Gary Cooper

  • Today we Live (1933)

    Today we Live (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) I got interested in Today we Live because I’m trying to complete my Howard Hawks filmography, but not every one of movies is a hit, and this early effort goes right in the bottom tier. On paper, there’s certainly plenty to like about the film and the people it involves. I mean: Directed by Hawks! Dialogue by William Faulkner! Featuring Gary Cooper, Joan Crwford and Franchot Tone! A big romantic WW1 epic! Well, sometimes the ingredients don’t take in the mix: Today we Live has an excruciating first hour of drawing-room conversations set against the WW1 backdrop, with a love triangle between the heroine and two officers laboriously constructed according to familiar conventions. It’s dull in a way that we rarely associate with Hawks movies (even previous ones, such as Scarface). The pacing issues are compounded by a dour tone that leaves no place for Hawks’ usual humour, and even less for capable, vivacious characters. Fortunately, the reason why Hawks took the project becomes more obvious in the second half, with some aerial combat footage (much of it apparently recycled from Hell’s Angels) and characters in peril. On the other hand, the abrupt change in tone and style does give further credence to the idea that the film is a botched blend of creative influences, studio interference and mid-flight corrections—reading about the troubled production history of the film is very instructive. In the end, what’s left is something that feels a lot like a lesser take on material done better in Wings or Hell’s Angels, and nowhere near what Hawks himself would do in later years.

  • The Westerner (1940)

    The Westerner (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) The Western film corpus is large and not always distinguished — it’s filled with humdrum horse operas merely parroting the mythology of the wild west, cheaply conceived and indifferently executed. The Westerner, however, manages to clear the bar thanks to some skepticism and above-average acting. The story of a drifter who ends up in a long-term adversarial friendship with notorious historical figure “Judge” Roy Bean, the film is slightly ahead of the curve for the genre in poking at the heroic narrative of the west. As early as 1940, it fictionalizes Bean in a somewhat unflattering light, taking for granted that he was abusing his authority for personal gain rather than civilizing the west through frontier justice. This take on a sometimes-beloved figure is already interesting, but then there’s the great interplay between Gary Cooper (stoic but bland as usual as the drifter) and Walter Brennan (in fine form as Bean) — they elevate the material, and make it do it justice to a years-long battle of wills. One shouldn’t read too much into the historical figure of Bean as portrayed in the film: numerous liberties were taken with the facts, and the film is more comfortable poking at the idea of a hanging judge than the reality of it. Still, The Westerner is directed with some narrative energy by William Wyler, and the blend of straightforward western themes with more unusual elements, such as an English actress becoming the obsession of the film’s villain, adds a bit more flavour to the mix. I have muted reactions to westerns and The Westerner doesn’t quite do enough to get me to be enthusiastic about it, but it is a better-than-average western and should appeal more specifically to fans of the genre.

  • It’s a Big Country: An American Anthology (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Watching many Hollywood movies requires, in some ways, buying into the self-aggrandizing mythology of the United States as the shining beacon on the hill. Over time, you often get used to it and maybe even stop noticing the unspoken assumptions… until an even more blatant example of the form comes along and strips away the pretence. I realize that there’s some irony in watching as blatant a propaganda piece as It’s a Big Country: An American Anthology on July 1st (Canada Day), but sometimes celebration is calibrated by comparison. Meant as a big showcase of MGM stars celebrating various aspects of American life through an anthology of short segments, It’s a Big Country remains a nexus for anyone trying to complete filmographies for stars as varied as Gene Kelly, Gary Cooper, S.Z. Sakall, William Powell, Ethel Barrymore, Janet Leigh, Fredric March or Van Johnson. If nothing else, you get snippets of familiar actors usually playing their screen personas in small roles — and there’s some fun in seeing Kelly romancing Leigh and going head-to-head with Sakall, or Gary Cooper playing a rancher “dispelling” some Texas-is-bigger myths. (It’s easily the best segment of the bunch.)  But I suspect that that biggest issue with It’s a Big Country sixty years later isn’t as much the depth of its America-can-do-no-wrong attitude (which is not unprecedented), but the spectrum on American values that the film tries to address. A segment purports to showcase black Americans, but plays more as an itemized list of “valuable citizens” making contributions to a country that still had institutionalized segregation. Another segment deals with a grieving mother being reassured that the war in Korea was about the values of America being projected upon the world. A late segment explicitly links religion (but a very specific religion) to the President of the United States. It’s quite a lot to take in at once, and few segments have the ironic humour of the Texas-is-best one to diffuse the earnestness. After a while, it’s a relief to see more dramatic segments that don’t explicitly wrap themselves in the flag and the cross — It’s a Big Country is best when it deals with characters rather than national virtues. It’s still worth a look if only for the talent assembled, but contemporary viewers may have a hard time not criticizing what the film ignores or sweeps under the rug.

