Reviews

  • The Absent-Minded Professor (1961)

    The Absent-Minded Professor (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Part of Hollywood history is finding films that were, in retrospect, far too ambitious for their own good considering what would be possible later on. From this perspective, you can identify 1967 as the year where thematic barriers were blown wide open, and roughly 1995 until visual obstacles were crushed by CGI. When it comes to The Absent-Minded Professor, the trouble here isn’t thematic: it’s a silly live-action family comedy handled by Disney, and that means that there isn’t much to be improved by franker depictions of themes, sex or violence. The adventures of a genius but scatterbrained chemistry professor who invents flying rubber are innocuous and broad—the kind of thing you could (and still can, notwithstanding the young ones’ tolerance for black-and-white cinematography) take the entire family to see. Fred MacMurray is in complete charmer mode as the titular eccentric scientist—the kind of amiable leading performance he would repeat many times in the Disney-dad stage of his career. Where this first version of The Absent-Minded Professor reaches its limits, however, is in the inability of the special effects to do justice to the high-flying imagination of the script. While the efforts of the special effects crew (nominated for an Academy Award) were undoubtedly heroic and occasionally effective, the seams are clearly showing compared to later-generation digital effects (including the 1997 remake) and may be worth a look just out of bemused not-always-suspended disbelief. As for the rest of the film itself—it’s family fare, too focused on one single joke but otherwise as harmless as it comes. But don’t confuse The Absent-Minded Professor with Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor—it’s on an entirely different comedy register.

  • Fletch (1985)

    Fletch (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2020) The paradox of Chevy Chase is the paradox of Fletch—which makes sense considering how much the film relies on Chase’s comic persona. And that paradox is that Chase’s comedy always ran very close to abrasiveness: arrogance, showboating and self-satisfaction can either lead to good jokes (“I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not” remains a great one-liner) or sheer exasperation. Thus Chase’s performance here as a disguise-loving undercover journalist who turns to amateur sleuthing: while the bones of the story (adapted from an acclaimed Gregory McDonald novel) are solid, the script never misses an occasion to get Chase’s protagonist to play another character, multiplying accents, props, hairstyles and over-the-top histrionics. If you’re a Chase fan, the substantial plotting comes as a bonus to make this a better-than average Chase film; if you’re a mystery fan, Chase’s antics are annoying and stop the narrative drive of the film whenever it indulges him. As far as Chase films go, however, Fletch remains significantly better than the average, even with him indulging in his own worst excesses—director Michael Ritchie walks the fine line between extracting laughs from Chase without necessarily letting him run away with the film. The mid-1980s atmosphere as aged into a period patina and the technical credentials are well in-line with mainstream Hollywood studio polish at the time. Fletch may not necessarily work equally well on everyone, but it usually scores higher than average and that’s not too bad considering the very large Chase-shaped wildcard at its centre.

  • Captain Ron (1995)

    Captain Ron (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2020) As far as mid-1990s family comedy vehicles go, Captain Ron is… pretty much what you’d expect. There’s a bit of a twist here having Martin Short in the straight-man role and Kurt Russell (with a Pliskinesque eyepatch) as the tornado of chaos upending the other characters’ lives, and that generally works: Short’s everyday-man charm is an anchor, while Russell rampages from one comic set-piece to another. It’s not particularly sophisticated, but it’s well engineered, and there’s some Caribbean scenery to take in. There are a few chuckles, with the titular character not to be trusted on anything – especially given that the film plays various ambiguities to the point where nothing really matters. Otherwise, Captain Ron is your average family comedy with a more memorable than usual character—but that’s already not too bad.

  • Above the Law (1988)

