Robert Montgomery

  • Hide-Out (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2021) As much as I’d like to say something interesting or enlightening about Hide-Out, it’s the kind of film that’s good enough to escape snarky comments about its shortcomings but not good enough to get ringing praise. The plot isn’t that complex, as a wounded womanizing mobster ends up on a farm and spends his recovery time falling for the farmer’s daughter. There’s clearly a lot of comedy to be mined in how our urbane protagonist has to adapt to the farm — and some obvious romantic material with the daughter as well. It works more often than not — director W. S. Van Dyke clearly knows what he’s doing even with a middle-of-the-road script, and the acting benefits from the professionalism of Robert Montgomery and Maureen O’Sullivan — as well as an early role for Mickey Rooney. Hide-Out is entertaining even if not particularly memorable — and it ends on a sweet high note, ensuring a nice finish for the audience.

  • Night Must Fall (1937)

    Night Must Fall (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) You wouldn’t necessarily expect a 1937 Production Code film to play so gleefully with the idea of a sociopathic serial killer carrying a previous victim’s head in a hat box, nor to see then-romantic idol Robert Montgomery playing the killer… but here we are with Night Must Fall. Reportedly an experiment by MGM with the larger goal of keeping Montgomery happily under contract, Night Must Fall has aged better than its initial commercial performance suggested — current audiences are liable, despite the creakiness of the static execution, to find more familiar material in the handsome-lead-turned-psychopath twist. Rosalind Russel shows up as the one suspecting that something is afoot, but she’d get better roles elsewhere. Elsewhere in the cast, Dame May Whitty is a bit showier as a cranky old woman. Night Must Fall feels a bit too long and stiff for what it’s trying to do, but the substance remains more interesting than many other crime thriller movies of the time. Those efforts led to two Oscar acting nominations: one for Whitty, but also one for Montgomery’s dark turn as the charmer turned killer, inaugurating one timeless way for good-looking actors to polish their image and be taken seriously.

  • Rage in Heaven (1941)

    Rage in Heaven (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) You can argue that Rage in Heaven is a film noir, but I see just as much kinship here with the domestic thriller subgenre of the 1940s, especially as a woman gets frightened by an increasingly unstable husband. But there’s more — a framing device that takes us to a French mental hospital, a subplot involving a family steel mill and a third act that’s all about a psychopath framing his romantic rival even in death. It’s a lot of stuff to fit in 85 minutes, and what holds the film together is more the casting than the plot. It’s tough to resist any 1940s film with Ingrid Bergman, and Rage in Heaven does pair her with a rather rare good-guy turn from George Saunders, while Robert Montgomery is a bit of an odd fit as an insanely jealous psychopath. The plot is lurid enough to be entertaining — but it’s not credible and that does harm the result. While Rage in Heaven is interesting enough, it’s a scattered film and one that probably should have been tightened up in production, or reworked entirely.

  • They Were Expendable (1945)

    They Were Expendable (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Hollywood’s World War II years were thick with propaganda films. It seems as if every conceivable part of the US armed forces had a movie or two made about them, usually showing the American soldiers as good people fighting the good fight on behalf of the good people at home. Most of them do have some intrinsic interest for military buffs—even sanitized and simplified for mainstream audiences, these movies usually delight in showing us the way the armed forces operated, and many feature historical footage of real military training or operations. They Were Expendables squarely fits in this category: it’s a look at the introduction of PT boats in the Pacific theatre, featuring John Wayne and Robert Montgomery as clashing officers with different views on the usefulness of those ships—Montgomery as a true believer in the capabilities, while Wayne is cast as the voice of skepticism at the sight of those light, fast boats. The special effects are not bad for the time, as they blend studio footage with what was shot in Florida (a credible stand-in for the Philippines, where the story takes place). While They Were Expendable does have its share of battle scenes, perhaps the most interesting material happens at the PT boat base in repairing and maintaining the ships. Director John Ford seemed to enjoy this movie because the entire film is detailed, credible and enjoyable to follow. Its weakest part, unfortunately, is John Wayne—the film seems to spend far too much time deferring to him, giving him the spotlight and a love interest. (Hilariously enough, the credit sequence is studded with military acronym to represent the service record of the director, actors and crew… except for John Wayne, who never served in the armed forces and so has nothing but his name on-screen.) It’s really interesting that They Were Expendable manages to transform a rout (at the time of the story conception in 1942, the Americans had retreated from the Philippines, vowing to return) into a triumphant film… but this is neither the first nor the last Hollywood production to pull off such a trick. Still, this is a film that still holds some interest today. Thanks to future president John F. Kennedy’s service, there would be other PT boat movies (most notably PT-109), but none with as much credibility in showing the way men dealt with those new ships—part of it has to do with how They Were Expendable takes a break from the battle to talk about operational issues.

