David Vining's Blog, page 118

Jean-Pierre Melville – A Retrospective

Stanley Kubrick saw two crime films and decided to never try and make another one in the genre again because, he said, they were the two best crime films one could make. The second best was Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi. The first best was Bob le Flambeur by Jean-Pierre Melville.

I last wrote about a foreign filmmaker who was one of the most influential filmmakers you’ve probably heard of. Now, I’m going to write about one of the most influential filmmakers you’ve probably never hear...

Spies

This is the second time that I’ve seen Fritz Lang’s follow up to Metropolis, and I was still not that into it. This tale of espionage in the interwar period is simply too loosely told to hold the kind of interest with me that, it seems, it holds with many other people. It’s ending is buoyed by some technically adept filmmaking, but the script is just simply far too unfocused to have the kind of exciting effect it obviously wants to have.

The film begins with somewhat of a bravura editing ...

Metropolis

This is one of the titans of the silent era. If anyone knows any silent film, it’s either this or a Charlie Chaplin movie. It’s a monumental achievement of production design that wears its heart on its sleeve and has a wonderful emotional impact, giving it the staying power that has allowed it to continually find new audiences over decades. I have a small issue with one character and his motivations, motivations that drive most of the action in the third act. Maybe if the final minutes that ...

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge

The first half of this story was a grand fantasy adventure that ended sadly. The second half is…an amazingly great, morally complex, and incredibly involving tragedy. I mean…I loved the first part of this large epic film, but this second part is something else. It’s not the greatest of analogies, but it’s like going from Beowulf to Hamlet. I love Beowulf, but it’s Hamlet.

Kriemhild (Margarete Schon) mourns the murder of her husband Siegfried by the king’s advisor Hagen of Tronje (Hans Ada...

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried

Fritz Lang dealt with Germany’s present in Dr. Mabuse, and now he turns his eyes to its past, its myth, and its legends. It’s also a rollicking good time of grand adventure, magic, and bravery. It’s a triumph of physical production combined with a wonderfully engaging mythic quest to hang it all on. This is the sort of movie I eat up.

Siegfried (Paul Richter), a prince, has been training with a troll blacksmith in the deep forests of the land to learn the craft of sword making. When he co...

Prey

This is one of those movies that I want to like more than I actually do. It addresses some of my issues with a movie monster, has some great individual sequences, but I don’t think it actually comes together all that well. It’s got a couple of ideas that it introduces and never explores with any real depth while feeling structurally off, especially considering its first act. I can see why some audiences are eating it up, it provides the kind of pseudo-scifi monster action they would expect. ...

Dr. Mabuse

Fritz Lang and his writer Thea van Harbou return to the crime genre they had previously played in with The Spiders films, and they pull from the literary source written by Norbert Jacques about a Moriarty-like criminal genius. A four-and-a-half-hour affair, it shows us the criminal mastermind at his absolute and terrifying height before throwing him to his lowest level possible. It’s a metaphor for Weimar Germany, both the decadence and the depravity as well as the inevitable end. I still th...

Destiny

Fritz Lang’s first five surviving films are largely workmanlike films that seem to be chasing simple pleasures of popular genre. Destiny, Lang’s seventh film, is outright art. Part of a small subgenre of dramas of the era (like Leaves from Satan’s Book by Dreyer) heavily inspired by DW Griffith’s Intolerance that told interrelated tales across different eras of history, Fritz Lang’s Destiny has one of the strongest framing devices I’ve seen in this kind of film. There’s a wonderful emotional...

Four Around the Woman

Another movie with male twins fighting over a woman with a heavy use of flashbacks. It’s kind of like an improved version of The Wandering Shadow. This is the first of Lang’s films in this early period where I feel like his skills have actually improved from one film to the next. The filmmaking is actually quite competent and put-together, but, unfortunately, it’s in service of a story that is surprisingly uncompelling. Pulling the focus away from the situation of the previous film and inves...

The Wandering Shadow

If I had been a contemporary of Fritz Lang in his early career, this is about the point that I’d begin writing him off. There was some entertainment in the first of the Spiders episodes, but the only real positive attribute of the next two films was the production design. Here, in The Wandering Shadow, there’s still a strong visual element that comes up from time to time, mostly when filming in the mountains, but the story is a complete jumble. Not helped by the fact that a good chunk of the...