Barbara Stanwyck

Meet John Doe (1941)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-09-012023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2019) It’s easy to recognize Meet John Doe as a Frank Capra movie, and just as easy to see why it’s not one of his best-known works. On one hand, here we have Gary Cooper blandly (but sympathetically) playing another everyman role—this time, the plot literally turns around that idea, as a newspaper columnist creates a “John Doe” persona out of sheer job-preservation determination. Before long, however, the blank person selected to incarnate the decency of the ordinary man becomes all too real, and may be the only one to stop what dark forces are planning to do with this populist movement. You can see Capra’s strain of American exceptionalism running here, along with a populist fervour for decency and strong values. There’s also the montages and newspaper headlines flying at the screen used as exposition devices—Capra handled those better than anyone else, and the result here is undeniably a film shaped by his sensibilities. Barbara Stanwyck is also remarkable in the lead female role, although her initially prominent place in the story gradually gets sidelined in favour of Cooper’s character. Which leads us to the weaker third act, in which the appeals to decency feel manipulated by the demands of an overarching plot with a specific destination in mind. The ending, as much as it wraps up matters in a way that’s satisfactory, nonetheless leaves us wondering if there wasn’t a better way to conclude matters. There’s certainly material in Meet John Doe for contemporary contemplation as the nature of populism is examined, and shaped in a markedly more optimistic direction than current trends. It almost makes one long for some neo-Capra filmmaking, with sometimes-naïve optimism, human decency and all.

Movie Review

Union Pacific (1939)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-08-242023-03-18 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, August 2019) I’m not sure how much we twenty-first century sophisticates truly understand the meaning and importance of the first coast-to-coast railway. To put in modern context, it was akin to building the first highway and the first Internet link throughout the country at the same time. The first transcontinental railway (1869 in the United States, 1886 in Canada) did as much to tie the country together as any law. It standardized time, facilitated the mobility of labour, ended the wild frontier, improved the flow of news and information—all things that we now take for granted. We may never be able to fully appreciate that it meant then, but at least there are movies like Union Pacific to make us appreciate the details of how it was done. Focusing on a troubleshooter for a railroad company, this is a film that takes a look at the nitty-gritty of building such a revolutionary endeavour, from shooing away undesirables that prey on railroad workers, to the logistics of keeping such a group of workers fed and productive, to negotiations with the native tribes. Joel McCrea plays the troubleshooter, bringing his usual charisma to the part and helping to humanize a complex subject. Barbara Stanwyck plays the love interest, while you can see (or rather hear) Robert Preston and Anthony Quinn in the supporting cast. But this is director Cecil B. de Mille’s film—an expansive, spectacular subject matter that never misses a chance to stage a large-scale action sequence. While the film does regrettably rely on native attacks as a pretext to action scenes, it does spend more time than was usual back in 1939 showing how those attacks were motivated by the white businessmen breaking their promises to the tribes. Union Pacific is my kind of western—not a celebration of the wild frontier using the usual macho tropes of the genre, but a study in how civilization spread throughout the land and closed the frontier. Some film historians point to this film and Stagecoach as when the Western grew up, but I can only testify as to the interest that it created and sustained over a two-hours-and-fifteen minutes running time: It’s a fascinating railway procedural, and it manages to have a nice human edge to it.

Movie Review

Double Indemnity (1944)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-06-232018-12-28 Movie Review

(On TV, June 2018) Like many, I like film noir a lot, and Double Indemnity is like mainlining a strong hit of the stuff. Pure undiluted deliciousness, with black-and-white cinematography, unusual investigator, femme fatale, crackling dialogue, strong narration and bleak outlook. Here, the focus on insurance agents trying to figure out a murder mystery is unusual enough to be interesting, while the Los Angeles setting is an instant classic. Fred MacMurray is a great anti-hero (morally flawed, but almost unexplainably likable along the way), Barbara Stanwyck is dangerously alluring and Edward G. Robinson is the moral anchor of the film. Double Indemnity does have that moment-to-moment watching compulsion that great movies have—whether it’s the details of an insurance firm, dialogue along the lines of the classic “There’s a speed limit in this state” exchange, a trip at the grocery store, or the careful composition of a noir film before they even had realized that there was a film noir genre. Double Indemnity is absorbing viewing, and a clear success for director Billy Wilder, gifted with a Raymond Chandler script from a James M. Cain novel.