Movie Review

  • The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943)

    The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Writer-director Preston Sturges famously made his mark in the early 1940s with an impressive string of comedies that fired on all cylinders, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is clearly part of that run, even if it’s not quite up to the standard set by at least three of Sturges’ previous films. I suspect that some of that lessened impact has to do with social mores — the idea of having a young woman pregnant from an unknown father and desperately trying to save her reputation by marrying the nearest hapless clerk was reportedly a scandal back then, but not quite as hard-hitting today. (And probably not as comic either.)  Betty Hutton stars as the party-loving girl who drinks too much and wakes up both married and pregnant (albeit without a clue as to her husband’s identity), but for once the brassy Hutton gets upstaged by Eddie Bracken, whose tics-ridden performance as an exceptionally nervous young man walks a fine line between sympathy and exasperation. The script here is a thing of beauty (even if it was reportedly re-written on the fly to accommodate apoplectic censors) — flashbacks, satire, character-driven comedy with absurd flights of fancy affecting even the highest personalities of the time: Hitler gets outraged at “the miracle,” Mussolini resigns and, most hilariously of all, Canada protests (in a clear echo of the Dionne quintuplets). Managed at a pace that still impresses, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek isn’t quite as madcap as Palm Beach Story, as cutting as The Lady Eve or as philosophical as Sullivan’s Travels, but it still packs a punch today and should play well even with jaded audiences.

  • Tiger Shark (1932)

    Tiger Shark (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Hollywood is arguably at its best when combining the familiar in slightly intriguing doses, an approach that finds its drawbacks when imitators pile up. From a contemporary perspective, there’s something well-worn to much of Tiger Shark, as it creates a love triangle between a tough man (Edward G. Robinson, playing a tuna fisherman who loses a hand in an accident), his wife and a man closely associated to them both. It all takes place in a dangerous, high-risk, manly environment, clearly fitting with director Howard Hawks’ career-long preoccupations. At a slim 77 minutes, Tiger Shark does make in brevity what it never really possessed in originality, but again it’s all about how the elements are combined. Hawks is playing to his strengths by taking a sometimes-documentary approach to men in a dangerous job — there are some fascinating moments here as we get a look at 1930s commercial fishing, echoing the later Come and Get It look at lumberjacks. Robinson goes all-out playing a rough and quick-to-anger character and the result does add quite a bit to the already decent film. The only two Hawksian trademarks that don’t quite fit in this early film are the Hawksian woman (Zita Johann is remarkably tame here) and the fast-paced comic dialogue, although let’s be reasonable: Hawks was still a few years away from hitting the heights of screwball comedy. The result is a bit more laborious than Hawks’ upper-tier films, but still a bit more action-packed and faster-paced than similar films of the era. Tiger Shark doesn’t have much to its title in terms of distinction, but it’s not a bad example of the form.

  • Love on the Run (1936)

    Love on the Run (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Neither Joan Crawford, Clark Gable or Franchot Tone step far away from their established screen personas in Love on the Run, a kind of silly romantic comedy that had its start in the 1930s but certainly didn’t end there. The premise will be dead familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a screen romance: a millionaire (Crawford) wants to get away from the attention she’s getting, while an undercover reporter (Gable) is only too willing to help her… as long as there is a good story in it. The tension created by the lies sustains much of the film, as is the rivalry between reporters Gable and Tone. To contemporary viewers, what makes Love on the Run more than a romantic comedy is the 1930s atmosphere: With hard-nosed print reporters in the lead, colourful characters such as aviator (how exciting!), communication by cablegrams, the allure of a glamorous European getaway, and the menace of international spies, it’s almost more interesting now than it must have been at the time. Still, there isn’t much to the foundations of the story — it’s clearly a derivative of It Happened One Night (back then a box-office and Oscar sensation) and it plays in the same comic space as many films of its era. It’s fun to watch but not overly gripping even if you like the actors involved in it. Still, Love on the Run is perhaps best not appreciated by itself, but as a representative example of a genre — the 1930s Hollywood comedy, light on the screwball and heavy on the romance between marquee names.

