Reviews

  • Souls for Sale (1923)

    Souls for Sale (1923)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) My appreciation for 1920s silent movies only goes so far, but I was curious to see how far back the “young woman goes to Hollywood to become a star” genre went back, and the earliest stop I’ve found so far (there are doubtless others) is Souls for Sale, a 1923 comedy/drama that has our proverbial heroine indeed landing in Hollywood to become a star. But there are complications so thorny that they wouldn’t be imitated in later years. For instance, the opening segment has our heroine dropping off the train she is riding with her new husband and discovering a movie-shooting troupe in the desert, just as we discover that her no-good new husband is a serial killer who marries, robs and kills young women. If you think that’s far-fetched, you haven’t seen anything yet: Our heroine makes an impression on the star and director of the movie she stumbles on, but refuses to follow them back to Los Angeles, taking up a job in a hotel that lasts about ten seconds before she once again heads over to Hollywood in the kind of useless plot kink that no modern screenwriter would dare include. (If it’s any help, the film is based on writer-director Rupert Hughes’s own rather turgid novel, which is now in the public domain and can be found online easily enough.) It gets much wilder later in the film, as the no-good ex-husband goes to Europe, meets a woman who swindles him in the same manner he usually does, and makes his way back to Hollywood having seen his ex-wife in movies. But the real interest of Souls for Sale is elsewhere—in the glimpse at 1923 moviemaking, with the Hollywood mystique already in full swing. Amazingly enough, even a relative silent movie neophyte such as myself was surprised to recognize Erich von Sternberg filming Greed, or Charlie Chapin (sans moustache) directing one of his movies—the film spends a few minutes simply revelling in taking us backstage and telling us all about how Hollywood worked, even as the title means to imply a condemnation of the entire town. But it doesn’t. Unsurprisingly, this film actually likes Hollywood (one notes that director Hugues was the uncle of movie magnate Howard Hughes), especially when the killer ex-husband (who doesn’t actually kill anyone throughout the film) is a more immediate villain. Souls for Sale can be a messy mix of style at times: in addition to the thriller aspect, the wish-fulfillment aspect and the behind-the-scenes aspect, the film isn’t above a few pure comedy gags, especially when it comes time to show the underside of the dream factory. (I was particularly fond of the “Lunch. Lunch! LUNCH!!!” title cards.) This bizarre mixture does make the film messy and undisciplined in the way later movies wouldn’t be. On the other hand, it does make Souls for Sale far more interesting than most of the straight dramas of the 1920s—there’s a rough vitality to the result that’s about as interesting as the realization that not as much has changed in the hundred years since the film was put together. And those are the things that can catch my interest even in 1920s films, an era of film that I often find more educational than purely entertaining.

  • True Confessions (1981)

    True Confessions (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Ideally, movies start with an intriguing hook, then build to a good conclusion. True Confessions doesn’t. Oh, the hook is there all right: taking us back to 1940s Los Angeles, the film quickly sets up a mixture of crime drama (featuring a murder similar to the Black Dahlia case), then complicates it with ties to the Catholic Church and powerful real estate developers, and executes its narrative with none other than Robert de Niro and Robert Duvall as, respectively, a Catholic operative and a police detective with temper issues. So far so good, especially when the film manages a low-budget but decent neo-noir atmosphere. The problem with True Confessions, however, is that it goes nowhere after that. The film plays with its crime story but gradually disengages from it, and never quite manages to reach any dramatic intensity. The ending flops hard, no providing any satisfaction. You can appreciate the film for the performances of now-veteran actors as younger men, but True Confessions does itself no favours by setting itself up to be compared with much-better movies such as L.A. Confidential or Chinatown, and then stripping away all the complexity that its betters embraced. There’s little joy to be found inside the film either, with a slow pacing that doesn’t seem to bring anything to the film. At times, True Confessions feels like a late-period degenerate example of the New Hollywood—gritty and grimy and slow and low-stakes but not building to anything more along the way. Such a disappointment—it’s the first rule in the screenwriter’s handbook that a good conclusion forgives a lot of past sins, and True Confessions can’t even manage that.

