Reviews

  • Cover Girl (1944)

    Cover Girl (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Just as I thought I had seen all of Gene Kelly’s better musicals, here is Cover Girl to reassure me that I’d missed at least one. A good musical by most standards, Cover Girl was singled out by at least one film historian as the first in an illustrious series of musicals in which the plot was advanced during the songs, and the first collaboration between Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. It’s also one of Kelly’s first efforts at choreographing his own dance numbers, and a film that hones in the typical self-aware style of Classic Hollywood musicals with wit and humour. Rita Hayworth shares the screen with Kelly, a pairing that works surprisingly well. The dance numbers are varied and well-executed, with a decent amount of visual innovation throughout the film. Surprisingly enough, it’s not an MGM musical — Kelly was loaned to Columbia (for their first colour musical) on the promise that he’d be able to stage the film’s numbers, but MGM definitely took notes when the film was a box-office success. Latter MGM/Freed films would come much closer to the example set by Cover Girl, and the result was an extraordinary string of timeless musicals. As for Cover Girl itself, it’s good — not great, but interesting enough in its own right that it’ll charm musical fans. Oh, and there are plenty of cover girls to gawk at, so the title is not misleading advertising.

  • Stand and Deliver (1988)

    Stand and Deliver (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Inspiring-teacher stories are well worn by now, but I suspect that they may not have been so common at the time that Stand and Deliver came out in 1988. Considering the rather large corpus that followed in the same genre in the early 1990s, it’s interesting to go to this earlier example in its rough effectiveness. Filmed with a low budget and plenty of noble intentions, it’s a film that tells the story of a teacher who accepts to teach mathematics in a challenging neighbourhood, where the students are almost entirely uninterested in the course load and plenty of non-academic obstacles threaten their grades. In other words — more or less the same story. But what sets Stand and Deliver apart, even today, is an unusual refusal to make its protagonist glamorous — As played by Edward James Olmos, protagonist Jaime Escalante is a balding, meek, even silly looking. But following the real-life Escalante, Olmos shows that there’s more than one way to tech effectively: He manages to get his students onboard while avoiding the too-familiar strong-arm tactics of lesser movies, and eventually leads his students to great academic success. (Although not in the single year the film portrays!)  Stand and Deliver is familiar and likable at once, with plenty of charm even today — and the added dimension of it being an early example of Latino-made filmmaking is inspiring in itself.

  • A Lovely Way to Die (1968)

    A Lovely Way to Die (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) As much as I enjoy discovering the past classics of cinema, sometimes there’s no substitute for the kind of downmarket low-brow genre picture that more clearly reflects the quirks of its time than the timeless classics. Which brings us to A Lovely Way to Die, a slightly-trashy neo-noir swingin’ detective film best qualified as obscure. Whatever claim to an enduring legacy it has is solely in the casting: With none other than Kirk Douglas playing the lead character, the film automatically becomes more interesting. It doesn’t take much more than a few moments into the film, with its bombastic musical score and depiction of Douglas as a manly late-1960s renegade police detective, to realize what kind of film we’re getting — a type of film that would mutate in blaxploitation, but clearly belongs to its time. Dimpled-jawed Douglas plays the protagonist exactly like he should: without subtlety and with reactionary zeal, anticipating Eastwood’s Dirty Harry by two years. The plot is a murky concoction of matrimonial murder gussied up in tough-guy detective thriller, with Douglas smouldering so intensely that none of the female characters can resist him for long. Mostly shot in a vast mansion, the film does make its way to a courtroom in time for the third act. Douglas is a delight here, but maybe not for the right reasons — seeing a progressive icon like him play a reactionary tough cop who quits the force after bristling at criticism of his brutal methods is amusing, and having him being roughly twenty years too old for the part is additional material for hilarity. A Lovely Way to Die itself is average, but it’s the late-1960s quirks that make it special.

  • The Devil Makes Three (1952)

    The Devil Makes Three (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Even when not singing and dancing, Gene Kelly was blessed with considerable charm as an actor, and his presence in The Devil Makes Three transforms what could have been an unremarkable postwar genre picture. Here he plays an American aviator who returns to Germany (during his annual Christmas vacations!) to meet again with a family that saved him during the War. Shot on location to take advantage of tax breaks, the film makes good use of wintertime German landscapes to tell a story of postwar black-market shenanigans and neo-Nazis. One sequence of historical interest is the climax, shot in the ruins of Hitler’s house right before it was demolished. In strictly entertainment terms, The Devil Makes Three is merely average: Kelly is very likable, co-star Pier Angeli is cute enough, the genre elements are deployed effectively, but the result somehow fails to ignite much interest. Still, it’s a good illustration of Kelly-the-Actor’s strengths, and a decent-enough period piece set in the murky Postwar period away from Berlin.

