Rosalind Russell

  • The Casino Murder Case (1935)

    The Casino Murder Case (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) Hmmm. When I said to myself that I’d watch the Philo Vance series, I did so after watching a William Powell Vance, not a Paul Lukas Vance. The Casino Murder Case (which features far less of a casino setting than you’d think) is a decent but not overly impressive murder mystery, as foppish detective Vance goes around collecting clues that the police has missed. There’s poisoning, recalcitrant witnesses, candies, fake-outs and characters obsessing over the properties of heavy water. Lukas is disappointing as Vance, hitting the worst notes of the character without quite managing to let the best come out—Rosalind Russell is better in the lead female role, but not that good due to the limitations of the part. The plot itself is rather dull, with the comedy only hitting in brief spurts. The Casino Murder Case amounts to a somewhat mediocre example of 1930s murder mystery in a light vein: not unwatchable, but hardly worth as much attention as other examples of the subgenre.

  • Picnic (1955)

    Picnic (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) William Holden plays a slightly off-brand version of his persona in Picnic, as a hobo who walks into a small Midwestern town to ask for a job from an old college friend… but sees everything turn sour when his friend’s paramour falls for him instead. Much of the film’s atmosphere depends on how credibly it can portray a small Kansas town in the waning summertime, and Picnic actually does well there — much of the film’s middle act revolves around happenings at a Labour Day country fair and there’s a strong sense of atmosphere throughout the film as it plays out the “stranger comes to town” narrative. Holden is too old to play a twentysomething drifter with a strong attachment to a college friend, but his shirtless scenes bring all the girls to the yard (but especially Kim Novak, in an early role) and his star quality sustains much of the film. I did like Susan Strasberg, but it’s not clear if I like the actress or the tomboyish nerd she plays. On the other hand, I definitely dislike the shrewish character played by Rosalind Russell but the actress is magnificent here and never more so as when her characters deliver a merciless verbal bombardment to the protagonist. Picnic is a small-scale kind of drama, a bit overwrought by today’s standards but still interesting to watch in its own way. The final aerial shot is evocative (and novel enough for the time), but much of the film can be used as an exemplar for the way Midwestern America thought of itself in the mid-1950s, creating an artificial utopia belied by the unfulfilled desires of its characters.

  • The Trouble with Angels (1966)

    The Trouble with Angels (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) At first glance, The Trouble with Angels feels like a silly comedy featuring two teenagers taking on their nun-run Catholic school. Child star Hailey Mills (fresh from the end of her contract with Disney) pairs up with June Harding to butt wills against a Mother Superior portrayed by Rosalind Russell. Mills’s character isn’t always likable in the opening minutes of the film, multiplying trivial hijinks out of what sounds like sheer boredom and dragging her new friend along. The highlight does remain Russell, almost ideal as the reasonable voice of reason keeping the girls in line. As it happens, though, this is indicative of where the film wants to go — away from anti-establishment comedy, and into a coming-of-age drama where The Girl Learns better. I still don’t quite buy the revelation-for-the-sake-of-drama that dominates the film’s last ten minutes (you’d think that such a shift would be more gradual, and that the best friend would be aware of it), but I don’t think the film is meant to be assessed on strictly realistic terms. You can recognize in The Trouble with Angels the kind of heartwarming film meant to reaffirm traditional values, right on time for family night viewing.   It’s not bad as such — a bit conventional in the end, but clearly engineered by director Ida Lupino to be innocuous and likable.

  • The Feminine Touch (1941)

    The Feminine Touch (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) One of my favourite kinds of comedy, especially in the Classic Hollywood era, if when the entire premise of the film causes characters to act in counter-natural ways. The Feminine Touch has that as a driving principle: the idea that an academic working on a book about jealousy would be blithely unable to be jealous, even despite ample provocations from his wife. The story does get more complex when other characters are introduced with non-mutual infatuations for other characters. Notable players here include Don Ameche as a comic/romantic lead playing the academic author, Rosalind Russell as his scheming wife trying to get a reaction out of him, Van Heflin as a romantic pretender, and Kay Francis as the fourth point in this romantic quadrangle. While The Feminine Touch is more charming and amusing than outright funny, it does culminate into a rather spectacular scuffle between the leads, and that’s a nice capper to an entertaining film. There’s a pretty good bit involving Van Heflin sporting an uncharacteristic beard and wolfish attitude. The material here is better than usual for a romantic comedy, and if you’re a fan of any of those actors (if not all four of them, because this is a seriously good cast), then The Feminine Touch is a can’t miss.

