Reviews

  • King of Kings (1961)

    King of Kings (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) I’m not sure there’s anything really interesting to say about King of Kings. One of the last big epics of the wave that began in the 1950s, it tackles perhaps the biggest story in the Western canon—The Passion of the Christ—and gives it the maximalist treatment that blockbuster films went for at the time. It’s melodramatic, unsubtle, garishly dependent on Technicolor and almost exactly what we can imagine from hearing “The Passion of the Christ as filmed in 1960.”  I’m almost sure I watched the film a few times while attending Catholic grade school, and as a result I’m almost disarmed as a reviewer in trying to find anything else to add about the film. It’s an Easter Weekend film staple for a reason — despite relying on acclaimed director Nicholas Ray, it’s one of the most basic takes on its topic, and by the same token one of the most innocuous. I’ll take Jesus Christ Superstar over King of Kings most days of the week, but I can’t deny that it’s one straightforward take on an incredibly familiar story.

  • Rising Sun (1993)

    Rising Sun (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) There are movies worth a look because they are not good, original, timeless or kind-hearted. Rising Sun is one of those. Adapted from a typically hysterical Michael Crichton novel published the previous year, it shamelessly exploits the anti-Japanese rhetoric of the time, at a point where Americans were convinced that the Japan Inc. juggernaut was unstoppable — that it would gobble up companies, dominate manufacturing, steal secrets, control politics and make Washington regret that unfortunate Hiroshima/Nagasaki business. There’s an instructive history lesson in watching Rising Sun’s characters ponder the inscrutable yet all-powerful ways the Japanese are poised to rule, and the reality of what happened later on — enough to make you look twice at any similar prediction made today. But so it goes — Rising Sun is, from its first moments onward, a film made to fan fears. Made in the form of a buddy crime thriller, it features an incredibly American cop (Wesley Snipes, not yet full of himself) paired with a veteran ex-cop (late-career Sean Connery in a rather good interpretation of a bad role) with a deep knowledge of Japanese culture and norms. Connery plays the voice of authority here, confidently instructing us in how exactly the Japanese escape American norms and laws in their all-conquering path. It all feels ridiculous thirty years later, but the point it — many people believed it, and believed it for a long time. The rest of the film is slightly better once it lays off the xenophobia and embraces its familiar nature as a buddy-cop techno-thriller: in keeping with its source novel, Rising Sun peeks at some of the gee-whiz technology of the time (such as real-time surveillance video editing) and occasionally scores a few better moments when it focuses on suspense sequences rather than anti-Japanese racism. (It feebly attempts to distance itself from racism by featuring “good” Japanese characters and a Caucasian villain… but nobody’s fooled.)  Tia Carrere and Steve Buscemi have short appearances. By itself it’s not a very good film — its xenophobia is embarrassing, and so is the way it’s integral to the plot. But the way the film has aged poorly (That other Michael Crichton film of 1993 was… Jurassic Park) should be a hard-hitting lesson to all — racism is bad for all sorts of reasons, one of the longest-lasting of them being how it just makes you look stupid to later generations.

  • How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

    How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2021) There are many, many reasons why How to Marry a Millionaire is a reprehensible film by today’s sensibilities (and perhaps even to the sensibilities of its time), but just as many reasons as to why it doesn’t really matter. The powerhouse cast is a good chunk of it: with Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable playing three women with devious schemes to snag themselves a rich husband (at a time when millionaire meant real money — roughly 10 times as much), the film is a snapshot of early-1950s sex symbols. Bacall is magnificent as the brainiest of the bunch, renting an apartment from a tax-evading millionaire and selling off the furnishings to meet her operational costs. Betty Grable may no longer have the cachet that she did at the time, but she’s also a lot of fun as the energetic Loco. Meanwhile, well — I’ve never been that big of a Monroe fan, but she’s in her best element here in a comedic role, and seeing her spend much of the film wearing cat eye glasses (leading to a very funny scene of mutual myopic flirting) is enough to make me marginally more interested. The other actor worth noting is William Powell, turning in one of his last suave performances as (what else?) a debonair multimillionaire targeted by one of the women. The gold-digging aspect would be far less amusing had it featured in a worse film. Here, however, the script is good enough and the characters are likable enough to overcome any ethical concerns we may have. Romance, in the end, triumphs —and Powell plays the character with enough disposable income to make all inconveniences go away as an amusing trifle. Shot in what would become the classic 1950s widescreen Technicolor sheen, How to Marry a Millionaire is bolstered by great vignettes of New York City, excellent individual scenes, winning performances, and a lighthearted tone that still works very well today. It remains a delight.