  • Turbo (2013)

    Turbo (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m always surprised at the films that fell in-between the cracks of my avid movie-watching. To be fair, animated family film Turbo came out at a time when I was busier raising an infant than going to the theatres. It was part of my Netflix watchlist for years, but it just didn’t feel essential. Honestly, even after watching it, Turbo still doesn’t feel essential—but the result is entertaining enough in a wholly familiar key. Blending a comic high-concept (a fast… snail!) with the icky creatures and racing hardware so beloved of the boys more likely to be the film’s audience, Turbo tells us about a snail with aspirations to race the Indianapolis 500. Obviously, we’re not aiming for strict mimetic realism here, so by the time the film uses a Fast and the Furious-type scene to infuse the protagonist’s snail DNA with nitrous oxide, you either hop on for the ride or get left behind. A few complications are required in order to make the result’s running length commercially acceptable, and those take the form of a taco restaurant co-owner and a half-dozen other snails (not nitro-DNA infused) with a thirst for speed. By the time the DreamWorks Animation film finally makes its way to Indianapolis, the ensemble cast of voice actors (led by Ryan Reynolds, but with notables such as Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Peña, Snoop Dog and Michelle Rodriguez all making themselves heard) has had the chance to deliver a few gags. Aimed at the under-12 set, the plotting relies a lot on a selective take of “There ain’t no rules saying a snail can’t race!” (Ignoring the rather detailed technical specifications dictating what can race in the Indy 500) but then again: not mimetic realism. What Turbo does amount to, if you’re willing to give it a chance, is a reasonably entertaining kid’s adventure with plenty of side gags to bolster a straightforward narrative. The technical details are convincing, and the film makes a surprising amount of mileage on anthropomorphizing creatures that, well, aren’t known to be cuddly and cute. It’s a rare Hollywood film to feature a French-Canadian character, but I have problems with Bill Hader’s terrible accent, considering that it smacked more of a caricature of European French than Canadian French. Still, much of Turbo works rather well — fast pacing, comic complications, great animation and done: an animated family film that’s worth watching if you haven’t already.

  • Une femme mariée: Suite de fragments d’un film tourné en 1964 [A Married woman] (1964)

    Une femme mariée: Suite de fragments d’un film tourné en 1964 [A Married woman] (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2021) I’ve mentioned this a few times, but it still amazes me how often the French nouvelle vague can feel like a parody of itself. Ask any North American cinephile about their worst preconception of French cinema, and they’ll almost immediately reach for the clichés of a black-and-white dialogue fest in which the characters keep talking about life, love and sex. But many nouvelle vague films did correspond almost exactly to this cliché, and Une femme mariée is certainly one of them. The very slight plot has a married woman finally breaking off her affair with another man. But narrative is the least of writer-director Jean-Luc Godard’s concerns here — much of the film is a very typical blend of flat voiceovers, extended riffs, intertitles, semi-related images and conversations about various topics with a slight philosophical bent. I’m relatively lucky in that, while I don’t exactly hate that kind of filmmaking, I can listen to it without too much trouble. (I’m also understanding it in the original French, which helps — the translated subtitles, as competent as they are, flatten some of the dialogue.)  On the other hand, there isn’t much left once the film ends — it’s 94 solid minutes of meandering dialogue without much of a narrative point, and I suppose I’ll get to enjoy the film all over again if ever I get to see it again. Behind the scenes, there’s some interest in how the film was produced (in less than three months to meet a deadline) or the controversy that it attracted, even in France, for its then-racy dialogue and character behaviour. Still, Une femme mariée doesn’t do much to change my opinion of Godard or la nouvelle vague in general — it’s very much the kind of film that makes people wary of them both.

  • Garbo Talks (1984)

    Garbo Talks (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, July 2021) Classic movie fans may get an extra kick out of Garbo Talks, a slight comedy that has its protagonist frantically tracking down Greta Garbo in early-1980s New York City as a favour to his terminally ill mother. Much of the film hinges on Garbo’s famous reclusiveness, as she left acting in 1941 at the age of 35 (after twenty years in the business) and lived a private life until her death in 1990. By the time Garbo Talks was made, she had become this enigmatic Manhattan figure, sometimes seen but rarely heard. It’s in this situation that our protagonist (a likable but otherwise bland Ron Silver) starts acting like a detective, trying to find Garbo in order to relay to her his mother’s dying wish to meet her. There are a few low-octane hijinks along the way, but Garbo Talks never takes it to a consciously comedic level. Director Sidney Lumet, working with what he has, keeps things going at a tepid boil — the film should be more interesting than it is, either by leaning on the detective elements of the story, or its comic potential. What we have instead is a film that runs a long time on the Garbo mystique, but otherwise walks through the motions. Although, the final scene is amusing enough.

