Warren Williams

  • Satan Met a Lady (1936)

    Satan Met a Lady (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) It’s hard to argue that Satan Met a Lady is an interesting film by itself — while it features a killer title (especially for a film released so soon after the enforcement of the Hays Code), it’s executed like many jocular detective movies of the 1930s, and there are far better examples of the form than this one. But where Satan Met a Lady becomes truly special is in the exemplary lesson it offers in how tone can reshape a film adaptation. For this is, amazingly, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, five years before the John Huston adaptation that would help ignite the film noir genre and launch Humphrey Bogart to superstardom. The protagonist here, played by a twinkle-eyed Warren Williams, couldn’t be farther away from Bogart — he’s a smooth romantic operator and a constant one-liner generator who barely takes himself seriously. Not that he is the most outrageous deviation of the adaptation, which takes so many liberties with the source material than even viewers with fresh memories of the 1941 version will have trouble spotting the similarities. But the frankly comic tone is where the film is most distinctive, and perhaps most enjoyable as well. It’s not a good movie — Bette Davis, one of the film’s lone bright spots as the femme fatale, famously rebelled and refused to show up on set for the first few days of shooting—but it becomes fascinating when you put it against the film noir style of telling roughly the same story. Then again, film noir wasn’t even in the cards in 1936 — amateur sleuths and high-society escapes from the Depression were the vogue, and Warner Brothers was clearly aiming at chasing trends of the time. Despite a plot that becomes unpalatable late in the film’s brisk 74 minutes, Satan Met a Lady is not an unbearable watch, but it’s far best appreciated as the second feature in a Maltese double (or triple) bill.

  • The Dark Horse (1932)

    The Dark Horse (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) As I sat down to watch The Dark Horse, a Pre-Code political comedy featuring a simpleton being groomed for high office, the United States is experiencing the last drawn-out spasm of an incompetent federal administration led by another kind of simpleton. My tolerance for fictive portraits of such people put in position of power is at an all-time low considering the excess mortality rates south of the border during a worldwide pandemic, and I wasn’t sure I was going to like the result all that much. Happily, the film often exceeded my expectations. It certainly helps that the candidate at the heart of The Dark Horse is an amiable, harmless kind of simpleton—not the kind of person you’d want as a governor, but not the kind of spiteful, destructive idiot found in reality. It also helps that the dull character is not at the centre of the film: that honour would go to a sharp politician operative dealing with grooming his charge, while also managing his ex-wife and new flame during the election period. Bette Davis co-stars as his would-be second wife, but it’s Warren Williams who grabs most of the spotlight as a genius-level political operative. Some of the script is a bit blunt and repetitive, but there are a handful of very funny moments, and a third act that keeps escalating out of control even from the protagonist’s capable mind. You can see in The Dark Horse the somewhat freewheeling attitude toward marriage and divorce that characterized many 1930s romantic comedies (something that would ironically grow even bolder after the imposition of the Code), but you will especially recognize the timeless nature of political campaigns, even despite very different tools at the disposal of campaigns. The Dark Horse thus finds a place in the very, very long list of American movies about American politics, often being far more idealistic than reality, even despite their comic cynicism.