Lilian Gish

  • The Cobweb (1955)

    The Cobweb (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Unlike many other psychiatric institution movies, The Cobweb isn’t solely concerned about the therapy of its residents. Oh no — this film is about nearly everyone involved with the institution — patients, doctors, administrators and their spouses, as a question of drapes manages to ignite a near-vicious power struggle for the well-being of the institution. (The film is bookended by two title cards: “The trouble began” and “The trouble was over.”)  Richard Widmark stars as a workaholic doctor who gets involved in the trouble, and has to juggle patients, faculty infighting and marital troubles. The supporting cast is probably more interesting than you’d expect, what with the ever-beautiful Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame, a matronly Lilian Gish as well as an Oscar Levant as a patient. (Legend has it that Levant was incredibly difficult to work with, which feels entirely unsurprising.)  The Cobweb isn’t exactly a high-octane film — for all of the strife that it works toward, it all feels mild-mannered, even academic. Levant is underused in a role unusually close to his persona, while Bacall doesn’t have all that much to do either. Still, the film does offer a glimpse into mid-century mental health attitudes without quite delving into the usual clichés of the genre. It’s not that good but not that unbearable either, although careful viewing is required to remain invested in the ongoing story before it heats up to serious drama.

  • The Unforgiven (1960)

    The Unforgiven (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2021) In the pantheon of revisionist western movies, you could be forgiven for initially mistaking 1960’s The Unforgiven with 1992’s Unforgiven. But while both movies are independent from a storytelling perspective, they do share an intention to question some of the unexamined tropes of the genre. Clint Eastwood’s 1990s masterpiece was a deep meditation on violence that cleverly rifled through decades of doubts about impassible virtuous gunslingers, but if The Unforgiven isn’t anywhere nearly as successful, it does tackle the legacy of racism against Native Americans on film. But the way it gets there, though… can be problematic. Burt Lancaster ably stars as a rancher who learns that his sister (played by Audrey Hepburn) is, in fact, an adopted Native girl. That doesn’t go very well among the white settlers, and it doesn’t take a long time for them to become at odds both with their neighbours and with the Native Americans coming back to claim the girl as their own. It all climaxes in a scene that, for once, feels decently original — that of a dirt house being set on fire as Native Americans ride on the rooftop. The meditations on racism are atypical and rather welcome, considering the state of Native Americans in 1950s Hollywood, but the film itself is far from being as accomplished as one could have expected. Reading about its production history does help explain why, with enough behind-the-scenes drama (deaths, injuries, near-death experiences, and a disengaged director) to make a movie of its own. Suffice to say that the herky-jerky scene-to-scene rhythm of the film may not have been in the initial plans. Of course, there are other issues — as much as I love Audrey Hepburn and the lovely long hair she has here, she’s perhaps not the best pick for a Native American. Her performance bulldozes through objections of ethnically inappropriate casting, but it’s one more thing in a long series of issues with The Unforgiven. Lilian Gish and Audie Murphy are quite a bit better in supporting roles, each of them having a few standout sequences. Meanwhile, Lancaster provides yet another example of how he was willing to use his stardom to enable projects that poked at the kind of leading man he was supposed to play. In the end, The Unforgiven remains a provocative, big-budget revisionist western before it was cool to make revisionist westerns and in that, at least, it has appreciated from the underwhelming critical and commercial reception it got upon release.