James Stewart

The Rare Breed (1966)

The Rare Breed (1966)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, November 2020) It takes some audacity to even think about making a western about livestock, but that’s what The Rare Breed goes for. James Stewart here plays an adventurer hired to ensure the safety of a lovely widow (Maureen O’Hara in her red-headed glory) as she brings a prized British heifer out west for breeding purposes. There are a few complications, including a lustful rancher, competing clans, budding romance and intergenerational tensions. It all culminates in a happy ending tempered with a little bit of sadness. Steward here has a tough outdoorsman role more akin to his many 1950s westerns, albeit tempered by age and a slightly softer attitude toward women and cattle: If you’re lived this long without seeing Stewart carry a calf in his arms, then this is the film for you. The focus on cattle warms my former farmhand’s heart, and still feels unusual for the western genre, despite cattle being such an important part of the wild west. (But cattle don’t carry guns, so that doesn’t make them as interesting to filmmakers.) Otherwise, I’m somewhat muted in my appreciation for The Rare Breed—I like Stewart, the bull, the ending and O’Hara, but the rest of the film feels a bit inert to me compared to the high points. Ah well—at least it concludes with cute calves galloping around.

Broken Arrow (1950)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, November 2020) There are movies that play well both on a surface and a metatextual level, and The Rare Breed feels like one of them if you’ve been paying attention to the history of the representation of Native American culture in Hollywood. I don’t have the knowledge to say for sure that Broken Arrow was the first film to portray a reconciliation between white settlers and Native Americans. But in the grand sweep of the western genre, it feels like a front-runner to the changing attitudes toward Native Americans during the 1950s and even more so the 1960s—often used by Classic Hollywood as caricatural villains and nothing more, it took a long time for Native Americans to establish themselves as real characters. With Broken Arrow, Hollywood takes a big step toward better representation. Here we have the all-American everyman James Stewart playing the part of a man seeking peace with Cochise—first, by learning the language, then by negotiating a carefully worded agreement to leave the mail carriers alone. It’s not a painless process for him—white people regard him with suspicion, as do most of the Native Americans. Romance blooms, and tragedy strikes—this is a dramatic western, after all, and great sacrifice make for great drama. Still, the film feels like a tentative reconciliation by itself: it would take many more decades before getting to a sufficiently accurate depiction of Native Americans in westerns (some say we’re not even there yet) but intermediate steps are important. Broken Arrow still stars a white actor as Cochise (although Geronimo is portrayed by a Mohawk actor) and fictionalizes quite a bit of material, but the Native American characters are developed; they speak in conversational English (as highlighted by the film’s opening narration) and are seen as people with valid grievances. As a result, it’s a film that has aged far better than contemporary knee-jerk depictions of Natives as pure antagonists that still filled up most of the pre-1950s westerns.

It’s a Wonderful World (1939)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, November 2020) As far as 1930s screwball comedies go, It’s a Wonderful World is a competent but not particularly striking example of the form. The crime shenanigans propelling the plot have less to do with a rich businessman and a private eye being framed for murder than they do with getting James Stewart playing alongside Claudette Colbert for much of the film. The ever-cute Colbert is up to her usual standard here, a curly blonde haircut acting complementing some good banter back and forth. Stewart is a bit off-persona here, playing his PI character with a bit more roughness than usual, less drawling and with more cutting remarks. Still, it’s a decent-enough romantic caper, as both run from the law in order to establish the protagonists’ innocence. The comic convolutions get a bit overdone by the end—especially as Stewart goes undercover in an actor’s troupe, all to justify a third act with theatrical jokes. Still, there’s real fun to be had watching Colbert and Stewart play off each other, each of them bringing a different style to it. If you’re a fan of the form, It’s a Wonderful World should be fun enough.

