Reviews

  • Ava Gardner, la gitane d’Hollywood: les années espagnoles de la Comtesse aux Pieds Nus [Ava Gardner: The Gypsy of Hollywood] (2018)

    Ava Gardner, la gitane d’Hollywood: les années espagnoles de la Comtesse aux Pieds Nus [Ava Gardner: The Gypsy of Hollywood] (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2018) Made-in-France TV documentary Ava Gardner, la gitane d’Hollywood: les années espagnoles de la Comtesse aux Pieds Nus has both a breathless title and a somewhat tight focus on Gardner’s years in Spain during Franco’s dictatorial regime. While there’s clearly some affection for Gardner here (expressed either through interviewees who met her over there, or star-struck commentators), she does get excoriated for her indifference to the authoritarian regime that welcomed her, and her lack of awareness for the role she played in realpolitik between the United States and the Spanish government at the time. A secondary axis of focus for the film is in describing how Gardner was possessed of a beauty that outstripped her ability to deal with it. Coming from modest rural origins, she was celebrated as a world-class beauty but it was a life-long struggle for Gardner to come to grip with what it meant and not being exploited for it. A third area of interest consists in her tumultuous marriage with Frank Sinatra, although there’s a lot left out of that segment. The rest of Gardner’s life and career gets perfunctory but disappointing mention—her apprenticeship in the studio system prior to The Killers, her stardom years, her twilight decades before her 1990 death in London all get comparatively short thrift here compared to the Spanish years. It’s not uninteresting (especially as an occasion to learn more about Gardner), but the film ends up being unsatisfying: It’s focused on too narrow a period in her life when there’s an incredibly rich career barely mentioned. I suspect that much of Ava Gardner, la gitane d’Hollywood’s shortcomings come from its origins as a time-limited TV documentary and ready access to Europe-based sources more familiar with Gardner’s Spanish years—but there’s a lot of material left untouched if anyone else wants to make a better Gardner biopic.

  • One Foot in Heaven (1941)

    One Foot in Heaven (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) An almost wholly unremarkable film, One Foot in Heaven probably gets most of its viewers these days because it was once nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (alongside Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon … but it was a ten-nominee slate that didn’t even include Sullivan’s Travels or The Lady Eve). Much of the film’s episodic structure revolves around a preacher and his family going from town to town, restoring ailing parishes to normalcy before moving again. The topic is ideal to pay respect to a religious leader, with tensions within the family being addressed through an extra helping of faith. Fredric March plays the protagonist in a script adapted from the preacher’s son’s autobiography. It mostly innocuous—while focused around a preacher, the film isn’t particularly insistent on religious matters, offering to viewers the choice to read the film with a secular perspective as a case study in a nomadic figure. From today’s perspective, the film offers a glimpse into a much simpler time where films were aimed at unsophisticated small-town Americans, carried on a light use of the cross and much appeal to all-American values (even if the subject of the biography was born and raised in Canada). It’s hard to get excited one way or the other about One Foot in Heaven—it’s dull but not bad, taking up obvious homilies but not really getting anywhere good with them. Remnants of thankfully extinct social mores carry through—such as the portrait of a man in a loving marriage who nonetheless doesn’t really care about what his wife thinks (in addition of calling her “mother”). The Best Picture nomination is a further piece of evidence allowing us to assess the esteem through which moviegoers (or at least the Academy) regarded the admittedly competent result. But don’t worry—future generations will openly scoff at some of today’s nominees.

  • The Red Shoes (1948)

    The Red Shoes (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) What a sumptuous movie. One of the sure-fire highlights of 1940s cinematography, The Red Shoes isn’t just a visual feast from writers-directors Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell (with MVP Jack Cardiff doing cinematography)—it’s also a rather enjoyable, if melodramatic, meditation on the price of art no matter what kind of art. Creatives of all stripes are liable to get a charge of inspiration from the result, even if they (like me) will look on skeptically at the idea that art is worth dying for. (That’s not true for one simple reason—you can’t create anything more if you’re dead. Full stop.)  But, of course, for most people the film is about ballet, about dancing sequences made even more meaningful by a very sophisticated visual language. Compared to other films of the 1940s (and, indeed, still most twenty-first century films), The Red Shoes is complex and self-assured in the way the visuals work in tandem with the narrative: this is a film worth watching intensely to catch the nuances and interplay between its elements, far more so than other films of that era that do not rely so much on visual material. The complexity carries to other facets of the film, from mixing genres to keeping a poetic ambiguity over some plotting choices. The Red Shoes thus appeals to many audiences for many reasons—the tragic romance, the dancing sequences (which reportedly inspired many young girls to pick up ballet), the impassioned appeal to artistic creation, the ability to diverge from strict realism, the terrific music, the sumptuous filmmaking. Moira Shearer has a one-of-a-kind performance here, and you can argue that despite stories careers, producer Alexander Korda and writers-directors Powell and Pressburger never quite hit the same notes as The Red Shoes does. It’s a cinematic landmark for a reason—and if I don’t quite love it as much as other movies, I can only respect its ambition and its integrity.