    Above the Law (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, January 2020) Notable for being Steven Seagal’s movie debut, Above the Law is a bit of an odd duck in retrospect—Seagal is still his usual I-can’t-believe-he-was-an-action-star slimy self, but at least he’s younger and not yet calcified in his increasingly tedious screen persona. At times, we get sequences that would be very much out of character later on. It’s clearly a Seagal film that doesn’t know that it’s a Seagal film yet, so the formula’s not quite there. Alas, this means that the film is a somewhat bland 1980s action movie instead: the film built around Seagal’s star-making manoeuvre (let us be reminded that Seagal was, at the time, a protégé of super-powerful agent Michael Ovitz) is a generic vehicle representative of the era—slick and polished, like the middle-grade Hollywood movies of the time, with a plot that blends a cop protagonist with an overstuffed plot made of drugs, weapons dealing, CIA shenanigans, Catholic imagery and even a Vietnam flashback to round things up. At least things are better when it comes to supporting actresses, with an early turn for Sharon Stone and Pam Grier with such a presence that even the film itself seems awed by her. There are, eventually, a few decent-for-the-time action sequences once the narrative throat clearing is over, and even Seagal skeptics may find themselves intrigued by his turn here—before his ego took over and led to the career he had. Still, this isn’t much of a film—and so we come to the curious conclusion that if it wasn’t for Seagal, Above the Law would be better but utterly unmemorable.

  • New York, New York (1977)

    New York, New York (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) My working theory at the moment is that all 1970s movie musicals were terrible and/or depressing, and New York, New York only adds more fuel to it. There’s some logic to that theory—the 1970s were marked by excess, as Hollywood found itself freed from the constraints of the Production Code and compelled to look again at past Hollywood successes. But in typical Hollywoodian/American fashion, they went too far with their newfound freedoms and the result feels incredibly dated rather than timeless to twenty-first century audiences. There are other very specific problems with New York, New York: Director Martin Scorsese wanted to go big in an homage to musicals, to New York City, to jazz standards… and was largely (ahem; reportedly) fuelled by cocaine throughout the shooting of the film, upsetting the fine control a director should have over that kind of production. But then again, the project was flawed from the start: the entire thing revolves around an abusive, depressing relationship between rather unlikable characters. Robert de Niro is miscast here—while he’s fine as an explosive terrible man (essentially rehearsing Travis Bickle), there’s no world in which he feels right as a saxophonist. Liza Minelli does better because she can sing and her character is meant to be more pitiable, but her long wig here does nothing to make me like her more than usual. (I used to think that her short hair was what I didn’t like about her, but at least this film proves me wrong.) As for the rest, New York, New York is a depressing exercise, as it charts a doomed romance between two volatile characters. The tale’s darkness definitely fits the 1970s, but also limits the film’s more exuberant goals. The “Happy Endings” number is a blunt lie considering the rest of the movie, and for a film that tries to celebrate classic Hollywood musicals, it’s a self-limiting move. But it’s not a complete loss, and I don’t loathe it nearly as much as Cabaret—For better or for worse, this is a Scorsese film and it does have lavish sequences, striking images, untapped potential as a stylized musical, and it coasts a long way on its rousing rendition of the classic “New York, New York.” But as far as homages to classic musicals go—no. New York, New York is far too long, loose, glum and rarely as purely likable as the best of the genre that he’s trying to honour. What 1970s Hollywood hadn’t yet figured out in its rebellious adolescent phase is that sometime, happy funny romance is exactly what audiences want.

  • Vivacious Lady (1938)

    Vivacious Lady (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) In retrospective, there was a different James Stewart for every decade. While he never abandoned the likability that made him one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Stewart played to different strengths every decade. His best 1930s persona was that of the young romantic lead, a bit naïve, pursuing women more sophisticated than his character and over his head most of the time until came a conclusion that made good use of his good nature. In this light, Vivacious Lady is an almost prototypical Steward feature for the 1930s—not the best, but one of Stewart’s earliest starring roles and one that’s just as representative of what he was doing then as anything else. Here he plays a shy intellectual who falls in love with a Manhattan nightclub singer (Ginger Rogers) and marries her after a whirlwind romance. If that setup seems implausible, keep in mind that it’s a mere prelude for the real plot of the film—returning home to his parents, his job, and small-town prejudices. Forced in increasingly contrived situations (such as introducing her as his newest student), Vivacious Lady deftly plays with comic situations and character types, setting up situations to make us anticipate the result, then subverting them slightly for a surprise. Stewart is quite good in the leading role, but Ginger Rogers is just as good opposite him—she gets a few of the film’s biggest laughs, and she shares a slapping/counter-slapping sequence with Frances Mercer that quickly escalates into one of the film’s best scenes. The third act is a bit weaker than the rest, as it finally has to pull all of the subplots together. Still, Vivacious Lady is a pretty good screwball comedy, and it happens to star two of the best-remembered stars of the 1930s. Rumours have it that Rogers and Stewart had an affair while shooting the movie, and some of that energy is clearly perceptible on-screen.