  • Thunder Bay (1953)

    Thunder Bay (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) For a born-and-bred Ontarian, “Thunder Bay” carries an entirely different meaning than the title of a James Steward adventure film imagining the construction of the first offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. But here we are with Thunder Bay. This comparatively minor entry in the Stewart filmography has him as a genius (but broke) oilman with the vision and know-how to propose building an oil drilling platform off the shore of Louisiana. The film gets us from the initial pitch to oil gushing out of the derrick, with clashes with the fishing locals and some thunderous romance along the way. Filmed in very nice Technicolor, it’s an interesting procedural, even if Stewart isn’t always the best fit for a rugged oilman character—his urbane screen persona is not necessarily serving him well here, even though Stewart spent much of the 1950s pursuing more outdoorsy roles, as his time as a romantic lead was running out. The result is easy enough to watch, although twenty-first century viewers may not be entirely convinced by the film’s pro-oil stance, clearly stating that oil was central to the survival of the United States (a sentiment echoed in the near-contemporary and almost complementary Tulsa, for instance) and pretending that fishermen and oilmen could co-exist, especially after the Deepwater Horizon ecological disaster. But you have to get into the spirit of the 1950s to appreciate the film, especially when it resorts to the romantic tropes of an overbearing father deciding would-be suitors for their daughter, or the coarse poverty of the Louisiana town that acts as a base of operation for the enterprise, or even the saloon scene that brings to mind other Stewart westerns such as Destry Rides Again. I rather enjoyed Thunder Bay with the engineering-friendly portion of my brain, as an oil-drilling procedural with then-new technology—the first offshore deployment in the Gulf of Mexico dates from 1947, if I’ve got my notes right, and Thunder Bay was filmed on this Kerr-McGee site while a political fight erupted in Washington over legislating this new oil rush. I also enjoyed seeing Stewart at work, obviously, even if I’m not sure about the cast: at least he’s got the aw-shuck inspirational messaging done right. I suspect that many other viewers won’t get as much out of the film at all. If you want to hear James Stewart talk about the other Thunder Bay in northern Ontario, have a look at Anatomy of a Murder instead.

  • Hearts of the West (1975)

    Hearts of the West (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I had a harder time than I expected in watching Hearts of the West. Starring Jeff Bridges as a 1930s naïve would-be writer heading west to gather fresh material for his prose, and then to Hollywood to escape a pair of criminals, this film has a lot of elements that I would consider enjoyable. Bridges as a young man, some material about naïve writers, the ever-cute Blythe Danner as the love interest (any resemblance to Gwyneth Paltrow is strictly maternal) and, more interestingly, a look at Hollywood in the everything-goes 1930s before westerns became respectable. But it’s when you dig into the details that it all becomes much messier. For instance, I never got a good handle on its lead character: written as a naïve kid with literary delusions, he’s played by a too-old Bridges as somewhat wiser than what’s on the page: I would have enjoyed the film more had the character been something else—perhaps coming from an eastern city rather than the farm, or something. And while Hearts of the West has been described as having an off-beat tone, the reality feels more undisciplined than anything else: the good moments are undercut with tonal shifts and tangents that don’t do much to reinforce the film itself. Oh, Alan Arkin is good as an old-school producer and Andy Griffith is unusually likable as a has-been star would-be plagiarist. But the low budget seemingly limits the film from creating an immersive look at 1930s filmmaking, and the film doesn’t have a plot as much as an excuse to string along various scenes. In the end, Hearts of the West is intermittently interesting, not quite as likable as it should have been and somewhat vexing in how it squanders promising elements.