The Naked Spur (1953)

The Naked Spur (1953)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2020) I’m somewhat familiar with James Stewart’s filmography of the 1930s and 1940s, but not so much about the movies he did during the 1950s, a time when he consciously sought to remake his image away from the young romantic premiers or everymen characters that made his success in previous decades. By the 1950s, he sought to reinvent himself in darker, more rugged roles, often in western settings. The Naked Spur does seem like a rather good introduction to that era, as he plays a bounty hunter who heads into the wilderness to track down a man with whom he has a very personal grudge. A mere handful of characters populate The Naked Spur, giving a quasi-theatrical focus on the story even as the film is set against expansive western landscapes. The story itself gets darker as it evolves, with the characters eventually working against each other in order to secure the reward or their vengeance. Stewart himself plays a harsher character this time around, obsessed with revenge and definitely not amiable as usual. Janet Leigh is there as a possibly unreliable love interest, with director Anthony Mann completing one of his many collaborations with Stewart. The result is a cut above most westerns—a close-knit, rather short character drama set against the grandeur of the Rockies.

Rose-Marie (1936)

Rose-Marie (1936)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2020) If I was in a cheeky mood, I could try to use the 1936 version of Rose-Marie to make a point about American cultural appropriation of Canadian iconography, and there are quite a few howlers in there. Rose-Marie (second of three versions of the same story, following a 1924 silent version and prior to a colour version in 1954) is about a singer searching for her criminal brother in the Canadian wilds, accompanied by a tall and handsome Mountie. It’s a musical, but musically, it draws its inspiration more from opera than Broadway musicals—the protagonist, like Jeanette MacDonald, is a soprano, and most of the songs (including the signature “Indian Love Call”) are very much tailored to classical singers. That means that the lighthearted comic tone that we often associate with musicals of the period is sorely toned down here—it’s a romance first, and a comedy merely by virtue of not ending horribly. It does satisfy, I suppose, but then there’s my maple-leaf emblazoned axe to grind. Playing with “Canadian references” as shoddily as any other non-Californian culture, Rose-Marie quickly accumulates howlers. The opening sequence has the protagonist being greeted warmly by the Premier of Québec, with the language question being almost completely absent in their exchange. (Well, she does sing Romeo and Juliet in phonetic French, but that’s it.) The English-French language question remains almost completely removed from the rest of the film, but there are more visual absurdities to take care of, including our protagonist travelling to “Northern Québec,” which has the backdrop of the Rockies mountains. The musical montage “The Mounties” is oddly affectionate in singing about how they always get their men, but we’re clearly playing with a bunch of Canadian clichés thrown in a blender at this point. It gets much, much worse once the native characters are introduced, with Eastern tribes wearing Prairies-type headgear and dancing around Western totems. My brain, normally adept at ignoring such cultural absurdities, basically broke down at this point and I’m not sure if I remember much more of the rest of the film than an early (and somewhat atypical) role for a young James Stewart as the protagonist’s criminal brother. (There’s also David Niven as a suitor, but he’s barely in the film.) Although I definitely remember the numerous howlings of “Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo When I’m calling you Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo Will you answer too? Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo.” I won’t even discuss the Metis character (or, for that matter, the Mountie) to spare you some harsh language. But let’s acknowledge one thing—Rose-Marie itself is somewhat innocuous: we know where it’s going, and it’s not because the film was shot in the Sierra Nevada’s Lake Tahoe passing itself for “Lake Chibougam” (an obvious bastardization of Chibougamau) that the rest of the film has to be thrown away. If you’re willing to be amused at its absurdities, it’s even charming in its own quaint way. Heck, it’s kind of interesting to feel first-hand the same kind of cultural indignation that other cultures must feel every time Hollywood comes playing in their cultural backyard: It does recalibrate the debate.

Take Her, She’s Mine (1963)