  • Little Darlings (1980)

    Little Darlings (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2020) There were a lot of summer camp movies in the early 1980s and most of them had something to do with losing one’s virginity, so you can be forgiven if you’re thinking of putting Little Darlings in the same category. After all, it’s about two teenage girls heading to summer camp and making an anti-virginity pack. But that’s ignoring some fairly important differences, starting with how the film was written by female screenwriters taking a decidedly female approach to the story. The emphasis here isn’t on the appeal of losing one’s virginity as much as the consequences following such an event. Our two protagonists (played by Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol) are mismatched girls each from a different side of the track, and they allow the story to approach the issues coming at it from two different perspectives. The result is still very much in line with other coming-of-age films, but with a sufficiently different perspective that it still works—it’s not exactly a wholesome movie, but it’s a great deal less mindlessly raunchy than other comparable movies. In part, it almost feels considerably more modern at times—I was reminded of 2013’s The To Do List in trying to find comparable films. But only at times—in most ways, Little Darlings is definitely a film of its time, disco-era fashions included.

  • Major Payne (1995)

    Major Payne (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2020) There’s a profound and unabashed silliness at play in Major Payne, as the film follows a retired super-soldier who ends up commanding high school cadets. This is, like many movies, a character-driven comedy—the titular Major Payne is the most important thing about the film and everything else comes second. Fortunately, Damon Wayans is up to the scrutiny. From less-than obvious choice (such as the surprisingly squeaky voice), he builds a character so incredibly over-the-top that it affects the reality of the film. Yes, it’s a dumb comedy. But it’s perfectly aligned with everything else in the film. As one would expect, there is a bit of sentiment to temper the anarchic comedy—including a rather good scene between a boy and his abusive father that seems to come from another less silly film. The actors do their best to keep up with Wayans, with a special mention to Karyn Parsons as the romantic interest—their first date is one of the film’s highlights. Cartoonish and aimed at kids, Major Payne does have a few good chuckles along the way, and a spectacular comic character at the centre of it.

  • Alice Adams (1935)

    Alice Adams (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Everyone can admire the matriarch of steel that Katharine Hepburn became late in life and career, but I do have a soft spot for the soft ingenue Hepburn of the 1930s, playing against later type as just the kind of irresistible sweet girl that people expected from female leads at the time. So it is that she headlines Alice Adams as a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, trying to woo a much richer suitor despite plenty of social embarrassment and twisted resentment between their two families. It all culminates at a supper where everything goes wrong, and there’s no other way out than a few frank discussions, absolute candour and reconciliation. Alice Adams is a romantic comedy, and a rather good one too: adapted from a 1921 novel, it does reflect early-twentieth-century small American towns, and milks the social mores of the time for romantic complications that are happily resolved. (The novel doesn’t end as happily, and neither did earlier versions of the script.) Fred MacMurray makes for a great suitor, while Hattie McDaniel shows up in a comic role as a maid. While Alice Adams may not bowl over contemporary viewers, it’s a nice treat for Hepburn fans and those who like mid-1930s Hollywood productions.

  • A Song Is Born (1948)

    A Song Is Born (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2020) By sheer coincidence, I happened to have A Song is Born sitting on the DVR right after seeing Ball of Fire — The first film being a musical remake of the second. Considering how much I liked Ball of Fire, I was both curious and apprehensive about a remake, especially one made barely seven years after the original and by the same director Howard Hawks. Of course, it turns out that there were at least two reasons for the remake: picture and sound. For one thing, A Song is Born is shot in glorious early-colour cinematography, improving upon the atmosphere of the original and making it just a bit more accessible to modern audiences. For another, A Song is Born clearly listened to those who raved about the musical number in Ball of Fire and repurposed the plot to focus on musical elements. Our encyclopedia-writing professors are now putting together a compendium of musical styles, and the lounge singing aspect of the heroine takes far more importance. According to the historical record, production on the film was difficult (Howard Hawks coming back as a director solely for the paycheque, lead actor Danny Kaye being in the middle of a rough divorce) but little of it is visible on-screen as the film bounces from one comic set-piece to another. In many ways, A Song is Born is not as good a movie as Ball of Fire: Danny Kaye is working only at half-speed compared to Gary Cooper (Kaye’s divorce had an impact on the film in that Kaye refused to sing—with the result being a musical in which the lead actor doesn’t sing: strange!), and the set-pieces seem far more deliberate than the first film. Most modern viewers will miss an entire layer to the film that was obvious to late-1940s audiences: the film is crammed with cameos from then-famous musicians. If you’re not familiar with the era, many jokes will fly over our heads –the (admittedly very funny) Benny Goodman sequence being a case in point, as he plays a professor being asked to perform as Goodman would. Still, A Song is Born does have its qualities: it’s very amiable, does change just enough from the original film to feel fresh, and -in its own way—affirms how good the first film was. It’s not quite as good indeed, but I didn’t have the impression that I wasted my time having a look at it.