  • Bing feng: Yong heng zhi men [Iceman: The Time Traveler] (2018)

    Bing feng: Yong heng zhi men [Iceman: The Time Traveler] (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) Imagine my surprise, upon sitting down to watch Iceman: The Time Traveler, to get a big-budget, high-imagination first few minutes rushing through an entire movie’s worth of plot in less than five minutes: All right, now we’re off to the races, I thought. A quick search confirmed that this was a sequel, and that the prologue was a trailer-sized summary of the first film. Now that the origin story was out of the way, I was hoping that the film could move to more interesting material than its premise of feuding Ming-era warriors being frozen and sent to modern times. Unfortunately, I had already seen the best of what the film had to offer: The Time Traveler lives up to its title by taking us from the modern era back a few hundred years, then to the 1920s, then all over the place in a plot that disintegrates the longer it goes on. Save for a somewhat spectacular final sequence set aboard a train that keeps going through time, the action and spectacle in the film are lacking, with superstar Donnie Yen turning in the strict minimum. There are one or two beats about the inevitability of a closed time loop (recast in romantic tragedy) but otherwise the result just isn’t all that interesting, and the incoherency of the film goes far beyond lacking cultural references or having to rely on translated subtitles. Digging deeper in the film’s production and reception in China reveals that Iceman: The Time Traveler remains one of the biggest flops of recent years—there’s a contentious production history between Yen and the film’s producers, as well as scathing reviews from Chinese-language sources. No wonder it’s even less interesting to western audiences: it’s just a bad film from the start.

  • Make Me a Star (1932)

    Make Me a Star (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I am an avowed sucker for movies about movies. I will record nearly everything that has to do with movies about Hollywood, and that goes double for older films showing us older depictions of Tinseltown in its glory days. In other words, I had to see Make Me a Star, a satirical film in which a young man (in an unusual gender shift from the usual young woman) goes to Hollywood with big dreams. Unfortunately for him and unfortunately for us, the lead character is a dim-witted clerk whose ambitions greatly outstrip his talent—and he doesn’t learn much over the course of the film. Inexplicably taken under the wing of a star (Joan Blondell, the best thing about the film), he’s tricked into being unintentionally hilarious by comedy film producers who make him think that he’s starring in a serious drama. It would be a nice story if we actually cared about the main character, but Stuart Erwin has a detestable screen presence playing a dumb character without much to redeem for it. Cloying, naïve and barely tolerable, his protagonist is a very weak anchor for the film and it becomes even worse when they turn his pitiable character into a romantic hero. (A 1947 remake, Merton of the Movies, is sitting on my DVR right now—I’m hoping that it will do justice to the story.) I did, to be fair, like the look at early-1930s western filmmaking, inside the studio and among the superstars of the day through plenty of cameos. There’s also a provocative comparison here in having the lead being a man—it substantially changes the equation regarding gender-specific exploitation. But much of Make Me a Star itself is just grating beyond its strengths.

  • Don’t Make Waves (1967)

    Don’t Make Waves (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) The mid-1960s were a strange time for Hollywood movies—at once poking and prodding at the social changes occurring over the United States, yet still being held back by decades of slavish adherence to the Hays Code. One of the laboratories through which to study this interregnum is the sex comedy genre, which pushed the envelope… but never too much. They feel charmingly quaint these days, as they play with ideas of infidelity, female characters with their own sexual agenda, and newish modes of living, such as muscle-bound surfers. Is it any surprise if much of it is about the ways Californians were breaking free from US orthodoxy? Such is the situation at the beginning of Don’t Make Waves as a New York promoter drives to California with everything he owns in his car… only to lose it all due to the actions of an inattentive Italian artist. This forces him to live with her, however briefly, and get caught up in a complex web of infidelity, surfing hippies, swimming pool salesmanship and unstable coast-side housing. Tony Curtis is up to his usual good standards as the fast-talking New Yorker almost completely out of his element on the West Coast, but most of the attention usually goes to his female co-stars: Sharon Tate in one of her few roles, this time as a young fit surfer, and the divine Claudia Cardinale as the scatterbrained Italian at the root of his problems. There’s clearly a satirical intention to Don’t Make Waves that’s probably wasted today, as the film goes from one contemporary hot topic to another in a way that may be less obvious in a future in which these topics have become commonplace. Much of the film’s comedy is to be found in one weird situation or another, although the film does hit a highlight later on by featuring a big physical comedy set-piece as the characters are stuck in a house tumbling down a hill. Don’t Make Waves is certainly not a great movie, but like many lesser-known films of the 1960s, it offers a slightly different view on the obsessions of the time, and perhaps even a more honest one even through the comic exaggerations.

