedies of the time.

  • L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo [The Bird with the Crystal Plumage] (1970)

    L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo [The Bird with the Crystal Plumage] (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) I was pretty sure that I didn’t like giallo, but as I made my way through Dario Argento’s debut feature The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it struck me that I didn’t dislike the genre as much as I thought I did. In fact, giallo looks much better when placed next to the slasher horror that it inspired in the Halloween/Friday-the-13th/Black Christmas tradition. Argento’s debut feature predates all of this, obviously: Working in 1970, Argento was more clearly inspired by classic horror—albeit with more bright-red blood. Where this film does well, as is usually the case with giallo, is presented a much-heightened vision of standard horror thrills. Exuberant with colours, unusual camera angles, subjective viewpoints and an aggressive soundtrack, giallo is usually far more interesting than the stories it portrays—although there too, there are plenty of opportunities for being wilder than more staid thrillers. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage does have a familiar base premise—an innocent man investigating a murder in a foreign location, something that would pop up again later in Argento’s career in films such as Deep Red—but it adds a few striking wrinkles to it. The result is quite watchable: still effective in its stylish excess, and benefiting from a generally solid script. It also unlocked the key to giallo as far as I’m concerned, as a far more interesting stylistic variant on the usually dull slasher films that would follow.

  • Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956)

    Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, November 2020) I have said some very dismissive things about writer-director Robert Bresson in past reviews, but Un condamné à mort s’est échappé makes me want to walk back some of that commentary. Bresson’s typically sparse and detached style ends up being a near-ideal match for this topic matter here, as he intensely studies every twitch and action standing between a French Resistance leader and his escape from a Nazi prison during WW2. Bresson, working from a real-life memoir, himself knew what he was talking about, having himself been imprisoned by Nazi authorities during WW2. His quiet, drawn-out approach works well here, maintaining the suspense of the ongoing escape, and relying on a meta-tapestry of thrills (that is: the threat of being shot, the evil of the Nazis, the patriotic meaning of La Resistance) outside of what he is showing on-screen. It’s a clever film, stripped of the histrionics of not-dissimilar movies such as The Great Escape but effective in its own way. The film’s world is the prison—it ends as soon as the lead character is no longer in it. Sometimes a director’s idiosyncratic approach proves to be irritating until it’s applied to the right context, and that’s how I feel about Bresson here—I can’t stand much of his filmography, but it happens to be the exact right fit for the topic matter here, and the result is without a doubt not only my favourite film of his, but an essential French film of the 1950s.

  • Hot Air (2018)

    Hot Air (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Considering the United States currently charged political climate, fomented by shameless media outlets for which truth takes a backseat to profits, it’s almost inevitable that we would get Hot Air, a dramatic comedy featuring a blowhard conservative radio personality challenged by the unexpected arrival of a hitherto estranged but very progressive teenage niece. The two best things going for the film are its lead acting duo—Taylor Russell is very likable as the niece, but it’s Steve Coogan who gets most of the attention at the radio host: he looks the part, but clearly wants to puncture the façade presented here. Much of Hot Air does poke at the “man who learns better” trope, while not going too emotional about it. The highlight of the film is a long screed from host to public that nods toward Network and does have its moments (among them “You elect a deranged conman just to see what happens!”) but does strip hollow the contradiction between the film’s premise and its execution. To put it simply, Hot Air wants to play with political divisions, but stops short of being political about it: it’s all platitudes and homilies disarming any attempt at taking a true position on its premise. It misdirects and brings the focus to personal epiphanies, while ignoring the uglier political climate in which it’s supposed to take place. The show goes on and still the film tries to make us believe in a context that no longer exists in American culture: Anyone outside US borders will recognize that the political conversation going on since 2016 isn’t between feel-good mushy notions of liberalism versus conservatism, but reason against full-blown authoritarian craziness. Your average American right-wing radio host appealing to a crazed base has nothing to do with the one played by Coogan here, and so Hot Air seems to be trivializing its topic to the point of having nothing to say—which would be completely acceptable for many kinds of films, but not one that explicitly courts audiences with a political premise. I may be part of the problem in ringing a five-bell alarm over what’s happening right now and wishing for more substantial denunciations of a toxic right-wing, but the current situation is not tenable, and I can point to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths to prove my point. Oh, I still liked Hot Air—Cooghan and Russell and Neve Campbell are giving it what they’ve got, and the film does everything that it wants to do in its carefully delimited audience-friendly way. But right now, in the gaslit interregnum between Presidents 45 and 46, I’m more irritated at anyone still claiming to be on the fence.

