Janet Leigh

  • Angels in the Outfield (1951)

    Angels in the Outfield (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Anyone seriously thinking about how baseball is often presented as America’s religion has to watch Angels in the Outfield at least once, if only to experience the delightfully earnest lunacy of a film that explicitly links the two. The story of an abusive baseball team manager who comes to hear angels speak, the film eventually shifts gears when an 8-year-old girl begins seeing the angels on the field helping out the team. Heavenly intervention eventually leads to (what else?) winning the pennant, raising all sorts of thorny issues about divine morality and vulgar sports fandom. The contrast between the sublime and the ridiculous would have been witty, but there’s little ironic detachment exhibited here — Angels in the Outfield clearly and obviously equates godly intervention with the right team winning, and while this was probably heartwarming to the film’s target audience (it was reportedly Eisenhower’s favourite film), it feels like a mash-up of absurdities to anyone who’s not already living within the insanity of America’s twin obsessions. Thematic weirdness aside, the film does have a few moments of charm — the overweight, middle-aged protagonist is played by Paul Douglas in an earnest performance, with the film playing audio tricks around his dialogue so that no swearing could be heard during the actual swearing. Janet Leigh plays a journalist who brings the little girl’s visions to the masses, and Bing Crosby shows up briefly as a co-owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates (which was true at the time). The tone of Angels in the Outfield is very much in line with the reverential treatment that other later baseball movies have adopted as default (Field of Dreams, The Natural), lending a supernatural aspect to the game. As said — it probably works for some… and will feel utterly baffling to anyone outside America’s borders.

  • Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)

    Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I probably need to slow down my intake of 1950s musical comedies, because they’re all starting to blur together and I’m having a harder time holding on to the spark of joy that attracted me to the genre. It doesn’t help that Two Tickets to Broadway plays in the exact same playground than many other musicals from the previous two decades—that of a backstage musical about young women heading out to Broadway to seek fame, fortune and romance. The tropes are very well worn, and the film has a harder time than it should in distinguishing itself. Which isn’t saying that I did not enjoy it—1950s movie musicals have graceful failure mode, and the worst thing you can say about the worst of them is something along the lines of “well, that wasn’t as much fun as I was expecting.” So it is that Two Tickets to Broadway feels familiar: a bit lazy, not terribly memorable nor particularly well executed. But there are highlights: My own favourite Ann Miller shows up in a fetching green dress in time for a great little tap-dancing number (although the film’s production history tells us that she was injured on set). Tony Martin and Janet Leigh bring some charm as headliners (they later married and stayed married for a decade), the film has good-natured fun in starring Bob “brother of the more famous Bing” Crosby and the script shows signs of having been written in the 1950s by featuring television rather than theatre as the heroines’ ultimate goal. Two Tickets to Broadway certainly isn’t a top tier 1950s musical, but keep in mind the ferocious competition—it’s not a dishonour to settle for mere entertainment.

  • 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.

  • Jet Pilot (1957)

    Jet Pilot (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) Can a film be fascinating for all of the wrong reasons? Of course. Take Jet Pilot, for instance—starting with being far more interesting for its production than for what appeared on-screen. On its own, it’s a bad movie. The premise blends Cold War thrills with romance in what may be one of the worst ways to go about it—featuring John Wayne as a fighter pilot who is asked to seduce an attractive Russian pilot who has defected to the United States. While the film drapes itself in the nuts-and-bolts realism of circa-1950 American fighter jets in luscious colour cinematography, the spy-caper plot itself doesn’t make a shred of sense. The casting alone is ludicrous: I don’t like John Wayne, and he’s completely wrong here as an ace pilot lusting after twenty-year-his-junior Janet Leigh, who’s also badly miscast at the Russian defector. A badly written script leads to titters of amusement, as, in the words of a better film critic than I, “the planes enjoy a more active sex life than the human beings”. Jet Pilot becomes increasingly more ludicrous as it goes on, and the miscast pair ensures that we’re less charmed than relieved that it’s all over by the end. But things become far more interesting once you hit the film’s Wikipedia page and start reading about the incredible production and post-production odyssey of the film. The legendary Chuck Yeager was a stunt pilot for the film. Josef von Sternberg directed some of the film but not all of it. Producer Howard Hugues, clearly lusting after the success of his earlier aviation films, spent no ness than seven years editing the final film—By the time the film appeared on screens in 1957, some footage was seven years old, and the US Air Force had moved on to another generation of planes. Much of that is irrelevant to twenty-first century audiences, but it explains part of why the film was a commercial and critical dud upon release even with some really interesting colour footage of US fighter planes. I like aviation just a bit too much not to find the entire thing interesting, but I would have liked Jet Pilot a lot more with different actors and a script that actually tried to be halfway plausible.

