Reviews

  • Z (1969)

    Z (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018) Most movies are almost entirely separate from reality, but Z is a shining exception. Based on real and infuriating events, Z also led to real changes in Greece years after its release. The line between fiction and reality is further blurred by an aggressive cinema-vérité style, taking us in muggy streets as protests between left and right-wing groups lead to aggression and, eventually, the death of an anti-war politician. The investigation in the events ends up triggering a national crisis, and the film ends on a sombre note as investigators are killed or marginalized after a military coup. The ending is both grim and darkly amusing as the film lists the items forbidden under the new regime (including the letter Z, which symbolized resistance). While real-life events had a happier ending (the junta was overthrown a few years after the movie, and its investigator protagonist became president of the country a decade and a half later), Z the movie itself is oppressive and gripping, still powerful in the way it presents a thoroughly deglamorized portrait of street violence for political goals. Director Costa-Gavras has since become an exemplar of a director-provocateur, and Z is as successful as politically engaged features can be. While long, the film steadily improves as it advances, and as its dark humour becomes even darker. It’s still very much relevant, as we hope that it doesn’t become even more relevant in today’s semi-insane American politics.

  • All the King’s Men (2006)

    All the King’s Men (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2018) Watching the original 1949 All the King’s Men quickly led me to this remake, languishing on my unseen-DVD shelves. While undoubtedly slicker than the original, this remake has issues of its own. Despite a terrific cast, fantastic atmosphere and Steve Zaillian’s moody direction (wow, that use of an engraved floor map of the state in the opening and closing sequences…), the film struggles with time, with motivations, with having something interesting to say at a time when political movies all seem to turn around the same ideas. The film was a notorious flop, which is too bad, because it does have quite a few things going for it: the cast alone is amazing, and comparing the slickness of the film’s production with the rough-hewn charm of the original is incredibly eloquent regarding the evolution of Hollywood movies in fifty-five years. Sean Penn isn’t particularly well cast as the lead—we can believe in him as a corrupt politician, but he somewhat misses the mark in the film’s first-act evolution of an idealist into a political machine boss. The film also misses the mark by compressing decades-long events into a mere few years: while the protagonist’s arc is a bit tighter, it’s far too fast for describing the corruption of an idealist populist. Otherwise, there’s a lot to like in the way the film looks, from costumes to sets to the overall atmosphere. Still, when you take it all in, this remake of All the King’s Men feels sluggish and overwrought. It certainly doesn’t replace the original film.

  • The Hustler (1961)

    The Hustler (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018)  As I go through the classic-film catalogue, some of them hit and some of them miss … and The Hustler does feel like a perceptible miss. Part of it has to do with my near-complete lack of interest in pool—given that the film has lengthy sequences of pure pool play, which may explain my difficulty connecting to the film. Of course, there is a lot more to The Hustler than pool—its central sport is almost irrelevant to its portrait of an incredibly ambitious protagonist, someone who has to confront a loss in the pursuit of victory. There’s a lot of drama along the way to a glum conclusion, but it feels as if The Hustler is simply too long for what it has to say. Paul Newman is very good, of course, and Jackie Gleason is also remarkable as “Minnesota Fats” while Piper Laurie is the film’s emotional centre. Even if film historians have a lot of praise for what the film brought to the table in the early sixties (it almost feels like a 1970s film at times), much of what The Hustler has to say has become well-worn territory, including its grim and realistic approach to character-driven drama. It still plays like a mature drama, but it can feel dull and exceptionally long at times.

  • La piel que habito [The Skin I Live in] (2011)

    La piel que habito [The Skin I Live in] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2018) Pedro Almodovar’s body of work (or at least the half-dozen films of his that I’ve seen) defy easy characterization: comedy, drama and thriller, all in the same films, all using refreshingly unfamiliar narrative structures … and seeing La piel que habito doesn’t help in clarifying things, as it blends mystery, horror and twisted romance in an occasionally-grotesque result. Knowing that it’s a twisted film, you can anticipate the worst once it becomes clear that the film is about a genius-level plastic surgeon, a captive woman and sombre disappearances in the back story. The film’s secrets are far wilder than most people would dare imagine. At that point, it becomes tricky to assess the film fairly: it’s certainly odd and well executed, but is it good? It’s certainly unpleasant, but was it worth watching? Almodovar fans will be best placed to answer these questions for themselves. In the meantime, there’s a good performance here from Antonio Banderas, some clever directing and a script that doesn’t spoon-feed some extreme material. It’s certainly not for weak stomachs—the blood alone is bad enough, but the themes are even worse.

