Another life for one time famed Montreal festival?

Once upon a time, this time of year, I would be in Montreal. From 1977 until 2018 the Montreal World Film Festival was a 10-day extravaganza, a late summer smorgasbord of world film. In its early days it rivalled the Toronto International Film Festival (Toronto started in 1976, Montreal in 1977). I remember attending the first edition held at Montreal’s Man and His World (former Expo 67). In the years since it morphed into the city’s downtown core, with unofficial headquarters being the great, late and lamented Le Parisien cinemas (photo), with five cinemas and escalators to different floors – a high rise cinema complex! Other venues were all within a few easy blocks for walking including the grand old Cinéma Impérial, still in existence, and alternately Complex Desjardins, Lowe’s and the Eaton Centre, and the city’s magnificent live arts showcase, Place des Arts. No matter where I lived in Canada, I would make sure to take off several days or an entire week and head to Montreal (I missed four or five years.) I went to the rival Toronto festival twice. And while Toronto overtook in prestige the Montreal festival, those of us who favored Montreal would still snobbishly look down our noses at it – “it’s soooo Hollywood, Montreal is a much more international festival!” Which was true. As well, from a purely logistical viewpoint, the Toronto festival was harder to get around – you sometimes had to take the subway long distances between theatres – and there was the annoying stand-by tickets, if you could get tickets at all for what turned into a human zoo. Montreal by contrast was professionally run using Famous Players and then Cineplex staff and their box office infrastructure. The Montreal fest had a good run - at one time it was actually more popular than Toronto - but increasingly there were news reports that the director, Serge Losique, was playing fast and loose with government and private funding. One by one government agencies pulled out, and critical news stories turned off audiences, attendance continued to drop until Losique’s final send off in 2018. I'd given up by then, last attending in 2016. It was pitiful. Cineplex pulled its venues, among other failings, because Losique had not paid up. So it comes as a surprise to read news stories over the past week in the Montreal press that Losique, who we always joked had nine cinematic lives, is trying to rekindle his beloved festival. This week, for example, he’s showing the greatest hits from the festival’s past. And there's talk of a resurrected permanent festival, now dubbed the Global Montreal Film Festival. Losique, who traces his roots in part to the French New Wave and worked with Jean-Luc Godard, is a diminutive, dishevelled guy who always walked around the festival in a battered baseball cap. We festival goers joked about what a “dictator” he was. It appears at age 91 he might have one or two lives left, the kind of guy who says never says die. We will definitely see.

Famed Cold War movie left me a little cold

The Manchurian Candidate is one of those seminal films so emblematic of its time and, given the nature of seemingly never-ending conspiracy theories, of all times, really. Based on the Richard Condon book, the 1962 John Frankenheimer film plays into the popular anti-Communist hysteria of the day. Of course, it’s subtly making fun of it or demonstrating its danger. Broadly speaking, the film deals with then Cold War themes of Communism vs. American freedom. But what I’ve seldom seen commented upon about this longtime cinematic favorite are some of the uncanny references to real political figures and events. For one thing it deals with a political assassination. The film was released on Oct. 24, 1962, smack in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis between the US and Soviet Union, when the world teetered on nuclear war. Second, the film's release was almost exactly a year prior to the greatest assassination in modern US history, that of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, one of the movie’s three main stars, Frank Sinatra, insisted the film be pulled from theatres after the assassination and it was not really granted an audience until two decades later when the movie became an instant classic. While some might suggest The Manchurian Candidate has no political bias there are definite aspects of it that show it very much has a pro-Democratic Party theme, no surprise in liberal Hollywood. For example, the anti-Communist senator, based on the loathed real-life Joseph McCarthy and played here by James Gregory, bears an uncanny resemblance to Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate who had just been defeated by Kennedy in the 1960 election. Second, both the senator and his wife, played by the truly ageless Angela Lansbury, are devout “patriotic” Republicans and the plot undermines their values in a truly frightful way. Ironically, the man who killed Kennedy was a devout Communist. Laurence Harvey, one of my favorite British actors of the era, plays the main character Raymond Shaw. Sinatra is also in it and considered it his best role as Shaw's Korean War army buddy. And Janet Leigh also stars. While The Manchurian Candidate has pretty much entered iconic status – and has a 97 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating - I found it only mildly interesting and plods along until, finally, at the very end, there’s a great deal of commotion indeed. And there are aspects of the film that are laughably absurd, like the the ladies’ horticultural club indoctrination scenes.   

More recently watched films:

Husbands (John Cassavetes 1970) is a searing portrayal of three middle class men played by the director, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, having, let’s say, a mid-life crisis. Fewer truly realistic movies have been made.

