Reviews

  • Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

    Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Blu-ray, September 2020) I’ve never been a big fan of the original Planet of the Apes series, and Escape from the Planet of the Apes is the series’ last gasp of interest before sinking lower and lower into nonsense. There are still some undeniable strengths to this third instalment, starting with how the screenwriters found a way to keep the story going even after the all-destroying climax of the previous film. Now, apes get back to circa-1971 California through more time-travel shenanigans and we can see a reverted image of the first film in how they are welcomed, feared and destroyed by human society. The potential for social commentary here is rich, especially given the era Civil-Rights in which the film was produced, and it’s to the film’s credit that some effort is invested in making the ape protagonists likable, and to try to show how the world reacts to them. Unfortunately, the script seems to have been written with an impossible deadline and a compendium of dumb movie clichés because the first half-hour is so dumb that it becomes exasperating. The film flies from one implausible situation to another not because it’s trying to be funny, but because it’s deliberately avoiding logical plot progression out of a misguided intention to save some revelations for Big Scenes—it doesn’t help that the scientists in this film are among the more incompetent ones ever assembled for a first-contact situation. As a result, Escape from the Planet of the Apes exhausts all goodwill even before it gets where it wanted to go through that slap-dash first act. It leaves a bad impression that can’t be entirely corrected by later improvements in the film’s overall quality. The unrefined dialogue can’t do justice to the ideas that the film wants to explore, and the action doesn’t fly particularly high either. The actors are fine, but the limits of the film’s budget clearly show throughout—although it’s fun to see the 1970s brought to life so unpretentiously. Still, the beginning hurts, and so does the overly pessimistic ending (although this was now the New Hollywood grim-dark era, and it’s not as if the series do far didn’t already feature two of the bleakest endings in American cinema at that point). I’m glad I didn’t stop watching when the script’s stupidity was unbearable because Escape from the Planet of the Apes does improve significantly after a while. But it brings my appreciation to a muddled ambivalence rather than anything overly positive.

  • Sons and Lovers (1960)

    Sons and Lovers (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I’m making a point of trying to watch ever single Best Picture Academy Award nominee, and I’m having a generally good time! The vast majority of the movies having earned such an honour are of high cinematic quality, and many of them do have that extra special ingredient that makes them worthwhile even decades later. But there are exceptions, and the English adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is one of them for me. Proudly belonging to the “subtle psychological drama” school of Oscar nominations, it’s a low-octane, intimate story of a young man’s inability to form bonds with anyone else but his mother, and it’s about as dreary as it sounds. Filmed in semi-realistic black-and-white, with actors clearly working within a subdued emotional palette, it’s meant as a small-scale small-town drama and is unfortunately far too successful as such: the characters are boring, the pacing is glacial, and the ending is a deliberate downer. Dean Stockwell stars but does not impress. There are far better choices out there, and to think—Spartacus wasn’t even nominated for that year’s Best Picture award, while Sons and Lovers was.

  • Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

    Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) The first half-hour of Leave Her to Heaven had me very, very confused—it’s a film noir, and yet I was served a Technicolor romantic drama about a man and his possessive new wife. While the images were spectacular (That lodge! Wow, that lodge!) and a foreboding prologue promised much, we were so deep in melodramatic territory that I found my attention slipping—Sure, Gene Tierney is always worth a look (although Jeanne Crain has her beat here), but would the film eventually get any better? And then it does, spectacularly. After a few arguments realistic enough to be uncomfortable, the film cranks it up midway through as a shocking death puts the female lead’s psychological cruelty to the forefront, and then it’s off to races as things get more and more convoluted for our likable protagonist. There are femmes fatales in film noir, and then there’s Gene Tierney’s character here, willing to plot revenge from beyond the grave in an effort to ensure that her husband will remain hers no matter what. By the end of Leave Her to Heaven, the film’s moniker as “the first Technicolor film noir” made complete sense—although I note with some amusement that it does provide a somewhat uplifting ending after so much misery. The blend of genres may be off-putting on a first viewing, but it does make the film stand out, even today, as something refreshingly different. Cornel Wilde is fine in the male lead role and Vincent Price does make a mark in a relatively short turn as a jilted then prosecuting attorney. But the film belongs to Gene Tierney, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. I’ll note that the film fits rather well in the “domestic thriller” subgenre of the era, albeit gender-flipped so that it’s the woman who is the threat rather than the husband. From an inauspicious beginning, Leave Her to Heaven does pack quite a punch in its later half. If you’re bored still after the first few minutes, keep watching—it gets much better.

