David Vining's Blog, page 101

Coonskin

This might be all of Ralph Bakshi’s worst impulses in one film. I know that the reappraisal of Bakshi’s work has placed this near the top, but this might be the most incoherent thing he’s made up to this point in his career. It’s all over the place with something incredibly indistinct to say about the black experience in America while poorly balancing its stylistic and thematic concerns against each other. Derided as deeply racist in its day for the use of racial caricature, in particular ar...

Heavy Traffic

This was the film that Ralph Bakshi wanted to make before Fritz the Cat, a film about an underground animator in New York who is actually human in design. There’s obviously some element of autobiography at play, but only to some limited degree. There are also some motifs that come into play that repeat from Fritz, mostly this desire to escape New York like it’s a prison. It’s also a slightly better film than Bakshi’s previous film, even if Bakshi’s worst impulses and general inability to tel...

Fritz the Cat

Made after Ralph Bakshi had some stints animating some Saturday morning cartoon shows like Spider-Man and Mighty Mouse, he wanted to make something more uniquely his but was convinced by his producer, Steve Krantz, to pursue the rights to the R. Crumb comic Fritz the Cat to take on something more distinctly commercial. Well, it worked. The independent animation made $90 million at the box office and launched Bakshi’s independent animating career. A work of confused anger and directionless am...

Ralph Bakshi: A Statement of Purpose

Over the years, I’ve seen a few of Ralph Bakshi’s films, most notably The Lord of the Rings which I remember picking up on the day it was released on DVD. I’ve also seen Wizards and Fire and Ice once, and I’m pretty sure that Cool World was one of my very early Netflix DVD rentals. That’s 40% of his feature films, and I don’t think I have any idea who he was as an artist.

So, why not try and figure him out? After the silent films of Erich von Stroheim, why not go in a vastly different dir...

So Ends the first section of Best Pictures…

I would normally mark the end of one run of films with a ranking, but I’m breaking up the whole Best Picture thing over time. I’m just not interested in only watching Best Picture winners for the next 3 months.

So, I will not be reviewing The Life of Emile Zola tomorrow. We’re taking a break, and tomorrow I will begin with work of Ralph Bakshi.

Just an FYI.

The Great Ziegfeld

An ode to producers in general and the famed Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, it’s little wonder that this extravagant spectacle captured the imagination of Hollywood and won its producer, Hunt Stromberg, the Best Picture Oscar. The sort of movie that MGM had perfected over the first few years of the sound era, which is a small irony since MGM bought the project from Universal that Carl Laemmle Jr. was in the middle of trying to make into a major studio (their production of Show Boat, a f...

Mutiny on the Bounty

John Ford‘s The Informer seems to have been a major beneficiary of Mutiny on the Bounty‘s riches at the Oscars. With three nominations for Best Actor (Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, and Franchot Tone), the vote seems to have split, taking the win from the major MGM production and giving it to Victor McLaughlin in the smaller, RKO picture. Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny on the Bounty is really an actor’s showcase, an effort by Irving Thalberg to effectively use the star system he had created to maximiz...

It Happened One Night

The first of three films that Frank Capra directed that won him the Best Director Oscar (Mr. Deeds Went to Town lost Best Picture to The Great Ziegfield in 1936), It Happened One Night is credited as at least one of the first, if not the first, screwball comedies. A genre born of the Hays Code Office’s requirements around the portrayal of sex in movies, it partially substituted violence for sex in watching the interplay of man and woman develop over ninety minutes or so. This is a much m...

Cavalcade

Something of a spiritual precursor to David Lean‘s This Happy Breed, Noel Coward’s Cavalcade (he also wrote This Happy Breed) tells the story of Britain from the end of the Boer War through the start of the Great Depression (roughly 1931). The screenplay, written by Reginal Berkeley, and direction by Frank Lloyd do everything they can to make cinematic this stage bound play by the British playwright, but the needs of a film that covers so much time with so many characters limits its emotiona...

Grand Hotel

A film set in a hotel? Where nearly everyone lies about who they are? Where a woman has to prostitute herself to survive? Where those who can remove their metaphorical masks honestly are the ones to come out happiest? With movie stars? Is this a Billy Wilder movie before Wilder came to America? Practically.

The first major multi-star vehicle with five of MGM’s biggest draws, Grand Hotel has the interesting distinction of being the only Best Picture winner to be nominated for absolutely no...