Spencer Tracy

The Seventh Cross (1944)

The Seventh Cross (1944)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2020) There are a few good reasons to watch The Seventh Cross – It’s an early film from Academy-award-winning director Fred Zinnemann, it features Spencer Tracy and it’s the first on-screen pairing of real-life couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy (the last being 1987 science fiction family comedy Batteries Not Included). More significantly, it’s one of the very few Hollywood films to talk about Nazi concentration camps as WW2 was going on, and before the true horrors of the camps were revealed. The story has to do with seven escapees from a concentration camp trying to evade capture, despite a commandant determined to bring them all back (“on crosses,” hence the title). Our protagonist (Tracy) is the seventh, the last escapee trying to get out of Germany despite a population not sympathetic to his goals. The premise is not bad, the acting talent is remarkable, the director would go on for better things and the script has a few flourishes (notably in having the narrator being one of the first dead escapees), but I found The Seventh Cross to be surprisingly uninvolving once past the first few minutes. This may be a reflection of a contemporary view of the situation: escaping Nazis would seem, today, to be of utter urgency, leading to a suspenseful film – but it seems more intent on an examination of the human spirit than out-and-out thrills. Whatever the reason, The Seventh Cross seems more interesting than purely enjoyable or entertaining today.

Edward, My Son (1949)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2020) There are two interesting things to chew upon while watching Edward, My Son—first, the conceit of having a film named after a character that is never shown (or heard) on-screen; and second, seeing Spencer Tracy play a despicable character. The film is a character study of the father, as his own personal failings help shape the deplorable personality of his (unseen) son, all leading to retribution both legal and personal. The protagonist’s egomania fuels his desire to shape his son into a more privileged version of himself, and this shaping extracts a toll on both men. It’s a decent theme and an intriguing premise (somewhat stylized by presenting the passage of time through candles on birthday cakes—this is adapted from a theatrical play) but in execution falls somewhat flat. The pacing is off, the staginess of the presentation reminds us that this is all a conceit, and all the parts don’t quite come together harmoniously. But, hey, Spencer Tracy being evil—at least there’s that.

Plymouth Adventure (1952)

Plymouth Adventure (1952)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2020) As a Canadian, there are a few pieces of American mythology that confound me, and the Mayflower is one of them. I know that Thanksgiving comes from its pilgrims, and so does part of the American overinflated sense of democracy. Never mind that it was a mere drop in the massive immigration waves that truly made America, that the American Revolution was far more crucial to its system of government or that Thanksgiving is a bit of a hollow celebration as we come to grips with colonization. But Plymouth Adventure goes all-in to mythologize the trip in celluloid form, featuring none other than Spencer Tracy as the captain of the ship ferrying the pilgrims to the new world. The journey is interminable for both the pilgrims and the audience, as the film overstuffs itself with an ensemble cast and several dramatic deviations from historical fact. There are romantic entanglements, deaths, storms and that stuff—with special effects so good at the time that they netted an Oscar. Dramatically, though, Plymouth Adventure is a bit of a bore. It’s so deeply convinced of the value of its story that it fails to make a case for its importance. The style of the film is typical of early 1950s bombast, although I fear what would have happened if they had made this film a few years later, just as 1950s films took on epic scope and length in order to outclass television. I don’t mean to imply that Plymouth Adventure is a bad movie—you can still watch it today and appreciate the result, as well as be thrilled at some of the storm sequences. But it’s self-satisfied in a way that limits its appeal to non-Americans—or even Americans who don’t buy into the white Pilgrim myth as the birth of the nation.