  • Scaramouche (1952)

    Scaramouche (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Hey, let’s head back to royal France for some good old-fashioned land-bound swashbuckling! Scaramouche is the kind of expansive epic film that Hollywood was able to execute so well in the early 1950s. Filmed in bright colours, it adapts classic literature into an adventure meant for the big screen. Our hero is a young man ably played by the square-jawed Stewart Granger, who finds himself tempted by two women (the gorgeous red-headed Eleanor Parker, and the no less good-looking Janet Leigh) as he makes an enemy of an aristocratic master swordsman (deliciously played by Mel Ferrer). Realizing that he doesn’t stand a chance in combat, he goes hiding in a theatre troupe, hoping to sharpen his sword-fighting skills until he can confront his nemesis. The emphasis on the theatrical performance of comedia del arte allows Scaramouche to have some intentionally comic interludes in-between the bouts of action and swordplay, but don’t worry: it ends with a magnificent eight-minute sword-fight that goes all around and behind a theatre, blending all of the clichés of Hollywood fencing in a rather delightful package. It’s all quite charming, and an almost pitch-perfect of the kind of Hollywood was churning out on an assembly line at some point. It’s far less leadened than many other historical movies, and Parker is a sight to see while waiting for the climactic sword-fight. The far-fetched plot elements are insane, but completely in keeping with Scaramouche’s slightly feverish pace and attitude.

  • The Vikings (1958)

    The Vikings (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) There’s certainly a spectacular aspect to The Vikings that makes it interesting to watch: Kirk Douglas going toe-to-toe with a bearded Tony Curtis as they debate the leadership of a Viking colony. Made at a time when historical epics were trying to lure audiences away from the TV, it has lavish production values and some credible outdoor scenes and combat—with longboats! Plus: Ernest Borgnine and Janet Leigh looking a bit weird in non-contemporary setting. It may not be as well-remembered as some of the Roman epics of the time, and the lack of big Viking movies lately is a bit of a wonder by itself (wasn’t the latest one the motion-captured Beowulf from 2007?) Still, let’s not overstate things: The Vikings is not that interesting and even gawking at the stars in unusual turns or the scenery isn’t quite enough to make up for the tepid pacing and overall lack of interest in plot or dialogue. Fortunately, director Richard Fleischer creates a lot of bombast here to keep things afloat.

  • Night of the Lepus (1972)

    Night of the Lepus (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I’ve been waiting to see Night of the Lepus for the past twenty years, ever since a snippet of it was featured in The Matrix. Predictably, it doesn’t live up to the hype—unless you’re expecting a B-grade midnight-movie kind of thing, in which case it definitely has its moments. Riffing on very early-1970s ideas about overpopulation, director William F. Claxton’s film presents as evil antagonists nothing but… gigantic cuddly rabbits. It’s really amazing what a bit of ominously slow-motion macrography can do, although you’ll have to either reluctantly suspend your disbelief or just revel in the sheer absurdity of it all. Alas, rabbits aside (although there is really no Night of the Lepus with “rabbits aside”), the film isn’t that good. The first half is a bit dull, while the second half becomes only slightly more enjoyable on a pure camp level. Even today, you can imagine the midnight-movie crowd whooping it up at some of the most over-the-top sequences. Janet Leigh stars in this MGM production, which clearly fits it in the “Classic Hollywood stars stuck in 1970s B-grade horror movies from the studios’ dying gasps” genre. Despite its weaknesses, I almost recommend seeing Night of the Lepus—it’s gloriously stupid enough to offset most of its most lifeless moments. This being said, you almost have to know how to watch bad B-movies before tackling this one, because there’s no way it’s good in a traditional sense.