Sharon Tate

  • Valley of the Dolls (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) In a classic case of a sequel overshadowing its predecessor, I went into Valley of the Dolls with distant but fond memories of the over-the-top pastiche that is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Well, it turns out that screenwriter Roger Ebert was on to something when he wrote the satirical sequel, because this film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s trashy 1966 novel is more incompetent than enjoyable. Valley of the Dolls attempts to be a dark mirror to all of those Hollywood fairy-tale films in which a small-town woman travels to Hollywood and becomes a star. Here, we have three young women destroyed by the pressures of chasing celebrity, turning to drugs (the titular “dolls”), bad men and flashy hedonism in an attempt to express the Susann’s glum dissatisfaction. It’s important to note the release year—1967, a turning point in film history when Classic Hollywood retired and New Hollywood took over, with its more realist approach but with the drunken abandon of a moved-out teen boy who finally gets to do whatever he wants. The result is meant to be a bit slummy, but it simply doesn’t have enough skill and finesse to do justice to the material. Valley of the Dolls just feels misguided at every turn, aiming to take down the image of Classic Hollywood (another miscalculation, as it turns out that even twenty-first century audiences like the allure of Classic Hollywood) but not having the right amount of perspective to be able to do so. It wants to showcase sexual freedoms but is stuck in an old-fashioned moralistic mindset. Sharon Tate is there, but not for a long time considering that the plot is scattered over three protagonists. Valley of the Dolls is semi-interesting in the ways it gets it wrong, of course, but the result is still wrong. Watch the Ebert-scripted satirical follow-up instead—you won’t miss much from the original.

  • Don’t Make Waves (1967)

    Don’t Make Waves (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) The mid-1960s were a strange time for Hollywood movies—at once poking and prodding at the social changes occurring over the United States, yet still being held back by decades of slavish adherence to the Hays Code. One of the laboratories through which to study this interregnum is the sex comedy genre, which pushed the envelope… but never too much. They feel charmingly quaint these days, as they play with ideas of infidelity, female characters with their own sexual agenda, and newish modes of living, such as muscle-bound surfers. Is it any surprise if much of it is about the ways Californians were breaking free from US orthodoxy? Such is the situation at the beginning of Don’t Make Waves as a New York promoter drives to California with everything he owns in his car… only to lose it all due to the actions of an inattentive Italian artist. This forces him to live with her, however briefly, and get caught up in a complex web of infidelity, surfing hippies, swimming pool salesmanship and unstable coast-side housing. Tony Curtis is up to his usual good standards as the fast-talking New Yorker almost completely out of his element on the West Coast, but most of the attention usually goes to his female co-stars: Sharon Tate in one of her few roles, this time as a young fit surfer, and the divine Claudia Cardinale as the scatterbrained Italian at the root of his problems. There’s clearly a satirical intention to Don’t Make Waves that’s probably wasted today, as the film goes from one contemporary hot topic to another in a way that may be less obvious in a future in which these topics have become commonplace. Much of the film’s comedy is to be found in one weird situation or another, although the film does hit a highlight later on by featuring a big physical comedy set-piece as the characters are stuck in a house tumbling down a hill. Don’t Make Waves is certainly not a great movie, but like many lesser-known films of the 1960s, it offers a slightly different view on the obsessions of the time, and perhaps even a more honest one even through the comic exaggerations.

  • Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

    Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Considering Quentin Tarantino’s fascination for older movies, it was almost inevitable that he’d end up recreating Hollywood history sooner or later. With Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, he gets to recreate 1969 Los Angeles in his own idiosyncratic fashion, playing up the iconography but avoiding many clichés along the way. In some ways, it’s a less overly experimental film than many of his previous ones: the direction remains grounded most of the time, and the film doesn’t overuse splashy effects. On the other hand, it’s still Tarantino and that means it’s quite unlike most other movies at the multiplex: it eventually becomes an alternate-reality drama, it has fun with narration, it plays off its actors’ career and it makes copious use of very long sequences that play almost in real-time. At times, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is less of a story and more of an immersion in a reality fifty years distant, taking in the mundane sights and sounds of a specific time and place. It’s quite a bit of fun even when it multiplies the obscure references of its day-in-the-life style, and the actors look as if they’re having fun. Brad Pitt has a terrific role as the guy who’s usually smarter than anyone else in the room and Margot Robbie is luminous as a Sharon Tate saved from her real-world fate (a justifiable historical inaccuracy) but the real winners here are the viewers for a quick trip through a time machine.

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Having just read Quentin Tarantino’s “novelization” of his own Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which departs from the film in many delightful ways, I had to re-watch it again: both for pleasure but also to make sure that I had a good handle on the differences between both. In many ways, I enjoyed the film even more on a second go-around. One thing that worked better this time was the homage to 1960s Hollywood – but that’s almost inevitable given that my own knowledge of the period has grown in the year since I first saw the film. Knowing what to expect from the film’s staggering running time also helped in settling into the slow pacing of the result. But the book also clarified things that may not have been obvious from a simple second view. It provide some fascinating additional background to the characters, chiefly in establishing Cliff’s incredibly violent personal history apart from Brad Pitt’s personal charm. While I still consider Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood to be middle-tier Tarantino, it does have the advantage of being somewhat better-natured than many of his other films – even the violence, when it ignites, seems to be unusually justified: you’ve never felt so good seeing a hippie girl being repeatedly face-smashed into furniture, considering that it saves Sharon Tate from a terrible death. So are the strange ironies of a film that could only have been made by a filmmaker with the creative freedom of Tarantino.

  • Dance of the Vampires aka The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)

    Dance of the Vampires aka The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) What a dud. I watched Dance of the Vampires semi-reluctantly. It was on a list of films I had to see (I don’t control the list; the list controls me) and I went in as reluctantly as I do with other Roman Polanski films. It’s hard to ignore the writer-director’s 1973 actions in confronting his filmography, and I’ve noticed that my favourite Polanski movies (which aren’t the ones you’d expect) work in spite of him rather than because of him. Dance of the Vampires further invites discomfort because it features Sharon Tate as a damsel to be rescued from a murderous cult (or vampires, but still) by none other than Polanski himself playing an apprentice vampire hunter. But even if you completely disregard the whole matter of Tate’s murder and Polanski’s flight from justice for rape, Dance of the Vampires is a hard film to like. Billed as a comedy, it now feels tedious and unremarkable. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that there have been many movies satirizing vampire films over the decades (even for kids!) and even the latest vampire films often have touches of humour far funnier than anything here. Seen today, Dance of the Vampires isn’t nearly as fresh as it must have felt back then. It’s also frankly dull—the comic devices are tired, the jokes are lame and the ending is a downer. As a result, it’s a comedy without laughs and a vampire film without thrills. It felt interminable and too easily satisfied with weak jokes. Some movies have survived well through the decades, but Dance of the Vampires isn’t one of them. Made redundant and repugnant by later life events and later movies, I can’t bring myself to recommend it except to dedicated film history students.