Boom Town (1940)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2020) There’s something fun in seeing Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy play frenemies on-screen in Boom Town, each of them bringing their usual persona to the fore in a tale of duelling oil tycoons throughout the years. The story spans more than a decade, and sees them make a large fortune at a time when oil madness was sweeping the United States. Women, business deals and even revenge tie their characters as much as it compels them to competition, and if the film has a narrative backbone, it had to be the character played by Claudette Colbert who becomes a prize for them. (Meanwhile, Hedy Lamarr gets an early good role as the temptress that comes in between the lead trio.) Boom Town gets a while to get going, something that is not at all helped by a cyclical structure that keeps getting back to familiar ground, suggesting an unsatisfactory lack of growth for the characters. Both Gable and Tracy are good at being themselves and playing off each other (this was their third collaboration after San Francisco and Jet Pilot, and perhaps the best) while Lamarr is striking in a limited role, but Colbert is wasted in a role that barely touches upon her comic talents. The result is not bad, but it misses being better than good by a wide margin—not enough development, a repetitive structure and a disappointing ending. I still liked the look at the wild oil fields of the early twentieth century and the character interplay (Gable had worked with his father on such fields, so he had a better than average understanding of how that worked), but Boom Town could have been better.

The Last Hurrah (1958)

The Last Hurrah (1958)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, July 2020) Hollywood has long been fascinated by the American political system, and even older films still have something relevant to say about it. In The Last Hurrah, John Ford directs a rumpled Spencer Tracy as he plays an older veteran mayor facing his last election (his “last hurrah,” although the title clearly anticipates a more definitive conclusion) and letting his perceptive nephew tag along for the ride. Perhaps the biggest strength of the film is Tracy’s weary and captivating performance as the engine of a vast political machine — although this is not necessarily portrayed all that negatively as he fights against the blueblood elites and still has the interest of the people at heart. He’s a canny operator, capable of unorthodox power plays such as threatening to install a clearly incompetent person in an important position just to see his family squirm with the anticipated disgrace. The election night itself is portrayed with some skill, as victory ends up yielding to the sum of the various incidents in the film. The Last Hurrah veers into more sentimental territory toward the third act, although it doesn’t quite yield to sappiness at the end. It’s often surprisingly nuanced, even-handed in considering the trade-offs inherent not just in elections, but in governing as well.

A Guy Named Joe (1943)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2020) There’s an unusual blend of elements at work in A Guy Named Joe—a mixture of wartime propaganda, supernatural events, romantic triangle and interesting performers. If you’re coming at this film from first having seen its 1989 remake Always, they it’s going to be pretty much the same things, flaws and qualities included. What’s good about it is the same, and what’s annoying (a reluctance to really lean on the supernatural possibilities of its premise) is the same as well. The indirect actions by the ghostly character on the living are both charming and frustrating in equal measure. At least Spencer Tracy (in full aw-shuck everyman yet skilled professional), Irene Dunne and Van Johnson (in a hard-fought role) are all quite good as the points of the triangle. To its credit, A Guy Named Joe is more than your usual wartime propaganda film, and Dalton Trumbo’s script is finely crafted. Some good special effects (for the time) help round up the picture. I don’t particularly love it, but maybe I would have said otherwise had I seen this first, and Always second.

The Actress (1953)

The Actress (1953)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2020) While adapted from the life of actress-playwright Ruth Gordon, The Actress (despite being scripted by Gordon herself) aims for amiable family comedy more than biographical sketch. By using Spencer Tracy as the sometimes-goofy family patriarch, it’s likely that director George Cukor meant to evoke fresh good of his then-fresh turns in Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend. The theatrical origins of the story aren’t readily apparent in the film’s eagerness to vary locations, but the quality of the dialogue is there. Still, the film does feel (especially seventy years later) like a small-scale domestic comedy. The biggest conflict is whether the family will accept the daughter’s dream of becoming an actress, and this being a Classical Hollywood movie, you can guess how that ends. There’s an affectionate component to the film’s look back to 1913 Massachusetts, and an amiable tone to the family’s small-scale troubles. Anthony Perkins shows up (in his debut) as a would-be suitor. The Actress, in many ways, is charming in its mediocrity—something to watch if you haven’t got enough of Tracy’s patrician roles.