  • Cloak and Dagger (1946)

    Cloak and Dagger (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2021) In sitting down to watch Cloak and Dagger, I thought I was going to see the 1984 spy thriller (or so the DVR listing reassured me), but I ended up with the 1946 WW2 spy thriller. I’m not complaining — while I do want to see the 1980s film someday, I was only too happy to see Gary Cooper taking on the Nazis and seducing a European resistance member. Based on OSS activities during the war, Cloak and Dagger also touches on the Manhattan Project, perhaps one of the first narrative films to do so. Along the way, it almost invents the James Bond formula, what with its suave agent, world-trotting settings, serial seductions and world-threatening plot in the balance. (If parts of the film feel familiar, it’s because the ending sequence has been parodied in Top Secret!)  Directed by Fritz Lang, you can see how the film is digesting noir cinematography (with many, many sequences set at night) and bridging WW2 propaganda films with later spy thrillers (which, come to think of it, would be a fascinating link to explore). It’s not all that far away from The Third Man or the Greenfield/Lorre geopolitical thrillers of the late 1940s. While I’m not Gary Cooper’s biggest fan, he’s well suited to the role here, gradually evolving from a meek atomic scientist to a dangerous spy (one brutal death along the way) with his usual stoic demeanour. For a film I wasn’t expecting, I found quite a bit to like in Cloak and Dagger, perhaps the most intriguing being the similarities with the Bond formula.

  • Springfield Rifle (1952)

    Springfield Rifle (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m not enough of a western fan to pay much attention when the films struggle to break out of the classic mould of the genre. Springfield Rifle eventually does, but it’s a long slog to the film’s twist, and the twist isn’t a twist as much as it’s a return to expectations. Let me explain: Here we have none other than western stalwart Gary Cooper (he of rugged but bland presence), except that he’s playing a no-good coward drummed out of the army and abandoned by his ashamed family. Left without anywhere to go, he goes west to end up in a fort where there’s some illegal weapon contraband… and then comes the twist that he’s really an undercover spy trying to stop the flow of rifles to the Confederates during the Civil War. So… Cooper is really playing a hero, which is really a return to form rather than a surprise. The rest of the film, despite an admittedly unusual amount of spying business in the middle of a western, does remain very much a western, and not always a gripping one at that. The 1950s were a high-water mark for westerns in Hollywood but remarkably few of them are worth mentioning today: there were a lot of them, and the better ones have floated to the top. While Springfield Rifle is probably one of those that has endured (mostly due to the star, reaffirmed by the twist), I’m so indifferent to the genre that it quickly becomes close to background noise.

  • The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977)

    The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, April 2021) I’m not often surprised by movie discussions, but when a colleague suggested The Last Remake of Beau Geste in the same lineage as Airplane! and Top Secret!, I had to admit that I’d never even heard of the film. Moments later, as I was looking up the film, seeing Ann-Margret in the cast sealed a hasty viewing. And my colleague was right — as far as silly absurdist comedies go, this is a film that feels more modern than its production date. Writer-director-star Marty Feldman goes for a wide variety of comic devices here, from dumb slapstick to meta-moviemaking jokes. The story takes off from the classic Beau Geste novels but soon turns to utter lunacy, as Michael York plays the impossibly virtuous Beau Geste, Feldman plays his bug-eyed “twin” brother and Ann-Margret schemes to steal the family fortune. We end up in the desert with the French Legion, taking aim at wartime movie clichés and meeting Gary Cooper (through the magic of editing shots of his 1930s take on Beau Geste against Feldman goofing off). A surprising number of familiar actors show up, from James Earl Jones playing a tribal chief to Terry-Thomas and Skip Milligan reinforcing the decidedly deep roots of the result in British comedy. Not every joke lands, is witty, or has aged well. (There’s a “used camel salesman” bit that really isn’t funny these days.) But the comedy has a fast-paced, almost anarchic quality that feels as if it emerged from the 1980s rather than the 1970s. The result is quite funny, and it’s a surprise to find out that The Last Remake of Beau Geste is somewhat forgotten today, perhaps overshadowed by later, more celebrated examples of the same kind of broad-shot comedy.

  • The Hanging Tree (1959)

    The Hanging Tree (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) Since westerns often degenerate into a morass of overused tropes, I was surprised to stay interested in The Hanging Tree at least throughout its establishing act. Here, we follow not a gunman, but a doctor trying to establish himself in a small town dealing with a gold rush. But the doctor is not necessarily an admirable protagonist, as he saves a criminal from death then uses his leverage to press him into servitude. Things get more interesting when a woman, the survivor of a stagecoach attack, is moved in his new offices, and they start making romantic plans for each other. The problem is that this isn’t necessarily a nice western — the lead character is a hyper-controlling deceiver (it’s a good thing that he’s played by the steadfast Gary Cooper), and the townspeople aren’t all upstanding citizens. (Plus, there’s a faith healer who is not welcoming of real doctors.)  It all conflagrates at some point, and it’s almost a surprise if it all ends on a somewhat positive note (although one wonders how long it can last — at the very least, someone’s going to move away). The colour cinematography takes good advantage of the landscape, and the feeling of a gold mine boomtown is portrayed convincingly. I wouldn’t classify The Hanging Tree as a great western, but it does have that elusive compelling quality that many better pictures lack — it may be imperfect, abrasive and meandering, but it holds our attention well enough.

