Angela Lansbury

  • The Hoodlum Saint (1946)

    The Hoodlum Saint (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Contemporary reviews of The Hoodlum Saint greeted the film with some suspicion — after all, both headliners William Powell and Esther Williams here play characters that noticeably part from their usual screen persona, in a story that’s not fun and games. Williams never sets foot in water — she plays a rather conventional love interest as a foil for Powell’s character — who’s an amoral conman who occasionally sees the light of doing good. Again, it’s not one of his usual roles: he’s a bit too cold, too hard, too criminal for it to qualify as a role fit for Powell’s persona. (Meanwhile, more contemporary viewers may be surprised by Angela Lansbury playing a nightclub singer who turns evil in the last act.) The story itself spans more than a decade as our two leads meet, fall for each other, see their paths diverse and then converge again. It takes us from the aftermath of The Great War all the way to the early 1930s, with an interesting portrayal of exuberant financial speculation in the lead-up to the Great Crash of 1929. Some of the plotting gets arbitrary and melodramatic, but the finale puts all of the pieces back in place. The Hoodlum Saint is not a terrible film: there’s usually something interesting going on, and Powell as a conman without his usual suaveness makes for a darkly compelling variation. Even in a conventional role, Williams proves herself to be more than an aqua-musical bathing beauty, while Lansbury gets a few good moments. But you can see the limits of the film and why it dangerously toys with expectations along the way. It probably plays better today than it did then, but it’s still not quite as good as it could have been.

  • The Harvey Girls (1946)

    The Harvey Girls (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I’m overdosing on Broadway musical comedies at the moment, so any musical comedy that heads out in a different direction is good news to me right now, and The Harvey Girls does offer a noticeable change of scenery—heading out west on a train, with a small crew of young girls ready to start working at the frontier Harvey House. Following the tangents of classic Hollywood movies is often as much fun as watching the movies themselves, and that’s how I ended up reading about the Harvey Houses (whose openings, as railway lines were extended throughout the 1880s, marked the arrival of modern comforts in the west) and the Harvey Girls (who often found husbands in frontier towns, further contributing to colonization). But little of that knowledge is essential to enjoying the song and dance numbers of the film. Judy Garland stars as a young woman seeking an engagement to a pen pal, with some support from notables such as Angela Lansbury (playing a dancehall madam), Cyd Charisse (in her first speaking role) and my own favourite Virginia O’Brien in what is best called a featured half-role. (The arc involving her character was cut midway through during the very long shooting due to her advancing pregnancy—but she gets “The Wild, Wild West,” a rather wonderful comic scene in which she sings in time with some blacksmithing and horse comfort.)  If you’ve been waiting for a film in which Garland, Charisse and O’Brien share a musical number—here it is, to the tune of “It’s a Great Big World” (even though Charisse is dubbed). The film’s biggest number is probably “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (which ended up being a national hit song), with an honourable mention to Ray Bolger’s energetic tap-dancing during “Swing Your Partner Round and Round.”  The combination of favourite actors, memorable numbers and a more original than usual setting makes The Harvey Girl at least a second-tier musical and a solid hit for MGM’s Freed unit. It’s decently funny, historically interesting (as per my extracurricular reading), and romantic enough to wrap things up when the comic numbers end. I wonder what kind of career O’Brien would have had if she had been able to complete her character arc here—The Harvey Girls came toward the end of her brief filmography, with only a few more roles (including the female lead in the following year’s Merton of the Movies) before the end of her MGM contract and disappearance from the big screen.