  • Viva Zapata! (1952)

    Viva Zapata! (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) The best reason to watch Viva Zapata is for Marlon Brando, and Marlon Brando is probably the best reason not to watch the film as well. Of course, that statement will hinge a lot on how you feel about Brando playing a Mexican revolutionary through a mixture of a stereotypical accent and quite a bit of mumbling. I pretty much loathed it (in keeping with a surprisingly large chunk of Brando’s filmography), and that’s probably where my review should stop. Alas, there’s more to it. Directed by Elia Kazan, featuring an Academy Award-winning supporting performance by Anthony Quinn and a screenplay by John Steinbeck (plus Daryl F. Zanuck producing), Viva Zapata is no lightweight fly-by-night production: It was intended as a prestige film, and the two things preventing the film from being recognized as an epic 1950s film are its restrained length (less than two hours) and black-and-white cinematography. It surely plays fast and loose with the historical facts—Zapata here is presented as a populist folk hero, illiterate (which wasn’t true) and utterly unremarkable from a political point of view. Worst of all is the somewhat tepid pacing and lack of sustained interest. At least Quinn is reasonably authentic. As for the rest of Viva Zapata—well, can you stand two hours of Brando mumbling? Some think that’s the best thing ever; others will want to claw their way to the exit.

  • Quiz Show (1994)

    Quiz Show (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, Youtube Streaming, September 2020) I first saw Quiz Show in the mid-1990s and had kept the memory of a dense, smart, compulsively watchable drama about the early days of television quiz shows. Fortunately, a second viewing sustains those high expectations. A historical fictionalization of the quiz show-fixing scandals that roiled TV networks in the 1950s, it’s a throwback to another era but with the same human flaws. Ralph Fiennes plays a telegenic academic from a respected family who comes to accept being fed the answers by the quiz show producers, while John Turturro is the less appealing participant whose volatile personality ends up being a key element in uncovering the scandal. Directed by Robert Redford, Quiz Show is a handsome, polished mid-budget production that seldom talks down to its audience—perhaps the kind of film that is endangered today. It still has a lot to say, as it grapples with the perennial sin of fraud for entertainment, and the irresistible impulse to arrange, guide and control even that’s supposed to be spontaneous. By virtue of being a sober period drama, Quiz Show hasn’t aged much in cinematographic terms, and certainly remains of interest at an age of artifice, high and low.

  • Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

    Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) You can certainly see glimpses of better Stephen King stories in Sometimes They Come Back—having a character confront supernatural horrors from an event thirty years before certainly smacks of It, and having an American classic car take centre stage is obviously reminiscent of Christine. We’ll never know how much of this was producer Dino De Laurentiis leering at other King properties he didn’t have the rights to. Not that it matters, considering that the film is weak stuff all-around: a ghost story spanning three decades, it’s about a schoolteacher coming back thirty years later and being forced to finish what he had started in avenging the death of his brother at the hands of a greaser gang. Sometimes They Come Back is not strictly terrible, but it’s intensely generic: production values aren’t that high, and the casting is indifferent at best. There are clearly worse King adaptations, but not so many of them that this warrants attention.

