Reviews

  • The Three Musketeers (1948)

    The Three Musketeers (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) There have been a lot of adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers over the years, so the only way to talk about them is to highlight how they differ from one another. In the case of 1948’s version, the answer is simpler than we think: Gene Kelly. That’s it: Gene Kelly as d’Artagnan, meeting the three musketeers and fighting valiantly against Milady, Countess de Winter (Lana Turner!) for the honour of France. The casting highlights doesn’t stop there, what with Vincent Price as Richelieu and Angela Lansbury as Queen Anne. The swashbuckling is strong in this late-1940s MGM spectacle, and while director George Sidney said he drew inspiration from westerns in staging the sword-fighting cinematography, the presence of Kelly suggests that there’s quite a bit of dancing inspiration in there as well—and Kelly’s skills were uniquely well suited for a non-singing sword-fighting hero. The colour cinematography still pops out today, and the rest of the adventure is handled competently, although perhaps too sedately when not busy with action scenes. Remove the cast and the sword-fighting and the film becomes far more ordinary, but that’s the nature of all versions of The Three Musketeers: we’re there for the swords, the rest is just fancy wrapping. If you want the story, read the book.

  • A Face in the Crowd (1957)

    A Face in the Crowd (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) The more I dig into 1950s cinema, the more I realize that there was much more to the decade than the epic movies and MGM musicals that often pop up as representative of the time. It’s possible to assemble a very nice corpus of audacious satires and warnings about the nascent medium of television, not merely as a competitor to cinema but also as a force affecting civil society (paralleling 2010s concerns about social media). In 1957 alone, you can take a look at Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? for a comic take, Sweet Smell of Success for a darker tale of runaway media personalities, or to A Face in the Crowd for a full-bore dystopian vision of a demagogue made unstoppable by the power of media. As amazing as it can seem from 2019’s realization that there’s a significant portion of the American populace that will embrace a tinpot authoritarian for comfort, there’s long been a streak of Hollywood movies warning against the dangers of fascism, and A Face in the Crowd turns out to be a character study of what happens when someone with mean authoritarian instincts can put up a false populist front. Andy Griffith (of all people!) turns in a dark and memorable performance as “Lonesome Rhoades,” a folksy guitar player who is discovered by a radio journalist and takes to radio like a natural. Before long, his folksy manners and willingness to say things that people want to hear propel him to greater and greater success, all the way to a national TV show from New York. But Rhoades is not the person he broadcasts himself to be: egomaniac, womanizer, abuser, he becomes all too aware of his own power and plans for much, much bigger. As the radio journalist contemplates the monster she has created, the question becomes: Can he be stopped? Griffith is wonderfully evil here, as Patricia Neal plays the conscience of the film and Walter Matthau plays a terrific part as a highly cynical writer. (His verbal takedown of Rhoades at the very end of the film is an exceptionally efficient piece of writing allowing the story to end in mid-flight yet reassure us that it’s over.)  As a piece of entertainment, A Face in the Crowd touches upon dark topics with success. But it’s as a media critique that the film becomes more and more relevant each year—the medium may change, but people like Rhoades are adept at exploiting them and had more people heeded the film, the American political leadership may not be in such a sorry state at the moment. I’m not sure that A Face in the Crowd can be called a hidden classic as it regularly gets unearthed and highlighted as being worthy of modern attention—but it’s a great movie and it shows us modern viewers that the 1950s weren’t necessarily the quaint quiet calm period often portrayed to be.

  • Fearless (1993)