  • The Lady Vanishes (1979)

    The Lady Vanishes (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2020) Trying to remake Hitchcock is such a pointless exercise that it probably shouldn’t be attempted. We already have the (admittedly interesting) Gus van Sant version of Psycho to tell us that, but Anthony Page’s earlier remake of The Lady Vanishes should have been evidence enough. Oh, the film is watchable enough—and if you asked a viewer used to contemporary films to watch either one of them, the remake is more accessible. Updated elements include colour cinematography, the presence of more recent actors such as Elliott Gould, Cybill Shepherd and Angela Lansbury, as well as resetting the setting to explicitly take place in Nazi Germany rather than the ersatz substitute used in the 1938 film. Most of what people remember from the original is in the remake as well: the two football-fan comic reliefs, the sense of paranoia, the climactic shootout and the final whistled tune… but it’s not quite Hitchcock, nor is it a marvel of technical innovation as the original was. If nothing else, it’s a decent-enough suspense with Nazis losing at the end, which isn’t too bad already. But it doesn’t help anything thinking that they can remake Hitchcock pictures with impunity.

  • All Fall Down (1962)

    All Fall Down (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) While director John Frankenheimer is best known for his action movies, he does have an almost-parallel filmography of character-driven drama films. Take, for instance, All Fall Down, released the same year as the far better known The Manchurian Candidate – it’s a relatively low-stake family drama, featuring a charismatic but self-destructive young man who drags down his family into misery. Unusually enough –and you can credit the literary origins of the film –, All Fall Down rarely revolves around that young man, inelegantly named Berry-Berry (the repetitiousness of it becoming an unintentional gag at some point in the film) and played by a very young and charming Warren Beatty. Much of the film is clearly from the point of view of his younger brother, undertaking a journey to the realization that his older brother is to be pitied rather than idolized or harmed. We also have their parents, divided over their older son’s behaviour, and an older woman who becomes the crux of the brothers’ irreversible rift. There is some intense melodrama to the twists and turns of All Fall Down that hasn’t aged particularly well, and having a handsome but dangerous central character is always a cause for mixed impressions. There are some good performances here – aside from Beatty, there’s Angela Lansbury as a misguided mother, Eva Marie Saint as the girl that divides the brothers, and Karl Malden as a father drinking himself to death. For all of Frankenheimer’s skills in directing, he couldn’t quite manage to improve on the screenplay’s least believable elements enough to improve the credibility of the film – it all seemed like an elaborate plotting exercise, moving pieces around without quite thinking about whether it made sense. I eventually tired of Berry-Berry, and wanted him unable to hurt any more people ever again, no matter how we got there. All Fall Down does hold more interest than expected as drama, but it does feel a bit hollow when all is said and done.

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

    The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Few things are timeless, but Oscar Wilde’s witty, acerbic dialogue comes close to standing out of time. While all of his bibliography is impressive, The Picture of Dorian Gray still stands among his best-known work given a narrative genre hook that literalizes a metaphor of universal currency. The idea of a portrait that ages while its subject doesn’t is well suited to the medium of film, where screen characters never age even though their actors do. This reflective funhouse mirror is enough to power this 1945 adaptation, which benefits from George Sanders’ snide skills in delivering some of Wilde’s best lines. The story may be familiar, but the execution is rather good. Writer-director Albert Lewin cleverly lets the story play out, but throws in a few shocks by portraying Dorian’s portrait in colour in the middle of a black-and-white film. (The film won an Oscar for cinematography) Wilde’s dialogue is quite good, with enough one-liners here and there to keep everyone happy—it’s a film worth listening to at least once. A very young Angela Lansbury shows up repeatedly crooning “Yellow Little Bird” (charming the first time, a bit annoying the third time). The inclusion of a supernatural explanation is not entirely satisfying, but the rest of The Picture of Dorian Gray happily shrugs off that issue.