Men of Boys Town (1941)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2020) Hollywood’s infatuation with sequels is pretty much a century-old tradition by this point, and so are the most common factors why sequels disappoint. An artifact of relevance: Men of Boys Town, sequel to 1938’s Boys Town, once again finds Spencer Tracy finely playing the wise helpful priest heading an educational establishment for troubled boys. Meanwhile, Mickey Rooney is once again the youthful sort-of-delinquent getting in trouble (but not too much trouble). Both could play those roles in their sleep, but that’s not important if the point of the film is repeating a formula. In this aspect, then, Men of Boys Town is a success—it delivers more of the same in the way viewers of the first film would expect. It’s shameless about emotional manipulation, dead dog and all—but the entire film careens from one big emotional register to another, whether it’s comedy in the form of a slow-motion fight sequence, or much darker suggestions of abuse when delinquents are sent to a reform school, quite unlike Boys Town. Of course, the film’s flaws will be magnified if you had no interest in Boys Town in the first place—repetition, manipulation and actors not challenging themselves being the most visible of them. Still, Men of Boys Town is traditional Hollywood filmmaking at its most exemplary, for better or for worse.

Fury (1936)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, February 2020) Some social issues movies still resonate through the ages, and there’s something still very unnerving about Fury’s depiction of mob justice in a small community—the collective unconscious of the group demanding sacrifice and stopping at nothing—certainly not proof—to get it. There’s certainly something eerie in seeing director Fritz Lang, freshly escaped from Nazi Germany, taking on the project as his first American film. Spencer Tracy brings his everyman quality to the protagonist, accused of kidnapping and left for dead by a mob seeking vengeance. Fury still strikes a nerve despite constraints imposed by the Production Code and limited technical means—even in politically charged 2020, where performative political discourse quickly descends to personal accusations, it’s far too close to plausibility to be comfortable. Lang brings an outsider’s perspective to something—lynching—that was still very much part of American culture at the time, and does so in just a way to make the matter feel atemporal—maybe it’s still quiet, but the impulse toward mob justice is still very much there.

Without Love (1945)

Without Love (1945)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, January 2020) While Without Love may not be Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s finest comedy, it’s not without its share of high points. As a story of two bachelors who marry out of convenience and patriotic duty then truly begin to fall in love, this is not exactly the sharpest premise in the book. But all is in the details, and the pleasantness is largely to be found in small moments, lines of dialogue and seeing both Hepburn and Tracy play off each other. (One very funny scene has Hepburn sneezing in a diver’s helmet.) The setting is hopelessly dated in many ways: much of the plotting is propelled by World War II concerns, something the film inherits from its theatrical origins. For science nerds and theatre geeks in the audience, the film does throw in a few jokes about distracted scientists (which Tracy’s character is), and pre-famous Lucille Ball does show up in an early supporting role. Anyone who champions Hepburn as a sex-symbol should watch Without Love if only for the brief scene in which she turns up with loose curly hair. As for everyone else: the film is fun, funny and ping-pongs between characters who think they’re too intellectual to fall in love, then spend much of the film trying to deny it’s happening. The very abrupt ending is a bit of a surprise—it ends well, but an additional scene may not have hurt. On the other hand, that’s how they often wrapped things up back then—cut to the trailers, and on to the next short comedy.

