David Vining's Blog, page 110

The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Watching Sam Peckinpah’s episodes of The Westerner was a really good idea before jumping into his feature films because it gave me a fuller view of the kinds of stories that Peckinpah wanted to tell. Sitting in my media room in the 2020s, decades removed from his death, it’s easy to think that he was a violence maestro from The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs and nothing else, but three of his five The Westerner episodes were comedic in tone. They were light affairs dealing with small things like ...

The Wild Bunch

Peckinpah met great success with “Noon Wine”, his television film starring Jason Robards and Olivia de Havilland, and he was able to secure funding for his grand, revisionist western, The Wild Bunch. John Wayne saw this and bemoaned the death of the myth of the Old West. Dirty and violent, Peckinpah’s exploration of brotherhood in a dangerous world without honor feels like everything Sergio Leone was trying to do with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly only much more successfully.

The titula...

Major Dundee

More than your typical Western, but less than the great, Civil War epic, Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee is one of those movies I wish was significantly longer, like Anthony Mann’s The Furies could be improved in a similar way. By all accounts, it was much longer in Peckinpah’s original cut, and this restored version comes in at two-hours-and-fifteen-minutes in length, somewhat less than the minimum three hours I would imagine this kind of conflict of personalities amid a conflict of nations an...

Ride the High Country

The Deadly Companions was a weird little western with an ending that Peckinpah had no say in. Ride the High Country, his next film, was credited to N. B. Stone but with extensive rewriting by both Peckinpah and William Roberts, feels much less compromised, especially in its ending. Anchored by a pair of wonderful central performances from Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, Peckinpah’s second film is a nearly great film that makes the absolute most of its location filming while telling a touchin...

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

I really thought that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story had cornered the market on musical biopic satires. There was nothing else to say or even make fun of. And then Weird Al Yankovic took the Funny or Die short from a decade ago and, along with his co-screenwriter and director for the film, Eric Appel, and made a film that goes well beyond the established satirical bounds of the previous film, pushing well further into satirical surrealistic nonsense, while also sidestepping everything the ea...

The Deadly Companions

Sam Peckinpah’s last television project, The Westerner starring Brian Keith, came to an early end, and Keith went off to star in a movie with Maureen O’Hara. However, they had no director, and Keith recommended Peckinpah to the producers. Peckinpah, eager to make the jump into feature films, worked for dirt cheap on a script on which he had no say, all while, apparently, disgusting O’Hara with his personal habits the whole time. Peckinpah was so frustrated with the experience, especially the...

Sam Peckinpah: A Statement of Purpose

Having completed the Universal Classic Monsters boxset, I needed a new direction, and I was feeling the need for a shorter run. I had recently picked up a couple of Sam Peckinpah films to add to the collection (Ride the High Country and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), films that I had previously seen and knew I really liked. Peckinpah was one of the early directors that I had explored in the first days of my Netflix DVD subscription more than 15 years ago, and I remember little of it. ...

The Universal Classic Monsters: The Definitive Ranking

The Universal Monster boxset that covers the highlights (and some of the lowlights) from Universals horror output from 1931 through 1956 was indeed a quality addition to the collection. I didn’t love everything, and I disliked its fair share, but there were enough nice, little surprises along the way that I feel confident in keeping the entire boxset on my shelf.

My favorite concept was in The Invisible Man. It had the most narrative malleability to tell different kinds of stories, but th...

The Creature Walks Among Us

Whose bright idea was it to change the design of the Gill Man to *checks notes* remove the gills? Seriously, I can understand the half-baked ideas about science taking shortcuts around Nature, the uninteresting love triangle thing that barely exists, or even the meandering story. All of that is pretty standard B-movie effort, but the Gill Man costume was one of the best things about this entire franchise, and they shaved him down to just a big, hulking man-thing with big lips. That’s just wr...

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy

How weird is it that Abbott and Costello star in not only the best monster team up movie of the classic era but also the best Mummy movie of the 30s, 40s, and 50s? It’s weird, but it’s true. Their effort with the Invisible Man was a bit of a dud, but they come back in the same zany form as their first movie in the Universal Monster franchise, finding a way to inject their brand of comedy into a Mummy story with a light touch including a couple of standout moments that highlight the more fami...