  • Alone in the Dark (1982)

    Alone in the Dark (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) Coming at the tail end of the 1979–1982 slasher craze, Alone in the Dark definitely knew what it was doing in revolving around a handful of psycho killers escaping from an insane asylum during a power outage and targeting their psychiatrist. Quickly shifting to home-invasion thriller, the film clearly upholds the tropes of the subgenre, and doesn’t care much about narrative cohesion. The biggest draw of the film, even today, is a cast that throws in Jack Palance, Donald Pleasence and Martin Landau together as psychiatrists and psychopaths. (Elsewhere in the film, Lin Shaye has an early brief role.) Better executed than average by writer-director Jack Sholder, Alone in the Dark does, however, remain a first-wave slasher—interesting if you’re into the whole psychopaths-with-knives thing; otherwise not very much.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, January 2021) Not remembering my first viewing, it took me a few false starts before I was able to make it (again) through Alone in the Dark. Either I stopped midway through, or I left it running while I was doing something else and realized by the end of it that I was never compelled to follow what was happening. When I finally sat down to watch with (mostly) undivided attention, I’m not sure I got much more out of it. The first half-hour does have something worth paying attention to: As a psychologist takes residence at an insane asylum, he has trouble connecting to a close-knit foursome of violent criminals, who blame him for the death of their previous psychiatrist. When a power outage strikes, they soon escape and head for his residence. The rest of the film, alas, is more or less a home-invasion thriller, albeit with a twist that can unfortunately be seen (or rather not seen) from the very introduction of the antagonists. If there’s any reason to watch the film, it’s probably for the casting of a few familiar actors: Jack Palance, Martin Landau and Donald Pleasence all have substantial roles here, with none other than Lin Shaye (who finally achieved horror stardom three decades later!) making a short appearance early in the movie. Alone is the Dark does work well in its execution, but it does boil down to a very average early-1980s horror film. That may not sound like much (it partially explains why I didn’t even remember seeing the film a few months ago), but it’s slightly more interesting than the omnipresent slashers of that time.

  • Wanda (1970)

    Wanda (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) While, on paper, Wanda looks like the kind of couple-on-the-run movies that were so popular in 1970s New Hollywood, the film is nothing like that. Almost entirely conceived (written, directed, produced) and starring Barbara Loden, it’s a character study of an aimless young woman who latches on to a bank robber as she leaves the rest of her miserable life behind. Road movie, aimless drama and gritty portrait of an unglamorous low-rent America, Wanda is all that and more, or maybe less, considering how threadbare, stripped-down, slow-paced and meandering it is. You can recognize the ambition to create something new and personal here—this is absolutely feminist filmmaking despite presenting a character so weak and flawed as to be loathsome. Representation can take the form of a character study as much as fist-pumping inspiration. Wanda may not be for everyone, but its historical importance seems secure (as, I’m told, the first film written, directed and played by the same woman)—and it’s not as if we’re forcing people to see it.

  • Incubo sulla città contaminata [Nightmare City aka City of the Walking Dead] (1980)

    Incubo sulla città contaminata [Nightmare City aka City of the Walking Dead] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, September 2020) I have no perceptible affection for circa-1980 Italian horror films (whether they’re about zombies of cannibals—same difference) but there were a few times in Nightmare City when I caught myself thinking, “Hey, this is almost interesting.” Not often, and never for too long, but still—I suppose I’m reacting more favourably to the idea of a city-wide zombie emergency, to the promising opening sequence (in which a cargo plane disgorges a group of zombies, effectively beginning the apocalypse), and to an audaciously dumb double-jot-nightmare ending. Alas, it doesn’t amount to much because director Umberto Lenzi doesn’t have the budget nor the wits to keep this interesting on a moment-to-moment basis. The makeup effects are not good, and the film’s cheap production values keep undermining whatever it wanted to do: gore in a well-made film can be tolerable, but it just looks laughable and pretentious in a cheap film like Nightmare City. Whatever promise it has is frequently wiped out, and, in the end, only confirmed my prejudices against that horror film subgenre.