    Fearless (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2019) There is something interesting about movies that dare navigate the fine line that separates realism from the extraordinary. Fearless is one of those movies that skirt the edge of a realistic drama by focusing on the survivor of a plane crash who develops some unusual psychological disorders, helped along by ambiguously fantastic events. Played by Jeff Bridges in one of his best roles, our protagonist overcompensates for his survivor’s guilt by becoming convinced that he is already dead, eating allergenic food without consequences and even crashing his car to make a point. His detachment from reality becomes spectacular at times, such as walking away from the crash scene without notifying anyone. His mental health issues are aggravated by the aftermath of the crash—the FBI investigation, the media attention, the legal proceedings, the guilt shared by fellow survivors. Directed by Peter Weir, who has often handled such tricky material, Fearless is an effective character study of someone ordinary in exceptional circumstances. A clever script heavily (but cleverly) relies on flashbacks to show us the before-and-after circumstances of the protagonist. With such skillful touches, Fearless is far more entertaining than expected for such weighty subject matter—and with such interesting actors as Rosie Perez (deservedly nominated for an Oscar), Isabella Rossellini, Benicio del Toro and John Turturro along for the ride, it’s also not a bad choice for anyone looking at the state of mainstream drama movies from the mid-1990s. Even if, at times, Fearless does push much realism as far as it can go.

  • I Still See You (2018)

    I Still See You (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) One of the fundamental writing lessons that they don’t often teach in how-to books is focus. Or, in other words, “calm down, and don’t make it so complicated.”  Writers often spend so much time with their story that it becomes almost a necessity to add fancy adornments to it. To make it even more complex. To add a plot so complicated that no one else can follow it. This is even more crucial in screenwriting, given the necessities to fit everything in a limited amount of time. Focus, screenwriters, focus! Don’t throw everything but the kitchen sink, then add a romance, a murder mystery, a voyage of discovery and a global apocalypse on top of everything. But novelist Daniel Waters didn’t listen and screen writer Jason Fuchs didn’t listen and director Scott Speer didn’t listen in the making of I Still See You, with starts with a future world in which ghosts have some influence over the real world, but then goes on to add romance, grief, conspiracy, murder and self-actualization on top of it. Pick two out of five, maybe. I Still See You doesn’t help its case by inventing a new vocabulary to talk about its ghosts, and then impose a curriculum that requires you to learn about a decade’s worth of future history in order to even make sense of what’s happening. The story becomes even worse once you discover that there’s someone in the protagonist’s entourage that has a significant role in how this world-changing incident happened. At some point, it all becomes too much for too little return. I would be amazed to say this considering that I spent a lot of time in my life enjoying thick science-fiction books about entire future empires, but the problem is that I wanted to enjoy those SF series, whereas I really don’t care about any aspect of I Still See You: it’s dark, dull, painfully less interesting than it imagines itself to be, and doesn’t have anything to keep viewers invested in what it has to say. A great story will spawn hundreds of fanfiction stories to expand upon the world it suggests, but as proved here a bad story will make viewers reluctant to even engage with its core. Goth Bella Thorne could have been interesting … but not in this film. There are plenty of other better YA horror (ish) stories out there to spend any more time even thinking about I Still See You. Go see those instead.  Please, no sequels.

  • Ski Party (1965)

    Ski Party (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) The Beach Party series takes an odd but not entirely unpredictable turn in Ski Party, as part of the gang heads for the mountains for snow partying. Our two lead lads, played by Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman, have the bright idea to disguise themselves as women to learn all about what they need to know in order to seduce. Many wacky hijinks then follow, in the somewhat anarchic type of comedy of the series. The film frequently breaks the fourth wall, with even terrible special effects being part of the fun. It’s reasonably entertaining as a comedy, but the real discovery of the film is its soundtrack, featuring on-screen appearance by Lesley Gore (“Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows”) and James Brown (“I Got You [I Feel Good]”) as themselves. The charming silliness is infectious, and Ski Party itself feels fun even if it’s an insubstantial add-on to an already frivolous series.

  • Astérix aux jeux olympiques [Asterix at the Olympic Games] (2008)