  • The Conspirators (1944)

    The Conspirators (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) I’m not sure why it took me so long to discover this, but Warner Brothers turned out a slew of Casablanca-light movies in the mid-1940s. Most of them took place in Europe, dealt with a combination of often-fictionalized European politics and romance, often featured Nazis as villains, and Casablanca performers as players. The Peter Lorre/Sydney Greenstreet duo alone is a good way to identify the half-dozen films in that sub-sub-sub-genre, and here they are indeed in The Conspirators, a film that sticks far closer to Casablanca than the other films in the same vein. Here, the Lorre/Greenstreet pairing is supplemented by Paul Heinreid and the beautiful Hedy Lamarr as members of a Portuguese anti-Nazi resistance group trying to root out a traitor among them. It’s all fairly familiar stuff, but the cast knows what it’s doing, and so does the Warner Brothers apparatus surrounding them. Lamarr is close to her most glamorous here, and the Greenstreet/Lorre combo is a known quantity as well. Churned out quickly to take advantage of topical events and the American public’s appetite for anti-Nazi material, The Conspirators is, in some ways, an ordinary wartime thriller, but the combination of some above-average elements does make the result more interesting even when it’s clearly trying to repeat a much-better film.

  • Panic Button (2011)

    Panic Button (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) Once, just once, I’d like to see a horror spoof in which the evildoers, having uncovered our characters’ innermost secrets thanks to elaborate hacking shenanigans, would despair at the humdrum life that most of us live. No ghastly secrets, no hidden identities, no criminal past, and barely any sordid perversions to be found in Internet search histories. Alas, this is not the world the characters in Panic Button live in, as four British social media users find themselves aboard a private plane flying to their prize vacation. But there’s a lot being kept secret, as a round of “innocent” questions asked by a hidden interviewer reveals that everyone has an implausible number of secrets to hide. And we’re not talking dull secrets either — we’re talking the kind worth killing for, which (this being a horror film) happens very quickly. As the body count goes up and the number of characters goes down, the film more or less goes where you expect an airplane thriller to do (down), with an added epilogue to make it all creepier. Developed on a low budget with a handful of actors and limited sets, Panic Button does quite a bit with what it has, but seen ten years later, does begin to suffer from topical novelty. As we leave the first troll presidency in the back view mirror, cautionary tales of social media run amuck are not just mainstream: they’re getting dull. The hysteric execution does the film no favour either, as the mechanics of its plot get more and more implausible by the minute. I do have some admiration for thrillers taking place almost entirely within the confines of an airplane—there have been some gems in the subgenre—but Panic Button feels a bit too ordinary and on-the-nose to be entirely fun or interesting. Kudos to writer/director Chris Crow for making much out of so little, but ten years later Panic Button seem to be heavy on button-pushing and thin on actual panic.

