Merle Oberon

  • The Cowboy and the Lady (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) Look, I’m not going to apologize for my near-complete lack of enthusiasm for Gary Cooper. He’s not a bad actor and clearly not a bad movie star, but his appeal is so incredibly bland that he seems to form a void of charisma every time he shows up on screen. I get that he’s going for a very safe and stoic ideal of the American male and that movie producers loved that stuff, but he seems so boring compared to many of his contemporaries. My point being that I do the equivalent of a mental shrug every time he pops up in a film, and that can be a problem when much of the film depends on his appeal. In The Cowboy and the Lady, for instance, his Cowboy doesn’t hold a candle for the charm of Merle Oberon as an aristocratic lady who, in trying to escape his influential father, meets and marries him. The relationship being built on a big lie—as in: she pretends to be a maid—the third act brings along all of the complications that you can imagine. The Cowboy and the Lady works as a film, but only just—it has a straightforward quality that keeps it from running aground, but on the other hand, there are dozens of films from the same era that tackle similar material more successfully. It may be my lack of enthusiasm for Cooper, but then again maybe it’s just the film being ordinary.

  • Wuthering Heights (1939)

    Wuthering Heights (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) 1930s Hollywood adaptation of literary classics are a specific category, but Wuthering Heights is in a category of its own even as a novel. Dismantling the archetype of the vengeful romantic hero, it presents protagonist Heathcliff as an obsessive monster destroying everyone’s lives in order to get what he wants. The glossy Hollywood adaptation, by necessity, does muddle the portrait: it lops off the more disturbing second half of the book, softens a few edges and provides a tragic romantic happy ending of sorts to the lead couple. (This being the second time in a few weeks that a classic Hollywood adaptation of a literary landmark features the heroine dying in the hero’s arms, I’m suddenly curious about the device.)  Being what it is, Wuthering Heights doesn’t completely delve into the most unsavoury aspects of the protagonist’s issues, although even a cursory viewing establishes that neither of the protagonists are particularly admirable in any way. For movie fans, there’s a certain pleasure here in seeing a young and dashing Laurence Olivier playing a cad opposite the beautiful Merle Oberon, or an even younger David Niven in an early role as another suitor. To contemporary viewers, the heightened melodramatic tone of the film can have a certain deliciousness, even if ironic. The film certainly won’t be much of a primer for a novel that keeps going for an entire generation after the events depicted in the film. Still, Wuthering Heights remains a landmark of sorts, and the period atmosphere is worth a brief time-travel trip.

  • That Uncertain Feeling (1941)

    That Uncertain Feeling (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) I don’t think today’s audiences can quite approach Ernst Lubitsch comedies with the same thrill as they did upon release: Social attitudes are not what they were, and the impish sense of the perverse that powers his comedies has often been outpaced by progressivism. But Lubitsch wasn’t just there to shock for comic value: the execution of his films was based on a solid sense of sophistication that, frankly, has rarely been equalled since. That Uncertain Feeling, for instance, takes on a comedy of remarriage as its topic, casually bandying around a divorce as if it was no big deal for a woman to leave her husband for an eccentric new man. It’s all sophisticated like many comedies of the time were, set within the upper-class Manhattan set with more romantic comic worries than money problems. Built on witty dialogue, much of the humour comes from characters acting unusually calmly to stressful situations … although That Uncertain Feeling’s biggest laughs come from having them revert to type and punch someone who aggravates them. The character work isn’t bad either—while Merle Oberon is splendid as the wayward wife and Melvyn Douglas does some great seething, Burgess Meredith is a highlight as a pianist who becomes the object of the female lead’s attention, causing chaos with gnomic utterances, misplaced dislikes, odd anxieties and a complete lack of care. It ends as we may expect, with a remarriage—both because the pretender is hopeless, but more importantly because (and here’s the heartfelt awww underpinning the comedy) our two leads never stopped loving one another. That Uncertain Feeling leaves a clear impression even in modern reviewers: it has aged quite well (perhaps helped along by a freer attitude toward divorce) and while it may not be Lubitsch’s best, it’s sufficiently clever and witty to remain interesting … and funny.