  • Spenser Confidential (2020)

    Spenser Confidential (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, March 2021) I wasn’t in the most forgiving mood during the first thirty minutes of Spenser Confidential. As someone who has read over twenty of Robert B. Parker’s “Spenser” novels back in the 2000s, my expectations were simple: I wanted a screen adaptation of Spenser, Private Investigator of little words and considerable attitude. In my mind, Spenser looks a lot like Parker himself — a bit squat and portly, with a magnificent moustache and flashes of devious inspiration. In other words, nothing like Mark Walhberg. But as the film advanced and made it clear that it only kept the Boston-area setting and character names of Spenser, wingman Hawk and dog Pearl, a quick look at Wikiepdia confirmed that I’d missed out on quite a bit in the past decade — most notably that following Parker’s death in 2010, writer Ace Atkins rebooted the Spenser series to (sigh) a younger, sexier version, and it’s that Spenser who was adapted to the screen. (I shouldn’t be too annoyed — after all, the original Spenser was previously adapted to the screen though a three-season TV show and two separate series of TV movies.)  But enough of that neepery — Considered on its own terms, how is Spenser Confidential? Well, it’s clearly designed as a launching pad for a series of Wahlberg vehicles— here we have Spenser as an ex-police officer who went to prison for hitting a (corrupt) officer whose savagely beaten body is found the day following Spenser’s release. Taking an interest in the widow and child of another slain officer in a connected affair, Spenser adjusts to civilian life, makes friends with the imposing Hawk, navigates a tumultuous romance with his ex-girlfriend, and investigates his own origin story. It takes place in Boston but stays in the working areas of the city, with director Peter Berg showcasing his easy rapport with Wahlberg in their fifth collaboration to date. Still, there’s no denying that the film almost runs on autopilot, with few surprises along the way and a strictly utilitarian approach to its material. There are a few scenes here that could be cut with no sense of loss — most notably a dogfighting sequence that serves no perceptible purpose other than making the film longer. Spenser Confidential is agreeable enough—the kind of film you leave playing but don’t have to watch all that closely—but it’s nothing special. Which, to think of it, does feel a lot like the overall goal of the original Spenser novel — expect that Parker’s formula was more interesting at its core than this adaptation.

  • Little Nellie Kelly (1940)

    Little Nellie Kelly (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) While Little Nellie Kelly isn’t much of a film on its own terms, it becomes more interesting in context. It’s one of the early films from MGM’s famed “Freed Unit” that eventually led to some of the best musicals in Hollywood history — and you can hear here a version of “Singin’ in the Rain” sung by none other than a youthful Judy Garland. Garland herself plays an Irish young woman who emigrates to America to follow her husband, but dies along the way — and Garland then returns to play her first character’s daughter. Filled to the brim with Irish idioms (is there anything more Hollywoodish than an Irish beat cop?), it’s adapted from an even older 1922 George M. Cohan Broadway play. As such, it’s not exactly a story told in subtleties — what with killing off a character and time-skipping ahead to her daughter, it’s generous with the “American Immigrant Experience,” the power of love over all other things, and (obviously) some song-and-dance to make everything go down easier. Garland here transitions from youth roles to more adult ones (though she would slip back with Meet Me in Saint-Louis), even if the 18-year-old actress was already acting ten years older with her ruinous lifestyle. Still, little of that was reflected on-screen as she played the role of an innocent felled by tragedy, and then an offspring trying to succeed despite obstacles — she’s young and pretty and lively. Considering this, you can see why Little Nellie Kelly is far more interesting as an early prototype of other, better movies.

