Leonard Maltin

  • Soundies: A Musical History Hosted by Michael Feinstein (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) I don’t often comment on a documentary’s style, because most often there’s nothing to say: documentaries often try to deliver their information as seamlessly as possible—sometimes with a friendly narrator and sometimes not, but usually not making that much of a fuss about themselves. Soundies: A Musical History Hosted by Michael Feinstein definitely takes another tack, especially when it comes to Michael Feinstein presenting everything as clearly coming from Michael Feinstein. No, I didn’t know who was Michael Feinstein prior to the film (a signer/historian, as it turns out) but you will see plenty of him as he introduces the film’s rather more interesting topic: soundies, the WW2-era short films that focused on a single musical performance in video jukebox format, essentially the precursors to modern music videos. Soundies are fascinating in that they captured music performances by many of that era’s top performers, and often featured black musicians and racially integrated bands. Soundies was made just in time to capture recollections by some people involved in that brief industry, and make that link to the modern era. If you’re aware of some of the era’s greats, some of the snippets are nothing short of fascinating in-between Liberace, Dorothy Dandridge, a pre-stardom Cyd Charisse and Doris Day, Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Cab Calloway and many others. Talking heads such as Leonard Maltin (is a Hollywood history documentary complete without him?) and Hugh Hefner (!) provide additional context, and then there’s Feinstein walking on-screen in his mellifluous voice to tell us more about soundies. I kid a bit, because that style of presentation felt outdated in 2007, let along right now. Still, it’s a minor (and perhaps even charming) aspect of a rather strong documentary that delivers a thorough history of a minor artform that has largely been forgotten along the decades.

  • Le mystère Méliès [The Melies Mystery] (2021)

    Le mystère Méliès [The Melies Mystery] (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) The more I learn about the history of cinema, the more I understand how perilous film preservation can be. There are a mind-boggling number of examples of films that didn’t survive to the present, or nearly didn’t survive — Oscar-nominated films that we can still see because one single copy survived to be restored, for instance. George Méliès’s place in cinema history is now secure as the first showman of the medium and the first to truly understand what was possible with cinematic special effects over theatrical production. But as Le mystère Méliès demonstrates, being able to see a good fraction of his body of work is a recent and hard-fought victory. Méliès, after all, burned down his entire film archive in a fit of despair back in the 1920s, and for decades there was no comprehensive catalogue of his work. Five hundred short movies at the genesis of the art form: gone. What re-emerged over the years was pieced together from private collectors, archive donations and, in one recent spectacular find, film negatives sent to the United States during Méliès attempt to establish an American distribution company and then forgotten. Le mystère Méliès doubles both as a succinct examination of Meliès extraordinary life (once a giant of cinema in middle-age, reduced to being a shopkeeper as a pensioner, then gradually rehabilitated late in life), and as a thriller in which contemporary film archivists manage to find and preserve a good chunk of his catalogue. Leonard Maltin narrates with charm and expressiveness, while archive footage gives us a generous glimpse at Méliès’s surviving body of work. As a deep dive into early cinema, it’s unusually accessible and entertaining — and as a primer on how narrowly some films can survive to the modern age, it’s quite enlightening. A too-short sequence even shows how digital techniques are being used to piece together movies from damaged reels. Le mystère Méliès is well worth a look—not just for cinema historians, but anyone interested in the medium.