  • Coquette (1929)

    Coquette (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I do better when I approach 1920s movies with low expectations. To its credit, Coquette is one of the first dramatic films of the sound era—and it features then-megastar Mary Pickford in her first non-silent role. Unlike many movie actors who couldn’t deal with the transition to talking movies, Pickford did well: Her theatrical experience showed in her use of a rather pleasant voice, and Coquette is a decent showcase in a different acting style than the silent movie roles that led her to fame. Her character here isn’t the kind of cute girl that she played throughout most of the silent era, though: cutting off her curls, she here plays a young woman trying to reconcile her romantic feelings for a young man against the wishes of her father. The stage is set for a very melodramatic film, and that’s what we get, all the way to a somewhat glum ending shot. From a technical perspective, the film is clearly from the 1929, with the flickering images of the time supplemented by the rough technicalities of the early sound era: scratchy low-fidelity dialogue, and bolted-down cameras in their own soundproof booths. It does make the film a bit harder to watch for non-initiates, but I can guarantee that it’s better than if it was constantly interrupted by title cards, as it would have been even three years earlier: Enabled by sound, Coquette does get to use the tools of theatrical dialogue to good effect. I wouldn’t exactly call the result compelling, but Coquette is interesting both as a representative technical milestone of the films of the early sound era but also as its own melodramatic narrative, presenting a somewhat downbeat story the likes of which would largely disappear from Hollywood mainstream until the New Hollywood of the 1970s. It exceeded my low expectations, which is about as nice a thing I can say about 1920s drama films.

  • Bus Stop (1956)

    Bus Stop (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) For movie buffs, Bus Stop is probably best known for being one of Marilyn Monroe’s few dramatic roles, following her year spent studying acting at New York City’s Actors Studio. It does demonstrate some range from her, although she does remain more memorable as a comedienne than a dramatic artist. The film itself shows a romance between two imperfect people, a naïve cowboy and a small-time signer—best showing its theatrical roots through a heavy reliance on two people verbally interacting through their own character growth. There’s an interesting aspect to the film in how it plays with some classic western tropes while in the setting of 1950s America—there’s a strange blend of cowboys and buses, saloon singers and telephones. On a visual level, the film couldn’t be more of a 1950s Technicolor film if it tried: If you came across the film cold, you’d be surprised at the blue-and-yellow flesh tone—it’s worth wondering if the film, as shown, has even been restored properly. As a romantic drama, Bus Stop does rely on very dramatic moments, and any appreciation of the film will hinge on whether those moments are believable or not. But there’s an interesting simplicity to the result, focusing more and more intently on the two lead characters until the climax that brings it all together.

  • World Without End (1956)

    World Without End (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) From the first few moments on, it’s clear that World Without End dates from the early rough days of Science Fiction as a self-aware movie genre. The science is so spectacularly wrong that it’s not even worth nit-picking. The production values are lower than what even a cheap modern made-for-video movie would accept, and the acting… well, the acting is typical 1950s histrionics. The film momentarily becomes more interesting when our plucky astronauts sent forward in time land on a future Earth and discover an underground society of survivors. But just wait, because it only takes a few more minutes to realize that we’re watching a cheap watered-down version of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine with its effete Eloi and brutish Morlock. Anyone allergic to the way gender roles were defined in the 1950s will be aghast at the film’s built-in politics, with future men being portrayed as wimpy degenerates, even as future women are beautiful and ready for romance with the hunky “real” men from the past. There’s even a shirtless scene that defines the entire film’s rough approach to how it approaches its themes… and it’s almost as hilarious as it’s terrible. (There’s some irony in how the said shirtless hunk is played by Rod Taylor, who would later go on to star in the authorized version of The Time Machine.) To be entirely fair, World Without End was not meant to be a prestige picture, nor an intellectual picture, or even anything more than a low-budget B-movie. But it’s in those down-and-dirty pictures that we can often get a clearer reflection of the cultural matrix of their creation, and if you can look past the ramshackle sets, ridiculous dialogue and derivative plotting, there’s something really interesting in here, and it’s something most often seen in exploitation genre pictures than slick contemporary dramas. There’s clearly a terrific double feature to be had with World Without End and Queen of Outer Space (also directed by Edward Bernds!) as complementary illustrations of the way blunt 1950s gender politics were clearly expressed in science fiction movies.

