Sydney Lumet

  • The Fugitive Kind (1960)

    The Fugitive Kind (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) It’s not hard to see how The Fugitive Kind was an envelope-pushing film back in 1960 — Tennessee Williams writing, Sydney Lumet directing and Marlon Brando in the lead role, with a plot that has a drifter arousing passions in the small town where he stops for a while. (That plot summary also covers Picnic five years earlier, which was also considered edge-of-the-envelope.)  If you’re familiar with films of the time, it does remain a bit shocking to see Joanne Woodward make her entrance, dishevelled, unmannered and quite possibly inebriated: while unremarkable by today’s standards, female leads simply didn’t do that kind of thing back then. As the film advances, malevolent undercurrents suggest that it’s not going to end well… and it doesn’t. Still, what was effective sixty years ago is not always as fresh now, and it doesn’t take a long time for The Fugitive Kind to show its limits. Brando’s acting almost feels like a parody of itself, and Williams’s writing isn’t among his best. As with many films of its era, its desire to push the edge of permissible subject matters in an environment where the Hays Code was holding back honest drama lands it in a weird demimonde of unsatisfying compromises. It amounts to a film that’s certainly interesting as a representative of its era, but not completely satisfying as a viewing experience these days.

  • Child’s Play (1972)

    Child’s Play (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) A decade and a half before Chucky’s introduction, there was a Child’s Play movie that had nothing to do with killer dolls, and everything to do with… hmmm, that’s actually a good question: What is Child’s Play about? It’s clearly about a boarding school for boys in which two senior teachers (James Mason as the hated one, Robert Preston as the loved one) have it out for each other. It’s also certainly about mysterious escalating events in which the hated teacher is tormented and maybe the loved one has something to do with it. But while it initially appears to maybe involve the supernatural, the ending apparently tells us that it’s not — but director Sydney Lumet maintains the ambiguity as if even he hadn’t made up his mind. Almost no one escapes from Child’s Play with their dignities intact: this is often derided as Lumet’s worst film (which isn’t that much of a dishonour considering the rest of his filmography), but he does manage to imbue something of an atmosphere by exploiting the dark gloominess of a boarding school and amplifying it with kids who clearly aren’t all right. Mason is clearly the least-disappointing one here, imbuing his character with his usual, polished blend of dignity and menace. Preston merely does OK with the role he’s given and the rest of the players are rather inconsequential. (Beau Bridges is just… there in comparison to the two veteran actors.)  In a historical context, Child’s Play feels like an attempt to ride the paranormal possession train launched by Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, except without the genre familiarity to do anything with that intention. Which isn’t outlandish, considering that the film is adapted from a Broadway play and Broadway playwrights have seldom been acknowledged as being particularly comfortable with paranormal horror.

  • The Pawnbroker (1964)

    The Pawnbroker (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Part of the way Hollywood movies changed during the 1960s was a turn from the grandiose to the mundane, focusing on small personal stories rather than grand sweeping spectacles. The other part of the change was being able to portray America closer to what it was rather than the bowdlerized version imposed by the Production code. You can see both of those tendencies at work in The Pawnbroker, a rather intimate take on post-WW2 trauma, as seen through the eyes and actions of a Harlem pawnbroker revealed to be a concentration camp survivor. His detachment from everyone around him is what gets hashed out over the course of the film in a series of small sequences and confrontations. What does make director Sydney Lumet’s film feel slightly more modern is a relatively true-to-life portrayal of the neighbourhood in which the story takes place: As pointed out by various film historians, The Pawnbroker features things we now take as commonplace — a diversity of ethnic characters with different agendas (fittingly for its upper Manhattan setting); a confirmed homosexual character; artistically-justified nudity (apparently a first); and a portrayal of the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Rod Steiger got nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of a man with strong internal conflicts, but much of the interest of The Pawnbroker goes to the supporting cast of characters, each with short but striking roles giving a good amount of credibility to the film’s setting. It’s not a spectacular film — most of the conflict is internal until a climax that lets the tension erupt outwardly. While not a fun watch, it does act as a turning point of sorts for those who want to track the ways in which late-1960s Hollywood was an entirely different place than early-1960s Hollywood.

  • Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

    Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2019) As much as it may displease some purists, there are times where the remake improves upon the original film, and my feeling after watching the original Murder on the Orient Express is that this may be one of those pairs. Oh, I liked it well enough—there’s something just delicious about seeing a gifted detective stuck in a remote location (here: a train immobilized by snow) as a murder has been committed and everyone is a suspect. Agatha Christie wrote strong material in her original novel, and it’s up to the filmmakers to do it justice. Under Sydney Lumet’s direction, the atmosphere is quite nice, and the editing is surprisingly modern with a number of flashback cuts. The ensemble cast is remarkable, with names such as Lauren Bacall (who looks fantastic), Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset and Anthony Perkins in various roles –some of them with very little time as the story goes from one interrogation sequence to another. Still, as absorbing as it can be, it’s probably worth watching the original before the remake, as the cinematic polish of the later Kenneth Branagh version is far better controlled, and so is the take on Poirot: Here, Albert Finney plays him far too broadly as a farce character, whereas the remake wisely makes sure that behind whatever eccentricity shown by the detective is a conscious veneer soon exposed. The Murder on the Orient Express remake doesn’t necessarily strip the original of anything worthwhile, but it does make it feel slightly less impressive.