  • The Odd Couple (1968)

    The Odd Couple (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018) The premise of The Odd Couple is universal to the point of nearly being a cliché fifty years later: A neat freak and a slob having to cope with each other in a single apartment? Sure-fire laughs. After seeing the same variation a few dozen times, however, it’s not surprising that the original The Odd Couple would feel so familiar. The film seemingly takes forever to establish what seems already obvious, and some plot points (especially during the third act) now feel forced more than organic. Fortunately, other elements rescue the film from those weaker moments: Both Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are quite good in the lead roles, and the beauty of The Odd Couple’s classic structure means that the film is almost bound to be satisfying from the beginning to the end. But the film’s biggest asset remains Neil Simon’s terrific dialogue, as witty now at it was then and adding much to the now-standard formula. The result may not feel particularly fresh, but it continues to get laughs.

  • Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 (2017)

    Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018) I had reasonably high hopes for this sequel to the 2009 bilingual thriller Bon Cop Bad Cop. The original was a clever look at Canada’s two linguistic communities, straddling language and culture in the service of a comic thriller. This sequel manages to get both Patrick Huard and Colm Feore to reprise their roles (no mean feat, given both actors’ busy schedules) but seems to forget much of what made the original work so well. The theme of the original film, so cleanly focused on French/English relationships, was clear and compelling—the sequel, alas, muddles along with a half-hearted look south of the border. Taking the plot to the United States is a logical step forward, but some of the America-bashing does get cheap and tiresome. The character work is fine in theory, except that we don’t particularly care about many of the secondary characters, and the film has the bad idea of giving a terminal illness to one of its protagonists, leading to one good death-wish scene but a whole lot of cumbersome emotional baggage to the film’s conclusion (not to mention a possible third film). Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 also falls prey to the easy lure of police brutality—it’s hard to cheer for nominally sympathetic and comic protagonists when they start manhandling and torturing suspects. Too long for its own good, Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 ends up feeling like a chore rather than a fun film … and given that the point of it is a fun film, the disappointment is palpable. I still like much of the film—Huard and Feore are likable, Mariana Mazza makes a remarkable (but almost overdone) appearance as a hyperactive computer specialist and some of the stunts are spectacular enough. But there is a lot of untapped or misplaced potential in the film’s execution as it loses its way, sabotages some of its own goodwill and ends up on a less than fully satisfying note.

  • Wonder Woman (2017)

    Wonder Woman (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018)  Now that the modern superhero film genre is nearly old enough to vote (not-so-arbitrarily ignoring 1997’s Blade and anointing 2001’s X-Men as the first of its subgenre), there is a real risk of superhero fatigue—in particular, the tendency for lead superheroes to be white men is getting particularly annoying—where are the alternatives, the diverse voices, the ways to use the superhero genre to poke at other kinds of issues beyond power fantasies? Then there is the dismal results of the so-called “DC Cinematic Universe” movies, deadened by disappointing films in the wake of Man of Steel. Expectations were mixed about Wonder Woman, hoping that the film would take advantage of the heroine’s gender (especially given director Patty Jenkins as a rare female director taking on the reigns of a blockbuster production) but not expecting much from the DCU track record. The result, fortunately, is quite a bit better than expectations. While Wonder Woman ultimately does not deviate all that much from the usual super-heroic template all the way to the final apocalyptic battle, it does have a few nice moments of doubt and confusion along the way, augmented by wonderful character moments and great period detail along the way. Gal Gadot truly stars as Wonder Woman, bringing looks, humour, action proficiency and quite a bit of charm to a role that requires some deftness in bringing it all together. Good writing makes the middle London-set “fish out of water” sequence curiously enjoyable. Chris Pine is quite good as the love interest, with noteworthy appearances by Danny Huston, Robin Wright, David Thewes and Lucy Davis along the way. It’s hard to underestimate the difference made by not having a male gaze on the entire film—thanks to director Jenkins, we get a female heroine (and supporting cast of amazon) that is credibly fierce on its own terms, and not necessarily presented as a male fantasy—although it can also work as such. Serious but entertaining, as earnest and non-cynical as a modern superhero movie can be, Wonder Woman is the best film so far in the DCU by a significant margin (it helps that it doesn’t tie itself too tightly to a mega-continuity), and a definitive affirmation of why we need more diverse voices in mainstream blockbuster filmmaking. 