  • Broadway to Hollywood (1933)

    Broadway to Hollywood (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) One of the defining aspects of the first decade of Hollywood musicals (which could only start after the invention of sound cinema) is how closely they were synonymous with Broadway. In reaching for readymade inspiration, the musicals reached out and grabbed talent, shows, attitudes and best practices from New York’s stage culture. You can see these fingerprints everywhere in 1930s musicals, from shows being adapted to the big screen, to performers jumping from stage to screen, to avowed subject matter revolving around Broadway—and not merely the ever-popular story of “putting on a show.”  Broadway to Hollywood isn’t much of a film, but more interesting when set against this broad 1930s movement. Tracking the story of three generations of theatrical performers as the family trade moves (all together now) from Broadway to Hollywood, it’s a drama more than a musical. Much of the initial narrative has to do with vaudeville losing its lustre and then being truly hammered by early cinema. The last act finds itself in the mansions of Hollywood, with the elderly protagonists having harsh words for what Hollywood has done to their grandsons. Much of the narrative is executed in melodramatic mode—albeit occasionally very satisfying melodrama, as proven by a climactic shove down an armchair—but the most intriguing aspect of the film is in showing, from a very close historical perspective, how American mass entertainment evolved over a lifetime, setting the stage for a cultural landscape far more familiar to us. Broadway to Hollywood has an equally interesting production history — largely shot in 1929 and 1930 in three separate musical streams, shelved when early-early musicals crashed at the box office, reshot and polished off as melodrama in 1933 when a more mature form of musicals once again became hits… the topic becomes the film. There are a few marquee names in here, with most of the contemporary attention going to an incredibly young Mickey Rooney (12!), a puzzling one-scene wonder from Jimmy Durante and a solid turn from Jackie Cooper — although if you want to talk performances, Frank Morgan and Alice Brady are the glue that holds a sometime-disjointed film together as they play the older performers. Broadway to Hollywood is not a completely successful film, but it is fascinating and it does offer a glimpse at a period where the American cultural landscape changed very quickly.

  • The Cleansing Hour (2019)

    The Cleansing Hour (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) As far as low-budget, few-locations horror films go, The Cleansing Hour is a bit better than most. The premise is charmingly 2019ish — what with its protagonists being involved in a webcast series of “live exorcisms” that are really staged events meant to sell merchandise. (Those sequences are accompanied by a chorus of far-too-authentic comments running in the bottom-left of the screen, complete with contemporary memes.)  The deception having being quickly made clear to us viewers, the fun begins when the latest of those fake exorcisms features the lead character’s fiancée, and she starts behaving in supernatural ways. Clearly, we’ve gone from fakery to real demonic possession, and a bunch of fakers are about to get schooled. Don’t worry — the absurdly hyped-up webcasting angle (reaching passional viewers worldwide!) and a subplot involving a young guest of the White House eventually play into the over-the-top climax. The Cleansing Hour is not that good, but neither is it dull or terrible, which is not a bad result for a low-budget effort largely distributed through streaming platforms. There are enough twists and turns in the film’s execution to keep things interesting even if most of it takes place in a dimly-lit recording area with a handful of characters. As far as possession stories, it doesn’t break a lot of new ground, and often relies on dubious plotting crutches (such as someone going crazy at the thought that his fiancé would have slept with his best friend years before they became a couple) and a menagerie of past traumatic experiences to keep its characters defined. Still, when it comes to horror films, writer-director Damien LeVeck’s The Cleansing Hour is a little bit better than most and that’s all it really needs to stick in mind a little bit longer.

  • The Passionate Friends (1949)

    The Passionate Friends (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) It sometimes boggles my mind that David Lean, the acknowledged master of the British epic film who eventually became synonymous with expansive, widescreen adventures largely shot on location and tackling ambitious topics (Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, etc.), had his start on much smaller, far more intimate romances — Including a simple tale of an affair in 1945’s Brief Encounter, and a love-triangle special with The Passionate Friends. The story of a woman who rekindles an old affair through happenstance despite being married to a banker (admittedly a dull one), it’s the kind of stiff-upper-lip British romance that helps perpetuate all sorts of national stereotypes. It’s almost insufferably dull whenever the adulterous lovers are involved in their insufferable should-we-or-shouldn’t-we, but our interest rises sharply whenever her banker husband becomes involved — and decides that he won’t tolerate any hanky-panky. Still, The Passionate Friends is about as far away from epic filmmaking as you can be, with most of the action taking place in quiet rooms and smouldering restraint. It’s not bad, but it does feel longer than its 95 minutes. The last act somewhat redeems the considerable investment you have to make at the onset, but it feels a bit too much like a chore for little payoff.

