Fred MacMurray

  • Kisses for My President (1964)

    Kisses for My President (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) While much of Kisses for My President can now be tolerated as an amiable but full-throated example of fragile masculinity, I have seldom seen a period film self-destruct itself for modern audiences so spectacularly in its last thirty seconds. Let me explain: As the film begins, we’re meant to sympathize with the male lead, the husband of the first elected woman president of the United States. Played by the normally likable Fred MacMurray, this first ever “First Gentleman” sees his identity threatened in several ways: Ushered in the normally feminine offices and duties of the role, he bemoans having to divest himself from his previous company due to defence contract conflicts of interest. Adding to his misery, his wife (a really good Polly Bergen) is occupied by matters of the state, while an ex-flame now safely divorced expresses an interest in him that goes far past the professional. When a South American dictator shows up in town, it’s up to him to try to mend international relations, while figuring out the role he’s expected to play in this then-comedic gender inversion. MacMurray is easily the rock on which the film is built for modern audiences: seldom less than incredibly sympathetic, he lets his charisma roll over the severely outdated (and frankly insulting) assumptions of the script—his befuddled expression rescues the film from several inexcusable logic holes and twenty-first-century objections to the moronic ways the characters behave. Kisses for My President was never meant to be anything but a comic film—but even by these standards, you would expect its characters and institutions to behave as if they had half a brain. MacMurray is arguably funnier now as a paleoanthropic remnant of a previous generation’s male stereotype having to fit with the times. Except that the film’s final indignity is allowing him to get away with it all—in the final moments of the film, his wife discovers that she’s pregnant, leading her to—wait for it—resign as president of the United States for the joys of motherhood (and putting her family back together), leading the couple to walk out of the White House as he crows, “It took you forty million female voters to get you in here and one man to get you out.”  Cue anyone’s astonished expression as the credits roll. While much of the film is grating but still funny, the ending kills off any remaining good intentions. Now generally forgotten by history (although it did win an Oscar for Costume design), Kisses for My President is perhaps best buried and unearthed only by cinematic political junkies and Fred MacMurray fans—it is by far the most Problematic of the Problematic movies I’ve seen recently, and considering that I watch Golden-Age Hollywood movies by the double truckload, that’s saying something.

  • Remember the Night (1940)

    Remember the Night (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) It’s hard to go wrong with Preston Sturges, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, even if Remember the Night is a portent of better things to come for all of them. An incredible contrivance is at the heart of the story – a District Attorney taking an accused shoplifter with him on a long car trip to spend Christmas with his parents. It’s a splendid excuse for a romantic comedy, though – with Stanwyck as the corrupt temptress and MacMurray as the letter-perfect officer of the law, working at tempering their differences and gradually falling in love along the way. (Their climactic kiss takes place in front of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side.) This was the last film exclusively penned by Sturges before he took up directing (Mitchell Leisen directed this one), and it’s filled with great moments, good dialogue, clever plotting and well-sketched characters. Remember the Night manages the impressive trick of being both archetypical enough to summarize quickly, and has a stuffed plot to make the moment-to-moment watching of the film engaging enough. It’s both a Christmas film and something that can be watched any other month of the year: when it’s funny, it’s very funny, and when it’s romantic, it’s very romantic. And yet, all three major players here would go on to bigger and better successes, sometimes even with each other – Stanwyck and Sturges in The Lady Eve, Stanwyck and MacMurray in Double Indemnity, and, of course, Sturges by himself with an extraordinary series of films over the following few years.

  • The Egg and I (1947)

    The Egg and I (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The dream of moving from the city to the bucolic countryside “to raise chicken or something” has long been a horrifying illusion, and there are decades of Hollywood movies to make the point. One of the funniest remains The Egg and I, featuring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as two city mice grappling with the not-so-much-fun reality of becoming chicken-and-egg farmers on a dilapidated property. It is, from a certain perspective, a horror movie – the newlywed bride (Colbert) barely has a say as she’s whisked off to rural depths, forced to slave away to support her husband’s crazy scheme, rebuffed in her basic desires and suffers the further indignity of thinking that her husband is being seduced by a local poultry queen. But it’s also very, very funny (plus, she gets what she wants in the end) – Colbert’s near-hysterical reactions are the perfect complement to MacMurray’s infuriatingly goofy charm and the film is further bolstered by strong performances from Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as “Ma and Pa Kettle” (a spinoff series would lead to nine more films for their characters). The episodic comedy-of-error can be repetitive at times (and there’s definitely a limit to the amount of humour you can wring out of poor Colbert being ignored and humiliated) but The Egg and I eventually succeeds by going back to the basics. After all, it is a “city mouse gets humbled by the country” kind of thing – the dated humour may be more visible now, but the underpinning of the subgenre always leads to an improvement by the end.