  • An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

    An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2018) I’ve got a soft spot for academy movies, or more specifically movies in which our protagonist matures by attending a tough school. And while that certainly doesn’t describe all of An Officer and a Gentleman, it certainly covers what’s most interesting in the film—as the no-good son of a sailor enlists in a military academy to become an officer. The training is merciless, and that’s not even getting into the issue of repeating his parents’ mistakes in romancing local girls. Richard Gere (at times with a crew cut) stars as the protagonist, while Debra Winger plays a strong love interest with issues of her own and Louis Gossett Jr. is a rough instructor. There’s a fairly predictable B-couple romance meant to illustrate the worst-case scenario as well, but never mind—much of the film’s entertainment comes from the hero undergoing the rigours of training, and much of the film’s emotional power comes from its romance. Firmly establishing itself in a grimy reality from the first few moments, the film does exemplify a certain seventies/early eighties rawness that makes the latter triumph more meaningful. While I shouldn’t exaggerate An Office and a Gentleman’s effectiveness (there isn’t much here that hasn’t been done elsewhere), it does nicely click together and works better than expected.

  • On the Town (1949)

    On the Town (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018) At face value, On the Town is a ridiculous film. Following three sailors on leave in Manhattan through a day of gentle debauchery, it has unbelievable coincidences, a pat ending, generic characters and some astonishing lengths, including an entirely optional dream sequence. But here’s the thing: it’s a musical, and like many of the musicals closely associated with Gene Kelly, it knows it’s a musical. It doesn’t even waste any time telling us that it acknowledges its own absurdity, from the impossibly full morning tourism of the characters, to three cabarets reprising the same ditty, to the consciously ridiculous meet-cute romances. Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra make for fantastic leads, and the visual polish of On the Town is often eye-popping: If I liked Ann Miller best of all the film’s dames, it may have something to do with the fantastic green dress she wears throughout “Prehistoric Man.”  The film is, from “New York, New York” on, a joy to watch: Cheerful, exuberant, unconcerned with plausibility and rather racy in some implications, it’s also a delightful romanticized time capsule of post-war New York City in full Technicolor. The location shooting (a rarity at the time), as short as it was, brings a lot to the film. I’m not terribly fond of the dream sequence, except that it does show the possibilities of ballet in a non-traditional setting … like many of Gene Kelly’s films. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by On the Town—it’s much better than a summary would suggest, and simply a lot of fun.

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, August 2020) Two-and-a-half years and several dozen musicals later, I still like On the Town a lot — it’s self-aware, visually imaginative, can depend of the combined talents of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Ann Miller and does create the bubble of fantasy that many musicals rely on.  A second look highlights a few things that hadn’t necessarily focused upon the first time — such as the underhanded agency of the female characters, and the fact that our male protagonists are slightly idiotic.  Once past Ann Miller, I also have plenty of nice things to say about Vera-Ellen, Betty Garrett and even Alice Pearce in a clearly comic role.

  • All The King’s Men (1949)

    All The King’s Men (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2018) Americans have a long history of examining their political system through popular entertainment, and All the King’s Men (an adaptation of a popular 1940s novel) endures even today given its subject matter, tragic arc and acknowledgment of how power corrupts. The tale of how an idealistic lawyer becomes a corrupt governor, as narrated by a journalist turned political operative, this is a story that stands on its own in addition to being a roman-à-clé about Louisiana governor Huey Long. It spans decades, charting corruption as it transforms the protagonist of the story. It’s a clear-eyed view of the political system that still holds a lot of resonance today, and it’s told well enough to still be interesting. Some of the montage sequences have a very modern feel (the film was nominated for an editing Oscar), supported by clever cinematography that goes from pastoral to noir as the mood of the story changes. Broderick Crawford is very good as the character at the centre of the story, equally credible as a young populist and as an older corrupt politician. Writer/director Robert Rossen does spectacular work transforming a novel in a solid movie (although we’re told that merciless editing saved the film), with good supporting work by Mercedes McCambridge (as the dour yet lovelorn Sadie) and John Ireland as the self-effacing viewpoint character. All the King’s Men was remade in 2006 but the remake, despite very polished visuals and an astonishing ensemble cast, doesn’t quite manage to capture the energy of the original.

