Reviews

  • Born to Dance (1936)

    Born to Dance (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Eleanor Powell is always worth watching, but James Stewart singing in a song-and-dance musical? Now that’s definitely worth a watch. No, as Born to Dance shows, he’s not good at it: there’s a reason why, in a long career, Stewart didn’t do many musical comedies. But to see him try to hold a note while Powell tap-dances up a storm around him is something well worth experiencing. The plot is an old staple of movie musicals: sailors on leave getting up to all sorts of romantic and comic hijinks. Still, it works well as a receptacle in which to place the musical numbers. Perhaps the most impressive of those is the finale, in which Powell tap-dances on a stage meant to look like a battleship: the kind of lavish, expansive musical numbers that defined the 1930s movie musical. Since Powell didn’t star in that many movies in a ten-year career, this performance (like many of her other ones) is a gem—and adding a young premier like Steward merely sweetens the pot. The rest of Born to Dance? Watchable, amusing, not necessarily memorable but quite entertaining in its own way. Powell, though: unforgettable.

  • Journey Into Fear (1943)

    Journey Into Fear (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) There’s something slightly insane about those WW2 thrillers shot and released as the war was going on—trying to comment on topical events despite the long length of film production (which was admittedly shorter then than now) and the possibility that real-world events would overtake them. And that’s not even mentioning the biggest uncertainty of all: not knowing how the war would end. Usually, screenwriters went around this problem by focusing on personal adventures, slightly blurring the background, cranking up the propaganda and hoping for the best. Journey into Fear is one of those instant-WW2 thrillers, but making life even harder on itself by adapting a 1940 novel. (Famously, the film’s protagonist has to escape to another country than in the book because France had been overrun by the Nazis in-between.) The result is a claustrophobic thriller about escaping the Nazis in one of the less overexposed fronts of WW2: Turkey. Journey into Fear is short (68 minutes!) and to the point, with a rather good action climax after a film that largely takes place aboard a passenger ship filled with tension. Orson Welles shows up on-screen and seems to have fun as a Turkish general, but the film’s messy production history holds that Welles was also involved as screenwriter, director and producer—effectively making this an unofficial early-Welles picture. Joseph Cotten and the beautiful Dolores Del Río also co-star to good effect. While not a great movie, Journey into Fear remains an effective thriller, and to think it was produced as the war went or, with no less a mercurial presence as Welles, is almost mind-boggling.

  • Nine Months (1995)

    Nine Months (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2020) Writer-director Chris Columbus’ assignment on Nine Months was simple: turn in a slightly hysterical portrayal of a commitment-phobe young man in the process of becoming a father. Whether he succeeded is debatable. There are certainly good arguments in favour: Hugh Grant is in full befuddled floppy-raised butterfly-blinking mode here, almost sending up his own early-career persona. If you care about cutie redheads, there’s a young and soft Julianne Moore, plus Joan Cusack as an unexpected bonus. A strong supporting cast includes Tom Arnold, Jeff Goldblum and Robin Williams doing an Eastern-European shtick. Nine Months is luminously shot in beautiful San Francisco, and has a few amusing comic moments. Alas, it’s not all good, and what’s not good arguably overwhelms the rest. Columbus has significant problems striking an even tone between the universality of its premise and the wild comic extremes of some sequences. Much of the character drama that should emerge organically instead seems contrived through characters who make dumb choices because the script requires it to prolong the tension. Even for comic effects, the protagonist seems remarkably clueless. Suspension of disbelief snaps a few times, whether it’s from perplexing character actions, or even simple physics. (No, you can’t be suddenly hit in the face by a swing you’re casually pushing.) Nine Months tries hard, and probably too hard: it tries to take two directions at once and ends up confused about what it was trying to do.

  • Hud (1963)

    Hud (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) The mark of a great actor can be to make you cheer, even reluctantly, for a terrible character. This, thanks to Paul Newman, is the key to Hud: He plays a strikingly unpleasant person, but somehow transforms it into a compelling performance through sheer charisma. Perhaps aware that such a character is best watched from afar, the film doesn’t give Hud the viewpoint character—that goes to a younger man who’s initially smitten with Hud’s personality, but grows progressively disillusioned as the film goes by and nearly everyone walks away from Hud after seeing who he truly is. While comfortably set in 1960s rural western America, Hud is not a traditional western: in various ways, it undermines and destroys the myth of the morally superior self-reliant rancher. By the end of the film, Hud finds himself alone, on a farm with nearly nothing left of his father’s efforts. Some moments are hard to watch, either because of basic empathy (the cattle slaughter) or because of psychological devastation (as Hud becomes isolated). This makes Newman’s anchor performance even more important in drawing viewers even as everything goes wrong. A great supporting cast wraps it up. I would suggest a double-bill with the somewhat similar The Last Picture Show (they both share roots in a Larry McMurty novel), but only if you can stand nearly four hours of unalloyed rural Texas misery.

  • Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

    Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Considering Quentin Tarantino’s fascination for older movies, it was almost inevitable that he’d end up recreating Hollywood history sooner or later. With Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, he gets to recreate 1969 Los Angeles in his own idiosyncratic fashion, playing up the iconography but avoiding many clichés along the way. In some ways, it’s a less overly experimental film than many of his previous ones: the direction remains grounded most of the time, and the film doesn’t overuse splashy effects. On the other hand, it’s still Tarantino and that means it’s quite unlike most other movies at the multiplex: it eventually becomes an alternate-reality drama, it has fun with narration, it plays off its actors’ career and it makes copious use of very long sequences that play almost in real-time. At times, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is less of a story and more of an immersion in a reality fifty years distant, taking in the mundane sights and sounds of a specific time and place. It’s quite a bit of fun even when it multiplies the obscure references of its day-in-the-life style, and the actors look as if they’re having fun. Brad Pitt has a terrific role as the guy who’s usually smarter than anyone else in the room and Margot Robbie is luminous as a Sharon Tate saved from her real-world fate (a justifiable historical inaccuracy) but the real winners here are the viewers for a quick trip through a time machine.

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Having just read Quentin Tarantino’s “novelization” of his own Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which departs from the film in many delightful ways, I had to re-watch it again: both for pleasure but also to make sure that I had a good handle on the differences between both. In many ways, I enjoyed the film even more on a second go-around. One thing that worked better this time was the homage to 1960s Hollywood – but that’s almost inevitable given that my own knowledge of the period has grown in the year since I first saw the film. Knowing what to expect from the film’s staggering running time also helped in settling into the slow pacing of the result. But the book also clarified things that may not have been obvious from a simple second view. It provide some fascinating additional background to the characters, chiefly in establishing Cliff’s incredibly violent personal history apart from Brad Pitt’s personal charm. While I still consider Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood to be middle-tier Tarantino, it does have the advantage of being somewhat better-natured than many of his other films – even the violence, when it ignites, seems to be unusually justified: you’ve never felt so good seeing a hippie girl being repeatedly face-smashed into furniture, considering that it saves Sharon Tate from a terrible death. So are the strange ironies of a film that could only have been made by a filmmaker with the creative freedom of Tarantino.

  • Way Out West (1930)

    Way Out West (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) In many ways, there isn’t much to gnaw upon in Way Out West—it’s a comedy western made at a very rough stage of American filmmaking, with sound technology not meshing particularly well with the on-location shooting and a not-so-great image quality. The story, about a city slicker huckster being forced to pay back his debts on a tough-guys ranch, is amusing but not particularly revolutionary. But the one exception to this autopilot comedy western is not a small one—dating from the wilder and woollier Pre-Code era, Way Out West was freer to be quite suggestive. Lead actor William Haines was one of the few acknowledged homosexual leading men in Hollywood at the time, and if you know where to look, the film is crammed with saucy allusions about him being in a big macho camp. (As per the film’s most noticeable double entendre goes: “I’m the wildest pansy you ever picked.”) It’s not a consistent queer reading of the film, as a romance is forced into the plot and the dialogue loses its sassiness in its last act, but it does add a lot to a film that was effectively banned through the Production Code years and could have been forgotten along the way. Nowadays, well, Way Out West becomes one of the most interesting westerns of the early 1930s because it’s so off-colour.

  • Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949)

    Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Part of the fun of watching Hollywood history is seeing talented performers getting paired up even when the match isn’t quite harmonious. Frank Sinatra—brilliant singer. Gene Kelly—terrific dancer. Both of them together? Well, you have to see Take Me Out to the Ball Game how they play together… and having Esther Williams as the female lead doesn’t hurt either. A prestige song-and-dance show from MGM (in Technicolour!), it blends its leads’ skills with America’s sport and the usual trappings of musical comedies. The highlight is the theme song, but there are a few good moments elsewhere too: Esther Williams inevitably dips into a pool at some point, and while director Busby Berkeley’s imprint on the film is faint (he only shot a small portion of it, and the rest was reportedly completed by Kelly and Stanley Donen), there are still traces of it in the finished product. On the other hand, there’s some weird stuff as well: the references to suicide and pedophilia in the middle of an upbeat wolf-whistling song are a bit off-putting to say the least. Also not quite as controlled for twenty-first century viewers: double standards in how a determined woman is portrayed compared to the equally persistent male characters. Ah well—this is from the late 1940s, after all. Still, a muddled average and no high peaks means that Take Me Out to the Ball Game suffers in comparison to other Sinatra/Kelly vehicles like On the Town and Anchors Aweigh. They can’t all be perfect. In this case, it still means we get Sinatra singing and Kelly dancing.