  • The Absent-Minded Professor (1961)

    The Absent-Minded Professor (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Part of Hollywood history is finding films that were, in retrospect, far too ambitious for their own good considering what would be possible later on. From this perspective, you can identify 1967 as the year where thematic barriers were blown wide open, and roughly 1995 until visual obstacles were crushed by CGI. When it comes to The Absent-Minded Professor, the trouble here isn’t thematic: it’s a silly live-action family comedy handled by Disney, and that means that there isn’t much to be improved by franker depictions of themes, sex or violence. The adventures of a genius but scatterbrained chemistry professor who invents flying rubber are innocuous and broad—the kind of thing you could (and still can, notwithstanding the young ones’ tolerance for black-and-white cinematography) take the entire family to see. Fred MacMurray is in complete charmer mode as the titular eccentric scientist—the kind of amiable leading performance he would repeat many times in the Disney-dad stage of his career. Where this first version of The Absent-Minded Professor reaches its limits, however, is in the inability of the special effects to do justice to the high-flying imagination of the script. While the efforts of the special effects crew (nominated for an Academy Award) were undoubtedly heroic and occasionally effective, the seams are clearly showing compared to later-generation digital effects (including the 1997 remake) and may be worth a look just out of bemused not-always-suspended disbelief. As for the rest of the film itself—it’s family fare, too focused on one single joke but otherwise as harmless as it comes. But don’t confuse The Absent-Minded Professor with Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor—it’s on an entirely different comedy register.

  • Dive Bomber (1941)

    Dive Bomber (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) Calling Dive Bomber a pre-WW2 military aviation thriller is underselling it severely—shot in colour in near-documentary style, it’s a showcase for the pre-Pearl Harbor US Navy aviation, and it’s far more colourful than you’d expect from other black-and-white thrillers of the same era. (Especially given the bright peacetime livery of the planes.)  It’s also strong in terms of marquee names—Errol Flynn headlines as a military doctor trying to find a way to prevent high-G blackouts, while Fred MacMurray plays a rival officer. Behind the camera, Michael Curtiz handles the demands of a highly technical production with a veteran’s aplomb, although the film’s history is rich in on-set clashes between Curtiz and Flynn: this would end up being the last of the twelve collaborations. As far as the result is concerned, Dive Bomber is remarkable without being all that good from a strictly narrative viewpoint: the script is made to string along the aerial showcases, although the focus on medical research is not necessarily something you’d expect from an airborne military thriller. (Just ignore the omnipresent cigarettes smoked by the doctors.)  Flynn and MacMurray probably would have been better in each other’s roles, while Alexis Smith wanders in and out of the film as female lead without much to do. Still, I found Dive Bomber more fascinating than I expected—although I suspect that my fondness for techno-thrillers had a role to play in this.

  • The Caine Mutiny (1954)

    The Caine Mutiny (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2018) The history of mutinies in the US Navy is a very short one, making The Caine Mutiny an even more interesting depiction of sailors rebelling against their captain. Adapted from the Herman Wouk novel, this film steadily cranks up the pressure as crewmembers of the Cain grow increasingly concerned with the mental stability of their commanding officer. (He’s played by none other than Humphrey Bogart, in a somewhat atypical role as a weak and cowering character.) It culminates in mutiny … but the film has quite a bit longer to go before being over, and it’s that third act that proves perhaps the most interesting portion of the film. Because after the mutiny comes the reckoning, as our rebellious protagonists face martial court for their actions. That’s when a lawyer (ably played by Miguel Ferrer) takes care of the mutineers, long enough to get them a fair or suspended sentence but also to deliver a terrific post-judgment speech explaining in detail how much he loathes them for what they’ve done. The Caine Mutiny also manages a terrific overturning of familiar expectations by making a semi-villain (or at least a weakling) out of its novelist character. Fictional writers being written by real writers usually means that most writers in any kind of novel/movie are usually semi-virtuous canny observers. Not here, as Wouk avatar Fred MacMurray turns out to be a coward and pointed out as such. Such overturning of expectations makes the film as good as it is, pointing out that mutinies aren’t necessarily admirable or glorious even when there’s a reasonable doubt of their necessity. The Caine Mutiny is not a short film, but it does put us on the bridge during a very tense situation, and then plays out the consequences.

  • Double Indemnity (1944)

    Double Indemnity (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé 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.