  • The Brain (1988)

    The Brain (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) A mildly interesting premise can’t save Canadian low-budget horror film The Brain from its low-imagination execution. The central idea does have its charm — something about a self-help guru’s TV show actually leading viewers to mind-control, and the rebellious student sent to the guru for personality readjustment. You can see the bare bones of a far more interesting movie here, but it’s all undone by indifferent screenwriting, incompetent directing and a disappointing low-budget execution. Sure, there’s a mildly exciting car crash that comes up as if to wake viewers from their growing slumber, but then we go to a twentysomething “teenager” gyrating wildly on a restaurant counter to reassure us that it’s not going to be any good after all. The film does get worse to the point of acquiring a patina of so-bad-it’s-good charm as it goes on as its brain monster grows larger, more powerful and definitely rubberier. By the time an overlong third act has the protagonist and his puffy-jacket-wearing girlfriend running around a facility with a wholly unconvincing brain chasing them down, director Edward Hunt’s film has become a sub-example of cheap 1980s horror movies. Despite the New York license plates, there’s some definite Canadianness to the exterior shoots, even though the level of snow in back-to-back scenes varies quite a bit. But consistency is a hallmark of big minds and decent budgets, none of which the film has. I had to double-check that The Brain came after the 1982 end of the Canadian tax shelter film era, because this definitely feels like a movie of that time.

  • The Dead Pit (1989)

    The Dead Pit (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Another entry in the “not good, but interesting” horror film category, The Dead Pit at least has the pleasant madness of not quite knowing what it’s all about. It starts with a mad scientist, continues with a young girl being stuck in a psychiatric hospital with wild hallucinations, and ends in zombie-movie mode with the undead rising from the dead. It’s a lively blend of elements, and it marks an interesting debut for writer-director Brett Leonard, whose career was consistently interesting (there’s that word again) throughout the early 1990s. As a mixture of genre elements, it often feels like a collage of other better movies, but that’s got charm as well: Echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest blend into Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and then on to a Re-Animator zombie hospital thing. Cheryl Lawson does look nice and screams even more nicely here as an inmate fighting against the undead menace and their mad master. While The Dead Pit is ultimately not as compulsively interesting as similar lighthearted horror cult movies, it does work well in a pinch as something reasonably entertaining that you have (likely) never seen before. I can think of far worse example, and that’s only in the movies I’ve watched this week.

  • The Glass Key (1942)

    The Glass Key (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I know that The Glass Key is highly regarded among fans of film noir — it was one of the films that helped codify the genre; it features Alan Ladd and the gorgeous Veronica Lake; it’s assembled from a Dashiell Hammett novel and it mixes politics with crime. At the time, it was clearly intended as a star vehicle for Ladd, and a way for the studio to capitalize on the success of both The Maltese Falcon and This Gun for Hire. You can recognize its early-noir pedigree by how the film doesn’t quite jump to the criminal aspect right away, spending a leisurely time setting up its characters and their political/romantic machinations before precipitating events with (at last!) a murder. This delay is probably what makes me so tepid on the result — while the last act of The Glass Key finally gets moving, the opening half takes a lot of time before getting moving, and doesn’t quite manage to create that narrative energy required to get going. The ending even flips into comedy, which is not necessarily a bad thing but does scramble expectations. Oh, I still generally like the result — and with Veronica Lake looking her peekaboo-hairstyle best as she’s delivering some good dialogue, the film is really far from a dud. There are also some good moments for Alan Ladd, and one overhead stunt shot that still amazes even today. Still, I’m not overly charmed by The Glass Key — it feels a bit laborious, without the lean mean focus of later film noir.

  • Ruba al prossimo tuo [A Fine Pair] (1968)