  • Topper Returns (1941)

    Topper Returns (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) As much as I’ve grown allergic to overly laborious origin stories in other circumstances (for instance, in movies about already widely-known characters), there is a definite strangeness in stepping into a series through the third instalments, with many series characteristics already established and in play without much justification. Topper Returns is the third instalment in a series featuring a mild-mannered banker with the power of seeing ghosts, and the complications that ensue when his wife doesn’t understand what’s going on. Clearly playing into its established mythology, it does move at a fairly fast clip—our heroine gets killed (taking it rather well), then finds Topper and recruits him to both solve her own murder and prevent her friend from being murdered as well. The tone of the film is semi-comic—despite the violence inherent in the premise, the characters are upbeat, and the film can’t help but feature a befuddled wife and a bewildered black servant. (I’d like for the servant character to be less stereotyped, but it’s a 1941 film, and the character goes gets a decent amount of screentime.) There’s a pleasant, well-oiled quality to the way the film runs through its paces, exploiting its spooky house setting (always a favourite of mine) and actually going through a surprising amount of plot in less than 90 minutes. The optical special effects are quite good in their own way. Topper Returns is arguably more popular today than its predecessors thanks to accidentally ending up in the public domain, but it’s a reasonably good movie in its own right.

  • Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)

    Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) Predictably enough, Someone’s Watching Me! checks off most items on the list of characteristics for early rough movies from a now-famous director: It was made for TV, features a simplistic plot line, and keeps costs low by shooting near Los Angeles. For a long time, this early effort from John Carpenter was almost impossible to find due to its humble origins, and I suspect that catching it on a French-language channel is a bit of a fluke. Still, even for early pre-Halloween work from Carpenter, there are a few nice things here. It’s directed with some competence within the limits of its production: the action moves at a decent pace, the budgetary limits don’t show all that much and it’s not unpleasant to watch. Perhaps more significantly, here we have a 1978 film already tackling the now-commonplace issue of a technologically savvy stalker harassing a single woman. The film is fascinated with then-cutting-edge technology (something reinforced by its opening credits typeface) and the patina now given by the period setting is increasingly fascinating. In other words, Someone’s Watching Me! remains an interesting film even if you abstract the fact that it was directed by Carpenter—a small-scale techno-thriller with a likable heroine (plus a sidekick being played by Adrienne Barbeau) and a great matter-of-fact late-1970s atmosphere.

  • The Tunnel of Love (1958)

    The Tunnel of Love (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) The late 1950s were a turning point for legendary singer-dancer-actor Gene Kelly: getting older, he turned his MGM fame into an opportunity to start directing movies. The best known of them probably remains Hello Dolly!, but the first would be the comparatively little-known The Tunnel of Love, a romantic comedy that pushes some disquieting buttons, such as marital infidelity. (Heck—much of the film’s later half is built on the suggestion of infidelity leading to a pregnancy leading to a baby being adopted by the man and his increasingly furious wife.) With such touchy material, it’s no wonder if the film flopped and the critics were not kind—with a number of contemporary reviews being particularly uncomfortable about the boundaries that the film was pushing in terms of sexual frankness. The Tunnel of Love feels tame today, but there’s still some material in here that seems cruel to the female lead: a combination of patriarchal aloofness and contrived avoidance of essential discussions that makes the film less than pleasant to watch even today. (This is one of those films where the plot falls apart if the two main characters had good ongoing communication.) Filmed in black-and-white, it also carries a connotation of seriousness that other colour comedies of the time didn’t have. Richard Widmark is not entirely suited to a role that crucially carries the film—Doris Day, meanwhile, is more pitiable than comic as his long-suffering wife. The direction itself is somewhat unremarkable, perhaps more noteworthy for the topic matter than the actual craftsmanship that it demonstrates. Kelly would later do much better as a director: even in the same infidelity-comedy ballpark, A Guide for the Married Man, ten years later, would be funnier and more interesting to watch, probably buoyed by changing mores and acceptance of a saucy topic matter.

