Home Movies: Tales from the Canadian Film World

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

The words “home movies” have a slightly pejorative connotation, suggesting films that are awkward and amateurish — something one feels obliged to watch politely in return for a pleasant dinner at a neighbour’s. There would appear to be an unhappy parallel between such images and many of the “home movies” discussed here by Toronto film critic Martin Knelman, who does, in fact, refer once to the kind of movie that “may be taken seriously by people who feel they are doing something patriotic by sitting through” it. This is a book about the recent history of the Canadian cinema.

The first section deals with the disastrous “Hollywood North” era, one of whose “tragic absurdities” was “the neglect of Canadian acting talent — surely one of the country’s greatest creative resources.” Knelman briefly describes the making of some dreadful and forgotten movies, and some that, perhaps mercifully, never were made; one cringes in disbelief at the suggestion that Lily Tomlin be cast in what Knelman calls “the title role” of The Diviners. This section ends with a delightful account of the making and selling of The Decline of the American Empire, and with a profile of Garth Drabinsky.

The middle chapters deal with “the continuing saga of how the Canadian movie industry turned into the Canadian television industry” and discusses such successes as Night Heat, SCTV, and Anne of Green Gables and its sequel. The third and concluding section, “Slouching Towards China, “ is particularly interesting, about the making of a picture that was not completed when the book was written, the long-awaited movie about Norman Bethune. Just how long it has been in the works will surprise many readers: Bethune’s friend and biographer, Ted Allen, who is finally seeing his film being made, was first commissioned by Darryl F. Zanuck to write a Bethune script in 1941. Also, the filming, when it got underway, “turned into the ultimate Canadian movie nightmare” and whether the result will be “some miraculous cure” for the “chronic malaise” of Canadian cinema, or “Canada’s answer to Heaven’s Gate” remains to be seen.

Knelman’s chapters are breezily written (one reads of “a Canadian I.D.”) and sometimes sketchy. One reads of the Canadians who wrote Peggy Sue Got Married, but not of the Canadians who wrote Tough Guys or Three Men and a Baby. The Fly (1958) may be “a cheapie cult film” but it is not in black and white. Circle of Two does not show “Toronto disguised as someplace else,” but refers to Toronto in its script, and has scenes shot on Toronto Island, taking full advantage of the city’s unmistakable skyline, something that Night Heat is not permitted to do, lest it give away its Toronto locale.

The index is spotty, but a useful and argument-provoking appendix offers capsule comments on “Fifty Notable Movies from 1978-1987.” Such was the quality of some of them, and such was our woeful distribution system, that even the most ardent movie fan will find an unfamiliar title or two here. Some are gems, but too many unhappily support Knelman’s earlier observation that for years at a time, “Canadians became known for their bummers.”