  • One Fine Day (1996)

    One Fine Day (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2020) Twenty-some years later, it’s amusing to see that a romantic comedy like One Fine Day has only appreciated in the interim. As an old-fashioned star vehicle, it runs on pure charm and that’s OK—Michelle Pfeiffer was already famous when the film came out (and has remained in the spotlight since then), but this was one of the films that first cemented George Clooney’s status as a movie star. His continued success since 1996 seems inevitable considering the swagger he shows here, even as a junior actor to his co-star. The film is a conscious throwback to 1930s screwball comedies with apt 1990s touches, as two single parents try to navigate a busy schedule with kids in tow… and each other’s cell phones.  This is all very predictable stuff, but director Michael Hoffman playfully handles the execution with a zippy peppy style, whether it’s shooting in numerous rainy Manhattan locations or letting the crackling dialogue take centre stage. The pacing drags slightly in the evening of the single day in which everything takes place, but thankfully keeps a strong spatiotemporal unity. A few additional touches are endearing: Clooney with dark hair; use of split screen; likable father-daughter relationship; use of bulky cell phones; a journalism subplot; and a strongly structured script. One Fine Day is such a likable film that it’s no surprise for it to be fondly remembered to this day—and not just because two famous actors happen to star in it.

  • After Truth: Disinformation and the cost of Fake News (2019)

    After Truth: Disinformation and the cost of Fake News (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) At an age of tribal epistemology, having to even discuss the nature of truth is infuriating… but there we are, hostage to a presidential madman whose narcissism is so strong that he has to distort reality in order to live in the world. That would be bad enough by itself, but it’s made worse by a menagerie of enablers rushing to create a universe of parallel falsehoods, and a mass of people credulous enough (or manipulated enough, if you’re feeling charitable) to believe all of it, sometimes for pure entertainment. So is the world in which After Truth: Disinformation and the cost of Fake News arrives, an HBO documentary meticulously charting how a substantial chunk of America became ready to believe in baseless lies. It goes from Jade Helms to Pizzagate to Seth Rich, giving a fair shake to everyone interviewed and letting fake news apologists present themselves as morons or disingenuous hucksters… which explains a lot. Director Andrew Rossi’s approach is fair enough to dig into a left-wing effort to create fake news during the 2018 Alabama senate race narrowly won by democrats. Still, it’s the right wing that looks worse—behind-the-scenes footage of the infamous November 2018 Jacob Wohl news conference makes the whole thing even more ramshackle than it seemed in the media at the time (plus, good footage of Claude Taylor’s inflatable Trump rat!) Notable interviewees include Yochai Benkler (deconstructing the right-wing disinformation pipeline) and Kara Swisher (talking as a professional journalist dismayed at what passes for news in some quarters). The entire film is framed by an interview with the owner of the Comet Ping Pong restaurant that saw a gunman show up, convinced the establishment has a basement dungeon holding kids while, in reality, the building had no basement. While it’s hard to finish a film with such a topic on a positive note, Comet Ping Pong has a happy ending of sorts to offer—that after the violent incident, the restaurant re-opened and found continued popularity with its regular crowd, which put no stock in outlandish conspiracy theories. It’s not much, but, at this time, we’ll take even a smidgen of good news. Especially considering that it’s true.