  • The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

    The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) At some point, I’ll have to dig deeper into the quasi-magical link between Hollywood and Paris. More than any other non-Anglophone European Capital (even Rome, which became an adjunct Hollywood for a time!), Paris shows up at an amazing frequency in the classic Hollywood imagination — a city where American GIs could return to after the war, a place of a thousand romances and a town where art reigned supreme. As the title suggests, The Last Time I Saw Paris fully plays into these stereotypes as backdrop for a thoroughly 1950s melodrama. Here we have a WW2 journalist turning to novel-writing as he takes in la belle vie, but things can’t be happy for too long as oil money, adultery and death-by-pneumonia strike our characters. It’s all wild and woolly and unrealistic to the Nth degree and that’s part of the film’s charm. Even if you don’t like the result, you can at least feast upon a young and vivacious Elizabeth Taylor, easily stealing the film from would-be lead Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon and Donna Reed—plus a very young Roger Moore as an adulterous suitor. The Paris backdrop is used as effectively as it could for studio-shot films of the era, but we’re still very much in an American fantasy of Paris. The Last Time I Saw Paris is not an uninteresting film, but it’s probably now best appreciated on a semi-ironic register in considering anything aside from Taylor’s presence.

  • Welt am Draht [World on a Wire] (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Now here’s a fascinating find — I used to fancy myself a Science-Fiction buff (considering that I was reviewing SF movies professionally), but even I was surprised to learn of World on a Wire’s existence as a proto-cyberpunk film dealing with ideas of simulated characters breaking out of their computerized existence. Better yet: It’s adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulatron-3, which also led to the 1999 American film The Thirteenth Floor. Digging deeper in the film’s production history (how could I have missed such a film??), things became a bit clearer: Broadcast on German TV in 1973 as a two-part miniseries, the film remained mostly inaccessible to English-language audiences until restored edition showings in 2010 and then a Criterion edition in 2012, a year after I started losing touch with the SF field. Still, it does remain a major find — directed by film legend Rainer Werner Fassbinder (his only SF work), the film is clearly a methodical, intellectual piece of work: It’s all about ideas and characters, shot with an overabundance of chrome, mirrors and glass. There’s an intention here to deal with futuristic topics that would only slide in the mainstream twenty-five years later, and the cinematography (despite obvious TV-schedule limitations) clearly goes for something deliberate. Of course, we’re grading on a historical scale when it comes to discussing ideas — for the film’s interminable 204-minute running time, it spends a lot of energy setting up a now-obvious revelation (“We’re living in a simulation!”) in time for the cliffhanger ending of the first episode. It’s not a story told efficiently — there are numerous useless digressions that an experienced editor could have cut out (but probably didn’t due to contractual length obligations) and the moment-by-moment pacing of the film is severely lacking. Dozens of other Science Fiction movies and miniseries have done much, much better than World on a Wire in terms of pacing, efficiency, ideas and effectiveness — but you can draw a straight line from World on a Wire to Westworld, and 1973 is remarkably early to be talking about computer simulations of real humans. I suspect that there’s an entire dimension to the film that I don’t get, not quite knowing what was normal in 1973 Germany — it may be that the film is filled with clever deviations from then-reality that I’m ill-equipped to grasp. I’ll also admit that the leisurely running time and laborious presentation of its ideas can be exasperating at times. Still, I count the result as essential viewing for anyone interested in the history of SF cinema — especially if you’re already very familiar with its later heirs.

  • Midnight Lace (1960)

    Midnight Lace (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) If you’re looking for the least Doris-Dayish film ever made by Doris Day, you probably don’t have to look much farther away than Midnight Lace. In some ways, it’s an incredibly familiar kind of movie: one where the beautiful lead actress is threatened by a mysterious man, and has to face both incredulity and betrayal in order to resolve the threat to herself. But here’s the thing: here, the damsel in distress is played by Doris Day, whose filmography does not include any other thriller of the kind. (Yes, she played in Hitchcock movies, but her role in The Man Who Knew Too Much really wasn’t in the same category.)  If you’re in a mood to hear Day screaming and whimpering in fear (a disturbing idea in its own right), this is the film for you, as her mysterious assailant employs everything in his power to frighten her beyond reason. The plot won’t be particularly original for anyone who’s seen more than two of those thrillers — the red herrings get a lot of work here to distract us from the fairly obvious conclusion. Still, it’s a change of pace: I doubt that the film would be nearly as remembered today if it had starred someone other than Day in the lead role — although seeing Rex Harrison as her husband and a secondary role for an elderly Myrna Loy aren’t to be discounted as bonus features. Day herself didn’t like the experience of shooting the film, in which she had a bit of an on-set breakdown — she never starred in another thriller again.

  • Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)

    Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, March 2021) You’re not mistaken if you detect an atmosphere of theatricality to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — after all, the film is an adaptation of one play in August Wilson’s Century Cycle, the same cycle that includes Fences. This time, Denzel Washington produces the film, which revolves around a contentious recording session by a 1920s (fictional) black jazz band and their (real) headliner Ma Rainey. The strong space/time unity of the film manifests itself by the characters arriving at the recording studio, where they’ll spend most of a day scratching vinyl in-between Rainey’s surliness, her stuttering nephew, the trumpeter’s aggressivity, greed-fuelled white studio owners and the laid-back veteran musicians making up the rest of the main cast. Given the slow, sure, dialogue-heavy pacing of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it’s no surprise if some of the film’s most enjoyable moments consist in hanging with musicians on a job, just doing their things and talking about this or that. The minutia of music-making is given a solid period patina with credible historical details. As the final ironic shot drives home, the racial component of the film’s setting is never too far away. Paradoxically, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom becomes less interesting when it reminds itself that it has to have a plot. By the violent climax, everyone feels bad about it all. Nonetheless, the way to get there is often a delight, with carefully written dialogue allowing the actors to show themselves at their best. Viola Davis—garishly made-up in diva garb—is a force of nature as a singer who’s just had enough of any nonsense. Meanwhile, Chadwick Boseman gets one last good role as a musician looking for a fight. While the result may not be particularly spectacular, there’s a lot to like here, and it’s a solid first entry in what is supposed to be nine films to be made from Wilson’s Century Cycle, complementing the already-existing Fences. I’m already looking forward to the rest of it.

  • Love Me or Leave Me (1955)

    Love Me or Leave Me (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) For seasoned movie fans, there’s an interesting meta-movie aspect in seeing two performers with strong screen presences go head-to-head in a single film, especially if they play roles reasonably close to their personas. Much of the fun in Love Me or Leave Me isn’t as much in the inspired-by-a-real-event story of a nightclub singer becoming married to a gangster, but seeing Doris Day, in singing mode, having to compose with James Cagney in full mob boss splendour. While the result is unquestionably a jukebox musical playing from Ruth Etting’s discography, Day gets closer to Cagney’s register than the reverse: the tone is dramatic, and Cagney’s character’s abusive behaviour appears harsh in a 1950s musical. There’s some additional interest in seeing Love Me or Leave Me portray the 1930s — or mostly failing to represent the 1930s while carrying itself like a 1950s musical. Still, seeing Day carry herself as a victim of spousal abuse is more sobering than other musicals at the time. The result is an interesting blend of elements — generally successful, but obviously pulled in two different directions at the same time.

  • Boarding School (2018)

    Boarding School (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) If horror movies have taught me anything, it’s that boarding schools are where terrible things happen and that we should never willingly go to one. Boarding School merely repeats that obvious lesson, albeit with a few extra complications. Our protagonist is a 12-year-old boy who gets sent to boarding school to learn alongside other misfits — and much of the film is waiting out the twists and complications, of which there are many if few do much more than add other dead bodies to the final count. Like a surprising number of recent low-budget horror films, director Boaz Yakin’s Boarding School does look good — and the slow burn of the plot means that the film is far more often effective as a mood piece than an out-and-out horror film. Unfortunately, it also plays with too many ill-fitting pieces to make the result anything but a half-satisfying blend of genre elements. The intention to deliver a sympathetic statement about misfits is blurred by their deaths, and the film is (thankfully) unwilling to commit itself to a classical genre piece. The result is far less interesting than it should have been, but it does distinguish itself from many other duller horror movies. Boarding School probably would have been better with half the ideas and twice the pacing.

  • Mank (2020)

