Reviews

  • High Pressure (1932)

    High Pressure (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) It’s amusing that the two kinds of roles in which William Powell did best were either amateur sleuths or fast-talking hucksters. High Pressure is one of the best of the second type: Powell plays a loquacious promoter who has specialized in giving legitimacy to high-risk investment schemes, not quite resorting to fraud but not quite doing things the most orthodox way. (Or what we’d call today a serial start-up entrepreneur.) The latest venture is about synthetic rubber and it seems to work well until the protagonist meets the “inventor” of the product and concludes that he’s made a terrible mistake in trusting a crackpot. But plotting his overseas exit isn’t so simple when romance with his long-suffering girlfriend is involved. High Pressure isn’t that good, but it does sport rather wonderful art deco sets, a very charismatic Powell spitting one convincing pitch after another, and moves forward rather amusingly thanks to director Mervyn LeRoy. The satirical look at the exaggerations required for success in business remains evergreen. (Why bother having a hiring process for a president when you can just hire someone who looks the part?) Since the same theatrical play was adapted four years later as Hot Money, it’s easy to see both films and appreciate just how much Powell brings to the result. Powell fans will love High Pressure, and those who don’t know Powell just may become fans.

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, February 2022)  William Powell is usually a delight to watch, but his early-1930s films have him going back and forth between the kind of villains he played in the 1920s, and the suave urban charmer he would go on to play for the rest of his career.  In High Pressure, we get him as a borderline cad – a fast-talking hype man for speculative business ventures, this close to a huckster without quite losing our sympathy along the way.  Much of the story has him trying to drum up interest for a synthetic rubber business venture, while navigating the rocky straits of his romantic relationship and learning more about the genius inventor who came up with the product he’s trying to sell.  The business satire is obviously coming from the depths of The Great Depression, but could play just as well with twenty-first century crypto-nonsense.  There’s at least one big laugh in the last third as our protagonist can prove beyond any doubt the false credentials of the inventor.  Otherwise, this is a rather amiable and typically zippy (72 minutes!) early-1930s film – already self-assured in its use of fast-paced dialogue and generous in allowing Powell to take centre-stage.  There’s much better out there, but any Powell fan should have a look at High Pressure.

  • Night on Earth (1991)

    Night on Earth (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) I can’t say that I’ve been able to make myself like Jim Jarmusch’s work, but at least I’ve warmed up enough to not dread his name every time he ends up on my must-see lists. Night on Earth is, as usual for Jarmusch, an interesting concept that offers something new, but doesn’t always work in its execution. The high concept is this: five vignettes about taxi drivers and their passengers, more or less happening at the same time, but in five different cities during one single night. The span of the cities (Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki) is different enough to offer different sights, but also different moods from comedy to tragedy. Is Night on Earth interesting? Sure. Does it have a good cast? Of course, in-between Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Esposito, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Rosie Perez and Roberto Benigni. Is it well directed? Yes, although it doesn’t have any particularly energetic style. But is it any good? Well, that depends – Jarmusch fans don’t need to be told what to think of it, but for everyone else it will depend on how you react to the individual vignettes. Benigni is, of course, a specific taste, and the Helsinki sequence feels like a downer every time it pops up. The Los Angeles and New York segments will feel most familiar, although the Paris one does work quite well. In the end, as with most of Jarmusch’s films, the only way to find out how you’ll feel about his movies is to watch them – at least Night on Earth is distinct enough to be picked from any lineup.