  • Klute (1971)

    Klute (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) If movies were our sole guide to the decades, it would be a wonder anyone made it out of the early 1970s without killing themselves out of sheer unadulterated depression. A good portion of 1970s movies are executed in a deathly serious tone, dark and merciless. Klute is certainly part of that era, both thematically and visually. The story of a Manhattan prostitute working with a private detective to catch a serial killer, Klute is a dour story executed in as visually dark a fashion as possible. It showed up on TCM as part of their cinematography showcase, and the introductory segment points out how the film deliberately obscures details that earlier films and lesser cinematographers would have exposed. But no: here we have the detective entering an unknown room, with only the light of his flashlight illuminating the scene. The rest of the film isn’t better, as it explores the inner life of a prostitute (played by none other than Jane Fonda, who got rewarded by an Academy Award for her atypical performance) against the backdrop of a lurking killer. Donald Sutherland (!) also leads as the eponymous Klute, drawn closer to a woman he wants to protect. Visually stylish and directed with gritty naturalism by Alan Pakula (anticipating some of his better-known conspiracy thrillers of the mid-1970s), Klute is perhaps best appreciated as another marker of the rapid evolution of American cinema after 1967—it’s not clear to me that the film, even with its clear affiliation with film noir, could have been made in the same way even five years earlier. At least Klute uses those then-new tools of cinema in the service of a genre story rather than a straight-up drama, ensuring that it remains worth a watch even if the all-consuming darkness of the early 1970s can become overbearing to modern viewers. Heaven knows we’ve seen much worse since then.

  • Lady in the Lake (1946)

    Lady in the Lake (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Film history is filled with curios, some of them of lasting importance and others forgotten until we revive them as earlier examples of what we thought was new. Putting aside the entire found-footage genre (in which a camera is presumed to be the viewer rather than the cameraman), there have been few subjective perspective (or Point of View—PoV) movies in the genre’s history: Hardcore Henry (2015) is probably the modern canonical example, although it’s inspired by videogames more than anything else. Farther away in time, the opening act of Dark Passage (1947) carefully avoided showing the protagonist’s face for plotting reasons, alternating between subjective takes and faceless framing. But Lady in the Lake is the real thing: a feature-length noir film in which everything is seen from the perspective of the detective investigating the case, navigating his way between femme fatale, corrupt cops, criminals and rich businessmen. As the film’s production history goes, Hollywood star Robert Montgomery wanted to make a splashy directorial debut by putting us inside a first-person noir narrative. As protagonist Philip Marlowe takes on a difficult case, the camera sees what he sees, experiences conversations from his perspective (Montgomery had the camera setup modified so he could sit under it as director), sees the clues as he does and gets knocked unconscious along with him. If that sounds like a challenge even today (Hardcore Henry has a generous amount of CGI to help things along), then you can understand why Lady in the Lake was not a big success upon release. The staging is awkward, the actors clearly don’t know what to do with a camera as an interlocutor, and the film often breaks its own PoV rules for reasons both practical (in order to show what’s happening) and commercial (with two breaks in which Montgomery appears on camera in-character, because studios wanted to feature his face as a commercial draw). Reviewers weren’t kind, but even if they were right in calling it a gimmick, the fact is that the gimmick remains fascinating even today. There’s a good chunk of “how are they going to do that?” interest in watching the film and even if it’s not completely successful, it remains interesting from beginning to end. The Christmas setting adds a bit of atmosphere, as are the typical noir archetypes used by a film more concerned about style than plot. Lady in the Lake is clunky, sure, but it’s also incredibly cool. I guarantee that you won’t get tired of watching what it tries to do.