Father’s Little Dividend (1951)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, January 2020) If you’re still annoyed at how Steve Martin (or rather Nancy Meyers) screwed up 1995’s Father of the Bride Part II, I’ve got mixed news for you. For one thing, Martin and Meyer weren’t completely making it up by themselves—the sequel was also a remake of 1951’s Father’s Little Divided, with the main plot (the father of the bride becomes a grandfather; angst ensues) inevitably making up the main arc of the follow-up. The good news is that the 1951 film wisely stopped there—there wasn’t a ludicrous subplot about the wife of the father of the bride becoming pregnant at 49, and that’s for the better. Focusing on the original does highlight how much the remake mishandled fundamental elements. Here, the essence of the film remains a universal experience—how do men go through the perception shift of thinking of themselves as grandfathers? Once again, Spencer Tracy makes for the perfect everyman going through a universally relatable scenario. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Taylor is cute but slightly wasted in the role of a young expectant mother—the focus, unfortunately, is squarely on her father without much interest in what she’s going through. While generally likable and still resonant, the film doesn’t equal its predecessor and highlights how values have shifted in the decades since then—the last set-piece of the film before its happy ending (grandpa losing a baby due to inattentiveness) is now nothing short of hair-raising, and that may stop some viewers from embracing the result entirely. (Still, that scene is notable for one interesting constant—Grandpa doesn’t become grandpa at his grandson’s birth, but later on once his self-image catches up to the events.) Still, the film survives this plotting bump thanks to Tracy’s always-sympathetic performance and some warm direction from Vincente Minelli. It may not be enough to smooth over the 1950s attitudes so prevalent here—there’s a lot of “well, accounting for the times…” required to get to the universality of the film. Still, my bold theory is that the 1951 film is still more relatable than the frantic 1995 remake that didn’t trust itself to tell a simple story without making it a frantic two-ring circus. If you’re going to make a film about a rite of passage for older men, why not focus on that? One final piece of trivia that may escape modern viewers: Father’s Little Dividend was released less than a year after Father of the Bride: a breakneck production pace that may explain why this sequel doesn’t quite rise to the level of the first film despite a good attempt.

Libeled Lady (1936)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, January 2020) If someone tells you that Libeled Lady is one of the top comedies of the 1930s, believe them—there aren’t many better ones. Firmly ensconced in the screwball subgenre, this is a film that plays into the whole weddings-don’t-mean-much (but they do!), harebrained-schemes-are-better-than-honesty, let’s-see-who’s-the-craziest ethos of those kinds of films. The cast alone is a solid treat, what with the legendary William Powell/Myrna Loy screen duo, bonified with Jean Harlow (who was romantically involved with Powell at the time, adding another layer of interest) and a dark-haired Spencer Tracy to round off the main cast. Everything takes place in a gloriously escapist Manhattan upper-class society setting (with a bit of newspaper journalism thrown in) where people have no better things to do than to pursue demented schemes, maintain misunderstandings and riff off quips at each other. It’s a hugely enjoyable film [April 2024: And one that appreciates upon subsequent viewings] because director Jack Conway’s execution is so smooth, not to mention the acting—Powell being Powell, his line delivery is perfect, but every main player has three other gifted comedians to play with, and the result is a small triumph. Even the outdated period detail becomes charming or at least easy to forgive. (There’s a bit of casual racism at the very beginning of the film, but it’s early, quick and more annoying than insulting.) The cavalcade of last-minute twists that serve as resolution is part of the joke: having no reasonable way to untangle the plot, the writers added more things and called it quits while daring anyone to say anything about it. Libeled Lady was, upon release, a box-office hit and an Academy Awards Best Picture nominee. It’s still a marvel even today—easily worth a watch.

Father of the Bride (1950)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, January 2020) There’s a reason why Father of the Bride remains a classic seventy years later, after a (rather good if far more histrionic) Steve Martin remake and many social upheavals that make the 1950 world of the film feel distant: It’s still sweet, humane and a terrific showcase for both Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. Adapted from a then-bestselling novel, the story is simple to the point of being archetypical—Daddy’s favourite daughter is getting married, and that’s cause for emotional, financial and comic upheaval. Handled by director Vincente Minelli in a manner reminiscent of his other musicals, the film moves at a steady pace, starting with a quiet but very effective monologue that sets the frame for the rest of the film. Spencer is typically good as the harried everyman father pushed to his limits in organizing an extravagant upper-middle-class wedding, while Taylor here plays the cute ingenue without the sex-symbol mystique that would accompany many of her later roles. Father of the Bride was an Academy Awards favourite, earning nominations for best picture, screenplay and a nod to Tracy’s performance (most likely cinched by his bittersweet narration that wraps up the film). It almost goes without saying that the socio-economic context of the film is almost entirely alien at this point, with much of the film treating the protagonist’s patriarchal viewpoint as the default assumption, and multiplying rich-people’s-problems as a source of comedy. But is it really so outdated? For all of the intervening social upheavals, there’s still a solid core of drama (expressed as broadly-accessible comic sequences) in seeing a middle-aged man go through the realization that his daughter has become a woman and is leaving his orbit. Father of the Bride is not quite as time-bound as you may think—for all of its circa-1950 context, it still works quite well today.