  • The Kitchen (2019)

    The Kitchen (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Performative female empowerment, 1970s cosplay and antiheroic rhetoric smash into each other in The Kitchen, a crime thriller taking us back to 1978 NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood to show how three mob wives turn to crime in order to make ends meet while their husbands are in prison. It’s no accident if the film happens to showcase three of the most notable actresses of the moments in a search for serious drama credentials: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss, all thoroughly deglammed and relishing their tough-girl roles. Haddish arguably gets the most out of it: Moss’s dramatic credentials are solid and McCarthy’s been pretty good in off-persona dramatic roles, but Haddish’s career has been almost entirely comic to date, so there’s something new for her to do here. In bits and pieces, The Kitchen is fun: while the narrative is often ham-fisted in how to get from Point A to Point B, seeing our heroines discover some self-resourcefulness as underdogs is an engrossing crowd-pleasing arc. Writer-director Andrea Berloff has fun with her material, Margo Martindale has a good supporting turn and Trump gets a not-so-subtle slam in passing. Highlights include a romantic meet-cute in which a supporting hero (Domhnall Gleeson) meets one of the heroines by shooting her would-be rapist dead, then teaching her how to dismember the body and dump it in the river. (Dismemberment becomes such a recurring motif in this film that it becomes almost comic in its predictability—whelp, someone’s getting dismembered at the end of this scene!) Alas, this leads us to The Kitchen’s more vexing aspect, which is to say its problematic use of violence as empowerment. While the film does lead us closer to a realization that the real antagonists are male-dominated power structures, the underdog status of the heroines turns into hubris. With an ending that’s not as retributive as one could hope for, the film doesn’t even approach an argument that violence is not necessarily more acceptable when it’s perpetrated by women—hypocrisy becomes real in the film’s last-act ballet of revenge when the husbands are released from prison and the action goes all over the place. (Unlike other movies, The Kitchen is weakly-built enough that it does not earn its use of violence.) A few twists punctuate the end of the film, leaving an impression that there’s a better movie somewhere in The Kitchen that is not fully realized—and, in fact, may not be fully realizable at the moment where violence is portrayed as being good as long as it’s committed by the good people on the bad people.

  • Queen of Outer Space (1958)

    Queen of Outer Space (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) If there’s any comfort in watching the mess of silliness, misogyny and terrible logic in Queen of Outer Space, it’s that the film was made—even then—as a parody and not as serious Science Fiction. No, our grandparents weren’t as dumb as the films of the era suggest: contemporary reviews state that they were aware that this wasn’t to be taken seriously at all. Still, watching from 2020, it can be difficult to accurately gauge what the filmmakers were trying to do. The science and plotting are terrible in ways that cannot be detailed succinctly, but suffice to say that our male protagonists go up in a rocket, crash-land on Venus after a missile attack, and discover that not only is Venus quite inhabitable, it’s host to a misandrist dictatorship solely in need of a revolution. Working with a courtier (Zsa Zsa Gabor!), they overthrow the queen, save Earth from destruction, restore a male-friendly regime and have to await rescue from Earth on a planet filled with beautiful women. Watching this film sixty years later, despite assurances that the filmmakers knew what they were doing (the film began as a proposal from legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht), it’s tough to differentiate between male-gaze power fantasy and barely sublimed eroticism, as the film parades miniskirts, tight tops and low décolletage in Technicolor detail. No matter the original intention, Queen of Outer Space is both laugh-out funny and unbearably misogynistic—the silliness isn’t always clearly intentional, and while the ineptness can be charming, it remains ineptness in the first place. It’s not without amusing moments or clever touches (it even nails the modern flatscreen monitor form factor!) but you’ll have to work harder than usual in putting this kitschy classic back into the context of the time. Although, if you’re looking for a visually striking example of terrible 1950s Science Fiction…

  • The Little Minister (1934)

    The Little Minister (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Look, I am a simple man: I see Katharine Hepburn looking gorgeous as a curly-haired gypsy, I like. Alas, the rest of The Little Minister is a letdown after seeing Hepburn at perhaps her all-time sexiest. It does help that, as an early dramatic role for an actress who hadn’t yet mastered her full range, this is a film that seems to run for a long time on empty conventionalities. Set in a rather strange nostalgic small-town in rural Scotland, the film is adapted from a J.M. Barrie novel (yes, the author of Peter Pan) as a somewhat serious drama with comic relief, none of which apparently reflects the source material, nor Hepburn’s then-range in romantic comedy. While there’s some heat between Hepburn (who’s not really a gypsy, but a noblewoman passing as a gypsy for some freedom) and John Beal playing a reverend taken by her wild-girl charm, the rest of this pleasant film feels both long and familiar in its take on 1840s Scottish romance. It’s not quite a misfire, even though it tarnished Hepburn’s status at the time as “box office poison.” Still, I like what I like—Hepburn is there, playing up her perennial rebellious persona and that’s quite enough for me.