  • The Three Musketeers (1948)

    The Three Musketeers (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) There have been a lot of adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers over the years, so the only way to talk about them is to highlight how they differ from one another. In the case of 1948’s version, the answer is simpler than we think: Gene Kelly. That’s it: Gene Kelly as d’Artagnan, meeting the three musketeers and fighting valiantly against Milady, Countess de Winter (Lana Turner!) for the honour of France. The casting highlights doesn’t stop there, what with Vincent Price as Richelieu and Angela Lansbury as Queen Anne. The swashbuckling is strong in this late-1940s MGM spectacle, and while director George Sidney said he drew inspiration from westerns in staging the sword-fighting cinematography, the presence of Kelly suggests that there’s quite a bit of dancing inspiration in there as well—and Kelly’s skills were uniquely well suited for a non-singing sword-fighting hero. The colour cinematography still pops out today, and the rest of the adventure is handled competently, although perhaps too sedately when not busy with action scenes. Remove the cast and the sword-fighting and the film becomes far more ordinary, but that’s the nature of all versions of The Three Musketeers: we’re there for the swords, the rest is just fancy wrapping. If you want the story, read the book.

  • State of the Union (1948)

    State of the Union (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) The main draw for State of the Union is that it’s another Tracy/Hepburn pairing. There’s a good reason why it’s not usually considered one of the most popular of their films, though: as a Frank Capra political drama featuring both of them as an estranged, nearly divorced couple, it doesn’t have the feel-good comic legacy than many of their movies do—except for Sea of Grass or Keeper of the Flame, which I like but are this close to downbeat.  The chosen tone for most of the film isn’t the kind of stuff that makes for fond memories. If you’re familiar with other Frank Capra movies delving into American politics, you can already see the shape of the plot as a down-to-earth businessman is convinced to run for president by his insanely ambitious girlfriend (Angela Lansbury, in a surprisingly detestable role that prefigures her turn in The Manchurian Candidate). Of course, our hero will see the light of American democracy and send the vultures away. Still, the fun of the movie is getting there, the political aligning with the personal as Spencer Tracy rediscovers his morals and boots the bad girlfriend away in order to reconcile with the virtuous Katharine Hepburn. That’s how it goes, and even knowing it doesn’t tarnish the heartfelt way the film makes his point. American politics circa 2019 aren’t exactly the purest, warmest, incorruptible they’ve ever been—and it’s at times like these that movies such as State of the Union can remind us of some good old-fashioned basic values. Now that we’ve established that political junkies will like the film’s timeless message, what about Tracy/Hepburn shippers? Well, State of the Union is average when it comes to the romance—Hepburn doesn’t come in until the second act, and while the dramatic arc of reconciliation does offer something different from their other movies, it’s not quite the fizzy feel-good material of their highlights. The film does have its comic moments, but it’s far more interested in its dramatic points. As a viewer, its success will depend on whether you like Capra’s straightforward and sentimental paean to democratic ideals. I happen to like it a lot, but I can see the rough spots during which the film gets overtly preachy—even if I happen to agree.

  • The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

    The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, November 2017) I thought I remembered The Manchurian Candidate from seeing it (on TV, in French) more than two decades ago, but it turns out that I had forgotten quite a bit in the meantime. Which is a good thing, given that I got to re-experience it all over again. A product of the paranoid early sixties (it was famously released shortly before the Cuba Crisis), The Manchurian Candidate delves into far-reaching Russian plots to destabilize the United States through intervention in its politics—but stop me if this is too familiar circa 2017. What I really did not remember from my first viewing is how early we know of the Russian brainwashing, and the delightfully crazy way in which this is explained, through a dream sequence that switches between real and imagined environments. After that, it’s up to Frank Sinatra as the protagonist to get Laurence Harvey (as the tragic anti-hero) to reject his condition. There are complications. While The Manchurian Candidate remains a clear product of its time, director John Frankenheimer keeps things moving, and the fascinating glimpse at early-sixties contemporary reality is now fascinating and proof that the film has aged well. It even takes potshots at McCarthyism. Sinatra is quite good in a relatively straightforward role, while Angela Lansbury is surprisingly evil as a scheming mother. Better yet, the film itself is a crackling good thriller with interweaving subplots and good character performances. While much of The Manchurian Candidate will feel stiff by today’s standard (and occasionally silly or misleading, such as Sinatra’s character love interest), it remains compelling today and well worth another look.