  • Beaches (1988)

    Beaches (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2019) If you’re wondering what a title like Beaches has to do with the adventures of two headstrong women played by Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, may I suggest pronouncing the title again with a slight accent? (Sure, there’s the setting going from the sandy shores of Atlantic City to San Francisco—but my explanation is funnier.)  The friendship drama spans decades, antagonistic romantic triangles, showbiz success, many personal milestones and one big sob at the end—exactly what a deliberate tearjerker needs to be successful. For many viewers, the best reason to watch the film remains Midler, here in the upswing of her movie career as a powerhouse performer. She’s terrific, although at the cost of taking away some of Hershey’s more delicate work. Director Garry Marshall does good work in executing the film’s intention in a mostly unchallenging manner, keeping its emotional punches for the tragic finale. The flip side of that mere competence is that Beaches feels far too deliberate to be affecting: it goes exactly where you expect in more or less the expected manner. While this may be an issue with jaded film critics and people falling outside the film’s intended demographics, this is unlikely to be much of a problem for that core audience seeking exactly what the film must deliver—the proof being all the other movies before or since taking up exactly the same formula. But, hey, this one had “Wind Beneath My Wings” to sob about.

  • Demon Seed (1977)

    Demon Seed (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) Considering what came out of Hollywood during the hazy 1970s New Hollywood era, it’s probably an exaggeration to call Demon Seed one of the wildest movies of the decade. But that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere near sedate—even by the entire Science Fiction genre’s standards, it remains way outside the norm. Much of it stems from the primal premise of the film (adapted from an early Dean Koontz novel), in which a malevolent artificial intelligence impregnates a young woman to ensure its immortality. Or would that be its mortality? This is one of those movies where you really shouldn’t waste brain cells examining the premise—just run with “woman impregnated by computer” and that’s enough. This ludicrous starting point isn’t helped at all by the now laughable 1970s execution—Demon Seed is all unconvincing special effects, moronic gadgets and eerie music. And yet, and yet—considering that the whole fear-of-AI thing is not growing any less urgent and the evergreen moral quandaries about reproductive plot elements, it’s almost shocking that there hasn’t yet been a remake re-examining those elements in light of contemporary developments. But I’m sure someone is working on it. In the meantime, you can enjoy the vintage 1977 film as a wacky ride of its own, both ridiculous and yet unnerving. Julie Christie gives it all she’s got even in being stuck in such a film, and she’s an essential component of why viewers won’t immediately collapse in laugher when confronted to such bonkers nonsense. Demon Seed, against all odds, remains surprisingly entertaining in the sense of keeping your attention, even if you may feel slightly dirty afterwards and never revisit it.

  • I’ll Follow You Down aka Continuum (2014)

    I’ll Follow You Down aka Continuum (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) As a Science Fiction fan and relapsing critic, one of the most exciting developments in the genre throughout the 2010s has been the emergence and maintenance of a stream of low-budget SF movies focused more on character-driven emotional issues than whiz-bang spectacle. They’re really not always good (some of them are, in fact, quite terrible) but they offer a more mature than usual, less thunderous alternative to the special-effects extravaganzas privileged by Hollywood studios. I’ll Follow You Down is one such film, focusing on a time-travel premise not as an excuse to strangle baby Hitler, but to help a young man find closure about his missing father. Gillian Anderson stars (this not being the sole small-scale SF film in her filmography) as the mother of the protagonist, although a grown-up child star Haley Joel Osment may earn the most attention as the tale’s protagonist. Alas, despite writer-director Richie Mehta’s best intentions, I’ll Follow You Down does fall flat. The stakes are clear but rarely exploited, Osment doesn’t quite have the intensity required of the role, the film does fall into clichés (not all of them science-fictional), and the ending is a muddled unsatisfying mess that loses itself attempting to do something other than the expected. (Here’s a note to those filmmakers mulling small-scale SF movies: The expected is forgivable if it makes audiences happy. That it all.)  Time-travel films work best with, appropriately enough, a deadline of sorts to meet and I’ll Follow You Down is far too laid-back to crank up that ticking-clock element. The cinematography is also quite reserved, meaning that there’s no execution bonus to compensate for an underwhelming substance. But while I’m somewhat disappointed in the result, I’m still upbeat about the existence of the film (a Canadian production!) as a further data point that the Science Fiction genre is perfectly viable—and interesting—to filmmakers without a sizable special effects budget: it’s always about the characters and how the science fictional premise affects them.