  • The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

    The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Come for William Powell as a sleuth; stay for a locked-room mystery so convoluted that it becomes a performance piece in The Kennel Murder Case. This was the fourth time Powell played then-popular literary detective Philo Vance (in the fifth film adaptation of the character). The actor, of course, was suited to portraying an upper-class gentleman investigator, but Vance isn’t quite the same as his later Nick Charles interpretation: Vance is single, serious and not quite as much of an alcoholic. Still, Powell’s charm and unflappability serve him well even when the script can’t quite serve up the quips. It helps that then-journeyman director Michael Curtiz does well in giving energy to the talky thriller through stylish decisions. The 1930s were a strong decade for murder mysteries, and The Kennel Murder Case does rather well in its elevated company: it’s intricate, presented smoothly (especially for a film of the early sound era) and engrossing – and doesn’t last more than 73 minutes! Narratively, it’s not quite perfect: Powell without a sparring partner feels like a missed opportunity, and the very last bit of the ending is slightly disappointing after the high-flying summation of all evidence. But generations of moviegoers have demonstrated an unquenchable thirst for good murder mysteries, and The Kennel Murder Case will satisfy even today.

  • Dark Victory (1939)

    Dark Victory (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The difference between drama and melodrama is often whether it works or not, and Dark Victory does play with highly combustible material, as it focuses on a hedonistic socialite who discovers she has roughly a year left to live. Trying to rearrange her affairs in order to exit with dignity, she discovers love, respect and acceptance. This could have gone wrong in a dozen embarrassing ways, but the big surprise here is how well it manipulates audiences and carries them willingly to a weeper of a conclusion. Dark Victory ranks high on the list of Bette Davis’s performances, and it’s not hard to see why: a lesser actress could have made the material ridiculous, but here she carries the entire film on her shoulders. It’s not just an acting performance: Davis also (says the film’s production history) pushed hard for such a tearjerker to be made in the studio system, believing that she could do justice to the material. Indeed she could, although later generations of viewers could also spot Humphrey Bogart (as a likable stable master, no less) and Ronald Reagan in small roles. Director Edmund Goulding gives Davis all the freedom she needs to nail the character, and the result speaks for itself. Yes, Dark Victory is manipulating your emotions and yes, you’ll see it coming, but it’s not melodrama if it works – it’s crowd-pleasing art.

  • La casa del fin de los tiempos [The House at the End of Time] (2013)

    La casa del fin de los tiempos [The House at the End of Time] (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) Slickly made, ingeniously (if messily) plotted, a bit silly with its fantastic devices, but still interesting enough by itself, The House at the End of Time is also a rare bit of Venezuelan cinema to have broken through to the North American market. Writer-director-producer Alejandro Hidalgo gradually puts together the piece of his narrative as he brings an older woman back to an isolated house, the scene of terrifying crimes thirty years earlier. Wrongfully accused of the murders, she vows to piece together the mystery of who killed her children and husband. The action kicks in high gear once the element of time travel is introduced into the story (it’s not a spoiler if it’s in the title!), but be careful: This is fantastic time travel, not science-fictional. There is no machine, no justification, no mechanism (the film’s exposition contains the word “randomly,” if that helps) – there’s only a thread of dramatic (or horrific) progression. More rationalist viewers will be put off by the messiness of the result, but in terms of creepy-house atmosphere and ingenious application of SF tropes to low-key horror stories, well, The House at the End of Time does much better. It’s not exactly great, but it’s a pleasant-enough surprise to warrant a bit of attention, and let’s face it: it’s not as if we’ve got a glut of Venezuelan horror films, right?

  • He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

    He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Tragedy and melodrama aren’t always that far apart, and He Who Gets Slapped’s biggest strength may be how it transforms ludicrous material into something of a psychological study in self-loathing and tragic repentance. The setup is so over-the-top as to become ridiculous, as our protagonist gets destroyed professionally, romantically and personally in one single slap – but reappears as a tragic clown years later in a performance where he recreates that single humiliating moment. The rest? Well, it involves a lion, another woman promised to the same rival, more slapping, and wholesale deaths by the time the curtains fall. And yet, and yet — Lon Chaney is very good in the leading role, bringing quite a bit of subtlety to a silent performance. Norma Shearer gets a pre-sound showcase role here. Finally, writer-director Victor Seastrom (adapting a Russian play) orchestrates something that transcends melodramatic material to become something far more interesting. Far-fetched and yet somehow universal, He Who Gets Slapped ranks among the finest of silent drama: not necessarily accessible to neophytes, but a powerful statement about the early days of cinema if you’re patient and willing to invest some work in watching the film.

