Laurence Harvey

  • Darling (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m not usually the kind of movie reviewer who’s harsh on whether films have aged gracefully or not. Most of the time, I tend to accept them as product of their era, and I can distinguish between good intentions at the time versus what we expect as the modern standard. I can grit my teeth at the kind of low-grade racism and sexism that was Hollywood’s baseline, and know enough about filmmaking history to tolerate technical limitations all the way back to the silent movie era. Being well-intentioned counts for a lot! But if there’s one era that I have more problem processing, it’s that weird mid-1960s to early 1980s New Hollywood period… largely because it seems so intent on upsetting the status quo that it often loses itself. I had a much harder time than expected watching the British New Wave’s late entry Darling, for instance. Focused on Julie Christie’s performance as a young woman with a chronic inability to make up her mind, it’s a romantic drama that explicitly refers to earlier film eras by having the woman’s duelling older lovers played by then-veteran Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. At the same time, it desperately wants to be of its time—specifically the Swinging Sixties sweeping Great Britain at the time, loosening morals and creating new icons for a post-post-war generation. Our characters seem as aimless as it must have felt at the time—too many possibilities, too few commitments, and an intent to upset institutions that seems irresponsible in retrospect. As a result, Darling feels curiously naïve and childish today—both on a personal level with the protagonist incapable of growing up, but also in the wider social experimentation that didn’t pan out as hoped. It’s a film that, in its desperation to feel different yet its inability to settle on a way forward, feels much longer than its 127-minute duration and much more irritating than it was intended. Not every Oscar-nominated picture ages well, but Darling seems even more dated than most—not because it’s technically limited, not because it’s particularly retrograde, but because it intently proposes ideas that just feel immature generations later.

  • The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

    The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, November 2017) I thought I remembered The Manchurian Candidate from seeing it (on TV, in French) more than two decades ago, but it turns out that I had forgotten quite a bit in the meantime. Which is a good thing, given that I got to re-experience it all over again. A product of the paranoid early sixties (it was famously released shortly before the Cuba Crisis), The Manchurian Candidate delves into far-reaching Russian plots to destabilize the United States through intervention in its politics—but stop me if this is too familiar circa 2017. What I really did not remember from my first viewing is how early we know of the Russian brainwashing, and the delightfully crazy way in which this is explained, through a dream sequence that switches between real and imagined environments. After that, it’s up to Frank Sinatra as the protagonist to get Laurence Harvey (as the tragic anti-hero) to reject his condition. There are complications. While The Manchurian Candidate remains a clear product of its time, director John Frankenheimer keeps things moving, and the fascinating glimpse at early-sixties contemporary reality is now fascinating and proof that the film has aged well. It even takes potshots at McCarthyism. Sinatra is quite good in a relatively straightforward role, while Angela Lansbury is surprisingly evil as a scheming mother. Better yet, the film itself is a crackling good thriller with interweaving subplots and good character performances. While much of The Manchurian Candidate will feel stiff by today’s standard (and occasionally silly or misleading, such as Sinatra’s character love interest), it remains compelling today and well worth another look.