  • Angels in the Outfield (1951)

    Angels in the Outfield (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Anyone seriously thinking about how baseball is often presented as America’s religion has to watch Angels in the Outfield at least once, if only to experience the delightfully earnest lunacy of a film that explicitly links the two. The story of an abusive baseball team manager who comes to hear angels speak, the film eventually shifts gears when an 8-year-old girl begins seeing the angels on the field helping out the team. Heavenly intervention eventually leads to (what else?) winning the pennant, raising all sorts of thorny issues about divine morality and vulgar sports fandom. The contrast between the sublime and the ridiculous would have been witty, but there’s little ironic detachment exhibited here — Angels in the Outfield clearly and obviously equates godly intervention with the right team winning, and while this was probably heartwarming to the film’s target audience (it was reportedly Eisenhower’s favourite film), it feels like a mash-up of absurdities to anyone who’s not already living within the insanity of America’s twin obsessions. Thematic weirdness aside, the film does have a few moments of charm — the overweight, middle-aged protagonist is played by Paul Douglas in an earnest performance, with the film playing audio tricks around his dialogue so that no swearing could be heard during the actual swearing. Janet Leigh plays a journalist who brings the little girl’s visions to the masses, and Bing Crosby shows up briefly as a co-owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates (which was true at the time). The tone of Angels in the Outfield is very much in line with the reverential treatment that other later baseball movies have adopted as default (Field of Dreams, The Natural), lending a supernatural aspect to the game. As said — it probably works for some… and will feel utterly baffling to anyone outside America’s borders.

  • Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

    Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2021) I was frankly surprised to like Jesus Christ Superstar as much as I did. For one thing, I’ve never been a good Sunday School student — I attended Catholic Schools because those were the only game in small Francophone Eastern-Ontario towns where I grew up, but my knowledge of the bible remains more one of rote memorization. For another thing, perhaps more importantly, I usually despise 1970s musicals: it’s a lost decade filled with depressing productions with bad music, dispiriting sequences and very little of the charm that you could find in even the most average examples of the genre in previous decades. But if Jesus Christ Superstar has a secret weapon, it’s Andrew Lloyd Weber’s rock opera music. There are some really catchy numbers here (my favourite being “What’s the Buzz?”) and this rocking take on Jesus’ last day isn’t sacrilegious as much as it’s exhilarating. I note with some amusement that religious authorities were not amused when the film was released… but fast-forward to 2021 and you’ve got a specialized religious channel playing this as an Easter week special… and padding a 106-minute film to a 180-minute time slot by cramming advertisements between every single musical number. It’s easy to see, however, why the film would be warmly accepted: it’s clearly an attempt to bring religion to the youthful audiences of the 1970s; it portrays Jesus in an uncommonly humane way; and even in its fizzy presentation, it remains reasonably faithful to the Bible. Non-religious audiences will also find more conventional cinematographic qualities to the result:  Thanks to chameleonic director Norman Jewison, its stylish presentation remains a draw even now. The framing device is a delight, Carl Anderson is quite good as Judas (to the point of sometimes challenging who’s the protagonist of the film), Yvonne Elliman is a striking beauty as Mary Magdalene and the pacing of the film is significantly more dynamic than expected, especially if your closest equivalents are films such as King of Kings or The Last Temptation of Christ — after all, even Catholic School renegades such as myself can tell you the story from A(rrest) to Z(urrection) even if Jesus Christ Superstar stops well before the truly unpleasant parts. A pleasant surprise, then — and one of the strongest musicals of the decade as far as I’m concerned.