  • The Wild Bunch (1969)

    The Wild Bunch (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2018) I may be a jaded cinephile, but there are a few things that I still don’t like. I’m a big fan of action scenes, for instance, but I don’t like violence all that much, and gore even less. Given this, it was almost a foregone conclusion that I wouldn’t be all that happy with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, a film whose reputation is tied to its brutal depiction of western violence. The opening sequence concludes on a bloody and depressing heist, and much of the film that follows doesn’t get any better—the characters are criminals escaping justice, but the lawmen aren’t more virtuous. Though visually a western, The Wild Bunch is set in 1913 and the end of the Far West era hangs upon the film like a curse—much of the film is about the characters realizing that there is no place left for them or their tools in the world. The automobile is replacing the horse, and the machine gun is far more efficient than the six-cylinder gun. There’s clearly a Vietnam-era attempt to deglamorize the western archetypes though blood squibs and dishonourable character. It must have been quite a sensation back in 1969, but today The Wild Bunch feels redundant. Worse; its unpleasantness lingers after the film has so little to teach us. I can admire the craft of the production (many of the action sequences feel surprisingly modern) but I can’t love the result. Even in the not-so-narrow field of revisionist westerns, I can think of a few better examples.

  • Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

    Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2018) I actually have faint and mild traumatized memories of seeing the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes as a kid, with its nightmarish conclusion. A more contemporary viewing isn’t making me any friendlier toward the film, although for different reasons: I now think that the end of the film, with its horrific facial revelation and atomic conclusion, is the best thing about a remarkably redundant sequel. Not that I’ve been a fan of the original film or the subsequent series—While the 2011–2017 second remake trilogy is fantastic, the first series and 2001 singleton are dull beyond belief. Beneath the Planet of the Apes is not particularly interesting, revisiting the same material and not offering much until the end. Even Charlton Heston is sidelined for most of the film. The cosmic coincidence of having a second set of astronauts land in more or less the same place is too big to swallow, and the grimness of the ending, underscored by a fairly definitive narration, isn’t one to make one’s inner kid happy. Too bad the rest of the series couldn’t stay as dead as it should have been after the ending of this one.

  • Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Henry Holt and Co., 2018, 336 pages, C$39.00 hc, ISBN 978-1-250-15806-2

    Just so that we’re clear on where this review is coming from: I’m not an American, and I’ve never been aboard the Donald Trump train. Like many others, I considered him a joke candidate until he wasn’t, and while I was momentarily intrigued by the idea of an outsider president able to set his own policy agenda outside establishment politics, a pair of articles read in early 2016 definitely made me a Never-Trumper: A transcript of Donald Trump’s meeting with The Washington Post editorial board that portrayed a candidate with serious cognitive problems, and an article from The Atlantic in 2011 describing how Trump personally wrote insulting notes to journalists reporting on him, showing a candidate with even more serious temperamental issues. I’m not claiming to any special deductive power here—what I saw was what everyone saw, and once you are outside the United States’ partisan borders as I am, my opinion is widely, almost universally shared.

    You can imagine that I didn’t sleep much on Election Night.

    The rest, as we now approach the first-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, is slowly sliding into history. It has been an eventful twelve months—even political junkies such as myself regularly risk overdoses when it comes to the carnival of political stories. Trump’s administration has been a rolling dumpster fire of incompetence, meanness and absurdity. While Americans seem to be stuck in a tribal epistemology debate, the rest of the world looks on worryingly and occasionally sends care packages to the remaining sane Americans—Are you OK? We’ll be there for you once this is all over. If we survive.

    Of course, the one-year anniversary of any new administration also sounds the starting gun of a second wave of reporting. Beyond the daily headlines and slightly longer analyses, a full year allows writers to take in the first few months of an administration and write longer pieces taking it all in. News reports and incidents accumulate, becoming data, patterns of behaviour and knowledge. While there have been a few relevant books about the campaign already published (Clinton’s What Happened is on shelves, along with the pro-Trump The Devil’s Bargain about Steve Bannon, and Corey Lewandowski’s Let Trump Be Trump), Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is the first blockbuster book giving readers insider access to the Trump White House’s first two hundred days.

    During that time, Wolff tells us, he basically sat in White House hallways, interviewed various people, listened to random conversations and was able to piece together a coherent picture of the administration. Amazingly enough, Wolff never signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement and was able to ask questions in a way that made people confide in him. The Trump administration thought he was one of theirs, but his conclusions aren’t friendly.

    Consider that most of Fire and Fury’s first chapter consists in presenting a portrait of Donald Trump as a dangerously unintelligent person. Though numerous examples and third-party recollections, we are shown an egomaniac who expected to lose the presidential election, someone uninterested in reading, analysis or decision-making. The essential Trump equals Stupidity equation is hammered over and over again, leaving us to wonder if Wolff has blown his most salient conclusion too early.

