Reviews

  • The Sea Wolf (1941)

    The Sea Wolf (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Let’s see: A Jack London maritime adventure novel brought to the big screen by director Michael Curtiz, and starring no less than Edward G. Robinson as a sadistic sea captain, John Garfield as a hero protagonist and a beautiful Ida Lupino as the love interest? Oh yes, there’s ample reason to have a look at the 1941 adaptation of The Sea Wolf. Reportedly the best of the numerous film version of the novel, this one does get a crucial element right: Robinson as the antagonist, a formidable presence for an equally fearsome character. Lupino is certainly an asset as well, but the film’s execution through a foggy studio set means that the atmosphere of the seagoing ship is appropriately claustrophobic and oppressive. The plot goes a bit further than an already-interesting adventure story to become a small-scale illustration of the dangers of fascism, which adds quite a bit to the result. Good special effects (for the time) and tons of atmosphere complete the portrait. While it has the clunkiness of the technical means available to studio-bound 1940s filmmakers, The Sea Wolf is nonetheless a good adaptation and a fair adventure story in its own right.

  • The Naked Spur (1953)

    The Naked Spur (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I’m somewhat familiar with James Stewart’s filmography of the 1930s and 1940s, but not so much about the movies he did during the 1950s, a time when he consciously sought to remake his image away from the young romantic premiers or everymen characters that made his success in previous decades. By the 1950s, he sought to reinvent himself in darker, more rugged roles, often in western settings. The Naked Spur does seem like a rather good introduction to that era, as he plays a bounty hunter who heads into the wilderness to track down a man with whom he has a very personal grudge. A mere handful of characters populate The Naked Spur, giving a quasi-theatrical focus on the story even as the film is set against expansive western landscapes. The story itself gets darker as it evolves, with the characters eventually working against each other in order to secure the reward or their vengeance. Stewart himself plays a harsher character this time around, obsessed with revenge and definitely not amiable as usual. Janet Leigh is there as a possibly unreliable love interest, with director Anthony Mann completing one of his many collaborations with Stewart. The result is a cut above most westerns—a close-knit, rather short character drama set against the grandeur of the Rockies.

  • “G” Men (1935)

    “G” Men (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) There’s a really interesting context to “G” Men that gives an added dimension to what could otherwise be dismissed as blunt pro-police propaganda, and it’s really no accident if this is a film from exactly 1935. At the time, producing studio Warner Brothers was far better known as a purveyor of gangster pictures, many of them taking a hypocritical approach to crime by glorifying the criminal… before ensuring that he was perfunctorily punished for his crimes right before the end credits. But this ended up being a factor in the drive to rein in Hollywood with an expansive Production Code of what could be shown on-screen—a code that went into effect in 1934, putting an end to the freewheeling Pre-Code era and posing a specific problem for Warner Brothers, as their best-known product was directly threatened. One of their solutions was to flip the script around and make policemen the heroes catching the criminals, and that brings us squarely to “G” Men, a film following an incorruptible young man (played by the roguish James Cagney, hilariously enough) as he joins the then-rather-newly named FBI to take down an organized crime boss. There’s a little bit of training, romance and action in the following scenes, as the film starts putting together the building blocks of the FBI’s reputation as a fearsome federal agency (a reputation that FBI chief Hoover would capitalize upon—indeed, the most commonly shown version of “G” Men is the 1949 re-release with an even blunter framing device introducing it as a training film for recruits. I can’t quite call “G” Men a good film—it plays in now-obvious clichés, outright propaganda and very familiar plot elements—but it’s certainly a fascinating illustration of the immediate impact that the Hays Code had on Hollywood… and the ever-creative solutions that studio executives will find to deliver more or less the same thing as per the tastes of the day.

  • Disraeli (1929)

    Disraeli (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) It’s amusing to go back in time and find things that will strike you as being quite modern. There are at least two strands in Disraeli that still feel quite novel, even for an early-sound-era film. They’re certainly not technical: As befit a film from the 1920s that may or may not have been restored lately, the images are often-blurry blends of various grays with few strong black or white tones. The audio is marred by constant hiss and poor audio fidelity. But when you take a look at the script, two things are striking: For one, it’s an attempt to portray the grander-than-life British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, but taking the modern approach of looking at a moment in history for the historical figure rather than attempting a multi-decade sweeping epic, as was far more common through Hollywood history. (It helps that it was based on a play which, by definition, is more concerned about unity of time than most movies.) Here, Disraeli focuses on the events surrounding the purchase of the Suez Canal, encapsulating Disraeli’s character through the various manoeuvres required to achieve his objectives. But in an almost-equally important subplot, Disraeli is also portrayed as a semi-comic figure playing matchmaker to a young couple, echoing the amusing historical reinterpretation of such movies as 1994’s I.Q. The result is undoubtedly rough to watch from a strictly audio/video perspective (Wikipedia notes that the sole surviving version is a 1934 re-release, with material forever cut to appease censors) but the result is a great deal of fun from a script perspective, and gives an accessible reason to be interested in the historical figure.