  • They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

    They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) There are movies that are best approached cold, considering that the mythology around them often leads to erroneous viewing assumptions. In the case of They Shall Not Grow Old, it means that a terrific film by itself was actively harmed by a disingenuous marketing campaign. The basics of the film are these: Director Peter Jackson wanted to pay homage to his family members having fought in WW1, so he produced and directed a documentary that used modern technology to breathe life into century-old archive footage. The film works almost as an oral history, as colourized and sharpened footage is accompanied by sound effects and narration adapted from contemporary accounts of the war. The point here is to present a soldier’s view of the war without much context other than the experiences of the men on the ground. As such, it is a remarkable achievement—the touched-up footage springs to life in near-contemporary fashion, and the film is emotionally effective in presenting the experiences of a generation that saw many killed in combat, never to go home or grow old. It’s a deeply effective, finely tuned moviegoing experience that makes history come alive and viewers realize that century-old events retain considerable relevance. If that was your experience in watching the film cold, or if this praise piques your curiosity to the point of watching the film then congratulations—no need to read any further. The rest is a commentary on how overly enthusiastic marketing can end up harming a film. They Shall Not Grow Old’s trailer strongly (wrongly) suggested that the original documentary footage of the war was in disrepair by the time it was enhanced by the filmmakers. (This plays into contemporary perception of old film footage as being scratchy, low-resolution and jittery—far from being true in many cases.)  Paradoxically, I can live with colourizing for dramatic impact better than misleading claims that the original footage needed almost heroic restoration work—the duplicity of the marketing being worse than the filmmaker’s liberties with the material. Of course, this should not be a concern if you, blissfully living years after the promotional push for the film, just happen to see it. But call it a cautionary lesson is believing the next promotional campaign you hear.

  • Frankenstein 90 (1984)

    Frankenstein 90 (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) It’s amusing to note how some stories create their own subgenre of adaptations, remakes and parodies. Horror-comedy Frankenstein 90, starring a descendant of the OG scientist in then-contemporary France, is one such alternate take on the classic Mary Shelley story—filtered through movie adaptations, early-1980s French society and the comic sensibilities of writer-director Alain Jessua. The result is interesting, but it would be a stretch to call it good—often too slowly paced to be particularly funny, usually far too timid to bring anything really new to the table, it exists as an object of contemplation for those who have seen many other Frankenstein stories but struggles to say anything new. Refreshingly, Frankenstein 90 does present a smarter-than-usual monster rather than the frequently portrayed brute, and also adds some typical casual French eroticism to make it even more fun to watch. Jean Rochefort and Eddy Mitchell are a bit disappointing as (respectively) the scientist and the monster. Not a good movie but not a terrible one—on the other hand, not a memorable one either.

  • Bug (2006)

    Bug (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2019) William Friedkin is no stranger to bold movies and while Bug certainly doesn’t rank high in his filmography, it’s clearly meant to create reactions. Adapted from a theatrical play by well-known playwright Tracy Letts, the vast majority of the film takes place in a small three-room motel suite, focused on two increasingly paranoid characters egging each other on with their own conspiracy theories. It escalates to foil-lined rooms, bodily harm to take out implanted foreign objects and world-altering imaginary plots. But if you’re expecting all of this to have a tidy resolution, then calm down, because the film delights in a conclusion that blurs the lines between what happened and what didn’t. While that severely harms the film, it doesn’t really take away from Ashley Judd’s intensity and an early starring turn for the always-excellent Michael Shannon (who originated the character in its initial theatrical run) in the lead roles as they one-up their own delusions and try to find some companionship. The directing is audacious in its determination to get inside the protagonists’ minds despite a very limited setting and some very weird material. Ultimately, though, it’s hard to avoid feeling that the film loses steam as it goes on—that a tight and creepy first half devolves into an everything-goes, nothing-matters conclusion. But while the destination may be disappointing, part of the trip may be worthwhile for fans of the lead actors or the director or movies that aren’t supposed to make sense. (Although if that bothers you all that much, do what modern film critics do and claim that the film is “all about trauma” and call it an analysis.)