    But as it turns out, Trump equals Stupidity is a foundational aspect of the narrative that Wolff builds throughout the book. It is the necessary element to understand the dark comedy of Fire and Fury. The intellectual void at the top of the Trump administration explains why, in its first six months, three warring factions operated within the White House: The establishment Republicans (rep: Reince Preibus), the far-right populists (rep: Steve Bannon) and the president’s own family (rep: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner). Trump being a weak president unable to lead, all factions saw the potential for their viewpoint to prevail, explaining much of 2017’s turmoil.

    In any other administration, Wolff’s book would have been an unprecedented tell-all, vulnerable to basic incredulity—who would believe such a thing? But in Trump’s administration, the warring factions inside the White House leaked so much information throughout their tenure that much of the story has already been told and can readily be believed through corroboration. The leakiest administration in history has already had nearly all of its actions and inner processes extensively documented in public media. In this light, Wolff’s book becomes an exercise in detail and narrative—it provides additional information about actions already publicly described (such as going into further detail as to how Ivanka convinced her dad to send missiles on a Syrian airbase, by showing emotionally poignant pictures of dead children) and wraps up those news reports into something of an overarching theory about the administration.

    The story, as often repeated, is this: Trump is ill-equipped to be the President of the United States. He has neither the knowledge, the temperament nor the abilities to be commander in chief. This void is filled by people around him (few of them competent, because the competent ones know better than to dive in this cesspool), but since there are various factions all aiming for superiority, the results we get are inconsistent, and frequently sabotaged by Trump himself. Wolff tells, time and again, how everyone surrounding Trump has lost their illusions about him. They know him to be inept, and it’s only a matter of time before he turns on them. Those who stay do so because they’re convinced they can use his weakness as a way to further their own ambitions, or because they fear that even worse things would happen if they left.

    The book’s main narrative effectively ends in August 2017, days after the infamous press conference in which Trump refused to condemn neo-Nazi groups in the wake of the tragic Charlottesville events. (I remember that day—we were driving home after a long family trip, and my wife was reading the highlights of the press conference as they came in on her cell phone, while I was shaking my head in redundant disbelief.)  An October 2017 epilogue describes Steve Bannon’s future plans after leaving the White House, suggesting that Trump is merely a component of a larger movement.

    Ironically, the one person who does come out of the book more positively than others is Bannon himself. He was obviously a primary source for Wolff (thanks to the copious amount of Bannon’s inner monologue, but also descriptions of how voluble he can be) and it shows… Bannon’s agenda may be repulsive to most, but the man himself is shown to be more intelligent than most of the other people in the White House, his policy-making efforts sincerer than others, and his warnings going unheeded in the wake of catastrophic PR moves by the administration. Conversely, it goes without saying that the biggest loser of Wolff’s book is Trump himself—an empty shell where a leader should be, a self-destructive fool frequently losing control of himself. (“Dyslexic” and “illiterate” are only a few of the words used to describe him.) Still, those rankings are relative: Nearly everyone in the book is portrayed as being in over their heads, holding on until the pressure is intolerable. But once you accept the Trump equals Stupidity equation, it becomes difficult to be sympathetic to anyone willing to cover up for an unsuitable president.

    The reaction to Fire and Fury in the week-and-a-half since its first excerpts leaked has been as spectacular as it’s been predictable: The national conversation has seriously looked at nigh-unthinkable topics such as “Is the president mentally fit for duty?” prompting the new Trump-issued catchphrase “stable genius.”  The various factions of the Trump White House have started firing denials and accusations about what other factions have said, further reinforcing the book’s thesis. (And as I write this review, the BREAKING NEWS is that Bannon is out of Breitbart, largely due to Fire and Fury. The Trump news never stops, don’t they?)  Wolff has become a minor newsmaker, with post-publication interviews dropping further nuggets of provocation along the way, such as a possible affair in the White House. Clearly, there was an untapped hunger for a Trump-weary nation to discuss these things and the book was a catalyst for the conversation.

    And while it felt really good to read a book that tells it as candidly as possible, I’m not too fond of some aspects of Fire and Fury. Wolff spent a lot of time embedded with the Trump team and some of it has stained him. He sets up, somewhat disingenuously, an overarching polarized conflict between Trump and the media, minimizing that much of the revulsion against Trump and his systematic undermining of institutions goes far beyond the media to the American people at large who, by a three-million-vote margin, collectively preferred Hillary Clinton. There’s no need to portray the media as an antagonist. But then again, Wolff is a New York media creature, and he’s got plenty of baggage about it. In the middle of Fire and Fury, there is a lengthy digression about the New York Observer magazine that Jared Kushner bought, and it feels like score-settling coming out of nowhere. In other spots, the book feels as if it has been rushed through editing, with cumbersome sentence structures that could have used another round of polish.

