Richard Dix

The Tunnel aka Transatlantic Tunnel (1935)

The Tunnel aka Transatlantic Tunnel (1935)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2019) Oh, what a fun curio Transatlantic Tunnel is. As I’m slowly documenting my history of science-fiction films, one of my assertions is that there was no self-conscious SF genre before the 1950s: Much of what preceded was in the horror genre. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t a few specific SF movies before then.  In between Metropolis and Things to Come, here we have a film fussing over the digging of a tunnel between Great Britain and the United States. This is only made possible through fancy technology (science: check!) and developed through a sometimes-stupefying pile-up of melodramatic tropes (fiction: check!) Consider that, in the tradition of two-fisted SF heroes, the protagonist of the story (played by Richard Dix) is a genius engineer who becomes the public face of the grandiose project, but ends up losing nearly everything along the way. Consider how an exotic gas blinds his wife, how an underground volcano threatens his plans and how terrible tragedy affects him. It’s not meant to be subtle and indeed at times the Anglo-American boosterism of the film feels ridiculously overdone. (Also, hello, Canada’s coast is right there to save you some time and money in completing the tunnel!)  Still, there’s an undeniable Buck-Rogers-style charm to the proceeding, as primitive as they may seem. There’s an attempt to develop a vision for the future even in a film limited by budget and being shot on studio-bound sets. One notes with some amusement that even in 1935, this Maurice Elvey film was the third adaptation of a transatlantic tunnel novel, and that it copiously reused footage from the previous films. As a classic Science Fiction novel reader, I’m curious as to whether Transatlantic Tunnel influenced Harry Harrison’s semi-classic A Transatlantic Tunnel Hurrah (early research suggests no explicit link), but the film itself stands on its own.

Cimarron (1931)

Cimarron (1931)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2018) As one of the earliest Best Picture Oscar winners, Cimarron remains a quasi-mandatory viewing experience for film buffs, and comparative lists are quick to bury it to the bottom of the Best Picture winners. I went into the film with low expectations, and was surprised to find out that I rather liked much of the movie. My appreciation has its limits, of course—the film is casually racist, long, lopsided in its structure by accelerating toward the end and making the motivations of its characters increasingly nebulous … and so on. But there is a sweep and a scope to the film’s central premise (adapted from an epic novel): the development of a place (and a family) from the initial land rush to a then-modern city. It does start with an impressive sequence, a re-creation of the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush in all of its crazy glory. Then we’re off to understand our putative protagonist, who ends up becoming a pillar of the community after being beaten to the plot of land he wanted for himself. Various episodic shenanigans take place until, in a bizarre third act, the protagonist disappears from the story and leaves his wife to fend off for herself. Spanning forty years, Cimarron is at its best when it portrays its characters civilizing their own community, banding together to create some peace and order. Alas, even in that most noble portrait, the film has some serious issues in bringing everything together and tightening up its story. At least the wild-west visuals are interesting, Richard Dix is fine as the protagonist, Estelle Taylor is still eye-catching decades later and Irene Dunne makes an impression as the dramatic burden of the film falls on her shoulders toward the end. Watching old movies can turn into an anthropologic expedition—especially during the tumultuous thirties, as movies acquired more or less the same basic cinematographic grammar used today but to portray a significantly different time. So it is that I’m rather happy to have seen Cimarron—It’s memorable, was made with high production values for the time and carries to the present day a time capsule of things both admirable and reprehensible about how American saw themselves back then.