  • Gypsy (1962)

    Gypsy (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) It took me far too long to realize that Gypsy was based on a true story, but no matter — even if you don’t know anything about burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee and her impossibly micromanaging mother, the film still works quite well as its own thing. Few movies do the passing-of-the-torch thing as well as this one, either narratively, structurally or in a historical context. While Gyspy’s first moments are almost entirely dedicated to the formidable presence of “the ultimate stage mother” played by Rosalind Russell, almost forgetting the children and especially the eldest one, the film gradually shifts focus as it goes on, giving more and more place to the eldest daughter, as Natalie Wood takes centre stage and needs to put her mother in the background for her own good. Taking a step back, the film itself can be seen as a generational passing of the torch between Russell and Wood — both of them not dissimilar as actresses. (Legend has it that the two did not get along very well on set.) Wood looks really good here even if, to remain a family film, Gypsy considerably sugarcoats burlesque to the point of innocuousness. There’s plenty of good dialogue, strong character evolution and enough colourful background details to make it interesting. The first hour is a bit long — and much of it can be justified by seeing the film as a transition between two characters that could have been rushed had the first hour been snappier. Adapted from a Broadway musical that was itself adapted from Gypsy Rose Lee’s autobiography, Gypsy remains a fascinating character portrait more than a true musical… and it’s still effective even in a far more permissible twenty-first century.

  • No Time for Comedy (1940)

    No Time for Comedy (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) If you like James Stewart (and who doesn’t?), No Time for Comedy has him in a good role as a young romantic lead, a gifted comic playwright playing opposite an actress (the rather wonderful Rosalind Russell) through high and low times in their relationship. As a portrait of another era where playwrights were household names, No Time for Comedy is interestingly off-beat—it speaks to readers and movie fans alike in having Stewart as an agreeably awkward writer as the protagonist. Russell was very near the peak of her early roles at the time of this film (shortly after great turns in The Women and His Girl Friday) and her screen persona is a good match for the material. Both Stewart and Russell had better roles in 1940 alone—for Stewart, his foremost turn as a young romantic lead came the same year in The Shop Around the Corner—but it’s actually fun to see them both in a lesser-known film playing to their strengths. If anything, No Time for Comedy is a perfectly acceptable little comedy (despite an unconvincing slide into manufactured drama in the third act), and it’s not quite as overexposed as His Girl Friday or The Shop Around the Corner from the same year. Stewart and Russell are perfectly up to their personas, and the result is a nice little discovery.

  • Auntie Mame (1958)

    Auntie Mame (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Late-1950s comedy Auntie Mame is a bit of an odd duck to me. Its helter-skelter structure and narrative certainly reflect its eventful origins—first a novel in 1955, then a play in 1956, followed by this film (and then later as a Broadway musical in 1966 that led to another movie in 1974—whew!) The key of Auntie Mame isn’t the plot, though: it’s an eccentric character study featuring Rosalind Russell in a powerhouse late-career performance. Compared to her, it’s fine if the rest of the film pales a bit. Still, the weirdness is often conscious and sometimes not. It feels harmlessly eccentric at first, with a young boy being taken in by a socialite aunt whose main talent appears to be giving lavish parties in her large apartment. But then it goes on to become darker (all the way to tackling prejudices), only to win viewers back by the time the finale rolls by. There’s a new thing every ten minutes which sounds exciting but often lends a disconnected feeling to the proceedings. In many ways, Auntie Mamie often feels like a different kind of film than it is—the multi-decade plot is more akin to serious family epic dramas, whereas the bright Cinerama cinematography and overall tone seem to belong to a musical even if it never bursts in song and dance—and then there’s the theatrical scene transitions. Fortunately, Russell is formidable as a formidable character (with Peggy Cass also having a short but likable turn), which helps to ground everything on a central focus. Eventually, her performance coheres to go beyond the “quirky character” to demonstrate the kindness and determination of the woman behind the eccentricities. But it does occur to me that Auntie Mame is the kind of film that may appreciate considerably on a second viewing, once you know what to expect.

  • His Girl Friday (1940)

    His Girl Friday (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2018) There are many reasons why His Girl Friday shouldn’t work. The characters aren’t particularly nice people. A man about to be executed is at the centre of the film’s premise, which is odd for something often billed as a romantic comedy. A woman in a tragic situation becomes a comic device, and then the film makes it even worse by playing her quasi-suicide for laughs. The ending shows no real character growth. And yet His Girl Friday is fantastic. It’s a riot of laughs, a whirlwind of lightning-fast dialogue, a strong show of characters and it still has, more than seventy years later, both crackling energy and some thematic depth. Cary Grant is wonderful as a tough newspaper editor who browbeats both employees and lovers into doing what he wants—an utterly repellent character transformed into a striking comic figure through sheer acting talent. The first fifteen minutes, in particular, have Grant at his best. Rosalind Russell is equally good as a reporter who can’t quite quit either the business or her ex-husband. A sparkling battle-of-the-sexes comedy of remarriage, doubling as a highly cynical (yet uplifting) look at the news business, His Girl Friday still has plenty to wow audiences even today—the speed of the dialogue alone feels very contemporary and so does the biting cynicism about the news business. The film is optimized for speed, not detail—then-veteran director Howard Hawks (in almost exact mid-career) knew that he didn’t have to do anything to get in the way of his two lead actors, and the results speak for themselves. His Girl Friday is well-known today partly because it accidentally ended up in the public domain and has since then been a staple of late-night cable TV broadcasts, but it’s actually really good on its own. It’s got enough laughs to please modern audiences, especially now that the bad behaviour of its characters doesn’t seem so awful.