Tom Ewell

  • The Great American Pastime (1956)

    The Great American Pastime (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The more I dig into the classic movie catalogue, the more I’m amazed by the number of perfectly decent films that simply have been nearly forgotten since their heyday. The Great American Pastime is not what we’d call a great movie. It’s patrician, simplistic, and definitely belongs as an exemplar of the 1950s “Father knows best” social norms. It’s about a family man who is convinced to coach a little league baseball team for his son, but quickly finds himself besieged by unhappy parents, and falsely convinced that a widow is hitting on him. Predictable pushback follows from both his wife and the widow herself. It’s not always convincing, lacks a bit of polish and remains a slight comedy. But it’s rather charming in its own way. TCM unearths it once in a while, often because Ann Miller plays the widow – a rare non-singing, non-dancing, non-tap-dancing movie for her, but also the last of her MGM years: she wouldn’t appear again on the big screen for another twenty years. Tom Ewell plays the harried father (the film amusingly begins with him bemoaning the mountain of trouble that befell him after trying to do good) while Anne Francis plays the wife with firm understatement. Perhaps The Great American Pastime’s funniest sequence has him accepting a dinner invitation from the widow, and being completely oblivious to his wife’s increasing desire to go back home. A blend of sports, parenting and relationship comedy, the film does hit the right spots and unknowingly becomes a symbol of how people could idealize life in small-town 1950s. It’s easily watchable even in its voluntarily simplistic nature… and it currently doesn’t even have 200 votes on IMDB. Clearly, The Great American Pastime ranks as the kind of film that more people could know about.

  • The Seven Year Itch (1955)

    The Seven Year Itch (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2019) The interesting thing about The Seven Year Itch is that I could reliably predict how much I’d like it based on other movies. Like writer-director Billy Wilder’s other comedies, it navigates a tricky path between tones, pushes the envelope a bit and shows his clear gift for humour. Like other movies featuring Marilyn Monroe at her best, it shows her as a comic actress first and a sex-symbol second. Like other brightly lit comedies of the mid-1950s, it offers us a colourful, nearly fabulist look at a society long gone. Beginning with a sardonic interlude describing the timeless ritual of men packing their family for summer trips while they get to enjoy themselves at work and at home during the summer, The Seven Year Itch quickly gets down to business as it relates the flirtation between a married man alone for a few weeks and his new sexy upstairs neighbour. It all takes place in 1950s Manhattan, as fun as a playground can be for this kind of thing. While quite tame by today’s standards, we shouldn’t underestimate the delicate way Wilder daringly tackled tough issues in the far more prurient 1950s, acknowledging a few base instincts that weren’t proper to acknowledge back then. Monroe can be very, very funny at times, although those who are attracted to the film for the infamous “dress pulled up by subway venting” shot will be very surprised to find that it’s nowhere in the film—that sequence is carefully framed to pull down from her head to the subway grate without offering a single overall shot of the pose, and the photo that people remember is a recreation of the scene made sometime later as a publicity shot. Protagonist Tom Ewell pales in comparison to Monroe, but he still acquits himself well, even when saddled with a narrative monologue that straddles an awkward line between voiceover and mumbling to oneself. The conclusion of the film is a forgone conclusion given the Production Code that limited all Hollywood movies at the time—as much as the film pushes at the edge of the permissible envelope, it will never rip it and maybe that’s why we feel so safe watching it. I much prefer the other Wilder/Monroe movie Some Like it Hot, but I did have quite a bit of fun playing a tourist in mid-1950s summertime Manhattan in The Seven Year Itch.