  • Superintelligence (2020)

    Superintelligence (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) It only took “Melissa McCarthy in a Ben Falcone film” to bring any expectations regarding Superintelligence down to a manageable level. The McCarthy/Falcone duo, married in real life, has a dismal track record on-screen: their movies are usually designed to showcase McCarthy’s increasingly overexposed comic persona, making everything secondary to sustained riffs on the same themes. Superintelligence, to its credit, takes a toned-down variation of this approach to the idea of hard-takeoff Artificial Intelligence, pitting “the most ordinary woman in the world” (McCarthy) against an AI pondering what to do with humanity. As a science-fictional plot device, “innocent decides the fate of humanity by their behaviour” is well-worn material—but as a Science Fiction critic on an extended sabbatical, I find quite a lot of value in seeing a comic take on the material, more as a marker of what a mainstream audience can be expected to absorb. Clearly, we’re at a point where few would be surprised to accept that an AI would be able to learn everything from us from our online behaviour, and reach us through the connected devices in our houses. Of course, Superintelligence sweetens/dumbs down the concept: this isn’t The Forbin Project, and so the AI is incarnated by the voice and occasional presence from James Corden, adding further comedy (some of it dubious) to the proceedings. The biggest ironic criticism that one can level at Superintelligence is that for a McCarthy/Falcone production, almost literally any actress in the world could have played McCarthy’s role—it doesn’t really rely on her persona, and, in fact, may be harmed by it. McCarthy as “the most ordinary woman in the world” is a boring waste of talent, even within the script’s expected infantilization of challenging ideas. The ending is never in doubt, nor are any of the subplot strands. Still, the film gets a few chuckles, and makes an exemplary case of how once-nerdy ideas get continuously absorbed in the mainstream until they become literally just jokes in service of an actress looking for a star vehicle. I didn’t dislike Superintelligence as much as I expected to, but it does remain a very safe, very mainstream comedy, almost to the point of being duller than anyone would have anticipated.

  • Action Point (2018)

    Action Point (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2020) It’s a great and terrible thing that, a few months ago, I watched Class Action Park, the documentary about the infamous 1970s–1990s New Jersey amusement and water park called “Action Park.” The documentary itself is terrific, based on events almost too ludicrous to be real. But it also knocks the wind away from any hook that comedy Action Point may have. Clearly inspired by Action Park, this Johnny Knoxville pain-fest relocates from New Jersey to inland California, and knocks production values down a few notches in portraying a run-down amusement park resorting to dangerous stunts in order to stay solvent. With Knoxville (of Jackass fame) at the helm, this means one dangerous stunt after another, regardless of whether they make sense. (The squirrel nuts sequence is a particularly blatant example, but by no means the only one.) There’s an attempt at emotional resonance awkwardly jammed in the works, but the highlights of the film are the cringe-inducing stunts—anyone with empathetic responses to pain will not have a good time here. Knoxville does make a good lead, however—although his attempts at playing older (literally—much of the film is a flashback story from grandfather to granddaughter) make everything feel even more dangerous than the carefree days of 2001 and the first Jackass movie. Action Point is often too blunt and crass to be funny, even though a few jokes land here and there. But the biggest knock against it is that it simply doesn’t even equal to the real thing—try watching Class Action Park and even the documentary will feel more dangerous and darkly funny than even this fictional take on it.

  • Nitro Rush (2016)

    Nitro Rush (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2020) I wasn’t all that fond of the first Nitro film—despite good technical production values and the ambition to deliver something akin to the Fast and Furious series in a French-Canadian context, the film erred by going ludicrously melodramatic and not quite understanding the balance between pathos and action. The sequel isn’t quite as atonal, but it still suffers from many of the issues of the original. Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge is back in action as a man with a substantial potential for violence, escaping from prison to go rescue his now-grown son from the influence of a crime gang selling fatal drugs. There’s a little bit more to this, however—As the script dumbly chooses to conceal (despite it being obvious from the start), he’s really working to infiltrate the gang. Nitro Rush is far better once it gets down to the nitty-gritty of its action sequences, swapping the urban jungle of Montréal for the rural backwoods of Québec as the characters try to sneak into a synthetic drug lab in the middle of nowhere. A car testing sequence is awkwardly inserted in the middle of the film to remind us that the first film was heavily in nitro-powered racing, but otherwise the pickup truck is the vehicle of choice here (including a rather good shot in which a pickup races to turn on a rural road). Technical credentials are unusually good for a French-Canadian film: slick direction and capable cinematography do much to paper over the dubious choices made in the script, which pits criminals against criminals and relies on protagonist-centred morality as a substitute for actual moral values. As a film, Nitro Rush is watchable—not quite so irritating as its predecessor, but not quite as ambitious on the action either. Lemay-Thivierge is not bad, but even the conclusion’s promise of further adventures is not really enticing considering that the series has been a half-misfire so far.