That’s Life (Blake Edwards 1986) Jack Lemmon plays a very annoying husband among a family of neurotics whose only sane one is the wife, played by Julie Andrews, who really has reason to complain.

Walk on the Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk) is a superb character study of a bunch of misfits played by actors like Jane Fonda (in one of her first film roles), Anne Baxter and the inestimable Capucine.

The Running Man (Carol Reed 1963) teams up Lee Remick and Laurence Harvey as a couple on the run in southern Spain. There are some memorable lines like, “insurance…it truly pays to crash.”

Little Miss Market (Walter Bernstein 1980), a remake if the 1934 Shirley Temple film, stars Tony Curtis, Bob Newhart and Julie Andrews with the endearingly grouchy Walter Matthau. But there’s no oomph as everyone seems to be calling it in.

Silver Streak (Arthur Hiller 1976) This comedy-drama features Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor fighting some dastardly guys led by Richard McGoohan in some perilous scenes aboard a train with the climax in, yes, Toronto’s Union Station. Enjoyable floss.

Get to Know Your Rabbit (Brian De Palma 1972) An absurdist comedy starring Tom Smothers, Orson Welles and Katherine Ross. What happens when a gray flannel suit executive drops out, is reborn, and drops out again? Absolutely hilarious.

 

 

 

 

Dare I say it? Hannah and Her Sisters is almost iconic

Turner Classic Movies screened yet again Hannah and Her Sisters on the weekend. This film seems to get recycled more than any other Woody Allen film – there are almost 50! – so it was tempting not to watch it again. Especially since this was probably my seventh time seeing it. But with little else on my agenda it’s hard to resist an Allen film and this is one of his best. The story’s outline is simple. Bookended by consecutive Thanksgiving dinners it’s a story of family and romance among three sisters: Hannah (Mia Farrow), Holly (Dianne Wiest) and Lee (Barbara Hershey). Elliot (Michael Caine), Hannah’s husband, has the hots for Lee, the predominant story line. Holly and Mickey’s (Woody Allen) relationship also heats up. This is all old hat for viewers who’ve watched the film innumerable times. But there are so many secondary story lines and nuanced scenes which make this movie so whole and sumptuous and therefore - dare I say it? - even iconic. And the cast of stars is stunning: Lloyd Nolan and Maureen O’Sullivan (Farrow’s real-life mother), Max Von Sydow, Sam Waterston, even little known future stars like Julia-Louis Dreyfus, John Turturro and Carrie Fisher. Famous jazz pianist Bobby Short puts in an appearance. Some of Farrow’s humongous family of kids, including Allen’s future wife, Soon-Yi, are bit players. Among the film’s takeaways: Mickey’s (Allen) typically neurotic obsession with death and his dad’s (Leo Postrel) matter of fact response, “when I’m dead I’ll deal with it then.” There’s the underlying showbiz theme, often an Allen meme.  The sisters’ parents Evan and Norma (Nolan and O’Sullivan) are old time Broadway performers, Holly’s (Wiest) constant singing auditions, Mickey (Allen) is a TV writer usually caught in the mania of a production office with his delightful sidekick Gail (Julie Kavner), his better professional half, propping him up. Mickey: “we’re all going to die someday.” Gail, “You’re just realizing this now?” Other images: Mia Farrow’s apple-like cheeks, Manhattan’s famous Café Carlyle where Allen himself has long performed on clarinet. Dorky record store signs that could have only been made in a bad design decade. The gritty and trash strewn mid-1980s Manhattan streets. And, among this group of New York Upper West Side liberals - all white – the only black person in the house is the maid Mavis (Verna O. Hobson).

More recently-watched films: 

The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame 1973) This supposed mother of all disaster films is really a ho-hum stage play with a small group of cruise ship passengers traversing the bowels a sinking ship; there’s even a few laughs.

The Hard Way (Vincent Sherman 1943) Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie are terrific as ruthless sisters trying to make it on Broadway.

SubUrbia (Richard Linklater 1996) I’m a big Linklater fan but this is a humdrum drama of growing up in a typical suburb that’s not much different from you and I experienced. But it does star Steve Zahn, Giovanni Ribisi and, my Indie queen fave, Parker Posey.

Smithereens (Susan Seidelman 1982) This indie auteur’s first film would soon lead to Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna three years later. Wonderful early 1980s NYC grit and punk life.

Raw Deal (Anthony Mann 1948) Rather stilted noir with a man (Dennis O’Keefe) on the run with two babes vying for his love – feminists would say “so typical.”

Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke 1934) has delicious performances by Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Stamboul Quest (Sam Wood 1934) Myrna Loy again as a World War I no nonsense spy who can’t be dissuaded by men or enemy governments, sometimes the same.