    Astérix aux jeux olympiques [Asterix at the Olympic Games] (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2019) There were four live-action movies based on the Asterix comic books between 1999 and 2012, and there’s a fair case to be made that Astérix aux jeux olympiques is the worst of them. Sure, the first film had some issues in terms of how to integrate comic book exaggeration in a live-action setting. But the script was generally serviceable, and that’s more than we can say about this third instalment. The most fundamental of its mistakes is to make an Astérix and Obélix story in which both main characters are supporting players in another plot having to do with fairly minor characters. The detour to Greece for the titular Olympic Games is (in keeping with the original comic book) an excuse to parody the modern Games, but they keep adding more subplots that have little to do with the putative heroes of the film. Much of the film is spent wondering when we’ll ditch the useless characters and go back to the lead duo. The chariot race that composes much of the third act does bring some much-needed energy back into the film, although that’s not a constant—whenever you puzzle over some lame joke, scene or one-off character interrupting the flow of the action, head over to the film’s Wikipedia page and you will realize that you’ve just seen a celebrity cameo from someone you’ve never heard of as a future viewer hailing from a future distant enough from 2008, which is already starting to happen in 2019. But Astérix aux jeux olympiques keeps the worst for last, as rather than wrap things up neatly with a quick banquet scene, it drags on for another 5–10 minutes for the sole purpose of bringing back an annoying character from the previous film (played by infamous showboater Jamel Debbouze) as well as other celebrity cameos. Enough. By that time, we just want it to be over. The special effects are better than the previous film, but not used judiciously or even tastefully. The direction isn’t particularly strong, and while it’s fun to see French-Canadian Stéphane Rousseau in a leading role, the amount of screen time he gets is an issue when the main characters of the series are sidelined. At least Clovis Cornillac and Gérard Depardieu are not bad as Astérix and Obelix, with no less than Alain Delon as Julius Caesar. Still, there’s not enough to offset the tremendous waste that is the misguided script and the overindulgent execution.

  • The Hitcher (1986)

    The Hitcher (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) Narrative plausibility is usually a good thing when it comes to movies, but there are exceptions, and The Hitcher sure knows how to play with it. Starting out when a young man picks up an unusually intense hitchhiker in the middle of the desert, the film quickly dives into a nightmare once the hitcher promises violent death to the protagonist, and starts toying with him in broad day light—framing him for terrible murders, blowing up gas stations and helicopters, breaking in and out of prison and doing so with a determination that would exhaust even the Terminator. Halfway in the film, it’s fully justifiable to think that our protagonist has escaped rational thought and that the Hitcher (an icy performance from Rutger Hauer) is a figment of his imagination. But no—quickly enough, The Hitcher firmly establishes that the hitcher can be seen by the other characters and that may make him even scarier, because the film imperceptibly shifts from a psychological thriller to something akin to supernatural horror. The impossible events of the film can only be explained by non-natural means even if there are no overt fantasy elements. I’m not so fond of the film’s grand-guignolesque level of violence (killing the most sympathetic of the characters along the way), but it does help the film’s nightmarish atmosphere. Disappointingly enough, the version of The Hitcher that HBO broadcast on the eve of Halloween had a low-resolution muddy matted visual presentation—surely there’s a high-definition version lurking somewhere in their archives?

  • On the Basis of Sex (2018)

    On the Basis of Sex (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) The rise of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a modern folk heroine is as unlikely as it is heartening in these times where lawlessness seems to be the norm for the highest office in the land. The Notorious RBG was a documentary account of her entire career, and it’s perfectly complemented by On the Basis of Sex, which chooses to focus on a very specific period of her life in order to illustrate her character … and provide a bit of an origins story as well. It begins with an extended prologue in which she goes to law school in the early 1960s (experiencing a predictable amount of sexism along the way), supports her husband throughout serious illness, has trouble getting a job as a practising lawyer and eventually joins faculty at a New York University. But the story really begins when she becomes aware of a sexual discrimination case involving a man being denied benefits on the sole basis of being male. Sensing an opportunity for establishing gender equality, she takes up the case and the film ends up chronicling her progress through a legal victory. On the Basis of Sex offers a stirring demonstration of rising to the challenge (her never having pleaded in court before taking on the case), benefiting from the support of her husband and using the law to break discrimination. It’s certainly an inspiring plea for the power of the judicial process—in addition to all of the usual arguments regarding the courts as instruments of social progress, there’s a really clever scene in which taxation is demonstrated to embody the values of its society (something that later feeds into her own victory). The historical accuracy of the film is reportedly quite high, what with the script having been written by Ginsburg’s nephew. There’s certainly something heartening in seeing her in a loving relationship with her husband, who provides a lot of support (emotional and otherwise) to her during the case. Felicity Jones is quite likable as Ginsburg, with Armie Hammer getting a good role as her husband; Kathy Bates also has a short but very visible role. It’s also a welcome return to the big screen for director Mimi Leder, who had been sent in exile far too long after the underwhelming Pay it Forward—it’s good to have her back, and her work here is as good as these historical dramas can hope for. While On the Basis of Sex does not reach outside the confines of its biopic form, it’s not a bad watch for audiences interested in the law, in equality and in one Supreme Court Justice who ended up capturing the popular imagination.

  • Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (2007)

    Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2019) I have a soft spot for movies celebrating (however cynically) the wonders of imagination and featuring off-beat characters, and I suppose that this is what Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium has in spades, what with Dustin Hoffman playing the titular Mr. Magorium, who built a fantastic toy shop and is now planning on leaving the Earth. His plan is to pass the mantle over to a young assistant flatly played by Natalie Portman, cute but otherwise unremarkable in a somewhat thankless role. Jason Bateman looks like he’s having slightly more fun as an accountant who loosens up throughout the film. Still, the point of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (what a title!) isn’t the plot or the characters as much as it’s the sight gags, magical devices and fantasy wrinkles (such as a building growing sullen) that are perfectly at ease in the universe created for the purposes of the film. Surprisingly enough, this isn’t adapted from a YA book—writer-director Zach Helm thought up the entire thing, and it’s the kind of colourful magical fantasy that can’t really exist just on the page. It’s all a bit childish, of course, but that’s part of the point of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium —imagination, creativity and fantasy don’t have to belong to kids exclusively. In fact, when adults take them up, it’s renamed as eccentricity … and that’s a message I can support wholeheartedly.

  • F for Fake (1973)

    F for Fake (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) We could easily rename F for Fake to F for Fascinating and it wouldn’t change much. Abandon any preconception of a standard narrative or documentary film, because from the first few minutes (which feature a suspiciously specific disclaimer that “everything we will tell you in the next hour is factual”), Orson Welles is clearly having fun playing with cinematic grammar, placing himself front-and-centre and messing with expectations. The subject matter, as we gradually discover (Welles doesn’t make it easy) is to talk about four fascinating personalities: Elmyr de Hory (celebrated art faker), Clifford Irving (journalist and de Hory biographer, discovered during filming to have faked an autobiography of Howard Hughes), Howard Hughes (mogul turned mysterious hermit, then far more mysterious than now) and finally Orson Welles himself (no stranger to fakery as a filmmaker and radio broadcaster). F for Fake a feature-length series of impressionistic digressions on fakery leading to a final fifteen minutes that goes somewhere unexpected. This is a film best seen with Wikipedia on hand, though, as it assumes quite a bit about what an early 1970s viewer would know and find interesting. My favourite part of the film is easily Welles’s larger-than-life presence himself, as the film allows him to charm the viewer and even witness as he holds court in a restaurant—if anyone ever wondered how much fun it would be to hang out with later-day Welles at his storytelling best, then wonder no more. Otherwise, there’s quite a bit of fun to see Welles subvert expectation and mislead his audience (as he tells us he’s going to do in the first few minutes). Welles buffs will also come away from the film far better informed about Oja Kodar, something that’s probably essential to understand Welles’s last few years and the tortuous path that The Other Side of the Wind took to its final release. There’s an entire film’s worth of supplementary material to be read about F for Fake, so keep that Wikipedia link close by.

  • The Rocker (2008)

    The Rocker (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2019) I wasn’t expecting much from The Rocker — It didn’t exactly make a mark in the decade since its disappointing theatrical release, and Rainn Wilson is (at best!) a very specific comedian. But I wasn’t counting on the power of rock, or specifically a movie taking place in the rock band touring realm, taking on the comfortable tropes of the subgenre and playing with them. A journey to fame that we think may take the entire film ends up being resolved in the first act (thanks to some social media shenanigans that still ring true eleven years later), leaving the film the luxury of heading out on the road to live out the Rockstar lifestyle. (The Rocker does itself no favour by leaning too much on vomit humour.) Rainn Wilson is occasionally annoying but not as much as anticipated, and he’s clearly the wildcard that brings a straighter cast of character together. Otherwise, the film features early roles for Josh Gad and Emma Stone as teenage rock musicians, along with Christina Applegate playing hen mother/love interest. The soundtrack is about as great as what we could have expected from a movie with such a title. I suspect that anyone’s liking for The Rocker will hinge on how susceptible they are to rock band tour comedies and/or Wilson as a comic performer. But I was pleasantly surprised, without going to the extent of claiming it’s a good movie.