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) We head over to rural Scotland in The Little Minister, and perhaps more strikingly to a young and radiant Katharine Hepburn as a local noble who enjoys passing as a lower-class gypsy girl in order to go against the action of her betrothed. In walks a young minister who catches her eye while he’s having a hard time integrating in the close-knit community. There’s a fair amount of Scottish mythology at work here, especially in its depiction of a small village with its quirks and issues. But Hepburn stands tall in a role almost custom-fit to her later personas: a liberal rebel out to tweak the establishment and a strong-willed woman who could be as determined as she was beautiful (and considering that mid-1930s Hepburn was a world-class beauty, that’s saying a lot). Everyone else pales in the rest of the film, especially considering that the execution of the plot is duller than it ought to be – reportedly more serious than the whimsical novel penned by J. M. Barrie (yes, “Peter Pan” Barrie), the film often feels laborious and forced. This is even more apparent when Hepburn shows up and seems to be playing something far more interesting. It’s not one of her finest films of the 1930s, but she frequently looks amazing and is clearly shoring up her distinctive screen persona. As such, The Little Minister remains a must-see for Hepburn fans, even if everyone else will have a harder time getting through it.

  • Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938)

    Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Now here’s a dream creative pairing: Director Ernst Lubitsch working with a story co-written by Billy Wilder. That should be enough, but when Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife raises the ante by throwing in Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper in the lead roles, well, it’s impossible to resist. Fortunately, the film does manage to meet expectations: it’s a fine screwball film with the expected wisecracks, romantic complications and remarriage humour—much of the plot, slowly revealed, has to do with a rich man trying to tame his newest (eighth) wife, as he suspects her of having married him for the money she’ll get after their divorce. (The twist, gradually revealed, is that she’s trying to break him out of his bad habits—and the film is much funnier knowing this.) The French Riviera atmosphere is lush and evocative, with Cooper turning in a more sophisticated performance than the aw-shuck material he became famous for—and Colbert being equal to her funny, sexy self. (Plus, a fourth-billed David Niven.) The script is what we would expect from a Billy Wilder collaboration with Charles Brackett—great dialogue, very clever characters (especially Colbert’s scheming young woman) and a script that’s not entirely predictable, especially during the middle act. Although not much of a commercial success at the time of its release, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife has since then reached an enviable and much-deserved place in the pantheon of 1930s comedies.

  • Elmer Gantry (1960)

    Elmer Gantry (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, March 2020) If you’re the kind of person to seek optimism in the most desperate situations, you can take a look south of the border in these desperate times and remind yourself that America isn’t solely composed of idiots—and more pointedly, there have always been sane voices in the wilderness highlighting the mistakes of the nation (past, ongoing and inevitable). Go back to 1960, for instance, and we already have Elmer Gantry as a mature, full-throated warning about the similarities between conmen and preachers. Burt Lancaster, never afraid to use his good looks in the service of questioning traditional masculinity, plays the titular Elmer, a fast-talking huckster who turns his talents to revivalist religion in order to woo a fetching young woman (Jean Simmons). Loosely adapted by writer-director Richard Brooks from a muckraking novel by Sinclair Lewis (Brooks won an Academy Award for the screenplay), Elmer Gantry isn’t content with merely making a link between confidence games and small-tent religious revivals—it’s a film that digs and digs into the characters, their unsavoury pasts, impure intentions, zealotry and mob vengeance to deliver a sobering statement on being taken by fast words and empty promises. Lancaster is terrific as a salesman turned fire-and-brimstone preacher, easily capturing audiences on both sides of the screen. (He also won an Oscar for it.) Elmer Gantry greatly benefits from his presence, and he helps the film overcome its excessive length. It probably doesn’t help that while Elmer Gantry confronts issues important to circa-1960 America, much of what it has to say is now common wisdom… or is it?

  • Doughboys (1930)

    Doughboys (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Buster Keaton served in World War I, and one imagines that Doughboys, which see Keaton’s idle-rich character accidentally set to the front, was an outlet of sorts for him. It certainly shows in the film’s more serious nature: while still a comedy, it’s more occasionally amusing than outright funny. Considering the bad years that Keaton had making early talkies at MGM after signing away his creative freedom, it’s a slight balm to find out that he considered this to be the best of his MGM films. Still, Doughboys was only his second sound feature, and the emphasis here is on plot rather than gags. I’m happy I saw it, but it’s not among Keaton’s best films—the ending peters out, and there’s a sense that here’s this comic monster leashed underneath a lot of constraints, both self-imposed and studio-mandated. There are some amusing gags, but it’s the overall plot that’s strong—perhaps as a deference to his own experiences in WWI, the film is not as ferociously funny nor as satirical as his other films, and that’s something to respect.