Joel McRae

  • Foreign Correspondent (1940)

    Foreign Correspondent (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) As I make my way down Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography, I’m now way past the classics and into his lower-rated, lesser-known work. Most of the time, I can understand why the work is not included in his highlights—atypical, less mastered, not quite exploiting his own strengths as a director. Foreign Correspondent is recognizably not one of Hitchcock’s best works, but it’s easily in the second tier: suspenseful, thrilling, fast-paced and quite funny at times, it’s recognizably a Hitchcockian film. Following a journalist as he gets embroiled uncovering a spy ring in Europe on the eve of World War II, it’s a one-thrill-after-another suspense film with a romantic component and a striking conclusion. Joel McRae is up to his most likable self as the two-fisted newspaperman, while Laraine Day is lovely and spirited as the love interest (back when Hitchcock didn’t obsess over blondes) and George Sanders is also quite likable as the sidekick to the pair. There are a few centrepiece sequences in here—the much-anthologized “walking through a sea of black umbrellas” sequence shows Hitchcock at his visual best, whereas the final sequence set aboard an airplane brought down over the sea is still hair-raising and a masterpiece of 1940s special effects. The end sequence reminds us that the film belongs to the WW2 propaganda subgenre, with a stirring call to arms delivered in a way that would be echoed in later real-life war broadcasts. Foreign Correspondent remains a pretty good Hitchcockian film—not a classic, but certainly one of his better efforts and one in continuity with his entire filmography.

  • The Palm Beach Story (1942)

    The Palm Beach Story (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) It’s not often that a classic Hollywood movie has me blinking in confusion, rewinding and starting again to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything, but then again very few Hollywood movies have as fast-paced an opening as writer-director Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, which crams a film’s worth of romantic comedy hijinks into a three-minute-long summary (if that), then proceeds to tell the sequel to that non-existing first film. (Pay attention, though, because there are a lot of clues in that opening flash to foreshadow the otherwise confounding last minute of the film.) Not that things get any sedate after that, considering that our happily married couple at the end of that film summary find themselves out of cash to develop an invention. In the finest screwball tradition, they have a flash of inspiration—why not divorce, let her find a rich husband, and allow that new guy to finance the development of the invention? If you think that’s insane, you haven’t met the other characters of the tale—including a shooting-obsessed hunting club eager to transform a train car into a shooting gallery. Part of Sturges’ miraculous first years, The Palm Beach Story is very, very funny from beginning to end. It’s filled with characters acting in ways we’d consider crazy, good lines of dialogue and plenty of screwball sequences—and it doesn’t skimp on a very romantic and satisfying ending. This is all enlivened by a charming throwback view of the 1930s as seen from the upper-class, from nighttime trains to fancy yachts and elaborate aristocratic entanglements. Claudette Colbert is utterly adorable in the lead role here, with Joel McRae providing good support as a nominally less-crazy husband. I know a lot of viewers have their favourites in Sturges’ filmography—either The Lady Eve or Sullivan’s Travels or maybe even The Big McGuinty. I’ll have to re-watch all of them to make up my mind, but for now I’m putting up The Palm Beach Story as my favourite by a nose—perhaps, unlike the better-known others, because it came out of nowhere and hooked me so quickly.