    Ruba al prossimo tuo [A Fine Pair] (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Film comedy is harder than many people think — it’s not enough to write a lighthearted script when you also have to make sure that the acting, cinematography and direction are up to the task of presenting the comedy on the page. If nothing else, A Fine Pair is an exemplary case of what happens when no one in the film’s production seems to be trying for comedy. The premise has Rock Hudson as a NYPD detective being more or less seduced (by Claudia Cardinale, one of the film’s few highlights) into becoming an international jewel thief. You can already think of a few other films of that era with similar premises (most notably How to Steal a Million), but if you’re expecting something along those lines from A Fine Pair, you’re going to be solely disappointed. Where to begin? We can start with Rock Hudson — often presented as the successor to Cary Grant, except that Grant would mumble and wiggle his way into more laughs than Hudson even could. He’s not exactly wrong as the humourless police officer, but as with many of his comedies, he’s asked to deliver more than he can. I’m not going to ding Claudia Cardinale as the jewel-stealing temptress — although I’ll note that she seems to be playing a broad take on similar roles that often dips into national stereotypes. But by far the biggest problem with A Fine Pair is that if you watched the film without sound, you would swear you’d be watching a grimy depressing 1970s crime thriller. The cinematography is in cold black and blue (far more black than blue), with wintertime NYC looking sinister and the rest of the European jaunt not being much better with its decrepit sets and naturalistic lighting. We are a long way from bright Hollywood cinematography and lighting, making the entire thing feel lugubrious at best. Further technical problems keep sucking all the fun out of the final film: ADR dialogue with terrible sound editing and hard cuts between samples, laborious staging of dialogue that feels more painful than amusing, and bad set design that makes everything feel claustrophobic. It’s almost amazing how the film mishandles an easy comic premise in order to deliver something that looks and feels like the most depressing film in the world. Cardinale is, fortunately, not that bad (I’d rather watch her than Doris Day) but that’s not enough when the image is dark enough that we can barely make the outline of her face even at the best of times. Hudson (or Cardinale) completists will eventually make their way to A Fine Pair — I’m told that the film’s long-time unavailability created pent-up interest — but all will agree that this ranks low in the lowest tier of both actors’ filmography.

  • Back from Eternity (1956)

    Back from Eternity (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m at a point in my exploration of Classic Hollywood where Sturgeon’s Law is finally reasserting itself. As a reminder, Science Fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said that “ninety percent of everything is crud.” This is relevant to classic Hollywood in that most people who dive into the era will first see the classics — and over the forty-year period from 1927 (sound cinema) to 1967 (New Hollywood), there are a lot of them. But sooner or later, you run out of the best and have to tackle the rest, and that takes us to Back from Eternity, a rather disjointed survival drama that takes forever to get going, eventually making its way to lifeboat ethics that it tackles with disturbing gusto. The premise of the film has an airplane crash-land in South America, with nine survivors doing their best to repair the plan and survive the local headhunters. My TV guide log entry helpfully adds, “…but the repaired plane can only hold five people,” which pretty much gives away everything but the last three minutes of the film. As with other stories manipulating a plot to end up in an ethical quandary about lifeboat survival (seriously: Why five rather than eight when you’re dealing with an airliner? The pilot’s fiat declaration carries a lot of weight here), the screenwriter goes straight to logic and reason as arbiter of who should live or die, which usually leads us straight to arbitrary decision based on the screenwriter’s morality. Blech. This being said, there are many, many other problems with Back from Eternity even before it finally gets to its final reel — the interminable setup that ends up with very little payoff being the worst of them. Much of the film’s publicity material makes a bit deal out of Anita Ekberg as the film’s pin-up girl, but the most interesting role here goes to a bearded Rod Steiger as a moral criminal with nothing to lose in making decisions for others. The black-and-white cinematography is a disappointment given the lush jungle setting, although it probably simplified the process of shooting most of the film on a soundstage. All in all — Back from Eternity is far from being the worst film ever made, but it’s still a disappointment considering the long setup and the disappointing payoff. But then again, most movies are crud.

  • The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

    The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) The 1970s were not a fun time at the movies, and movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle certainly drive the point home. The story of an aging small-time gunrunner (Robert Mitchum) trying to navigate a tricky path between criminal friends and police officers who want him to become an informer in the hope of staying out of prison, it’s bleaker-than-bleak, uglier than sin and about as much fun to watch as your least favourite nightmare. Mitchum is quite good here — some call this performance his last great role, and he certainly fits the part of an older criminal with few other prospects, trying to protect his homely wife and daughters against the consequences of doing three-to-five in a state penitentiary. Spilling what he knows about his criminal associates seems like the least awful course of action, but there are consequences for such a thing. Peter Boyle also makes an impression as one of Coyle’s “friends.”  One of the film’s biggest draws as far as I’m concerned is hopping into the time machine to take a look at early-1970s Boston — It’s the big American city that I know best, so it was interesting to see the film tackle some landmarks, whether it’s the brutalist city hall, an already-familiar skyline or spending some time watching the accursed Bruins. (Alas, they play the Chicago Black Hawks rather than the Habs.)  There’s also a nice lime-green muscle car driving through big chunks of the plot. As an oft-mentioned representative of the neo-noir movement, it almost goes without saying that there is no happy ending in store for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but even those who know what to expect will still be caught off-guard at the brutality of the conclusion. You have to have a solid stomach before delving into 1970s cinema in the first place, but this one goes a few extra steps further.

