David Vining's Blog, page 117

Jesse James

*note: The Return of Frank James is a sequel to this film by Henry King, so I decided to watch it ahead of Fritz Lang’s film. I didn’t imagine that I would miss anything important story-wise, but I thought it would mostly be interesting to compare and contrast.*

Let’s just imagine that this film is about a fictional character named Jesse James who, completely coincidentally, also robbed banks in Missouri in the late 19th century, not the actual man. That strips away a lot of the noise abo...

You and Me

Fritz Lang was brought in late to this project after it had languished for a few years for a few reasons, invited to the project by his female star of his last couple of movies, Sylvia Sidney. I wonder if he had had more time with the material beforehand he could have ironed out some of the disconnect between different sections of the film. Knowing his work, he probably would have pushed it further into a straight drama instead of the combination drama/comedy that is the end result. That’s n...

You Only Live Once

This is of a piece with Fury, Fritz Lang’s previous film, in that they both deal with innocent men facing the unjust reactions of systems. Fury was about mob justice, but You Only Live Once is about the official system leaning unfairly on a man on the edge of acceptance, essentially using his past to deny him justice for a crime that leaves only the most circumstantial of evidence against him. The movie lacks the clarity of Fury‘s emotional throughline, essentially becoming a proto-Bonnie an...

Fury (1936)

This is the Hollywood extension of M and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge, a story of mob mentality and someone wronged exacting terrible vengeance upon those that committed the wrong. It’s Fritz Lang coming to America after his brief stint in France and applying his harder edged streak to the early days of the Hays Code, executing his vision as precisely as possible under the new strictures of the American system. Do those production and thematic demands compromise the story? Perhaps, sl...

Liliom

It seems as though when Fritz Lang fled Germany to France he ended up in a situation where his producer, Erich Pommer, started up a new production company with two films and two directors. There was this, and there was Max Ophuls’ A Man Has Been Stolen. Ophuls would later go on to say that Pommer had assigned the wrong projects to the wrong directors, feeling that Liliom more easily fit his own sensibilities while A Man Has Been Stolen more closely fit Lang’s. Well, I haven’t seen A Man Has ...

Living – Trailer

A remake of one of my favorite movies?

My usual idea is to remake movies you want to love but can’t for some reason, not movies you love. This takes Kurosawa’s Ikiru and puts it in a new cultural context (post-war Britain instead of post-war Japan) which could create enough space for it to live on its own in the minds of people (those few people who know Ikiru, that is). Plus, Bill Nighy is a quality actor.

I’m intrigued, especially by the Academy ratio:

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

Fritz Lang’s last film he made with his wife Thea von Harbou and in Germany before he fled after a meeting with Joseph Goebbels where the chief propagandist of the Nazi Party offered to make him legally Aryan (Lang’s mother was Jewish, though he was raised Catholic), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is a follow up to both the earlier Dr. Mabuse film as well as M. It’s another crime film in Lang’s body of work, another solid thriller to end his time in his native country before he said goodbye to ...

M

I don’t think Fritz Lang or Thea von Harbou had demonstrated the artistic depth and talent to make M before 1931. I’ve really enjoyed many of Lang’s films from the 20s, but the closest he came to something even approximately like M was the second part of Die Nibelungen, a film that explored a certain psychological reality in a serious manner while the rest of his work was a series of variations on melodramas or fantasy adventures. M is a procedural, stripped of all melodramatic emotion or se...

Woman in the Moon

I have a huge soft spot for movies that at least seem to attempt to take space travel seriously. Woman in the Moon is just that kind of film, except it was made in the 20s, more than thirty years before the Mercury missions or Yuri Gagarin. This creates a wonderfully eclectic mix of prescient views of how space travel will work with deliciously anachronistic touches along with genre defining production design (that cheap B-movies would copy to no end through the fifties). It also shifts from...

A Nightmare on Elm Street – A Retrospective

There were three major slasher franchises born of the late 70s and early 80s. The first was Halloween, the tale of a masked killer who never said a thing and represented evil itself. The second was Friday the 13th, the tale of a masked killer who never said a thing and represented some kind of moral judgment. The third was A Nightmare on Elm Street, the tale of an unmasked killer who invaded the dreams of the children of the people who killed him and exacted vengeance upon the innocent.

All t...