  • The Exterminator (1980)

    The Exterminator (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) If you want an illustration of how ugly cinema became in the 1970s and how ready it was for this ugliness to be glossed up in the 1980s, you could scarcely do better than watch The Exterminator, which seems dead intent to redo Death Wish except with even more sadism. The story is about a Vietnam veteran taking revenge over a gang of criminals that sent an old combat buddy in a coma, but if you were fast-forwarding throughout the film, you could be forgiven for thinking that the film is about a PTSD-afflicted vet going on a gory rampage throughout Manhattan—threatening people with a flamethrower, leaving them to be eaten by rats, and dumping one of them in a meat grinder. There’s usually a line between anti-hero and psychotic nutcase, but The Exterminator doesn’t really know about that. Writer-director James Glickenhaus justifies its gory vigilantism by creating a climate of overwhelming darkness as per the prevailing mood of the 1970s, complete with a sitting US senator torturing a young woman with a soldering iron in the basement of a Manhattan brothel. It’s all too much, too ridiculous, too over-the-top and out-of-touch. While the opening Vietnam segment feels cheap, the rest of the film manages to claw its way to simple competency, but it’s the ugliness of the message that stays with viewers. Now, let’s not kid ourselves: 1980s vigilante action movies were not necessarily less gruesome in their celebration of so-called heroes killing criminals in cold blood—but they realized that the gore had to be toned down and transformed into rousing action, and that heroes needed more background for audience empathy. Still, The Exterminator shows a sorry intersection between ugly 1970s urban thrillers and out-and-out slasher movies: it’s not a high point.

  • Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

    Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) Nominally a biopic about the life of composer Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By is perhaps best seen as an anthology showcase for MGM’s roster of musical talents. The story itself is perfunctory, largely fictional, and revolves around Kern’s best-remembered Show Boat. (Amusingly enough, Till the Clouds Roll By begins with a twenty-minute recreation of several of Show Boat’s set-pieces, years before MGM’s official adaptation—which also featured Kathryn Grayson in the same role.) There’s some additional resonance knowing that Kern died during filming—it’s too bad that his Hollywood years were scarcely covered here, the climax of the fictionalized story having occurred earlier. But that overall plot quickly gets forgiven and trivialized when you get down to the meat of the film, which is a series of nearly thirty musical numbers (some of them very short) featuring some very well-known names and fan favourites. The film gets off to a very strong start during its Show Boat sequence with performances by Kathryn Grayson, the always-funny Virginia O’Brien and a spellbinding Lena Horne. Later highlights include a surprisingly saucy Angela Lansbury, Dinah Shore, a trio of numbers by Judy Garland, Lucille Bremer with Van Johnson, a very short but still impressive dance number with Cyd Charisse, and a final rendition of “Ol’ Man River” by none other than a young Frank Sinatra. When you have such a strong cast of performers, the plot itself becomes inconsequential. While Till the Clouds Roll By doesn’t manage to create the alchemy required to become a great movie musical, it’s a strong collection of material and performers, and it will be best appreciated by those with some understanding (and appreciation) for the roster of mid-1940s MGM musical performers. [December 2021: Now that I’ve seen the 1951 version of Show Boat and read about its production, Till the Clouds Roll By becomes a precious document: a glimpse into an alternate reality where Lena Horne would have played the part that was so well suited to her rather than Ava Gardner.]