  • Frankenstein General Hospital (1988)

    Frankenstein General Hospital (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) Public domain monsters are meant to be re-used in ways that their long-dead creators couldn’t possibly have imagined, so let’s not mourn Mary Shelley’s creation being featured a silly horror-themed hospital comedy. From the first few moments (cultivating the black-and-white aesthetics of Frankenstein’s lab, even in a modern colour film), it’s obvious that Frankenstein General Hospital is swinging wildly for every joke that comes to its mind, even if they’re not exactly the wittiest. Oh, there are a few moments here and there — combining the blind man and the little girl that the monster encounters is fun enough, but the nods to the mythos are not meant to be profound nor all pervasive. This modern-day “sequel” sees one of the Doctor’s descendants replicating his ancestor’s experiments in the sub-basement of a hospital by taking body parts from unwillingly deceased patients. It doesn’t take a long time for the overacting, the overly broad humour and the uneven jokes (many of them running gags) to strike. Frankenstein General Hospital is clearly meant to be a dumb comedy, but it loses something by simply trying too hard — the mugging occasionally becomes obnoxious, and the danger of a running gag is that if it doesn’t work the first few times, you’re stuck with it for the rest of the film. Fortunately, the last half is better than the first, once the humour gets less obnoxious and the pieces are all in play — including the monster. The lack of wit occasionally plays in the film’s favour — at least for a segment of the audience: I will always appreciate any sequence of enthusiastic sudden toplessness (this time featuring Katie Caple in an elevator), but naughty slapstick is not necessarily a broad crowd-pleaser. At least it’s a step up from the basement gags that populate the rest of the film. If you try hard enough, you can find a few elements of interest — a dominatrix psychologist (Kathy Shower), a hideously more effective joke past 2013 (“Boston Marathon special”—I thought it was an addition from contemporary dubbing, but no—it’s from the original 1988 script). Frankenstein General Hospital is not good, but it’s almost enjoyable in a low-grade try-hard way, with one bonus point or two if you’d rather see nudity than nihilistic horror.

  • The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975)

    The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2021) An exasperated Jack Lemmon was, for decades, one of cinemas most reliable comic engine and The Prisoner of Second Avenue is ample proof of that… even if it’s substantially darker than many other comedies in his filmography. A tale of mid-1970s alienation told with sarcasm, it’s about a man who starts the film as a comfortable middle-aged man, then experiences one indignity after another until he snaps and spends much of the film flouting social conventions even as further indignities accumulate. Adapted from a Neil Simon play, it does feature some wonderful dialogue and clever character work — plus there’s a telling reflection of the way Manhattan must have felt in the mid-1970s, with garbage strikes, petty crime, friction between neighbours and constant noise weighing down on its citizens. (I encourage a themed double-feature with the original The Out-of-Towners for more of Lemmon’s exasperation in the streets of New York City.)  Anne Bancroft provides a lot of support as the put-upon wife developing her own crankiness along the way, and Sylvester Stallone pops up in a small funny role. A few factors, however, do take The Prisoner of Second Avenue out of the top tier of Lemmon comedies. For one thing, it’s not quite always played for laughs — the comedy can be dark at times. For another, tales of middle-class urban alienation have been a staple since well before the mid-1970s, and this one is not always distinctive enough to leave a mark. Still, it’s a solid film and one that does get Lemmon the chance to run through some of his most comfortable material.

  • Only the Lonely (1991)

    Only the Lonely (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2021) In the John Candy filmography, Only the Lonely remains a bit of an oddball. Eschewing the typical slapstick comedy starring Candy as an idiot who eventually does well, this romantic comedy takes its cues from the classic Marty in presenting Candy as a gentle but single policeman with a domineering mother who finally gets a chance at a romance with a shy girl… if only his mother stopped interfering. Candy avoids most of the slapstick here, in service of a more heartfelt and vulnerable character. It’s very much a film about an urban neighbourhood and the people that live in it: neighbours, shops and community events. In this context, Ally Sheedy makes for a rather adorable love interest, albeit one whose main role for much of the film is to absorb a terrifying amount of nastiness and scorn from the protagonist’s mom (a detestable Maureen O’Hara) until she snaps and precipitates the climax of the film. Written and directed by Chris Columbus (but produced by John Hughes), it’s never a surprising film (we all know where it’s going, and that’s part of the charm) but it’s reasonably well-made even when it’s almost completely unmemorable. But Candy is at his likable best, and Only the Lonely runs a long, long time on that strength. All the way to the happy ending, in fact, anything else would have been a betrayal.