  • Executive Suite (1954)

    Executive Suite (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I am fascinated by tales of boardroom intrigue, a fascination that comes from my background as a white-collar office drone, constantly aware and at the mercy of senior management shenanigans. I also suspect that such high-level executive machinations are perhaps the closest modern equivalent to palace intrigue, what with the king having to deal with his scheming courtiers in modern attire. No matter the reason, I found myself very quickly drawn into Executive Suite’s steely-eyed depiction of the feeding frenzy that follows the death of a furniture magnate, as two visions of the company battle it out in a succession drama played in voting shares and personal grudges. The film’s opening moments are remarkable, as a first-person point of view of someone sending a telegram and going out to take a taxi turns tragic when the person dies and his wallet is stolen. It turns out that we’ve just seen the death of a company president, and the wallet theft means that no one (except for one executive using this knowledge for insider trading) will realize what happened for another day. The film settles down a bit after this fantastic opening sequence, but the sides are steadily described, what with a quality-conscious designer going up against a penny-pinching financial officer for control of the company. There are many similarities here with 1956’s Patterns, but Executive Suite is a solid drama of moves and counter-moves (with a seriousness underscored by, well, the lack of a score), with a likable hero played by William Holden and decent supporting roles for Barbara Stanwyck, Fredrick March and Shelley Winters. Director Robert Wise’s approach to the material is decidedly close to the ground, but there’s a decent understated flourish to the script, as it quickly sketches characters, and sometimes catches them in compromising positions. I don’t expect everyone to be as enthralled by Executive Suite as I was, but there’s something carefully balanced about its dramatic plotting and its almost realistic approach to the material.

  • B.F.’s Daughter (1948)

    B.F.’s Daughter (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I know, intellectually, that there are thousands of perfectly enjoyable movies that have been more or less forgotten by history. Still, it’s always fun to catch some random film on TCM and be unexpectedly charmed by the result. I probably recorded B.F.’s Daughter because it stars Barbara Stanwyck—she’s one of the few stars of the 1940 that I find interesting in her own right and not simply as a variation on leading lady stereotypes. But the story of the film does have a way of drawing audiences in, as our protagonist, the daughter of a rich self-made man, decides to trade off an ambitious upper-society lawyer boyfriend, for a humble working-class academic. It does help that the male lead is played by Van Heflin, a likable actor I’ve recently put in perspective thanks to such movies as East Side, West Side. But that whirlwind romance is only the beginning of a story that stretches over ten years and into World War II, as our hero becomes a noted academic and a trusted advisor to the upper sphere of the US government thanks to hard work… and an initial secret push from his wife. Their romance is prickly, complicated by other factors and severely put in jeopardy thanks to a crucial evening. Much of the third act is dedicated to the resolution of two crises, as the heroine suspects her estranged husband is having an affair (he’s not in the film, but he was in the original novel), and her old flame is presumed dead over the Pacific. It’s not really a great movie, but I thoroughly enjoyed Stanwyck and Heflin at work, and the look at the professional progression of an academic over a few years is the kind of material I actually enjoy watching. By the time the film raises issues about selling out principles in favour of access, I was as invested in those ideas as the central romance. Some movies, for lack of better descriptions, simply click and B.F.’s Daughter is one of those: I approached it without too many expectations and was very pleased by the results. Now let’s keep watching older films to see what other happy surprises are hidden in the archives…

  • Rose-Marie (1936)