  • I Love You Again (1940)

    I Love You Again (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) You can’t really go wrong with the William Powell / Myrna Loy duo in romantic comedies, and their ninth outing I Love You Again is a good example of that: the premise is ridiculous but the zest with which both Powell and Loy dive into the material is what elevates it to another level. Taking the good old amnesia trope out for a spin, the film begins when a straight-laced model citizen (Powell) suffers a head blow and discovers that he has reverted to a state prior to another blow to the head, ten years earlier when he was a conman. Finding himself in a position to use his good community standing, he launches a few schemes… but also discovers that his fuddy-duddy personality was so dull that his wife (Loy) is planning to divorce him. Deftly navigating between romance, scheming, comedy, preposterous bits of plotting and quite a bit of crackling dialogue, I Love You Again first works as a script, and then becomes even better in the hands of Powell and Loy, both of whom are able to get back into Thin Man-esque repartee without the accumulated weight of the series’ later instalments. While Powell gets the biggest roles in terms of comic shenanigans, Loy’s dialogue is funnier and better delivered. On the other hand, Powell in a boy-scout monitor’s uniform is one for the clip book. Funny, witty and rather cute too, I Love You Again is a demonstration of pure star power: director W.S. Van Dyke lets Powell and Loy do what they’re best at, and doesn’t interrupt of call attention to himself.

  • The Trip to Spain (2017)

    The Trip to Spain (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) If you’ve seen The Trip or The Trip to Italy, you know what to expect from The Trip to Spain… mostly. Clearly, it’s still about Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, travelling, eating, impersonating and bickering throughout a few days of Spanish tourism. It’s exactly what they did in the previous two instalments, and it’s about as good and amusing as it was – provided that you have a tolerance for the same. The formula survives another bout pretty well: the scenery is usually magnificent, the food looks great, Coogan and Brydon each go over-the-top with funny impersonations, and the film’s dips into drama once again take the form of the two middle-aged men working out their insecurities and small-scale personal crises. The most distinctive element for the film involves a running theme about Don Quixote and Pancho Villa, leading to an ending that struck me as overdramatic. [November 2024: …and isn’t really followed up in the fourth-and-final instalment The Trip to Greece.] Still, The Trip to Spain is rather good fun in a comfortable way: If you like the shtick, take a look, and if you don’t, then don’t.

  • Les Boys IV (2005)

    Les Boys IV (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2020) Considering how closely the Les Boys series aligned itself with a certain stereotypical depiction of French-Canadian males, it was almost inevitable that sooner or later, it would pick up that other big French-Canadian tradition: the fishing trip up north. After the usual 45-minute throat clearing so characteristic to the ensemble nature of the film series, this fourth instalment finally picks up its own identity when it becomes clear to the coach that his dysfunctional team needs a deep-woods retreat to patch itself. Most of the film’s middle section fuels its comedy by taking up the clichés of an expedition gone wrong, fit to the ongoing characters. It’s watchable without being particularly better than expected. Directed by George Mihalka rather than Louis Saïa (who helmed the first three films), this one has occasional moments of more intense cinematography, and some not-so-subtle touches (such as the camera lingering on hockey tape as the team psychologically gets back together). Most of the cast is back, although Patrick Huard’s character is hilariously depicted as being bandaged up and so unable to speak. The soundtrack is far less remarkable without Éric Lapointe’s involvement, and the episodic nature of the characters gets more and more obvious – the series would become a five-season TV show two years later. Still, as a wrap-up to the mainline series, it’s not too bad, and it certainly cannot be blamed for delivering exactly what fans were expecting.