    Mank (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, March 2021) For all of the times when I felt excluded by a favourite director getting interested in some esoteric topics far away from mine, here is the exact opposite: David Fincher going full out on an examination of 1930s Hollywood, through a dramatization of Herman Mankiewicz’s work on the script that would become Citizen Kane. Written from a script authored by Fincher’s father, Mank is a film that goes back ninety years to show, in fantastic black-and-white, the tumultuous Hollywood experience of a writer too clever for his own good — a member of MGM’s screenwriting team who gets involved in state politics, who hobnobs with Hollywood royalty, who challenges and alienates nearly everyone he gets in contact with. Mankiewicz was a larger-than-life personality — consciously abrasive, ferociously talented, witty but also prone to obsessive behaviour and all-consuming alcoholism. Through him, we get a tour of the Hollywood machine from 1934 to 1940 in short vignettes that ring remarkably true to those who know the era. Thanks to Fincher’s legendary attention to detail, we know that even the silhouetted one-line characters are meant to be real historical characters, and you can recognize several of them just by their headshots. As for the lead character himself, his terrific lines are delivered by none other than Gary Oldman — clearly twenty years too old to play the fortysomething Mankiewicz, but clearly relishing the material as a cantankerous screenwriter dealing with a blank page. It’s a great deal of fun, but I’m saying so with a few years’ worth of interest in 1930s Hollywood and an increasingly encyclopedic understanding of who was who at the time. I don’t particularly agree with some of the dramatizations used here (I’m one of those traditionalists who think that Orson Welles equally shaped Citizen Kane’s script) but I like that Fincher has turned his energies to this project for years and that we got a wonderful look at the early days of the Dream Factory as a result. Yes, Mank is long and talky and occasionally too dramatic (such as the scene where Mankiewicz gets cast out of Hearst House) but I still liked it quite a bit. For all of the times when a film doesn’t play to my interest, here’s one that does, and I’m going to appreciate the results.

  • Underplayed (2020)

    Underplayed (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) It’s impossible to be against Underplayed’s intention, which is to highlight the underrepresentation of women in the current electronic music scene. I take it as granted that more diversity is better, I can affirm without a doubt that the EDM scene is heavily male-dominated, and the remarkable change in representation in film over the past few years is an eloquent demonstration of what happens when more diverse people get to create and broadcast art that reflects them. But why did director Stacey Lee’s Underplayed itself have to be so incredibly conventional? If you’re even slightly aware of issues regarding female underrepresentation in various fields, you can probably outline the topics that the documentary will approach in monotonous order. There’s the wage gap, there’s the LGBT angle, there’s the racial aspect, there’s the problem of tokenism, there’s the difficulty in linking work with family life… it all feels well worn, working from an established template and each interviewee making obvious points. I had hopes that the music would save the film—electronic music is one of my jams, so to speak—unfortunately, the highlights are few: much of the soundtrack is disappointing, similar and low-key. The film does much better once it focuses on its interviewees’ individual stories: Most of them are likable, have interesting journeys and telling examples. But when the film goes back to its blunt-force retelling of obvious points, it once again becomes the formulaic progressive screed that has the power to annoy even those who support its theory. The analytical component is barely anecdotal, and the historical context is incredibly selective—Wendy Carlos is justly mentioned as a pioneer of electronic music, but (unless I’m not remembering this correctly), there’s nothing about her influence as a transgender pioneer. And so on, and so forth — at times, it felt as if Underplayed was so incredibly self-convinced about the righteousness of its topic that it didn’t lay out the proper groundwork to be a film worth watching by those who agreed with it. (Let alone anyone who didn’t.)  By the end of it, I had a list of artists to listen to that was more interesting than the film itself.

  • Sands of the Kalahari (1965)

    Sands of the Kalahari (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2021) Eerily similar in its first few minutes to The Flight of the Phoenix (also released that same year), Sands of the Kalahari also starts with a small passenger-plane crash in the desert, with a motley group of survivors trying to figure out what to do. But unlike the engineering-minded crew of the Phoenix, the survivors here are somewhat more vicious: One of them has clear intentions of getting rid of the other male survivors so that he can end up with the sole female. There are also killer baboons lurking around, and they add quite a bit to the film’s atmosphere of nihilistic exhaustion even when the humans are better at assaulting each other than nature is. Even couched in survival terms, this is really not an uplifting film — it manages to place a revenge climax at the end of a man-against-nature film, and the result is really not glossy nor pretty. In some ways, Sands of the Kalahari was a film slightly ahead of its time — it portends the gloominess of 1970s cinema, breaking from comforting Hollywood clichés. It’s clear from the making of the film that writer-producer-director Cy Endfield was going for a deliberately harsh and unnerving experience, blurring the lines between civilization and survival, with individual greed threatening collective survival. Even the setting is bleak, avoiding the stereotypical sand dunes for barren rocks and just enough wildlife to be even more dangerous. Even the nominal hero of the story (bringing back help after exiling himself from the group) does something terrible right before leaving the group — and such bitter ironies are part of what makes this film feel five or ten years more modern than its production date.