  • Morocco (1930)

    Morocco (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2021) I can read about Morocco’s historical meaning as an early blockbuster as well as anyone else, but it doesn’t mean that I appreciate the result. I’ve always had mixed feelings about Marlene Dietrich and director Joseph von Sternberg — there’s something about their acclaimed collaborations that doesn’t work for me. Perhaps it’s because I arrive to their idea of gender-bending with, oh, a perspective that is decades removed. Perhaps there’s something in Sternberg’s approach that doesn’t quite work. Perhaps I just don’t like Dietrich. Perhaps I find lead actor Gary Cooper to be the blandest of the bland stars of early sound cinema. Perhaps I’m not quite as taken by the Moroccan setting as I should be. No matter the reason, I’m not overly impressed by Morocco. Oh, there are still a few good things here: Dietrich is captivating, and the cross-dressing sequence is not bad at all. The Moroccan scenery is a historical document, and it’s not as if you can dislike Cooper. But the overall impact is flat — there’s a lot of fluff to get to what’s interesting about Morocco, and I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

  • The Plainsman (1936)

    The Plainsman (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2021) While I can appreciate individual westerns, I am not a genre western fan and a quick look at The Plainsman demonstrates why. Now best known as an amalgamation of historical mistakes and simplifications (so much so that there’s even an academic article cleverly arguing for its less-than-terrible authenticity) by notoriously loose director Cecil B. DeMille, The Plainsman plays like a who’s who of historical western figures even if they never significantly interacted or if the chronology doesn’t make sense (such as having Lincoln in the opening scene of a post-Civil War film). The film does score points for featuring big 1930s stars such as Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, but the impact of the result is underwhelming. Part of it is having Western as a spectacle of American expansionism, which gets less effective one centimetre past the American frontier. It probably doesn’t help that The Plainsman is as plain as Westerns got at the time—let’s remember that the big revolution in western-as-a-deeper-genre came years later with Stagecoach. Until then, The Plainsman is still a western about the western, since it cares so little about the facts to make any impact as historical fiction. Both Cooper and Arthur were bland stars at their best, and this film doesn’t do much to make them look any better. (Although Arthur with a bullwhip is definitely something special.)  I strongly suspect that I’d like The Plainsman if I had more interest in western history, or even in westerns as genre. As such, it simply looks average—although the glut of much better westerns to come in later decades may work against even the best of what the 1930s had to offer.

  • Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938)

    Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Now here’s a dream creative pairing: Director Ernst Lubitsch working with a story co-written by Billy Wilder. That should be enough, but when Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife raises the ante by throwing in Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper in the lead roles, well, it’s impossible to resist. Fortunately, the film does manage to meet expectations: it’s a fine screwball film with the expected wisecracks, romantic complications and remarriage humour—much of the plot, slowly revealed, has to do with a rich man trying to tame his newest (eighth) wife, as he suspects her of having married him for the money she’ll get after their divorce. (The twist, gradually revealed, is that she’s trying to break him out of his bad habits—and the film is much funnier knowing this.) The French Riviera atmosphere is lush and evocative, with Cooper turning in a more sophisticated performance than the aw-shuck material he became famous for—and Colbert being equal to her funny, sexy self. (Plus, a fourth-billed David Niven.) The script is what we would expect from a Billy Wilder collaboration with Charles Brackett—great dialogue, very clever characters (especially Colbert’s scheming young woman) and a script that’s not entirely predictable, especially during the middle act. Although not much of a commercial success at the time of its release, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife has since then reached an enviable and much-deserved place in the pantheon of 1930s comedies.