  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) A few people claim that the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre had some respectability. Despite its grand-guignolesque violence, their argument goes, it had stripped-down naturalistic cinematography that did much, in the early 1970s, to take the horror genre forward and (also) into slashers. Well, that original respectability certainly isn’t carried over to its sequel, which was made on the other side of the slasher craze it helped create and as a result goes nuts on ludicrous gore while leaving any attempt at realism well behind. What was halfway believable in the prequel is now completely crazy in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, taking advantage of heightened audience expectations and pumped-up gore effects. What saves the film (and earns begrudging respect from this slasher-hater critic) is director Tobe Hooper’s willingness to indulge into satire of the slasher genre itself. What is over the top is deliberately over-the-top, highlighted in so many ways that the film almost thinks of itself as a comedy. It doesn’t exactly endear me to the result, but it does raise The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 above the copycat nature of many of its mid-1980s slasher equivalents.

  • This Property Is Condemned (1966)

    This Property Is Condemned (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) At first glance, there isn’t much in This Property is Condemned to make for compelling viewing. It takes place in a small town whose main attraction remains the railway, features a young woman taking conscious advantage of her beauty to find a way out of town, and ends on an immense downer of an ending made even worse by how it’s casually revealed in voiceover by a minor character. But here’s the thing: The film features Nathalie Wood at her most beautiful, and a very young Robert Redford in full worldly charmer mode. Plus, it’s the second feature film directed by Sydney Pollack, right before becoming a defining filmmaker of the 1970s and 1980s. It’s an impressive pedigree, but it understates the well-oiled nature of the script, which manages to create a captivating atmosphere and compelling characters. This Property Is Condemned is still a sad love story, but there’s plenty to watch along the way as Wood and Redford push and pull, with her character’s mom meddling as much as she can and true love being no match for desperate circumstances. Despite a similar thematic concern of a young woman using her charms to get ahead, there’s a world of difference between this and Breakfast and Tiffany’s, for instance, and you can just feel the disillusionment of New Hollywood peeking through This Property is Condemned, barely a year before Hollywood shifted forever. I may not like the entire film, but there are some really interesting moments along the way to its sombre conclusion.

  • The Great American Pastime (1956)

    The Great American Pastime (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The more I dig into the classic movie catalogue, the more I’m amazed by the number of perfectly decent films that simply have been nearly forgotten since their heyday. The Great American Pastime is not what we’d call a great movie. It’s patrician, simplistic, and definitely belongs as an exemplar of the 1950s “Father knows best” social norms. It’s about a family man who is convinced to coach a little league baseball team for his son, but quickly finds himself besieged by unhappy parents, and falsely convinced that a widow is hitting on him. Predictable pushback follows from both his wife and the widow herself. It’s not always convincing, lacks a bit of polish and remains a slight comedy. But it’s rather charming in its own way. TCM unearths it once in a while, often because Ann Miller plays the widow – a rare non-singing, non-dancing, non-tap-dancing movie for her, but also the last of her MGM years: she wouldn’t appear again on the big screen for another twenty years. Tom Ewell plays the harried father (the film amusingly begins with him bemoaning the mountain of trouble that befell him after trying to do good) while Anne Francis plays the wife with firm understatement. Perhaps The Great American Pastime’s funniest sequence has him accepting a dinner invitation from the widow, and being completely oblivious to his wife’s increasing desire to go back home. A blend of sports, parenting and relationship comedy, the film does hit the right spots and unknowingly becomes a symbol of how people could idealize life in small-town 1950s. It’s easily watchable even in its voluntarily simplistic nature… and it currently doesn’t even have 200 votes on IMDB. Clearly, The Great American Pastime ranks as the kind of film that more people could know about.

  • There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970)

    There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) It’s tough to resist a film titled There’s a Girl in My Soup, although seeing Peter Sellers play the aging playboy is certainly enough to cool any enthusiasm. I’ve had a hard time liking Sellers’ work even since reading his biography, and having him in a somewhat repellent role can be a tough sell. At least there’s Goldie Hawn (in one of her earliest screen appearances) to keep his character in check. As would befit a film from the early New Hollywood era, There’s a Girl in My Soup doesn’t end well – although it’s not exactly a downer either. Along the way, we get two capable actors batting good dialogue back and forth (as you can reasonably expect from a theatrical source), perhaps the highlight being a lengthy dialogue sequence as he takes her back to his place and she deconstructs his seduction techniques. The third act of the film doesn’t have anywhere as rich to go, and There’s a Girl in My Soup deflates as it makes its way to its inevitable ending. Still, Sellers does manage to create a complete character by the end of it, keeping his personality shifts to a minimum along the way. Fittingly enough for him, the ending is a perverse celebration of narcissism as a solution to heartbreak.

  • Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (2001)

    Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) While the Crocodile Dundee II seemingly lost its way by going back to the bush, this third instalment does what third instalments do best: go back to the first film, except slightly different. This sequel picks up year after the previous one, featuring Paul Hogan as a crocodile hunter with a son and a not-quite-wife that is suddenly called back to Los Angeles for professional reasons. The only thing that equals Crocodile Dundee in Manhattan is Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, and that’s the cue for the film to milk the kind of fish-out-of-water humour that was missing from the second film. The targets are obvious in la-la-land, and it did strike me at some point not only that this Crocodile Dundee instalment was relying on Hollywood stereotypes that haven’t been true for decades (at least when it comes to having a studio operating in this fashion), but that it was relying both on the audience knowing what the character didn’t as an engine for comedy. It does work – it’s not refined cinema, but there are plenty of comic set-pieces, and Hollywood is enough of a common target that there’s also comfort to be found in the comedy. It could have been worse. Fortunately, the filmmakers had the good sense not to go for a fourth instalment. [September 2020: WRONG! As of 2020, there’s a sort-of-meta fourth instalment, starring Paul Hogan at eighty. It did not get good reviews.]

  • Go West (1940)

    Go West (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Good but not great, the Marx Brothers comedy Go West is typical of their MGM years. Structurally sound, it has the extraneous romance for supporting characters, it has musical numbers we don’t need, it has Harpo on the piano and the harp, and it takes a very specific environment (in this case the Wild West, or perhaps more accurately the western genre) as an excuse to line up thematic gags. As usual, the plot summary is irrelevant – The Marx Brothers go west! While well assembled by director Edward Buzzell, the film as a whole remains a sedate affair for a very, very long time: amusing but not hilarious. Having the brothers not being pure agents of chaos is a disappointment, as is an iffy sequence with a Native American character (the patter is progressive, but the portrayal is regressive). But then comes the climactic scene, in which the frantic brothers must dismantle their train in order to keep feeding the engine (a comic device used in prior and later films, but still quite funny here) – that scene is clearly the highlight of Go West. Unfortunately… I had just watched it a few days earlier as part of The Big Parade of Comedy anthology film. While funny, this is weak stuff compared to the better Marx Brothers movie – but if you’re intent on watching their whole filmography, then this one is in the lower tier, but still wrings out a few more bits of comedy.

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) You would think that unleashing the Marx Brothers on the Western genre would have been a sure-fire recipe for comedy, but the Brothers’ MGM years weren’t all equally good, and Go West is often blander than their other movies. Typical to the MGM formula imposed on the Brothers, their antics are interrupted by straight romantic-drama stuff and musical numbers — some of them fun, like “Ridin’ the Range,” but others bland and forgettable. The moments that we best remember from the Marx movies are fewer. The opening is a classic interplay between the brothers and the final twenty minutes are a great deal of fun, but what’s in the middle is dull and hardly deserving of the Marxes. There’s a sadly stereotypical sequence with native characters that feels more obnoxious than funny (although it does get a few pot-shots at white colonizers in between the more racist material), but otherwise the film doesn’t quite know what to do with its vaudevillians invading the western frontier. I actually had to watch the film twice to form a coherent impression of it, having fallen asleep in the middle section the first time. (And that’s after having forgotten that I had seen it last year.) A second viewing did not necessarily improve my opinion of it much. Go West was clearly made in the descending era of the Brothers’ filmography – you can still see the bits of genius that made them famous, but there’s not much left once you remove the spirited final train sequence.