W.S. Van Dyke

  • Hide-Out (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2021) As much as I’d like to say something interesting or enlightening about Hide-Out, it’s the kind of film that’s good enough to escape snarky comments about its shortcomings but not good enough to get ringing praise. The plot isn’t that complex, as a wounded womanizing mobster ends up on a farm and spends his recovery time falling for the farmer’s daughter. There’s clearly a lot of comedy to be mined in how our urbane protagonist has to adapt to the farm — and some obvious romantic material with the daughter as well. It works more often than not — director W. S. Van Dyke clearly knows what he’s doing even with a middle-of-the-road script, and the acting benefits from the professionalism of Robert Montgomery and Maureen O’Sullivan — as well as an early role for Mickey Rooney. Hide-Out is entertaining even if not particularly memorable — and it ends on a sweet high note, ensuring a nice finish for the audience.

  • Eskimo (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) It’s tempting to see Eskimo (their word, not mine) as a talkie remake of Nanook of the North. Indeed, there are numerous points of similarities between both movies, and they all run along the lines of other remakes:  The story remains an exploration of Inuit communities up north as they live their lifestyle and meet Caucasian people. The film is presented with an anthropological intent, as we follow the characters living in the arctic circle, going hunting and taking in the unusual landscape. But the two films are not particularly alike once you look closer. Clearly coming from another source (a novel), Eskimo heads for Alaska rather than Hudson’s Bay, and seems put together with a Pre-Code lasciviousness that doesn’t spare a lot of time in highlighting the looser sexual mores of the “primitive” people (their word, not mine) and how sexual favours are routinely traded for material goods. Truth in cinema, for sure, but the angle is more exploitative than the rest of the film. In terms of inclusivity, Eskimo does about as well as any film could have been expected in the early 1930s. Much of the dialogue is not in English, and it is presented through title cards rather than subtitles. The Inuit characters are portrayed by director W. S. Van Dyke as having agendas and personalities, with the Caucasians not coming across are particularly likable. Still, the film rankles from the title onward, clearly presenting an exotic, sometimes exploitative vision of “the other.”  Obvious rear-projection work damages the effectiveness of some hunting sequences, while taking a look at the cast list belies the idea that this is in any way authentic. There are ample reasons to prefer Nanook of the North.

  • I Love You Again (1940)

    I Love You Again (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) You can’t really go wrong with the William Powell / Myrna Loy duo in romantic comedies, and their ninth outing I Love You Again is a good example of that: the premise is ridiculous but the zest with which both Powell and Loy dive into the material is what elevates it to another level. Taking the good old amnesia trope out for a spin, the film begins when a straight-laced model citizen (Powell) suffers a head blow and discovers that he has reverted to a state prior to another blow to the head, ten years earlier when he was a conman. Finding himself in a position to use his good community standing, he launches a few schemes… but also discovers that his fuddy-duddy personality was so dull that his wife (Loy) is planning to divorce him. Deftly navigating between romance, scheming, comedy, preposterous bits of plotting and quite a bit of crackling dialogue, I Love You Again first works as a script, and then becomes even better in the hands of Powell and Loy, both of whom are able to get back into Thin Man-esque repartee without the accumulated weight of the series’ later instalments. While Powell gets the biggest roles in terms of comic shenanigans, Loy’s dialogue is funnier and better delivered. On the other hand, Powell in a boy-scout monitor’s uniform is one for the clip book. Funny, witty and rather cute too, I Love You Again is a demonstration of pure star power: director W.S. Van Dyke lets Powell and Loy do what they’re best at, and doesn’t interrupt of call attention to himself.

  • Trader Horn (1931)

    Trader Horn (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) Movies were something else in 1931, and Trader Horn is a tour through everything that has changed since then. Whether you want to talk about the film’s wobbling technical quality, its blatant exposition, simplistic plot or colonialist tendencies, there’s a lot of material for discussion here. I imagine that at the time, the chief appeal of the film was primarily as a way to see Africa and its wildlife on the big screen, from lions to giraffes all identified through a mildly hilarious travelogue sequence that doesn’t even attempt to hide its wide-eyed nature (even commenting upon how it’s not that unusual to see that many animals all close together). I also imagine that shooting the film on location was unimaginably difficult, explaining both the lush location and the disjointed editing of the result when there’s no time or resources to get it perfectly the first time. (Oh wow: checking its Wikipedia article, I see that it was not only the first non-documentary film shot in Africa, but a substantial portion of the cast and crew —including director W.S. Van Dyke—fell ill and a few actually died of various mishaps during filming.)  What’s left is a piece of history, but perhaps not a very pleasant one: the depiction of the native tribe is straight-up from the Victorian colonialism period, even though it’s not quite as offensive as I was dreading. Still, this is a film about white explorers discovering picturesque Africa, and no cliché is left unturned, including the white princess to be brought back to civilization. (Edwina Booth looks fantastic in the role, but she paid for it by falling gravely ill for years following the film’s production and never became the superstar that her performance suggested.)  Trader Horn is, in most respects, a rough watch: thematically, technically, and creatively, it shows its era’s limits more often than not. But I still found it unexpectedly compelling even though there are much more enjoyable movies from its time. This is one case where it’s probably better to read about the film’s extraordinary production history before watching, in order to best appreciate the labour that it represented.