Boys Town (1938)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, January 2020) There’s an immediately recognizable rhythm to Boys Town that works even eighty years later, so closely does it adhere to some conventions of Hollywood feel-good movies. It starts with our heroic priest protagonist (in an understated performance by Spencer Tracy) visiting a death-row inmate and resolving to do what he can to save boys from criminal destinies. Moments later, he’s establishing a reform establishment for troubled boys in the hopes of putting them on a straighter path. (It’s based on a true story.) As regular as clockwork, this is all a setup for the redemption of a particularly troubled soul played by… Mickey Rooney. That’s right. All-American ruddy-cheeked teenage heartthrob Rooney playing a bad boy, going against the establishment and vowing that nothing and no one will even tame him. You can imagine how the rest of the film goes, and that’s actually part of its charm—the utter comfort of watching a film eighty years later and still being able to know with confidence where it’s going. Boys Town was an Academy Awards favourite back in 1938 and the formula it adopts is still being used these days. Still, the fun of the film is in the details and the performances. Even if you don’t buy Rooney as a hoodlum, Boys Town (helmed by then-veteran director Norman Taurog) is a movie that clearly understands what it’s doing, and executes it with good details. The Christianity of the lead character is present without being overbearing; the bad-boy antics of its teenage co-lead are easily acceptable by the audience and the film rides this kind of middle-of-the-road sensibility all the way to a feel-good conclusion. Is it inspiring but predictable, predictable but inspiring or simply both?

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(YouTube Streaming, December 2019) There is a place and a time for everything, including slow-paced dramas dealing with heady questions of shared responsibilities and war crimes. What I’m getting at is that you should give yourself plenty of time to get into Judgment at Nuremberg—at a staggering three hours and eight minutes of mostly courtroom dialogue, it’s a long sit. But you do get a lot for your time—starting with an all-star cast that starts with Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster and Marlene Dietrich, all the way to one of William Shatner’s earliest prominent roles. This film is a debate of ideas, as the American occupation struggles with the prosecution of war crimes at a time when Germany is becoming a crucial Cold War playground, and the US can be accused of having inspired some of the Nazi rhetoric. The battle between lawyers gets to some crucial issues, not the least of which is assigning blame for atrocities. Perhaps the most affecting moment of the film comes from well-known material—starkly-presented footage of concentration camps shortly after liberation, with piles of corpses and bulldozers doing mass burials out of health concerns. (Those images aside, be careful about seeing the film as fact—while it’s adapted from real-life events, nearly all the characters are deliberately fictional and condensed from the proceedings.)  Judgment at Nuremberg doesn’t pull any punches in its topic or depiction—it’s cinema as consciously codifying right and wrong, dismissing feeble objections to the contrary. Despite good-faith efforts to make the film cinematic, there is a lot here that could play as a theatrical piece, including a lengthy summation-as-judgment from Tracy that can be seen as a template for director Stanley Kramer’s climactic sequence in the later Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner. The leisurely pace, repetitive material and fixed location doesn’t work against the film as much as you’d think, though: there’s a moral argument here, and it’s not as much about finding right or wrong as it’s about how to establish right in such overwhelming fashion that there can be no lingering doubt about it. Judgment at Nuremberg does amount to an admirable piece of cinema, as compelling today as it was in 1961. But give yourself plenty of time to immerse yourself in it.