  • Mexican Spitfire at Sea (1942)

    Mexican Spitfire at Sea (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) It’s one thing to have star vehicles, and it’s another to have a series of films tailored to your screen persona. Anyone unfamiliar with Lupe Velez’s brand of comedy as an attractive but stereotypically tempestuous Latina will know everything they need to know from Mexican Spitfire at Sea, the fourth in a seven-film series all featuring Velez and her “Mexican Spitfire” moniker. Here, we’re aboard an ocean liner as our heroine thinks she’s finally getting her honeymoon but instead gets tangled in a mix of social climbing, husband shaming, impersonations and rapid-fire dialogue often punctuated by comic rages from the protagonist. At 72 minutes, Mexican Spitfire at Sea has no time for niceties, and no appetite for subtlety: this is classic community theatre farce material with mistaken identities and misunderstandings powering much of the plot, with the actors mugging for the camera so that we don’t miss a single double take, confusion or lustful thought. The ending is a bit weak, but it actually works quite well if you’re in the mood for that kind of sitcom-level comedy … and it works even better if you like the “Mexican Spitfire” archetype that Velez plays so well. Added attraction may come from the easy-to-digest pace of life aboard an ocean liner (you can cut production costs by going through the same five sets), funny dialogue and a performance from veteran actress Zasu Pitts that’s far funnier than anything she did in Greed. What may limit the appeal of the film is that the series is focused so extensively of a specific screen persona.  I was curious about Velez and sympathetic to that kind of role, but I’m not so sure that I’d watch all seven movies back-to-back. As a small discovery, though, Mexican Spitfire at Sea is just good enough to make me happy.

  • The Naked City (1948)

    The Naked City (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) This probably won’t make any sense, but The Naked City is not noir and yet not quite not-noir. A police procedural presented from the get-go as almost a documentary, this is a film that goes filming on the street of New York City, complete with an intrusive narrator to telescope events into expositionary montages. The narration is the first thing that grabs viewers in the film—the second is the authentic depiction of New York at the end of the 1940s. A murder has been committed, and the film details the arduous process through which the detectives investigate the crime. It’s not noir because it’s usually filmed during the day, and it features law-enforcement characters as the heroes. And yet it is not quite not-noir in that it abandons the romanticism of the city to take us to the venal humans that populate it, acting out of lust or greed in order to break the law and hurt others. Director Jules Dassin’s execution more than complements a decent plot in order to give us seven days in the life of New York City, following a murder that will soon be swept away like the previous day’s newspapers. Some good moments by likable actors do help in making the film interesting throughout—including a heartbreaking line about mourning a murdered daughter and terrific last lines that inspired many. (“There are eight million stories in the naked city. That was one of them.”) The Naked City has been imitated and surpassed by scores of other movies, but it has kept it patina of period detail admirably well. At this point, it’s as good a time-travel gets.

  • The Divorcee (1930)