  • The River (1951)

    The River (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) If you’re looking for the hidden link between French and Indian cinema, look no further than The River, a film for which Jean Renoir went to India and ended up hiring no less than Satyajit Ray as an assistant. The rest, as they say, is history as Ray (who previously worked in advertising) became one of India’s most acclaimed directors. The irony here is that if you stripped off every name from The River, showed it to cinephiles and asked them which of Renoir or Ray made this, many would pick Ray. The River has, for better or for worse, the characteristics of a certain kind of slow meandering classic Indian cinema—starting from the subject matter, which describes a coming-of-age story during the British Raj era. While skillfully made, I’ll admit to my limitations in trying to appreciate the results—this isn’t my kind of cinema, and while I find the Renoir/Ray historical connection fascinating, it doesn’t make the film more interesting to me. That’s fine—considering the number of best-ever-movies lists on which The River figures, it doesn’t need my approval.

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, May 2023) I’m surprisingly happy to report that The River is a lot more interesting a second time around — perhaps thanks to a batter understanding of what the film tries to be about — once you focus on the theme of life, death and rebirth as linked to the meandering, unstoppable flow of a current, a lot of the film comes into much better focus. In hindsight, it’s also easier to appreciate the accessibility of the film: Sure, colour shouldn’t make any difference but compared to a lot of similar movies of the era (or decades later), The River’s terrific colour cinematography makes it a great document of the era. Sure, the perspective on India from a foreigner living there and exploiting local labour may be not be our idea of ideal, but it is a smooth way inside the atmosphere of the time and place, and it is a perspective that you can’t really get any more. The somewhat mean plotting of the film’s last third becomes much more meaningful when you look at it thematically than narratively, and the rather surprising charm of its teenage narration becomes more apparent. I’m glad I ended up revisiting The River — I don’t exactly love it, but I like and respect it well enough this time around.

  • Dive Bomber (1941)

    Dive Bomber (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) Calling Dive Bomber a pre-WW2 military aviation thriller is underselling it severely—shot in colour in near-documentary style, it’s a showcase for the pre-Pearl Harbor US Navy aviation, and it’s far more colourful than you’d expect from other black-and-white thrillers of the same era. (Especially given the bright peacetime livery of the planes.)  It’s also strong in terms of marquee names—Errol Flynn headlines as a military doctor trying to find a way to prevent high-G blackouts, while Fred MacMurray plays a rival officer. Behind the camera, Michael Curtiz handles the demands of a highly technical production with a veteran’s aplomb, although the film’s history is rich in on-set clashes between Curtiz and Flynn: this would end up being the last of the twelve collaborations. As far as the result is concerned, Dive Bomber is remarkable without being all that good from a strictly narrative viewpoint: the script is made to string along the aerial showcases, although the focus on medical research is not necessarily something you’d expect from an airborne military thriller. (Just ignore the omnipresent cigarettes smoked by the doctors.)  Flynn and MacMurray probably would have been better in each other’s roles, while Alexis Smith wanders in and out of the film as female lead without much to do. Still, I found Dive Bomber more fascinating than I expected—although I suspect that my fondness for techno-thrillers had a role to play in this.

  • Mary of Scotland (1936)

    Mary of Scotland (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) Considering the sheer number of 1930s historical dramas, no one will blame anyone for overlooking Mary of Scotland—neither a terrible nor extraordinary example of the form. But there are a few interesting names here, and a vexing historical conundrum to resolve. Considering that the real story of Mary of Scotland does not end well, history-minded viewers will be most interested by the film’s almost-desperate attempts to rewrite history so that the ending is palatable to audiences. (I’m not sure how the Catholic propaganda played in 1936, but let’s just say that it has not aged well.)  But so did nearly every other historical costume drama of the time—and Mary of Scotland certainly fits within the lavish production means used for those movies—extravagant costumes, scripts that combined historical material with accessible dialogue, and sets that crammed the most they could fit in a Hollywood sound stage. Where the film gets interesting, perhaps for the wrong reasons, is in the top names involved in toe production. Fredric March, sure (I’ve never been much of a fan), but Katharine Hepburn yes! She wasn’t particularly well suited for the role at that stage of her career (her take on royalty in The Lion in Winter would be far more successful) and the film seems to be using her for royal demeanour and little else. But the surprise here is seeing John Ford, best known for all-American westerns, undertake an early job-for-hire here as the film’s director. None of his trademarks show up here, which is reasonable considering that this was a fairly early effort limited by mid-1930s Hollywood technical means. None of this makes Mary of Scotland particularly interesting, unless you’re using the film as a parallax measure against other films or later entries in the principals’ filmography. Or if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool fan of 1930s period dramas, of course…

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) I hoped that a second viewing of Mary of Scotland would help me warm up to the movie, but I don’t think it changed much: Katharine Hepburn’s royal performance is the film’s single best asset, and the film spins its wheels for a very long time before delivering a rather good final sequence in which our two strong female protagonists finally meet face to face. It’s mildly interesting to put Mary of Scotland up against more recent historical epics and see how they did things back in the 1930s, but there are probably more engaging films in which to do this kind of comparative analysis. John Ford directs a picture as a costume drama that we wouldn’t necessarily associate with his later career or favourite themes (scuttlebutt has it that he and Hepburn had an affair during the film’s production), but that only brings marginal interest to a surprisingly average film.