    Rose-Marie (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) If I was in a cheeky mood, I could try to use the 1936 version of Rose-Marie to make a point about American cultural appropriation of Canadian iconography, and there are quite a few howlers in there. Rose-Marie (second of three versions of the same story, following a 1924 silent version and prior to a colour version in 1954) is about a singer searching for her criminal brother in the Canadian wilds, accompanied by a tall and handsome Mountie. It’s a musical, but musically, it draws its inspiration more from opera than Broadway musicals—the protagonist, like Jeanette MacDonald, is a soprano, and most of the songs (including the signature “Indian Love Call”) are very much tailored to classical singers. That means that the lighthearted comic tone that we often associate with musicals of the period is sorely toned down here—it’s a romance first, and a comedy merely by virtue of not ending horribly. It does satisfy, I suppose, but then there’s my maple-leaf emblazoned axe to grind. Playing with “Canadian references” as shoddily as any other non-Californian culture, Rose-Marie quickly accumulates howlers. The opening sequence has the protagonist being greeted warmly by the Premier of Québec, with the language question being almost completely absent in their exchange. (Well, she does sing Romeo and Juliet in phonetic French, but that’s it.) The English-French language question remains almost completely removed from the rest of the film, but there are more visual absurdities to take care of, including our protagonist travelling to “Northern Québec,” which has the backdrop of the Rockies mountains. The musical montage “The Mounties” is oddly affectionate in singing about how they always get their men, but we’re clearly playing with a bunch of Canadian clichés thrown in a blender at this point. It gets much, much worse once the native characters are introduced, with Eastern tribes wearing Prairies-type headgear and dancing around Western totems. My brain, normally adept at ignoring such cultural absurdities, basically broke down at this point and I’m not sure if I remember much more of the rest of the film than an early (and somewhat atypical) role for a young James Stewart as the protagonist’s criminal brother. (There’s also David Niven as a suitor, but he’s barely in the film.) Although I definitely remember the numerous howlings of “Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo When I’m calling you Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo Will you answer too? Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo.” I won’t even discuss the Metis character (or, for that matter, the Mountie) to spare you some harsh language. But let’s acknowledge one thing—Rose-Marie itself is somewhat innocuous: we know where it’s going, and it’s not because the film was shot in the Sierra Nevada’s Lake Tahoe passing itself for “Lake Chibougam” (an obvious bastardization of Chibougamau) that the rest of the film has to be thrown away. If you’re willing to be amused at its absurdities, it’s even charming in its own quaint way. Heck, it’s kind of interesting to feel first-hand the same kind of cultural indignation that other cultures must feel every time Hollywood comes playing in their cultural backyard: It does recalibrate the debate.

  • The Wizard (1989)

    The Wizard (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) As it happens, I was just about the right age to be fascinated by The Wizard when it came out… except that even then, I was a PC player rather than a console one. I distinctly recall the Nintendo-driven marketing push for The Wizard—the Power Glove, the reveal of Super Mario 3, the early glimpse at what would become the eSport scene… but somehow, perhaps fortunately, didn’t see the film until now. Which may have been for the best, considering the period feel that now distinctly lends some unplanned charm to The Wizard. The plot itself is a bizarre amalgamation between a video-game tournament entirely sponsored by Nintendo, and a teen road movie with some very dark undertones featuring runaway kids making their way across the continent for closure. Borrowing a page from the Tommy rock opera, our teen protagonists anoint themselves the guardians of a savant videogame player and decide to exploit his gaming skills by taking him to a tournament with a substantial cash prize. Following them are the worried sets of relatives (the genealogy of the characters is complex) and an unscrupulous bounty hunter. There’s more plot than expected here, although much of it does feel subservient to the demands of the film’s marketing-driven premise. A lot of it has aged, but the jury will stay out for a while as to whether it’s now dated or charmingly quaint. There are some sequences fit to make anyone cringe (I’m specifically thinking of the introduction of the !!POWER GLOVE!!), but there is some rather nostalgic value in seeing the characters react to now-classic gaming paraphernalia. It does add quite a bit to a story that, absent the videogame angle, would have been almost instantly forgettable. The film may have otherwise been only known as a minor early entry for Christian Slater and Beau Bridges. As it is now, it’s a bit of a time capsule for Nintendo’s glory days with the original NES—something that plays well to today’s 1980s nostalgia wave.

  • Johnny Guitar (1954)

    Johnny Guitar (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I don’t normally like Joan Crawford (Mommy Dearest didn’t help), but she is a force of nature in Johnny Guitar, a film that, despite its title, actually revolves around her. The titular Johnny (played by Sterling Hayden) initially gives us the impression that he’s going to be one of those singing cowboys matinee idols as he enters a saloon in the middle of nowhere and starts strumming and crooning. But the drama quickly displaces the music, as Crawford’s character (the owner of the saloon) comes in and sets the plot in motion. Her saloon is not built in the middle of nowhere as much as on the path of a future railway; nearby townspeople are insanely envious, and she has close ties to one of the local hoodlums. Our guitar-toting hero is also an ex-flame, and when the local bank is robbed in her presence, everything goes up in flames. A somewhat unpredictable screenplay and a steady descent into heavier and heavier drama do help make the most out of Johnny Guitar’s western elements. Crawford finds an equally impressive opponent in Mercedes McCambridge’s vengeful antagonist (a somewhat unusual case of a female antagonist in western films, if I’m not mistaken)—it’s said that the two women wouldn’t stand each other off the set as well. Nice outdoors colour cinematography also helps in wrapping up a package that’s far more interesting than your usual western.