    The Divorcee (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Compared to 2019 romantic drama, there isn’t much to distinguish The Divorcee from countless other similar movies in which a married couple fight and we follow the woman as she deals with the aftermath. Good execution and a dash of style (including a rather good montage of her holding hands with suitors to show the passing of weeks) help a bit, but the story certainly isn’t exceptional now. But historical context is important, and The Divorcee becomes far more interesting once you focus on the fact that it comes straight from 1930. It’s a product of the early sound films era (so much so that the poster boasts “all talking!”), so don’t be surprised by the omnipresent hum of the audio nor the somewhat theatrical acting of the cast. But more significantly, it’s a novel adaptation from the pre-Code era, meaning that its sympathy and treatment of its protagonist (a quite good Norma Shearer), as she leaves her husband and navigates the shoals of her newfound freedom through multiple liaisons (without a moral consequence!), is considerably more sympathetic than anything we’d see until at least the 1960s. Consequence-free divorce was A Problem during the Hays era, and the film doesn’t consider it much of a moral stain as much as what you do when you can’t stay married. The ending gets unrealistically romantic, but there’s a happy ending for you. What’s more impressive is, well, the accessibility of the film for such an early talkie: it can be seen today as “just another story” set in the 1930s, which is considerably more than we can say from other films of the time. One curio: There’s a bit of French dialogue in the film, and it sounded to me like a cleaned up but authentic French-Canadian accent rather than the far more common European French accent. Alas, we may never correctly attribute it to anyone, as the credits for the film are typically short and the person speaking the dialogue is not fully seen.

  • The Silencers (1966)

    The Silencers (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) No doubt about it: The Silencers is a trip through time. First in the Matt Helm series of films made to lampoon the Bond series and featuring no less than Dean Martin, it’s like an authentic 1960s version of what Austin Powers was going for. Not as farcical, but certainly playing up the most ridiculous elements of the Bond formula: the women, the gadgets, the women, the lavish lifestyle, the women, the ridiculous villains and, of course, the women. (“NOT FOR CHILDREN,” shouts the poster after stating, “Girls, Gags and Gadgets: The Best Spy Thriller of Nineteen Sexty-Sex.”  But don’t worry—it’s tame by today’s standards.)  Rat-packer Martin is near-perfect as the suave womanizing agent Helm, whose conquests multiply throughout the movie. The women all look great, although classic Hollywood fans will be overjoyed to see the great Cyd Charisse strut her stuff in two dance sequences—her legs still go up to there, and she looks fantastic with longer hair. Don’t pay any attention to the plot, though: It’s all familiar plot devices meant to string the gags in the correct order, including a car fully equipped with a driver-accessible minibar and switch-activated privacy drapes for, well, whatever spies do in this kind of movie. Alas, the villain is pointlessly stereotyped along Fu-Manchu lines. Still, The Silencers is a big broad caricature, fully capturing a kind of spoof that would later be re-imitated. I watched it on a whim, attracted by the casting of Charisse, but ended up liking it quite a bit.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, June 2021) I thought I’d have another look at The Silencers after only a few months… if only to verify that my wild memory of the film wasn’t an invention. It wasn’t. Revisiting suave Bond-like secret agents in a hyperbolic fashion, this film stars Dean Martin as (what else?) a top-notch special operative who serially romances a succession of beautiful women (for late-1960s definitions of “beautiful” – despite Stella Stevens doing her best as a redhead, contemporary viewers may be more intrigued by Daliah Lavi as the bad girl with the black-and-white hairdo). If you see nothing else, simply watch the first fifteen minutes, which begins with three successive dance/stripping routines by sultry performers (the third being none other than Cyd Charisse), followed by an introduction to the protagonist at home, surrounded by fancy gadgets and bedroom partners. It’s wild enough that Austin Powers fans will feel at home. The weirdness doesn’t stop after that, what with Martin singing some of his standards at the drop of a hat (even tuning in the car radio away from Sinatra to his own song), and the villain being a rotund white guy made up to look Chinese. It all leads (as it should) to a villain’s lair confrontation. Clearly, The Silencers doesn’t take anything seriously and neither should you: it’s intended as a spoof of 1960s Bond movies and if it works despite the obvious sexism and racism, it’s largely because of Martin’s charm and the excessive nature of the gags. When the protagonist (who became a fashion photographer in retirement) daydreams about the girls of his photoshoots and the film briefly pauses to allow them to prance a little on screen, its unabashedly retrograde nature almost becomes cute. Much of the middle section of the film can’t quite measure up to the wild introduction or the cranked-up final act, but the result is not without distinction. Keep watching until the end of the credits, if only to see what’s been identified as the first post-credit comic sequence in the history of movies. (Although be aware – weirdly enough, the version of The Silencers shown on TCM apparently does not include that post-credit sequence, even if it’s well-documented online.)