  • Virus [Hell of the Living Dead aka Night of the Zombies] (1980)

    Virus [Hell of the Living Dead aka Night of the Zombies] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, September 2020) The bad news is that Hell of the Living Dead (or whatever you want to call it) is a Bruno Mattei 1980 zombie film. The good news is that… well, there is no good news. This is all you get: Splatter gore sequences loosely strung along an incomprehensible plot about medical experimentation in the Third World, cardboard characters being killed one after another, an ill-fitting Goblin soundtrack, substandard acting, astonishing low-budget filmmaking shortcuts, scenes that feel recycled and a nihilistic ending. Don’t tell me that, for better or for worse, this isn’t what you were expecting. To be fair, Hell of the Living Dead didn’t strike me as being as heave-inducing as some of the truly atrocious Italian horror movies of the era, but that’s a low, almost nonexistent bar. See it if you want—it’s your time. As for myself, I’m steering clear of that era of filmmaking as soon as I’m done checking them off my list.

  • Tulsa (1949)

    Tulsa (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) If ever you thought that Cimarron didn’t spend enough time in the oil fields, then Tulsa is for you. Bombastically announcing itself as the story of how Tulsa became the oil capital of the world (no less!), it takes us in the early days of the American oil industry by examining the life and loves of a daughter of a rancher who becomes an oil baroness through the years. Susan Hayward is quite good in the lead role, with no less than a young Robert Preston lending his presence and deep voice to one of her main relationships. I quite liked the result, but perhaps more for the procedural aspect of spending time drilling for oil than anything else. A spectacular blowout sequence caps the film (perhaps a bit too suddenly) and netted the film an Academy Award nomination for best special effects. Surprisingly or sadly enough, the TV broadcast I saw was grossly downscaled and presented in black-and-white, whereas Tulsa was originally shot and distributed in colour. But that’s what happens when TV stations start downloading public-domain movies to fill out their nighttime slots. I’m not complaining as much as I should—if nothing else, it will give me another excuse to watch the film later under better conditions. Tulsa is not a great movie, but it’s interesting, and it’s not the paean to big oil that we could have feared from the opening narration when its second half delves so deeply into the perils of excessive greed when measured against the environment. There’s even a half-sympathetic representation of indigenous characters!

  • Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers (2019)

    Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) As a glimpse into a foundational but often forgotten piece of Hollywood history, Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers is exactly what it says in the title: a short documentary about the first defining cinematographers. Implementing a director’s vision is where the ideas hit reality, and as director Daniel Raim’s Image Makers delights to show, the early pioneers of the form had to put nearly everything together from scratch and jury-rigged equipment. Hand-cranked cameras, magnesium flares and specially-built carts were the tools of the trade, but Image Makers spends more time exploring the artistic meaning of the images created by those pioneers, from the sophistication of the late silent era (with quite a bit of time deservedly spent talking about Sunshine) and the early efforts to recapture the flexibility of cameras during the early sound era. Citizen Kane obviously gets a mention thanks to the efforts of Gregg Toland, who managed to synthesize and update a number of techniques in service to Orson Welles’ ambitious story. Also briefly discussed is the career of James Wong Howe, who battled prejudice in a Caucasian-dominated town to become a leading cinematographer of his era. Many movie clips illustrate the topic, along with interviews with various experts. While Image Makers does not attain the heights of other documentaries due to its scattered subject matter, it’s highly instructive and revelatory for cinephiles, as it can whet anyone’s appetite for further movies on the same topic. To tweak a saying, amateurs may talk about direction, but professionals talk about cinematography.

  • Jet Pilot (1957)

    Jet Pilot (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) Can a film be fascinating for all of the wrong reasons? Of course. Take Jet Pilot, for instance—starting with being far more interesting for its production than for what appeared on-screen. On its own, it’s a bad movie. The premise blends Cold War thrills with romance in what may be one of the worst ways to go about it—featuring John Wayne as a fighter pilot who is asked to seduce an attractive Russian pilot who has defected to the United States. While the film drapes itself in the nuts-and-bolts realism of circa-1950 American fighter jets in luscious colour cinematography, the spy-caper plot itself doesn’t make a shred of sense. The casting alone is ludicrous: I don’t like John Wayne, and he’s completely wrong here as an ace pilot lusting after twenty-year-his-junior Janet Leigh, who’s also badly miscast at the Russian defector. A badly written script leads to titters of amusement, as, in the words of a better film critic than I, “the planes enjoy a more active sex life than the human beings”. Jet Pilot becomes increasingly more ludicrous as it goes on, and the miscast pair ensures that we’re less charmed than relieved that it’s all over by the end. But things become far more interesting once you hit the film’s Wikipedia page and start reading about the incredible production and post-production odyssey of the film. The legendary Chuck Yeager was a stunt pilot for the film. Josef von Sternberg directed some of the film but not all of it. Producer Howard Hugues, clearly lusting after the success of his earlier aviation films, spent no ness than seven years editing the final film—By the time the film appeared on screens in 1957, some footage was seven years old, and the US Air Force had moved on to another generation of planes. Much of that is irrelevant to twenty-first century audiences, but it explains part of why the film was a commercial and critical dud upon release even with some really interesting colour footage of US fighter planes. I like aviation just a bit too much not to find the entire thing interesting, but I would have liked Jet Pilot a lot more with different actors and a script that actually tried to be halfway plausible.