  • A Girl in Every Port (1952)

    A Girl in Every Port (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) My answer to “Which Marx Brother do you find the funniest?” is immediate, constant and definitive: Groucho, always Groucho. His typical verbal wit is my kind of humour, and he was, to me, always the highlight of any of the Brothers’ movies. A Girl in Every Port is something slightly different, as we have Groucho without his brothers playing a sailor who gets embroiled in racehorse schemes while his ship is stationed in town. At no less than sixty-two at the film of the film’s release, Groucho is easily a few decades older than his character, but those (along with the painted-on moustache) are the conventions we have to play with if the film is to make any sense. The script is willing to complicate and overcomplicate its own fraudulent schemes until even the characters comment on easier ways of doing things. (But the gag of a horse being helped on a warship is worth it.) The result isn’t all that funny, but it’s amusing enough, and a welcome opportunity to have Groucho go for one of his last starring movie roles. Groucho himself may not hit any peaks of verbal humour, but he breaks the fourth wall quite a bit, and he gets his laughs. Don DeFore anchors the film as the henpecked victim of the scams, while Marie Wilson provides the romantic interest. Notably an early Irwin Allen production, A Girl in Every Port is probably best suited for Groucho fans and those who have the patience for an average comedy. But it’s fun all right, and who can resist Groucho commenting to the audience on the unlikeliness of his own movie’s plot?

  • Take Her, She’s Mine (1963)

    Take Her, She’s Mine (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) By the early 1960s, James Stewart was long past his young premier roles of the 1930s, his everyday men of the 1940s or his attempt to redefine himself in a darker, more rugged persona in the 1950s—he was now fit to portray a stereotypically likable dad dealing with sending his daughter to college. Adapted from a Broadway comedy that was, amazingly enough, based on the experiences of eventually famous writer-director Norah Ephron as a younger girl, Take Her, She’s Mine has Stewart as the kind of dad that everyone would like to have—bumbling and overprotective, but also intensely likable and able to support his daughter (played by iconic teenybopper Sandra Dee) whenever she needs help. The framing device has Stewart’s character explaining an increasingly ludicrous series of embarrassing newspaper articles before we go back in time and see how each one of them came to be. It all plays against a California-based couple sending their daughter to an east-coast college where she is swept up in the burgeoning social protest movements. As a look in the turmoil that was developing within 1960s America, Take Her, She’s Mine is a fun romp—at least in its first two thirds, because the film loses quite a bit of comic steam in the later third as the action moves to Paris and stops being as relatable. Still, Stewart can’t be topped as the well-intentioned, stammering dad who ends up participating in a sit-in against obscenity laws on behalf of his daughter, or tries to muddle through a deficient knowledge of French while tracking down his daughter in quasi-bohemian Paris. (Some of the French is quite good, some of it almost unintelligible.) It’s all good fun, and even the exhausted third act (reportedly a product of studio interference) can’t quite erase the superb period piece humour of the rest of the film as handled by director Henry Koster. Then, of course, you’ve got Stewart in a minor but highly enjoyable role—and sometimes, that’s really all you need.

  • Written on the Wind (1956)

    Written on the Wind (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I have, in past reviews, used “melodrama” as a bit of an epithet, complaining about overwrought drama as if it was a bad thing by definition. But Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind has shown me the error of my ways, as its overblown, overwrought, overdriven plotting is a spectacular demonstration of the joys of melodrama when it simply stops caring about being plausible. From the first few minutes (even discounting the very dramatic framing device that gets us to murder in less than sixty seconds), it’s obvious that this isn’t a script that plays in subtleties, as characters get married on a whim and are soon enjoying line-by-line verbal jousting. Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall play bickering couples like few others, and both amazingly tear into their dialogue without cracking up at the absurdity of it all. Things get much better (or worse) once a scheming sister (Dorothy Malone, shattering her mousy persona with a brassy blonde hairdo) and a longtime friend (Rock Hudson, in a straight—ahem: sedate—performance that became rich in subtext when his homosexuality was revealed decades later) enter the picture and also start making trouble. The love square is inherently unstable, and it becomes even wilder once infertility, money, alcoholism, lust and plain old death enter the picture. The fifth character here is heard rather than seen—the orchestral score is exceptionally aggressive here, not underscoring the action as much as overscoring it—there’s a scene with a boy riding a mechanical horse outside a restaurant that has to be heard to be believed. It’s all very broad and outrageously in-your-face, so much so that the film flips into satirical territory by pure brute force. The kicker is that there really isn’t much of a difference between Written on the Wind and later soap operas, even glorified ones such as Dallas and Dynasty—Sirk was clearly ahead of his time here, or simply repurposing pulp fiction to the big screen with a ferociousness that would set a precedent. No matter why or how, Written on the Wind remains a striking movie today, going for madcap blatant melodrama and leaving a much stronger impression than many so-called serious dramas of the time.

  • Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969)

    Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I don’t, as a rule, like westerns very much—the combination of overly familiar elements with an overall might-makes-right attitude has never sat very well with me, and you can make a fair argument that much of it boils down to basic differences between Americans and Canadians. It takes a lot to get me sympathetic to a Western, but Support Your Local Sheriff! manage to do so through a mildly comic treatment of the good old stranger-comes-to-town idea. Here, we have James Garner playing a confident gunsmith who takes up the sheriff’s job in a gold-rush town while he’s on his way to Australia—taming a rowdy town with little support from the town’s leaders. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Support Your Local Sheriff! is how it manages to be amusing without going to comedic extremes—this is tame material compared to Blazing Saddles, for instance, but the payoff is the ability to make compelling comic characters without turning them into absurdist caricatures. The film succeeds quickly at making us care for the characters, and once you have that, you can keep the same gently comic tone going until the end, as the film doesn’t necessarily rely on gags to keep going. Garner cuts quite a figure as the hero in a role tailored for him (he produced the film) — most modern comedies would have been tempted to make him incompetent, but here the laughs are better in following how he outsmarts the town. Meanwhile, Joan Hackett makes for a lovely romantic foil, with director Burt Kennedy being able to create a convincing small-town western atmosphere out of a meagre budget. I quite liked the result—it treats western with a lack of irreverence but not quite contempt, and it leaves viewers with smiles on their faces.

  • La residencia [The House that Screamed] (1969)

    La residencia [The House that Screamed] (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) It does happen that films that could have been considered mildly innovative for their time end up completely left behind by later variations on the same theme. Which is the sad case with La residencia, a film that could have been distinctive in 1969, but now feels overfamiliar—or perhaps it’s just me and the many boarding school horror movies I’ve seen over the past few months. Suffice to say that La residencia is, at first glance, a very familiar film—one about students in an all-girl school where creepy and terrifying things are afoot, where there’s rampant abuse and mysteriously disappearing students. Fortunately, the ending goes beyond that, into a semi-inverted Psycho scenario that puts a horror stamp on the result. It’s somewhat surprising for a 1969 film—and the treatment decidedly owes more to the slow-burn aesthetics of The Haunting rather than the wilder giallo movies of the following decade—but we have seen other movies do much more with the same premise, and unfortunately, this does reflect on La residencia despite its overall success.

  • The Way I See It (2020)

    The Way I See It (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Peter de Souza spent years of his life being as inconspicuous as possible—as an official photographer for the White House during the Reagan administration, then the Obama one, his job depended on capturing key moments of the presidency without being noticed, without people even realizing that he was in the room. As such, it gave him a unique look at the way a president behaves in all spheres of his life—personal and political. He probably could have lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity, but as The Way I See It explains, this unique knowledge of presidential behaviour also led him to pass judgment on Obama’s successor, especially as the excesses of the administration trampled upon the exemplary behaviour that de Souza witnessed. Using Instagram and his formidable archives, de Souza became a leading mocker of the commander-in-chief, pointing out the contrasts between the president he shadowed for eight years and his less-than-admirable successor. The Way I See It would not have existed without this controversy—much of the film is framed by a presentation in which de Souza acknowledges these unprecedented times and the unusually combative position in which he placed himself. But this, as he points out, is not a partisan thing—having served both Democratic and Republican administrations, he poses the difference in terms of decency—Reagan and Obama were decent people (a thesis abundantly illustrated with dozens of intimate anecdotes), whereas the current president is not. Much of The Way I See It illustrates its point by speedrunning through much of the Obama administration, pointing out a consistency of behaviour at odds with his successor, and reminding us of what a truly presidential response can be—the Sandy Hooks segment is particularly powerful, showing a president capable of authentic compassion and empathy. The documentary doesn’t need to compare it with the behaviour of Obama’s successor—we all know he’s incapable of such things. If I do have one issue about The Way I See It, it’s that Peter de Souza’s job is fascinating enough that it didn’t need the constant reminders about the current administration: it will date the film faster than it should, although I hope that we’ll soon be able to look upon this documentary as a distasteful reminder of a particularly dark period in American politics.