    But does it matter? Ultimately, I expect that Fire and Fury’s legacy will be dictated by later events. There are roughly seven ways the Trump presidency can end (three of them not advisable to mention unless I want to end up on a list of suspicious foreign nationals) and the conclusion of his presidency will either invalidate or reinforce what Wolff has seen from his perch in the White House.

    And yet, as I proofread this review for publication a few weeks later, I’m struck at how the book both caused and explained Steve Bannon’s fall from grace even from his once-unassailable position in the conservative news media. Destructive agenda aside, Bannon is too smart for his own good … leading him to candid comments and a sentiment that he was essential to his cause. Alas (?), it turns out that he underestimated how much of a tool he was for Trump worshippers. I’m also struck at how much of a good mental model Wolff offered in Fire and Fury to understand how the Trump White House works—and how, as droves of people are quitting or being fired, Trump remains at the middle of the storm, empty, weak and impulsive. We can already tell it won’t end well.

  • The Apartment (1960)

    The Apartment (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2018) For late-twentieth century cinephiles such as myself, Jack Lemmon is first the eponymous Grumpy Old Man, or the miserable salesman of Glengarry Glenn Ross. But this late-career Lemmon is the last act in a long list of roles, and films such as The Apartment (alongside Some Like it Hot and The Odd Couple) do suggest that young Lemmon was the best Lemmon. He’s certainly charming in The Apartment, playing a young man who has struck a most unusual arrangement with his superiors at work: His apartment made available for dalliances, in exchange for professional advancement. The film does begin in firmly comic mode, as the protagonist juggles the schedules of four executives with his own desire to sleep, and then to court an elevator attendant played by Shirley MacLaine. The first half of The Apartment plays as a proto-Mad Men, capped off by a sequence in which Lemmon dons a dapper hat and strolls out like a true New York City professional with a bright future. The look at this slice of 1960 NYC living is terrific and if the film had stopped there, it would have been already worth a look. But there’s a lot of murk under the premise of the film and The Apartment soon heads deeper in those troubled waters, shifting from suggestive comedy to much bleaker romantic drama as the protagonist ends up in romantic conflict with one of his superiors, and then in even darker territory with a suicide attempt that changes everything. Director Billy Wilder had an illustrious career, and the way he shifts adeptly between three subgenres in a single film is a great example of what he could do with difficult material. The Apartment is still unsettling today—less so than upon its release, but it still defies sensibilities. The film’s second half is a great deal less fun than the first, but it does give much of the film’s enduring power.

  • Some Like it Hot (1959)

    Some Like it Hot (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2018) Curiously enough, it takes longer than expected for Some Like it Hot to warm up. The first act, in which two Chicago-based musicians witness a mob murder and decide to go on the run by cross-dressing and joining an all-female musical group to Florida, is occasionally a slog. Sure, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are sympathetic enough, and Marilyn Monroe makes a striking entrance, but the film seems far too busy setting up its ridiculous situation to get many laughs. Things get much better once the story lands in a posh Florida resort, as the complications pile up and the film’s true nature starts coming out. By the time Lemmon’s character has to fake being uninterested in Monroe as she slinks all over him, or as Curtis rather likes the attention he’s getting as a woman, the film starts hitting its peak comic moments. It keeps going to a rather simple but effective final line. It helps, from an atmospheric perspective, that the Floridian passages spend quality time looking at a high-end lifestyle in which yachts are treated as mobile homes for the rich—there’s some wish-fulfillment right there. Thematically, the film has a few surprises in store: For a comedy dealing in cross-dressing and attraction based on misrepresented gender, Some Like it Hot has aged surprisingly well—it’s far less prone to gay panic than you’d expect from a movie from the fifties, and still feels almost progressive in the way it approaches same-sex attraction. As a result of its pro-love anti-hate agenda, it can be rewatched without too much trouble even today, while many (most!) movies of its era feel grossly dated. Much of this credit goes to director Billy Wilder as he allows Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe, to become a terrific comic trio and help the film get over its duller moments. The far more interesting last half makes up for an average beginning, and Some Like it Hot is still worth a look today.