  • Travels with my Aunt (1972)

    Travels with my Aunt (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I’m a big fan of George Cukor and will make a good-faith attempt at watching most of his filmography, but Travels with my Aunt is clearly from the twilight of his career—still amusing, but a clear step down from his previous films. The somewhat convoluted plot has a young shy English gentleman discovering an eccentric aunt during his mother’s funeral, and being manipulated in extensive travels through Europe and eventually Africa in the pursuit of a ransom. Plenty of opportunities come along for him to grow up along the way. He may be the protagonist, but the dominant character of the story is the titular aunt, played with exuberant panache by none other than Maggie Smith. Considering that the story switches back and forth in time between the present-day travels and excerpts from the aunt’s younger wilder days, Smith ends up playing an old version of her character and a really good-looking younger self as well. The effect for modern viewers is delightfully strange, as “old” Smith looks like the one with which we’re most familiar, making the impact of the younger Smith all the more apparent. The complex plot takes us across the continent and to personal growth for the oddball characters, but the way to that point feels loose and indulgent. If you read about the film’s genesis, there’s quite a bit of material there about this being a picaresque episodic novel first, before being adapted for the screen by an uncredited Katherine Hepburn (!) Fortunately, Travels with my Aunt does hold up as a mildly entertaining comedy with a production that obviously travelled as much as its characters did. It’s colourful, light, twisty and fun. Perhaps not as much so as earlier Cukor movies, but you can put it against a lot of other early-1970s New Hollywood productions as an antidote to their dreariness.

  • A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941)

    A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) A very nice surprise opens A Yank in the R.A.F.: A recreation of a famous bit of US/Canadian history in which American-built planes were flown, driven and then pushed to the Canadian Border, at which point the Canadians pulled the planes onto British Allied territory and were able to legally fly the planes to the UK while breaking no neutrality law. Alas, the rest of the film is far less interesting: Featuring Tyrone Power as a far-too-cocky American pilot, the film takes us through the first two years of WW2 with Power’s character fighting the war as a sideshow to his insistent pursuit of another American working in London (played his frequent screen partner Betty Grable).  A Yank in the R.A.F. tries to do too many things at once while not quite changing gears fast enough to suit the project. Produced at breakneck speed as the Americans were still contemplating whether to get involved in the war, the project tried to take the Power/Grable dynamic and force it into a war movie, ending up making compromises on both sides. Grable’s character is also far too much of a cad to be likable—and the film’s insistence on his rule-breaking heroism rings false from the get-go, as he casually flies from the Manitoba/North Dakota border to Trenton, Ontario—a two-thousand-kilometre trip! Granted, this is probably the only film in history where confusing Trenton, ON with Trenton, PA becomes a minor plot point, but still—it sets the stage for even dumber stuff later on, perhaps reflecting the lack of polish of a production so closely following the events of the war. If nothing else, this pre-propaganda film was clearly meant to prepare the audience for the United States intervening in the war, and by proxy gets us thinking about the now-unbelievable and often-elided isolationist attitude of the United States during early WW2. Unfortunately, A Yank in the R.A.F. is not quite the vehicle fit to fully do justice to the topic—Much of what it does well has been done better in other movies.