Take Her, She’s Mine (1963)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2020) By the early 1960s, James Stewart was long past his young premier roles of the 1930s, his everyday men of the 1940s or his attempt to redefine himself in a darker, more rugged persona in the 1950s—he was now fit to portray a stereotypically likable dad dealing with sending his daughter to college. Adapted from a Broadway comedy that was, amazingly enough, based on the experiences of eventually famous writer-director Norah Ephron as a younger girl, Take Her, She’s Mine has Stewart as the kind of dad that everyone would like to have—bumbling and overprotective, but also intensely likable and able to support his daughter (played by iconic teenybopper Sandra Dee) whenever she needs help. The framing device has Stewart’s character explaining an increasingly ludicrous series of embarrassing newspaper articles before we go back in time and see how each one of them came to be. It all plays against a California-based couple sending their daughter to an east-coast college where she is swept up in the burgeoning social protest movements. As a look in the turmoil that was developing within 1960s America, Take Her, She’s Mine is a fun romp—at least in its first two thirds, because the film loses quite a bit of comic steam in the later third as the action moves to Paris and stops being as relatable. Still, Stewart can’t be topped as the well-intentioned, stammering dad who ends up participating in a sit-in against obscenity laws on behalf of his daughter, or tries to muddle through a deficient knowledge of French while tracking down his daughter in quasi-bohemian Paris. (Some of the French is quite good, some of it almost unintelligible.) It’s all good fun, and even the exhausted third act (reportedly a product of studio interference) can’t quite erase the superb period piece humour of the rest of the film as handled by director Henry Koster. Then, of course, you’ve got Stewart in a minor but highly enjoyable role—and sometimes, that’s really all you need.

The Far Country (1954)

The Far Country (1954)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, October 2020) Never mind the western, here is the northern: The Far Country is distinctive in how it is set in Alaska (but shot in Alberta), featuring an adventurer bringing order to the north. There are numerous points of comparison between this and Thunder Bay in semi-awkwardly featuring James Stewart as an outdoorsy adventurer, and that was before I discovered that both movies shared the same director Anthony Mann, who made many other 1950s films (especially westerns) with Steward. The ingredients are similar, what with an adventure story made distinctive by its procedural description of a slightly unusual setting. The Far Country is not that distinctive nor that good, but it’s watchable enough in how it transposes familiar Western themes to an underused environment. There’s a little bit of Canadian and French-Canadian content in here (largely due to the location and to Corinne Calvet’s performance). Still, the film is not all that memorable, and there are better choices out there for Stewart fans looking at his 1950s filmography.

Thunder Bay (1953)

Thunder Bay (1953)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, October 2020) For a born-and-bred Ontarian, “Thunder Bay” carries an entirely different meaning than the title of a James Steward adventure film imagining the construction of the first offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. But here we are with Thunder Bay. This comparatively minor entry in the Stewart filmography has him as a genius (but broke) oilman with the vision and know-how to propose building an oil drilling platform off the shore of Louisiana. The film gets us from the initial pitch to oil gushing out of the derrick, with clashes with the fishing locals and some thunderous romance along the way. Filmed in very nice Technicolor, it’s an interesting procedural, even if Stewart isn’t always the best fit for a rugged oilman character—his urbane screen persona is not necessarily serving him well here, even though Stewart spent much of the 1950s pursuing more outdoorsy roles, as his time as a romantic lead was running out. The result is easy enough to watch, although twenty-first century viewers may not be entirely convinced by the film’s pro-oil stance, clearly stating that oil was central to the survival of the United States (a sentiment echoed in the near-contemporary and almost complementary Tulsa, for instance) and pretending that fishermen and oilmen could co-exist, especially after the Deepwater Horizon ecological disaster. But you have to get into the spirit of the 1950s to appreciate the film, especially when it resorts to the romantic tropes of an overbearing father deciding would-be suitors for their daughter, or the coarse poverty of the Louisiana town that acts as a base of operation for the enterprise, or even the saloon scene that brings to mind other Stewart westerns such as Destry Rides Again. I rather enjoyed Thunder Bay with the engineering-friendly portion of my brain, as an oil-drilling procedural with then-new technology—the first offshore deployment in the Gulf of Mexico dates from 1947, if I’ve got my notes right, and Thunder Bay was filmed on this Kerr-McGee site while a political fight erupted in Washington over legislating this new oil rush. I also enjoyed seeing Stewart at work, obviously, even if I’m not sure about the cast: at least he’s got the aw-shuck inspirational messaging done right. I suspect that many other viewers won’t get as much out of the film at all. If you want to hear James Stewart talk about the other Thunder Bay in northern Ontario, have a look at Anatomy of a Murder instead.

