Andy Griffith

  • No Time for Sergeants (1958)

    No Time for Sergeants (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m normally a good audience for military comedies, but there’s something in No Time for Sergeants that simply (and repeatedly) fails to work. I was left bored and unmoved throughout much of the film, but I think I know why. First up would be a lack of familiarity and liking for the leads of the film — featuring Andy Griffith in the lead role (one of his first) may be a boon to everyone familiar with The Andy Griffith show, but it’s not a step up over his powerhouse dramatic performance in A Face in the Crowd. Many of the supporting players (including Don Knotts) are similarly unfamiliar, so there isn’t much of an attachment. The other big factor, I suspect, is that the film was conceived as a military comedy at a time when the vast majority of the male American audience for the film had some military service due to the draft — as a result, the film often feels like one big inside joke aimed at those who were familiar with the basics of the situation. Or, you know, it just may be that the film hasn’t aged very well. To its credit, No Time for Sergeants (adapted from a Broadway play, possibly another issue) does get a bit funnier toward the end, as our protagonists are believed dead in a nuclear test explosion and make their way back to life. But it’s a bit too little too late, and doesn’t do much to make the film much better in its entirety.

  • 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.

  • A Face in the Crowd (1957)

    A Face in the Crowd (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) The more I dig into 1950s cinema, the more I realize that there was much more to the decade than the epic movies and MGM musicals that often pop up as representative of the time. It’s possible to assemble a very nice corpus of audacious satires and warnings about the nascent medium of television, not merely as a competitor to cinema but also as a force affecting civil society (paralleling 2010s concerns about social media). In 1957 alone, you can take a look at Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? for a comic take, Sweet Smell of Success for a darker tale of runaway media personalities, or to A Face in the Crowd for a full-bore dystopian vision of a demagogue made unstoppable by the power of media. As amazing as it can seem from 2019’s realization that there’s a significant portion of the American populace that will embrace a tinpot authoritarian for comfort, there’s long been a streak of Hollywood movies warning against the dangers of fascism, and A Face in the Crowd turns out to be a character study of what happens when someone with mean authoritarian instincts can put up a false populist front. Andy Griffith (of all people!) turns in a dark and memorable performance as “Lonesome Rhoades,” a folksy guitar player who is discovered by a radio journalist and takes to radio like a natural. Before long, his folksy manners and willingness to say things that people want to hear propel him to greater and greater success, all the way to a national TV show from New York. But Rhoades is not the person he broadcasts himself to be: egomaniac, womanizer, abuser, he becomes all too aware of his own power and plans for much, much bigger. As the radio journalist contemplates the monster she has created, the question becomes: Can he be stopped? Griffith is wonderfully evil here, as Patricia Neal plays the conscience of the film and Walter Matthau plays a terrific part as a highly cynical writer. (His verbal takedown of Rhoades at the very end of the film is an exceptionally efficient piece of writing allowing the story to end in mid-flight yet reassure us that it’s over.)  As a piece of entertainment, A Face in the Crowd touches upon dark topics with success. But it’s as a media critique that the film becomes more and more relevant each year—the medium may change, but people like Rhoades are adept at exploiting them and had more people heeded the film, the American political leadership may not be in such a sorry state at the moment. I’m not sure that A Face in the Crowd can be called a hidden classic as it regularly gets unearthed and highlighted as being worthy of modern attention—but it’s a great movie and it shows us modern viewers that the 1950s weren’t necessarily the quaint quiet calm period often portrayed to be.