  • Attack of the Killer Donuts (2016)

    Attack of the Killer Donuts (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2019) Don’t get your hopes up for Attack of the Killer Donuts: This is one of those cheap low-budget movies where the title makes up roughly fifty percent of the film’s enjoyment and almost all of its later disappointment. A premise-in-a-title, it does effectively announce a horror comedy in which people are slaughtered by donuts. The mechanics (killer serum dropped in a vat of oil, bla-bla-bla) are irrelevant—the point here is the succession of implausible scenes in which homicidal donuts kill much of the ensemble cast. Our plucky teenage protagonist and his soon-to-be girlfriend are in the middle of the action, but viewers’ attention will be glued to the special effects and low-budget craziness more than any meaningful characterization. It … works. Barely. If your expectations are low, that is—with its tiny budget and trashy execution, director Scott Wheeler can’t make Attack of the Killer Donuts become more than a ridiculous horror comedy earning a chunk of laughs at its own expense. In that Friday-night-at-the-grindhouse spirit, the film meets expectations. But don’t think you’re going to see an unheralded cult classic here: it’s what it presents itself to be and nothing more. At least the protagonists aren’t detestable, and the result isn’t reprehensible. The same film with a duller title would be noticeably less enjoyable.

  • Shane (1953)

    Shane (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) Often hailed as a western genre classic, it’s worth wondering if Shane still holds up today. Many of its innovations—notably its use of widescreen colour cinematography, as one of the first films to be produced in a format aiming to outclass television—could be seen as temporary and outclassed by several better movies. The then-shocking use of violence and reflections on its consequences, for instance, marked a departure from the trigger-happy standard of the genre throughout the 1930s and 1940s but was soon outclassed by far bloodier westerns to come in the next decades. But thanks to director George Stevens, there’s a welcome texture and complexity to Shane that works even today—layers of subtlety overlaid over the “gunman comes to a divided town” classic plot template. Forbidden attraction between the mysterious protagonist and a married woman; longing for permanent fatherhood; some acknowledgement of the costs of violence; and that classic ambiguous finale that skirts between a poignant finale and a feel-good one. (I could do with less of the kid, though.)  Add to that the still-effective colourful widescreen cinematography and, yes, Shane does remain a reference all these years later: sometimes outclassed, but no less effective on the fundamentals.

  • They Died with Their Boots On (1941)

    They Died with Their Boots On (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) It doesn’t take much for me to admit that as a boring straight white male, watching classic Hollywood movie is made easier by inherent privilege—those movies were (largely) made by straight white males, featured straight white males and incorporate the unconscious biases of straight white males. No disagreement there. I may twitch and make a note when films are unusually sexist, racist or outdated, and mention how terrible the French dialogue sounds, but in between my privilege and ready acknowledgement that “the past was another country,” I’m rarely scandalized out of my suspension of disbelief. But then comes a movie like They Died With Their Boots On to remind me that, no, I do have my limits. The problem is not that it’s an old-school western glorifying the Caucasian invasion of the West while showing them heroically battling anonymous hordes of Native Americans—there are plenty of those, and even the best come with an implicit warning for westerns: “You must accept this terrible viewpoint if you are to enjoy the film.” What puts this film over the top is that it is a (mostly inaccurate) depiction of George Armstrong Custer as a heroic, likable fellow before he died at Little Bighorn. That’s when my inner fuses blew up. Look: Custer was a terrible person—self-promoting as a symbol of crushing American Imperialism, but little more than the gun at the end of the American Government’s policy of betraying alliances and waging total war against Natives. He was a documented racist, rapist and executioner of noncombatants—and his own folly led to a well-deserved death. To see, even eighty years later, that a major studio like Warner Brothers sunk considerable expense, slick directing (from veteran Raoul Walsh) and marquee stars such as Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in this kind of project is still revolting. Worse yet—three people died in the expansive action sequences that mark the film. (But apparently no horses, a consequence of reforms following many animal deaths on the set of Curtiz’s previous The Charge of the Light Brigade.) We’re well past the point of an unjustifiable movie here. I’m a good sport for many surprising excesses, but They Died with Their Boots On is intolerable.