Destry Rides Again (1939)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, August 2020) It can take a lot for a western film to grab me these days –it doesn’t help that there’s a seemingly infinite number of them in the Classic Hollywood catalogue. Also, perhaps more importantly, I don’t have any basic affection for the genre as I do for musicals or film noir – as a result, I tend to watch westerns and forget them almost immediately. But Destry Rides Again is slightly different. For one thing, it features none other than screen legends James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in the lead roles – for another, it’s a somewhat less trigger-happy take on cleaning up a rowdy frontier town, with a baby-faced Stewart playing a deputy sheriff with an aversion to carrying or using a gun. (This being said, the film makes it crystal-clear that he’s an expert marksman when he wants to, which is a trope that frequently turns up in American “pacifist” fiction.) Meanwhile, Dietrich plays the femme fatale of the local drinking establishment, a powerful influence who could make or break the deputy sheriff’s efforts to get rid of the local lead hoodlum. The absolute highlight of the film comes when the two get involved in a saloon fight – or more specifically when she starts throwing objects at him and he’s bound not to answer in kind. Otherwise, Destry Rides Again does follow a generally satisfying narrative that promotes non-violence in the service of a taming-the-wild-west story. Or rather up to a certain point: true to form for American cinema, there’s a point where guns have to be used and bad people have to die. Still, the result is more memorable than many other westerns from the era.

No Time for Comedy (1940)

No Time for Comedy (1940)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, July 2020) If you like James Stewart (and who doesn’t?), No Time for Comedy has him in a good role as a young romantic lead, a gifted comic playwright playing opposite an actress (the rather wonderful Rosalind Russell) through high and low times in their relationship. As a portrait of another era where playwrights were household names, No Time for Comedy is interestingly off-beat—it speaks to readers and movie fans alike in having Stewart as an agreeably awkward writer as the protagonist. Russell was very near the peak of her early roles at the time of this film (shortly after great turns in The Women and His Girl Friday) and her screen persona is a good match for the material. Both Stewart and Russell had better roles in 1940 alone—for Stewart, his foremost turn as a young romantic lead came the same year in The Shop Around the Corner—but it’s actually fun to see them both in a lesser-known film playing to their strengths. If anything, No Time for Comedy is a perfectly acceptable little comedy (despite an unconvincing slide into manufactured drama in the third act), and it’s not quite as overexposed as His Girl Friday or The Shop Around the Corner from the same year. Stewart and Russell are perfectly up to their personas, and the result is a nice little discovery.

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Google Play Streaming, June 2020) Some Best Picture Oscar Winners are almost universally recognized as being weaker than the others, and The Greatest Show on Earth is often one of them. It’s not helped by the fact that it won the prize in the same year as High Noon (which was nominated) and Singin’ in the Rain (which wasn’t) were released. It rarely plays on TV, and I don’t recall any sustained critical attention about it except to bash it en passant in discussing Oscar-winners. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why it’s taken me so long to get to this film. It’s true that The Greatest Show on Earth is narratively weak—For a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film about the circus, there’s a three-ring-circus of subplots but only one of them is meant for the main stage. Revolving around a season in the life of the Barnum circus, the film often stops dead in its tracks to simply showcase the circus: the winter preparations, the train travels, the setup and takedown in each town and especially the numbers themselves. By most standards, this makes the film a bit uneven to watch, and dubious if you’re used to evaluating movies on strictly narrative merits. But (as much as it pains younger me, who believed it fervently) there’s a lot more to movies than plot, and The Greatest Show on Earth does exist in the same space as many early-talkie Hollywood movies that intended to bring the spectacles of other mediums (often Broadway) to the big screen. In historical context, The Greatest Show on Earth came at a time when movies were reacting to the arrival of TV with Technicolor and a wider aspect ratio and a conscious effort to show wonderful things to audiences. There’s something fascinating about depicting the intricate machinery of a circus and the sights and sounds of something grandiose. The film was produced with an exceptional amount of cooperation from the real Barnum Ringling circus, to the point of occasionally feeling like a big commercial. This takes on an even more precious quality now that the circus has, since 2017, stopped operating. Capturing the sights and sounds of the circus is important enough, and it will amply justify the film’s viewing for those people who may be interested in those things. The plot itself does serve in sticking things together, but most of its merit is in showcasing the circus rather than having stories. Still, it is fun to see Charlton Heston as a no-nonsense circus manager, James Stewart as a clown with a dark past, or Betty Hutton as a trapeze artist. The Greatest Show on Earth may not be a particularly strong Best Picture winner, but I’m still glad that I had an excuse to see it, as it may very well be the purest expression of Cecil B. DeMille’s thirst for spectacle.