  • Ball of Fire (1941)

    Ball of Fire (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I’ll watch anything directed by Howard Hawks, but even I got a bigger surprise than expected with Ball of Fire, a romantic comedy with a few unexpected treats. Gary Cooper stars in his own solid way as an encyclopedist who steps out of his reclusive existence to study contemporary slang… and ends up paired with a lounge singer who needs to lay low after her mobster boyfriend comes under scrutiny. Barbara Stanwyck is at the top of her game as the female lead invading the sanctity of the encyclopedia writers’ refuge, teaching them much and falling for one of them in return. The plot, in typical screwball fashion, makes little logical sense but impeccable comic sense. Before long, we’re in a clash in which bookish old men take on gangsters holding them hostage through science—and win. Along the way, we get a performance out of the legendary drummer Gene Krupa playing the original Drum Boogie (a welcome surprise, given that I was familiar with Swing Republic’s electro house remix), first with his big band and then minimally with two matchsticks (with the expected final flourish). The rapid-fire dialogue is a Hawks trademark (working from a script written by a young Billy Wilder), and having Stanwyck as a typical Hawksian heroine only bonifies the result. I’m not as happy with the film’s clear anti-intellectual skepticism, but much of it simply powers the plot—by the end brawl between Cooper and a mobster, there’s no doubt as to who will triumph. It all makes for a very likable film working from a Snow White and the Seven Dwarves template, with two lead actors at their most sympathetic, and a writer-director combo who clearly knew what they were going for.

  • Flirtation Walk (1934)

    Flirtation Walk (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) At one time, Americans loved their military officers as much as they loved their musical stars, and so Flirtation Walk is a naked attempt to combine both, as it focuses on a soldier who falls for a general’s daughter in Hawaii, and meets her again years later while they’re both at West Point. It’s also, in movie musical history, a film known for first attempting to get away from Broadway-inspired backstage musicals to a more naturalistic setting in which song and dance numbers could be integrated. Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler make for a good romantic pair—helped along by an antagonistic relationship that gradually defrosts and a comic tone that has the heroine pursuing the male lead on his own territory. The idea of getting the musical away from Broadway isn’t fully realized yet—or should we say that it comes with a rescue buoy given how much is made of the male character’s work on a West Point musical theatre play. (You can get the musical away from Broadway, but you can’t get Broadway away from the musical…) It’s not that good of a musical from a song and dance perspective, but it does work relatively well as a romantic comedy, with some very funny sequences midway through as the heroin barges in on the play that he’s writing—and he responds in kind. Blend in the romance, song, military, stars and amiable tone and you get something in Flirtation Walk that was apparently good enough to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy award back in 1934—a year in which the winner was the funnier but non-musical romantic comedy It Happened One Night.

  • The Monster Squad (1987)

    The Monster Squad (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, January 2020) As I dig deeper in the 1980s back catalogue, I’m sometimes amazed at the movies that I have managed to completely miss along the way. Given that I was 12 at the time The Monster Squad came out, I’m not sure how I managed to avoid knowing about the movie while I was growing up (Although I suppose that not having Cable TV and not speaking English might have helped). Now, I’m not going to claim that The Monster Squad is a great movie—at best, it’s a clever, reasonably entertaining homage to the Universal monster movies destined for teenage audiences. The plot barely takes the time to justify itself before sending its monsters (including The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in a hilariously short turn) in a small Midwestern town where they’re discovered and taken on by a group of misfit horror-loving kids. As I said, it’s not meant to be fancy, but to reintroduce the Universal Monsters to a younger crowd and wow them with makeup. It generally works: The young actors aren’t bad and the film has a bit of creative fun along the way (including the inclusion of a creepy old German man who ends up becoming an ally) even when it’s riffing off familiar clichés. Director Fred Dekker keeps things going, and if the mid-1980s sensibilities offer a rougher kind of tonal control than what we’re used to (as the film whips from horror to humour, best aiming for older kids), it does make for a far more interesting viewing experience. Adult horror fans should be particularly tickled by The Monster Squad, not only by the re-use of the Universal menagerie of beasts, but also from spotting Shane Black as co-writer, Tom Noonan in the credits, or makeup by Stan Winston. That’s not a bad set of contributors to an unassuming genre movie for kids, and the result is about as good as anyone could have hoped for.