David Vining's Blog, page 103

The Merry Widow

Based on an operetta by Franz Lehar, The Merry Widow is Erich von Stroheim working in a similar space as his contemporary Ernst Lubitsch (who made his own version of the same story nine years later). von Stroheim doesn’t have the same light touch as Lubitsch, but he was a graceful, detailed, and ornate filmmaker who tried for deeper emotions. The material isn’t the same kind of source of deep emotions as something like the novel McTeague that inspired von Stroheim’s Greed, but the director d...

Greed

“Can you tell me what the movie Greed is really about?” asked no one ever. I’m going to be honest, I hate the title Greed for this film. A film that could have been marketed as the story of the rise and fall of a man gets limited to just the most basic of thematic ideas from the start. Honestly, McTeague, the title of the source novel by Frank Norris, was a much more appropriate title. That being said, I wonder if anyone ever told Erich von Stroheim that no, no studio was ever going to relea...

Foolish Wives

I do not hold it against the film, but Foolish Wives is almost the same story as Blind Husbands, just with fewer mountain peaks. There’s a man dressed as a European officer who sets out to seduce the wife of an American in a small, European vacation spot that leads to the same lesson about husband’s appreciating their wives more. It’s interesting that Erich von Stroheim felt the need to reapproach this story as his third film (his second, The Devil’s Pass Key, is lost, but also seems to have...

Blind Husbands

Erich von Stroheim started his directing career with an adaptation of his own novel, The Pinnacle (a better title than Blind Husbands, I think), working with the original studio head of Universal, Carl Laemmle Sr. It was also the beginning of Stroheim’s problems with producers since they cut him out of the editing bay at one point and recut the film to their own liking (Laemmle was also known for wanting smaller, cheaper productions because of Universals lack of ownership of first run theate...

Erich von Stroheim: A Statement of Purpose

A friend of mine, Christopher DiGrazzia, suggested the work of noted perfectionist early filmmaker Erich von Stroheim a while back, and I’ve kept the option in my back pocket ever since. After the long run of forty films from Clint Eastwood, I was looking for a filmography both less imposing to handle as well as very different. Well, it was either this or Michael Bay.

I kid, of course. von Stroheim is best known for his look, a distinctive bald head with a monocle, that was made famous fi...

Erich von Stroheim – A Statement of Purpose

A friend of mine, Christopher DiGrazzia, suggested the work of noted perfectionist early filmmaker Erich von Stroheim a while back, and I’ve kept the option in my back pocket ever since. After the long run of forty films from Clint Eastwood, I was looking for a filmography both less imposing to handle as well as very different. Well, it was either this or Michael Bay.

I kid, of course. von Stroheim is best known for his look, a distinctive bald head with a monocle, that was made famous fi...

Clint Eastwood: The Definitive Ranking

I’d happily be wrong if Clint Eastwood managed to find the money for one more film after Cry Macho, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. His last two films were box office disappointments, he’s been on the wrong side of the political monoculture of Hollywood for too long, and the man is well into his nineties, creating potential insurance risks. Yeah, I think he’s done.

He’s had quite a career, though. Starting as a bit player in things like Revenge of the Creature, becoming a breakout...

Cry Macho

Not nearly the disaster that some critics made it out to be but also not that good either, Cry Macho was a script that author N. Richard Nash had been trying to get made since the early 1970s. It only took 20 years after Nash’s death for Clint Eastwood to convince some WB executives to give him the money to make the film (a promise that they were convinced would lose the studio money which angered incoming CEO David Zaslav). With a rewrite by Nick Schenk, it really doesn’t feel like it’s had...

Picture by Lillian Ross

So, my mother gave me this account of the making of John Huston’s film The Red Badge of Courage for Christmas, and I’ve just finished it.

It’s a very engrossing account of the studio system, the intersection of commerce and art, and changing times all at once. Highly recommended.

However, I just wanted to note something about Huston himself. He comes off really badly in this, making me think he was something of a phony tough guy. He rides the waves made by his previous, minor successes...

Richard Jewell

There’s been something interesting evolving through Clint Eastwood’s later career in terms of his view of authority. Going all the way back to Dirty Harry, he was looking at a series of institutions that were inept and maybe corrupt, but never malicious. Even Little Bill in Unforgiven was trying to maintain peace with violent means. However, by the 2010s with films like Sully where the government (the NTSB in that case) were becoming outright antagonistic towards the individual, especially t...