Aldo Ray

  • Battle Cry (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Running at a leisurely two and a half hours, it’s no surprise if Battle Cry ends up containing two different films. The first is a classic Hollywood war narrative, with recruits joining the army, forging themselves into a fighting unit throughout training, and going to war in the second half of the film. That first film, following a familiar formula, is rather well done: The colour cinematography helps in capturing the atmosphere of a World War II Marine regiment, and the execution does justice to familiar material. The second film, alas, keeps intruding on the first, and it’s a set of very, very lengthy romantic digressions in which our protagonists manage to find love interests in the usual places. It’s not that I object to romantic subplots — in war movies, they’re often great ways to put a stake in perspective, not to mention being interesting in their own right. But the way Battle Cry goes about it is completely lopsided, spending far too much time running over repetitive sequences that scarcely add to the whole. Our young protagonists would have been better off developing their character by interacting with their fellow soldiers, considering the exasperating tripe of the romantic segments. I can only suppose that this was a deliberate decision to gather the widest possible audience — but I’m not sure it succeeds from a narrative perspective. Heck, some main characters die and disappear from the film through voiceover! At least Battle Cry is slightly better when it focuses on military matters: Despite the colour cinematography, there’s a woolly WW2-era sensibility to the way everything is handled, with none other than Van Heflin to provide authority as a senior officer tasked to the group of trainees and Aldo Ray as a soldier who learns better from it all. The final result is muddled — good in some ways, dull in others for rather mixed results. See Battle Cry for the good parts, tolerate the not-so-good ones and wonder at how many recent films still use the same plot template.

  • The Marrying Kind (1952)

    The Marrying Kind (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) According to contemporary accounts, audiences didn’t quite know what to make of The Marrying Kind’s blend of comedy and drama, as it worked its way backward in flashbacks from the divorce court to show the strains of an ordinary marriage. Helmed by George Cukor, the film showcased funny scenes in between more dramatic ones, and I can understand how unpleasant it must have felt for critics and audiences back then to sit through what feels like ninety minutes of arguments between husband and wife. But there’s been a critical re-evaluation of the film by later generations, helped along by a growing familiarity with movies blending comedy and drama—we can draw parallels with 2019’s Marriage Story as a sombre film with darkly comic moments, and quite a few romantic comedies willing to showcase more serious moments on their way to a happy conclusion. It’s not a stretch to say that modern audiences are more sophisticated about their movies—or at least that they’ve seen many kinds of tones and moods. As a result, The Marrying Kind does work relatively well today: The unusual flashback-filled structure is more interesting than most similar films of the time, Cukor makes good use of ironic visuals to counterpoint spoken narration, and there’s an attempt to depict an unglamorous reality at work here. Far from the idealized portrait of marriage and archetypical characters, here we have two people struggling to make it work, suffering humbling setbacks and yet building something together. Judy Holliday does well as the wife, while Aldo Ray is sometimes a bit caricatural as the husband. Still, their work does find a happy compromise between the attempt at realism and the glossiness of studio pictures at the time. It’s a bit too dark to be fully enjoyable, but it will be interesting for those looking for evidence that the studios knew about real life even at the beginning of the glossy glam 1950s.