  • Lady in the Lake (1946)

    Lady in the Lake (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Film history is filled with curios, some of them of lasting importance and others forgotten until we revive them as earlier examples of what we thought was new. Putting aside the entire found-footage genre (in which a camera is presumed to be the viewer rather than the cameraman), there have been few subjective perspective (or Point of View—PoV) movies in the genre’s history: Hardcore Henry (2015) is probably the modern canonical example, although it’s inspired by videogames more than anything else. Farther away in time, the opening act of Dark Passage (1947) carefully avoided showing the protagonist’s face for plotting reasons, alternating between subjective takes and faceless framing. But Lady in the Lake is the real thing: a feature-length noir film in which everything is seen from the perspective of the detective investigating the case, navigating his way between femme fatale, corrupt cops, criminals and rich businessmen. As the film’s production history goes, Hollywood star Robert Montgomery wanted to make a splashy directorial debut by putting us inside a first-person noir narrative. As protagonist Philip Marlowe takes on a difficult case, the camera sees what he sees, experiences conversations from his perspective (Montgomery had the camera setup modified so he could sit under it as director), sees the clues as he does and gets knocked unconscious along with him. If that sounds like a challenge even today (Hardcore Henry has a generous amount of CGI to help things along), then you can understand why Lady in the Lake was not a big success upon release. The staging is awkward, the actors clearly don’t know what to do with a camera as an interlocutor, and the film often breaks its own PoV rules for reasons both practical (in order to show what’s happening) and commercial (with two breaks in which Montgomery appears on camera in-character, because studios wanted to feature his face as a commercial draw). Reviewers weren’t kind, but even if they were right in calling it a gimmick, the fact is that the gimmick remains fascinating even today. There’s a good chunk of “how are they going to do that?” interest in watching the film and even if it’s not completely successful, it remains interesting from beginning to end. The Christmas setting adds a bit of atmosphere, as are the typical noir archetypes used by a film more concerned about style than plot. Lady in the Lake is clunky, sure, but it’s also incredibly cool. I guarantee that you won’t get tired of watching what it tries to do.

  • Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)

    Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) There are plenty of good reasons to watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but one of the best has to be able to drop “You know, Alfred Hitchcock once did a screwball comedy” in conversation knowing fully well what you’re talking about. Bonus points given for the incredulousness of convincing people that the 1941 Mr. & Mrs. Smith has nothing to do with the 2005 spy-versus-spy action comedy even though you would think that Hitchcock would have been a good fit for that kind of material. No, this version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith is about a happily arguing couple that goes through a crisis of un-marriage, romantically bickering in fine screwball comedy fashion until they make up at the end. It feels very similar to other “comedies of remarriage” of the time (allowing the thrill of quasi-adultery without actually having adultery in the eyes of the Production Code) although that comes with a caveat for twenty-first century viewers: Even if the banter is equally distributed between female and male protagonists, the film clearly plays on very 1940s assumptions about gender roles and contrivances. Today’s viewers almost have to be trained to get over some of the material in order to enjoy the rest of it. If you can get past that hurdle, it’s quite a bit of fun: Carole Lombard is quite good here in one of her last films before her untimely death, while Robert Montgomery is a good foil throughout it all. The likable look at upper-class New Yorkers in their apartment, offices and privileged romantic squabbles is very much in-line with the rest of the screwball comedy genre. It’s not always convincing, though (even if you accept its contrivances), and the conclusion is a bit abrupt, but it’s not as if the reconciliation wasn’t already a forgone thing. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is goofy fun, though, and that’s more than you’d expect from Hitchcock.

  • Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

    Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) Everyone has their own irrational film dislikes, and one of mine is 1978’s Heaven can Wait, in which a lunk-headed football player is given another chance at life. It’s a manipulative, insulting piece of nonsense that doesn’t even work on a scene-to-scene level and one of my questions in approaching its original inspiration Here Comes Mr. Jordan was whether those flaws were inherent in the concept, or specific to the remake. (This seems as good a time as any to point out that 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan was remade as Heaven can Wait [1978], even if there was a different—and much better- 1943 film called Heaven can Wait. But that’s not all! Here Comes Mr. Jordan had a sequel in 1947 called Down to Earth, which was also the title of a third 2011 Hollywood remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan. All of these can trace their origin to a 1938 theatrical play called Heaven can Wait but originally titled It Was Like This. If you’re not confused, it’s because I haven’t included a diagram.)  The best thing I can say about the original is that it’s not quite as irritating as the remake. Robert Montgomery plays a boxer sent to heaven too soon, and then sent back to earth in another body.  The titular Mr. Jordan has the good luck of being played by Claude Rains, with Evelyn Keyes as the love interest.  But it’s still irritating: The protagonist is still an idiot, and the film still becomes ludicrous in its attempt to make an unsatisfying concept work. I understand the need to underscore unusual premises by clearly explaining to the audience, in triplicate, what’s happening—but a common failing of both versions is to dumb things down so much that the protagonist’s idiocy becomes grating and pile on one arbitrary rule on top of another until they don’t really matter anymore because angels. Speaking of which, there are much better angel movies—going from It’s a Wonderful Life to Here Comes Mr. Jordan feels like a downgrade. Or maybe I just don’t like the very idea of these films.