Lee Marvin

  • Point Blank (1967)

    Point Blank (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2020) Anyone studying how 1967 was the year movies changed from Classical to New Hollywood can add Point Blank to their viewing list, because it’s a film that could not have existed a few years earlier, and yet belongs far more to the cinema of the 1970s. A near-perfect starring vehicle for gray-haired Lee Marvin, it’s a solid piece of neo-noir tempered with European avant-garde style. A dark, moody, violent thriller in which a left-for-dead criminal wants his stolen share of money, Point Blank has a nice sense of late-1960s Los Angeles. Director John Boorman benefits immensely from Marvin’s impassible performance and glum face—it’s hard to imagine anyone else being as good in the same role. The modernity of the film still resonates—determined to place scenes unlike traditional cinema, the plot jumps in time and doesn’t always make easy sense. But that’s not necessarily an issue, considering how much fun it is to watch the protagonist fight gangsters in one scene after another. When a film is as stylish as this version of Point Blank, plot understanding takes a backseat to the moment-to-moment thrills.

  • The Big Heat (1953)

    The Big Heat (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) At first, I couldn’t quite see in The Big Heat why it has earned such high regard as a film noir. I mean—sure, the film opens with a murder, and there’s a cute barfly dame being antagonistic toward our protagonist… but what about that protagonist? A veteran policeman, a solid husband with a loving wife, a wonderful little girl and a happy middle-class life? Where was the real noir? I shouldn’t have asked (or should have guessed that the happy home life only highlighted what he had to lose), because by the middle of the movie the plot explodes all domestic bliss, turning our protagonist into a vengeful rogue with a gun and no badge to stop him. The barfly is dead, and an even more dangerous woman enters the picture, her face half-scarred from burns. That’s the point where The Big Heat becomes noir, turning into a two-fisted anti-corruption tale that’s well handled through unobtrusive direction by Fritz Lang. It gets noirer the longer it goes on, culminating in an action-filled climax where all the pieces have a role to play. Glenn Ford is simply perfect as the lead character, with some able support from Gloria Grahame as a vengeful moll and Lee Marvin as the Big Boss. While the story clearly harms its protagonist, the ending offers a semi-unusual return to normalcy for him as he picks up the badge again. Noir rarely allows for the possibility of it being a detour into madness, but The Big Heat was a late-period entry in the genre, and remains successful largely because it does not clearly begin nor end in typical fashion.

  • The Delta Force (1986)

    The Delta Force (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2019) I’ve come to be grateful for the “time-travel effect” of watching older movies that take us to a past time and place, but that appreciation has its limits, especially when it takes us to a time and place that should remain distant. Part of The Delta Force’s anti-charm is that it takes us to a radicalized version of the mid-1980s where terrorists were everywhere and the only possible solution was violent action taken against them. To be fair, I can imagine a number of good scripts in which this idea is discussed. But none of them happen to feature Chuck Norris as a former Delta Force operative taking on the terrorist almost single-handedly. And few of them go for the cheap theatrics and hyper-manipulative tactics used here. On the other hand, if you really want a taste of how American foreign policy was perceived in America circa 1986ish, then this is the film to watch: it’s not good and it’s not refined and it tells you everything you need to know in as blatant a way as possible. The stereotypes are as blunt as they can be, with Palestinian hijackers, Jewish hostages, American muscle and ineffective Middle Eastern help—is it even useful to note that The Delta Force was produced, written and directed by the very Israeli Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus? Calling it a piece of propaganda doesn’t quite capture it—considering that the villain’s plot was based on two early-eighties real-life events, it’s perhaps fairer to call it a fantasy of excessive retribution. It’s not fair to say that the film rests on a lot of unexamined assumptions about terrorism and violent response—it’s more accurate to say that the film stakes itself on not revisiting those assumptions. There are a few interesting things about The Delta Force. Chuck Norris may or may not be to anyone’s liking, but he is surrounded by an astonishing number of grade-A actors in big-to-minor roles, from Lee Marvin to George Kennedy to Shelley Winters to Robert Vaughn, to Robert Foster. For all of its emotional manipulation, the film does stumble into a few effective scenes (usually sandwiched between far less effective material). Finally, there’s a violent wish fulfillment of seeing terrorists getting their comeuppance, which works even when you’re not a far-right-winger. Any history of 1980s Hollywood movies and their relationship with American foreign policy can talk about Top Gun and Rambo, but it has to include a chapter on The Delta Force: It’s so blunt, with all subtext being presented as text, that it pretty much spells out what other films hesitantly allude to.

  • Ship of Fools (1965)

    Ship of Fools (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2019) There are many ways in which Ship of Fools reminded me of Grand Hotel—its 1930s setting, its ensemble cast with overlapping subplots, its black-and-white cinematography and its mixture of American and German characters. However, the comparisons only go so far and the crucial difference between the two movies is not that one is in a building and the other on an ocean liner, but that one was made in 1932 and the other one after World War II. As a result, expect a lot more Nazis in Ship of Fools than Grand Hotel, and the portentous veil that this distance casts over the entire film. As the film begins assembling its large cast of characters, it quickly becomes apparent that this isn’t just about people travelling from North America to Europe on a steam ship, but a message movie about the rise of fascism in Europe. (Contemporary viewers would have known that from seeing that it’s directed by Stanley Kramer, a renowned social issues filmmaker.) The foreboding feeling is accentuated by the characters opposing their views on the world, and the film sides squarely with the marginalized over more conventional heroes. (In addition to characters with terminal illnesses or mental conditions, there are Jewish characters, obviously, and the film’s most likable character, its narrator, is played by 3′10″ Michael Dunn in an Oscar-nominated performance.) The ensemble cast is impressive, what with Lee Marvin, Vivien Leigh (in her last film), José Ferrer and a terrific Simone Signoret. Ship of Fools is certainly preachy, but there’s a powerful sense of impending doom as the characters get closer to their German port of arrival. The last few moments are particularly hard-hitting, as the narrator delivers a bitterly ironic envoi.

  • The Dirty Dozen (1967)

    The Dirty Dozen (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) Frankly, I thought that I would have enjoyed The Dirty Dozen quite a bit more than I did. Part of it may have been shaped by modern expectations—in modern Hollywood, movies based on the premise of bringing together hardened criminals for a suicide mission are meticulously polished to ensure that the criminals aren’t too bad, or that they meet a morally suitable comeuppance. Our heroes have been unjustly convicted, or operate according to a sympathetic code of honour that may not meet official approval. Their adventures, first in training and then in combat, are calculated to meet focus group approval. But The Dirty Dozen, having been forged in the years following the breakdown of the chaste Hayes Code, is significantly rougher and grittier than the modern ideal. The dirty dozen members are in for reprehensible conduct, not pseudo-criminal malfeasance. The attitude of the film, as Hollywood was pushing the limits of what was acceptable in terms of violence, also permeates everything. While tame by contemporary standards of gore, The Dirty Dozen nonetheless feels … dirty. There are a lot of characters, and they’re often short-changed by the film’s juggling of roles. This being said, The Dirty Dozen is also a showcase of actors: In between Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, George Kennedy and an impossibly young Donald Sutherland (among many others), there are a lot of familiar faces here, and that has its own appeal. If you can go along with the film’s disreputable atmosphere, it remains a competent war film … but it may be difficult to do so.