  • Shiva Baby (2020)

    Shiva Baby (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) There are a few things I like about Shiva Baby, the biggest being its willingness to spend most of its running time in an enclosed house, in near-real-time, to study how its character reacts under severe multi-pronged stress thanks to the close presence of her former love, current sugar daddy, wife and baby of said sugar daddy, comically intense parents and overbearing family members. It’s a pressure cooker all right, and I have to admire the unity of action, place and time that writer-director Emma Seligman commits to. Rachel Sennott is not a bad anchor for the film, and the dark comedy of the film gets more and more intense as everything goes wrong for the heroine. There’s also an interesting intersectionality of elements — Jewishness, bisexuality, aimlessness, paranoia and anxiety—that give the film a unique atmosphere. Alas, I’m just about out of compliments, because the way Shiva Baby chooses to approach its material is that of a horror thriller — music, cinematography, editing and sound design are tuned to bring us inside the protagonist’s truly unpleasant mind, unable to deal effectively with the various problems to befall her—many of them of her own doing. What could have been funny with a different take on the material becomes obnoxious. The protagonist doesn’t take a long time to become irritating, except that the very nature of the film means that we’re stuck not just with her, but inside her perceptions until the end of the film. This is where the strengths of the film flip into annoyances if you’re not part of its target audience, or willing to play along. By the time Shiva Baby ends its mercifully short 78 minutes, I’ve had enough — and I’m not interested in any sequel.

  • The Empty Man (2020)

    The Empty Man (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) By the time the title card for horror film The Empty Man rolls by, twenty minutes into the film after a lengthy epilogue that ends with the death of characters we thought we’d follow for longer, it’s already clear that writer-director David Prior is going for something unusual, and that he’s woefully incapable of being efficient or concise in how he approaches his material. Various sources suggest that this version of The Empty Man is roughly six minutes longer than the director would have wanted (the film was taken away from him during post-production), but taking away six minutes would only begin to address the film’s severe pacing issues. At no less than 137 minutes, the film sports an overindulgent prologue that could have been cut entirely, interminable throat-clearing before the film finds its true identity, and a last ten minutes that merely hammers the same point over and over again. On the other hand, it’s a more ambitious horror film than many — before long, we’re into existentialist philosophical terrors, reality-bending cults, a manufactured protagonist and a far-reaching conspiracy: all good stuff, but weakened by the film’s refusal to get to the point of what it is about. Oh, there’s some visual stylishness on display — Prior is a much better director than a writer. But the film’s zigzagging between familiar tropes before getting down to its true business is more than annoying and contributes significantly to the film’s overall disappointment despite it swinging for the fences at times. I could have blamed the original graphic novel for the lack of efficiency, but a cursory look at the source’s plot summary suggests that the film is far from its inspiration. Prior certainly could have used a story editor — cut away the fat, focus the story on its most distinctive elements and the results could have been much better. But in its current state, The Empty Man is a laborious slog, and I don’t think that even an inevitable director’s cut will fix most of its problems.

  • At Eternity’s Gate (2018)

    At Eternity’s Gate (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m frankly more annoyed than amazed about At Eternity’s Gate and its take on Vincent Van Gogh’s life. I can certainly recognize the irresistible impulse that led to the film being made — hard for Willem Defoe to resist playing the famously tortured painter, hard for Oscar Isaac and Mads Mikkelsen not to join the production, hard for writer-director Julian Schnabel not to get a chance to play with cinematography in the key of Van Gogh’s perception of the world. Alas, the result is not necessarily pleasant. I have mild issues about how the film puts forth a new theory about Van Gogh’s death (that it wasn’t suicide) — but then again, I’m wearying of seeing even artistic misinformation in movies. I eventually got over my dislike of the way the film handled English-speaking Van Gogh next to other French-speaking characters. (Van Vogh was Dutch, so it makes sense to have a language barrier there.)  I have much bigger issues with the way the film is directed, with a nausea-inducing handheld camera in nearly every single shot, and cinematography that sometimes goes for subjective perception effect. At some point, I just wanted the film to calm down for a few minutes and deliver something like a biopic before going on yet another shakycam flight of fancy. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that I have recent and favourable memories of Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust for Life — to the point where I was wondering why At Eternity’s Gate was even necessary. The one person I can’t fault is Defoe — he’s really not bad as Van Gogh, with his screen personas being unusually well-suited to eccentric roles like this one. Still, I grew more and more vexed at the film’s excesses and unnecessary deviations from a straight-ahead film. Dafoe’s performance is good enough that it did not need Schnabel’s added fillips.