David Vining's Blog, page 116

Wes Craven – A Retrospective

This is the first time I’ve gone through the body of work of a filmmaker and simply regretted the decision. After having done several foreign filmmakers in a row (Kurosawa, Tati, Melville, and Kobayashi), I decided to search out a more modern, American filmmaker with name recognition, and I quickly settled on Wes Craven. I’d known Craven’s name for a long time, his work on such big-name horror movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream was simply far too big to ignore or miss.

He certai...

Cloak and Dagger

I’m not quite sure that Fritz Lang understood the spy genre. The best spy movie he ever made was the first third of Woman in the Moon, and he’d made several other outright spy adventures that never really grabbed my interest like the pair of films in the unnaturally shortened The Spiders serials and, of course, Spies. Cloak and Dagger falls into the tradition of his spy films in feeling too loose and unfocused to really thrill. It’s not a complete slog, it begins and ends quite well while th...

Scarlet Street

Another film marked as the beginning of the film noir genre, it actually feels more like a straight drama for most of the film. That really gives the film a solid character-based foundation on which its final act operates, creating a very well-fleshed out central protagonist who ends up descending into his own personal hell. This is also the first time in several films where Fritz Lang wasn’t working with a writer/producer, allowing him greater freedom in making the film his own, and while L...

The Woman in the Window

I’d say that this is the point where Fritz Lang was firmly planting his feet in the film noir genre. Made in the same year as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, it’s a formational film to the genre, using shadows extensively, as Lang had been doing since his silent days, while getting its main character in the middle of a murder plot where he can’t go to the police. It intelligently straddles a line between philosophical and suspenseful before managing to be both tragic and comic in its final ...

Ministry of Fear

It’s interesting to read that both Fritz Lang and the source novel’s author Graham Greene were unhappy with this film. It’s not Lang’s greatest work, but it entertains well enough. It’s also the first Hollywood film from Lang that, I feel, really looks like a Lang film from beginning to end. The sets are larger and slightly less realistic with greater depth, the use of shadows more pronounced, and the compositions more exact with a roving camera in certain spots. Surely, these things had app...

Hangmen Also Die

Fritz Lang revisited the procedural formula he had perfected in M while having to (and probably choosing to willingly) introduce elements that clash with that bedrock, making the unsentimental take on a hunt for an assassin more melodramatic than it should be while also bringing in a polemic about Nazi Germany. That final element, while making the film more timely than timeless, does create an interesting subtext unique to the time period that I wouldn’t want to deny the film, but calls to a...

Man Hunt

Fritz Lang made a quality John Ford film in Western Union, and then he made a quality Alfred Hitchcock film in Man Hunt. Echoing Hitchcock’s later British period like The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and his early Hollywood film Foreign Correspondent (of which I’m convinced this was made in partial response to), Man Hunt feels like any of dozens of thrillers made during and after WWII where Nazis became easy antagonists, except that it was made before America got involved in the war....

My Best Friend’s Exorcism – Trailer

I sort of know Grady Hendrix who wrote the source novel. The book is fun (I think I like his first book Horrorstor more), and I’ve been looking forward to this adaptation for a while, and now there’s a trailer!

Directed by Damon Thomas, who seems to be cutting his teeth in television, it’s got that now familiar 80s nostalgia feel that Stranger Things made so popular a few years ago. Amazon might be trying to chase that Stranger Things vibe, several years after it was cool, but the b...

Western Union

If someone had told me that this was a lost John Ford film, I’d be inclined to believe them. Made in the wake of Stagecoach‘s financial success, Lang films like Ford (not completely, but the influence is there), the story of male camaraderie is something that would fit Ford’s body of work more easily than Lang’s, and there’s a certain metaphor for the creation of a nation in microcosm like The Iron Horse, Drums Along the Mohawk, or Wagon Master. I can see Lang’s familiar sense of justice as ...

The Return of Frank James

Freed from any kind of fealty to reality, Fritz Lang’s sequel to Henry King’s original Jesse James is a huge improvement, that is, until it becomes a shockingly dull courtroom drama in its third act. I’ve read that courtroom finales often end up because of budget issues. Instead of multiple locations or sets, you have one, enclosed set where you collect your actors to fill dozens of minutes of screentime. I wonder if that’s what happened here, the studio wanted a sequel to their unexpected s...