The Mortal Storm (1940)

The Mortal Storm (1940)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2020) Hollywood doesn’t exactly have the most edifying track record of criticizing the Nazis before the war started—studios wanted to keep selling films to the German market, and despite what the official history will tell you, a high number of Americans (i.e.: Hollywood’s audience) were Nazi sympathizers, isolationists or apathetic to what was happening in Europe. The Mortal Storm, adapted from a 1937 novel by Phyllis Bottome, pushes the edges of the Production Code in virulently denouncing the Nazi regime by presenting a family of German resisters looking aghast as their country is transformed during the 1930s. It’s limited in what it can say (the word “Jew” is never said—the film uses “non-Aryan” as a substitute) thanks to the Production Code forbidding criticism of other governments, but the message is unmistakable. James Stewart shines as one of the most virtuous characters. The Mortal Storm’s very heavy-handed on-the-nose commentary certainly isn’t subtle, but it’s probably as overt as it could be at the time. Despite the film’s lulls and lengths, the film hasn’t really aged—by taking us inside a Germany shifting into authoritarianism, sometimes with Nazi characters that aren’t cartoonishly evil, it provides a useful guide to reflect on just what’s going on with the United States at the moment. Both a historical piece and unfortunately still current, The Mortal Storm isn’t just a WW2 propaganda piece.

The Stratton Story (1949)

The Stratton Story (1949)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2020) I must be overdosing on James Stewart’s movies, because there’s an impression of heavy déjà vu that hangs over the entire length of The Stratton Story and never quite goes away. Stewart as a baseball player? Yup, seen that before. Stewart in a biopic? Seen that before. Stewart playing loving couple with June Allyson? I certainly saw that already. The duality of Stewart is that he can do no wrong playing a humble likable character hailing from the heartland. Yet, at the same time, he never becomes anything else but James Stewart—he doesn’t disappear in the character as much as he makes the character him. This is fun to watch if you’re a fan of the actor, but the problem is that he forces the production to become “a Jimmy Stewart film.” Which may be for the best, given that The Stratton Story is otherwise a by-the-numbers biopic in the classical Hollywood mould, full of homegrown wisdom, conflicts between the family farm and the baseball field, terrible odds to overcome and a comeback hailed as a triumph. It’s easy to watch… but maybe harder to respect.

Of Human Hearts (1938)

Of Human Hearts (1938)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2020) How much you like Of Human Hearts will depend, I suppose, on your tolerance for nostalgic melodramatic Americana spanning decades of conflict between father and son from the 1850s to the American Civil War. Also, if you can tolerate a film whose climax is President Lincoln chastising the protagonist for not writing more often to his mother. (It’s not a dream sequence.) The drama feels unremarkable, the production values aren’t particularly impressive, and the characters are contrived. Just about the only bright spot is James Stewart’s role in the second part of the film, but he, too, is saddled with a mediocre script. Clearly optional for most, Of Human Hearts was once a crowd-pleaser, but now it just feels like it’s barely worth a shrug.

Born to Dance (1936)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2020) Eleanor Powell is always worth watching, but James Stewart singing in a song-and-dance musical? Now that’s definitely worth a watch. No, as Born to Dance shows, he’s not good at it: there’s a reason why, in a long career, Stewart didn’t do many musical comedies. But to see him try to hold a note while Powell tap-dances up a storm around him is something well worth experiencing. The plot is an old staple of movie musicals: sailors on leave getting up to all sorts of romantic and comic hijinks. Still, it works well as a receptacle in which to place the musical numbers. Perhaps the most impressive of those is the finale, in which Powell tap-dances on a stage meant to look like a battleship: the kind of lavish, expansive musical numbers that defined the 1930s movie musical. Since Powell didn’t star in that many movies in a ten-year career, this performance (like many of her other ones) is a gem—and adding a young premier like Steward merely sweetens the pot. The rest of Born to Dance? Watchable, amusing, not necessarily memorable but quite entertaining in its own way. Powell, though: unforgettable.