  • The FBI Story (1959)

    The FBI Story (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) National propaganda can take many forms, including a grandfatherly James Stewart narrating the officially approved story of the American national police force. So it is that The F.B.I. Story is one more Hollywoodian take on the FBI (also see the classic G Men), approved by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself. From the opening moment, we understand that it’s at least entertaining propaganda: As Stewart begins with the procedural details of how an airplane bomber (itself a then-new and disturbing concept) was caught through meticulous investigation, it sets up The FBI Story as a tale of how an organization can do no wrong. Stewart then plays an agent over the first few decades of the organization’s history, first in imposing some discipline over a lax and scattered organization, then in tackling progressively more difficult cases. In-passing, we get a look at the gallery of rogues that captured the American imagination from the 1930s to the 1950s —Ku Klux Klan, mobsters, Nazis and communists. Vera Miles plays the protagonist’s wife, providing enough domestic incidents to tie the episodic structure of the film together. It’s charming in an intensely paternalistic way — clearly outlining the FBI as a good, even infallible force for order, and their opponents as enemies of the state. (One wonders how the film would have been less amusing had it been completed even a decade later.)  Stewart is often too old to play his role, but he is Stewart and, as such, almost unassailable as the lead voice in the film. Some of the vignettes do represent a revealing look at episodes of American history, even as heavily fictionalized as they are — there’s something about its unspoken racist assumptions (just wait until it talks about Native Americans) that present history filtered through 1950s mainstream attitudes, and the dissonance with modern values can often be arresting. Despite its heavy-handed moral patronization, The FBI Story nonetheless remains a curiously involving film: the script can often be wryly funny, and Stewart’s charm does patch up a lot of issues. It certainly makes for a fascinating case study in media literacy, or how entertainment can serve the state’s interest in hyping its police as essential, righteous and all-powerful.

  • Possessor (2020)

    Possessor (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Fiction genres are tricky in that they can be as much about content than tone. Science Fiction, for instance, can be about “stories in the future,” but SF can also be about a way to tell a story, with unspoken but strong conventions as to which kind of approach is forbidden. Along those lines, it’s interesting to see something like Possessor pop up, telling us a familiar story of jacked-in assassins taking over other people’s bodies, but doing so in a way that owes a lot more to gory body horror than traditional SF. It’s almost too easy to point out that it’s from Brandon “Son of David” Cronenberg — but with his filmography so far, younger Cronenberg seems to be tackling topics very similar to the earlier films of his father. Possessor is kin to his earlier Antiviral in being put together in a way that’s deliberately off-putting to viewers. A mixture of gore, blood, violent imagery, unpleasant topics, droning soundtrack and actors put in unglamorous makeup, it’s a familiar story told in unfamiliar ways, with a mean attitude and an unforgiving finale. Never mind the assassination plot having to do with a corporate takeover: the core of the film is in the way the lead character is manipulated in getting rid of anything tying her back to humanity. It’s both unpleasant to watch (you’ve never seen Andrea Riseborough look so awful, or Jennifer Jason Lee playing such a falsely-frumpy middle manager, or Tuppence Middleton being put through such a wringer) and unnerving in how it goes from one uncomfortable set-piece to another. The body-snatching assassin thing is almost a common trope, but few other films have consciously looked into the anti-heroic, anti-power-fantasy flip-side of such things. The toll of the job is immense, and the film goes in a very different, almost decidedly noir nihilism in solving the conflict. I’m not sure I’m ever going to see Possessor again, but I’m not at all indifferent to the result.