  • Ball of Fire (1941)

    Ball of Fire (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I’ll watch anything directed by Howard Hawks, but even I got a bigger surprise than expected with Ball of Fire, a romantic comedy with a few unexpected treats. Gary Cooper stars in his own solid way as an encyclopedist who steps out of his reclusive existence to study contemporary slang… and ends up paired with a lounge singer who needs to lay low after her mobster boyfriend comes under scrutiny. Barbara Stanwyck is at the top of her game as the female lead invading the sanctity of the encyclopedia writers’ refuge, teaching them much and falling for one of them in return. The plot, in typical screwball fashion, makes little logical sense but impeccable comic sense. Before long, we’re in a clash in which bookish old men take on gangsters holding them hostage through science—and win. Along the way, we get a performance out of the legendary drummer Gene Krupa playing the original Drum Boogie (a welcome surprise, given that I was familiar with Swing Republic’s electro house remix), first with his big band and then minimally with two matchsticks (with the expected final flourish). The rapid-fire dialogue is a Hawks trademark (working from a script written by a young Billy Wilder), and having Stanwyck as a typical Hawksian heroine only bonifies the result. I’m not as happy with the film’s clear anti-intellectual skepticism, but much of it simply powers the plot—by the end brawl between Cooper and a mobster, there’s no doubt as to who will triumph. It all makes for a very likable film working from a Snow White and the Seven Dwarves template, with two lead actors at their most sympathetic, and a writer-director combo who clearly knew what they were going for.

  • The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

    The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2019) The problem with The Pride of the Yankees isn’t that it’s a bad film, because it is not. The problem is that it is primarily a film with very specific melodramatic elements crossed with a baseball legend, somewhat limiting its appeal to anyone who’s not already a fan. It’s easy to see why the topic matter of Lou Gehrig’s life would appeal to Hollywood—a good baseball player, a likable romance and then a fatal medical condition and a heart-stirring speech at the end. Familiar, melodramatic and certainly a bit overdone by today’s standard—but do remember that by the time the film opened in 1942, Gehrig’s final speech and 1938 death were still fresh in people’s mind. Everyone wanted a eulogy rather than a realistic film, and that’s what they got. Bland everyman Gary Cooper is exactly what was needed for the role, with some support from Teresa Wright, Walter Brennan and none other than Babe Ruth playing himself. The Pride of the Yankees will either feel like a stirring paean to a baseball legend, or a somewhat conventional Hollywood melodrama. Movies are often as much about their audiences than their own subject matter.

  • A Farewell to Arms (1932)

    A Farewell to Arms (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) Despite the technical refinements and permissive storytelling possibilities of today’s cinema, there’s something to be said about the classic Hollywood style of the 1930s. At times overwrought, earnest, melodramatic and shamelessly manipulative, it’s still a style that has weathered the decades remarkably well. You can look at A Farewell to Arms in many ways—as a contemporary adaptation of an autobiographical Ernest Hemingway classic piece of literature, as a showcase for Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, as an archetypical wartime romantic drama. It’s all of these things, bolstered by capable leads supported by a well-oiled Hollywood machine even in the early 1930s. But the image I keep of A Farewell to Arms is the final shot, as a scene of unparalleled tragedy (the heroine dies after a stillborn child, just as the armistice is declared) is completely transformed into a triumphant, angelic moment: Our hero boldly lifting the body of his dead wife, choir music booming and the camera looking up as he carries her away. It’s pure classic Hollywood, manipulating us in not feeling too bad despite the heartbreaking facts of the moment. It’s quite an achievement, and it ends up taking a lot of the sting out of what could have been a miserable experience. No wonder that Hemingway hated it. But don’t worry—the book is still on the shelves, intact. Whereas the film itself has swept along generations of viewers.

  • Meet John Doe (1941)

    Meet John Doe (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé 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.

  • Friendly Persuasion (1956)

    Friendly Persuasion (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2019) If ever I’m handed a time-travel machine, there are places and times that I’ve got no interest in ever visiting, and I know this because I’ve seen enough from Hollywood depictions of those times and places. Friendly Persuasion, for instance, takes us in a small nineteenth-century rural American community away from it all, and specifically in the life of a Quaker family. What could have been a semi-idyllic pastoral existence is challenged when strangers come into town announcing the big news: The United States is in the midst of a civil war, and recruits are needed to fight the enemy. This, obviously, challenges the Quaker’s pacifist, non-interventionist convictions, and most of the film’s plot is a debate of ideas about whether the kids should go to war. But this Oscar-nominated film isn’t solely about that—in many ways, it doesn’t have a plot as much as a threadbare narrative to link together a variety of vignettes about life in a village. At 137 minutes, it does end up feeling long and dull, not helped by the very loose plotting. The atmosphere will be a calling card for some viewers yearning for a rural fable, but not for others. Gary Cooper is his usual solid but bland self, while Anthony Perkins gets an early role playing the protagonist’s son. If you are in the mood for immersion in 19th century rural America, go ahead and watch Friendly Persuasion—otherwise, you may find yourself patiently waiting for the film’s second half, in which the story picks up substantially as war comes closer and the characters are called into action. That’s the point at which the film’s themes are finally confronted. While there is something admirable (and, frankly, still a bit unusual) in hearing Americans question the use of violence, the film simply isn’t tight or fast-paced enough to make the discussion more accessible. Fortunately, you can snap back to reality after a mere two hours and fifteen minutes.