David Vining's Blog, page 114

Blonde

So, I highlighted the trailer. Guess I gotta review it, huh?

I saw someone dub this film Marilyn Monroe: Fire Walk With Me, and that’s quite apt. It doesn’t have the intensity of David Lynch‘s film about a girl trapped in a nightmare on her way towards her inevitable end, but it is a similar path with a heavy arthouse flare to it. Netflix takes extra pains to make sure that everyone knows that this is a fictionalized version of the events of the blonde star’s life. Not being anything of a...

Bride of Frankenstein

This is what every B-movie monster mash wanted to be: a mixture of heady thematic ideas and pure entertainment, but very few ever got it as right as James Whale did in Bride of Frankenstein. Alternatively intelligently advancing the ideas presented in the first Frankenstein film while also providing pure camp as a counterbalance, Bride of Frankenstein is a combination of entertainment and intelligence that expands on the little world created in the original and finds a surprising emotional c...

The Invisible Man

Carl Laemmle Jr. finally got James Whale to come back to make another horror picture, having tried to get him to direct The Mummy, and Whale ended up making one of the least typical of these early films. It’s something between a thriller and a black comedy, and it works remarkably well, all the more impressive since we don’t see the star of the film until the final moment.

Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) arrives in a small, English village, his whole head entire wrapped in bandages and hi...

The Mummy

This third entry in the Universal Monster movies, what was at the time a loose collection of films with generally similar plots and tones, is the first that the lead producer Carl Laemmle, Jr. didn’t base on some piece of 19th century British literature, leaving his screenwriting team, led by John L. Balderston for this film, to come up with something original. Well, without that backbone the director, recent German immigrant and cinematographer Karl Freund (who had previously worked with Mu...

Frankenstein

Dracula was a big success for Universal and producer Carl Laemmle Jr. set out to follow up the gothic romance with something similar in terms of tone and reputation. What he ended up picking was an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel about man conquering nature to create life and the fallout that follows. Eventually the directing duties fell on James Whale based on a script credited to Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh (that Whale apparently rewrote a good deal). What Whale ended up c...

Drácula

The early sound period has always fascinated me, especially in how studios suddenly needed to find ways to release films in different markets with different languages when changing out intertitles had been enough since the advent of the medium. One thing they did was simply film multiple versions of a movie. This is probably the most famous example of the practice, but even Hitchcock did it with the English language version of Murder! and the German language version Mary. Using the same scri...

Dracula

The first official cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s seminal novel (the tales of the illegality of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu tickle me), Tod Browning’s Dracula is a handsomely produced gothic romance that manages to capture enough of the novel to retain a semblance of a story while removing any kind of emotional investment. At only 74-minutes long (reportedly cut down after its initial run with footage that’s never been recovered), it covers a lot of story very quickly while putting a surp...

The Universal Classic Monsters: A Statement of Purpose

This is the first time I’ve decided to spell out why I’m doing a group of films before I actually get into it. I just thought it would be a nice marker for establishing what and why I’m doing what I’m doing, so it feels a bit less random. I mean, it’s ultimately all kind of random why I go from one thing to the next, but at least I can state my reasons.

So, about a year ago I bought the Universal Classic Monsters Blu-ray pack of 30 (actually 31) movies. I bought it because it was on sale,...

Fritz Lang: The Definitive Ranking

Fritz Lang is one of those directors who is largely known for a single film. For him, that’s Metropolis. Like many other directors, he had a much wider and deeper body of work than that one film implies. Where Lang is different is the direction his career had to take when he fled Germany in 1933.

Unlike others who fled Europe in the Interwar period, people like Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang had real trouble finding how to make life in Hollywood work for him. He worked consist...

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

#16 in my ranking of Fritz Lang’s filmography.

In terms of how directors go out with their final movie, this reminds me of Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock‘s final film. There isn’t any daylight in terms of tone or genre, but both The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and Family Plot are solidly good works that firmly fit within the bodies of work of both men that may not reach the heights of their best, but do demonstrate many of their best qualities nonetheless. Lang’s final film is also the thi...