David Vining's Blog, page 146

Born Reckless

This is the dangerous part of not worrying too much about the pieces that feed into your ending. Yes, everything in the ending was set up, but the first bulk of the film is so overstuffed, unfocused, and downright dull that the fact that the ending is a fulfillment of the rest of the story ends up not meaning all that much. The story was simply not that interesting to begin with. This is an increasingly rare misstep in Ford’s burgeoning career.

Born Reckless tells the story of Louis Beret...

Men Without Women

John Ford was really good with endings, I’m beginning to realize. It’s been obvious that his greatest strength up to this point in his career was bringing in a bunch of different narrative pieces into a singular set piece. The overall strength of the film really depended on the quality of what came before. Oftentimes the films are simply too short for the amount that goes in, but there’s a very nice balance to be found in Men Without Women. The opening is very loose, but we get a surprisingl...

Salute

This is largely forgotten, and it’s curious as to why. Never mind that I seem to like it a fair bit more than most who’ve seen it, but it’s the first John Ford movie with speaking roles by John Wayne and Ward Bond. Wayne has shown up as an extra in a handful of other films (I’ve never been able to find him, though I haven’t looked too hard), but he talks here! In a talkie! The movie itself seems to have been born from a simple idea: film the Army-Navy football game and build a movie around i...

The Black Watch

I find the birth of sound to be the most fascinating point in movie history. Things like widescreen cinematography and color eventually ended up dominating cinema after their introduction, but those were slow and gradual processes. Simplified, movies went from silent in 1928 to sound in 1929. It was a sea change and it happened all at once. John Ford was had included some sound in a couple of previous silent films (notably Riley the Cop), and his first full talkie, a short film called Napole...

Riley the Cop

A light comedy with an endearing performance at its center, Riley the Cop is an amusing little film, the last surviving silent film in John Ford’s filmography (Strong Boy is lost). Well, it’s got a dedicated soundtrack with music and a few sound effects (like Howard Hawks’ Fazil), but that’s stretching the definition of a talkie. At only 70 minutes long, it’s a quick globe trotting affair that takes its likeable main character on a whirlwind tour, ending in love and a nice feeling of narrati...

Hangman’s House

This is a hidden gem of a film from Ford’s silent period. Much of Ford’s output often feels somewhat erratic, with different narrative pieces introduced and never quite fitting together, but Hangman’s House is a shockingly well put together film. At only 70 minutes, it feels stuffed with detail, but that detail never feels like a distraction here. Instead, everything works in tandem, revolving around everything else with a solid narrative core. It’s got so much of what animated Ford (horse r...

Four Sons

This could have used an extra hour of screen time. John Ford’s Four Sons, adapted from the story “Grandmother Bernle Learns Her Letters” by I.A.R. Wylie, tells a far larger story than its 96-minute runtime holds well, but the heart of it is so warm and endearing that by the movie’s final twenty minutes it had won me over. I can easily see why it would have been very popular back in 1928. Dealing with the Great War, the immigrant experience, and ending with heartfelt touches while pushing a p...

Risen

It is pure coincidence that I watched Kevin Reynolds’ Risen right after finishing Andrei Tarkovsky’s body of work, but Tarkovsky’s thematic focuses and motifs have really colored my reading of the 2016 film. It didn’t influence my overall opinion of Risen, but it does provide some interesting context about why I think this film succeeds when it succeeds and fails when it fails.

The story follows Joseph Fiennes’ Clavius, a Roman Tribune, in Judea at the time of Christ. After putting down a...

Mother Machree

I can’t review this film in full because its state is simply too incomplete to consider fully. There are only four of its seven reels still in existence, and two of the missing reels are the final two. Still, I watched what I could, and while I can’t give the film anything like a full measure, I can offer up some small thoughts.

Mother Machree, as far as I can tell, is the story of a woman and son who move from Ireland to America when they fall upon hard times at the death of the patriarc...

Upstream

Another film filled to the top with amusing side characters, Upstream is a modest and slight entertainment that does well enough to fill its sixty minutes and little else. It’s another instance of an early John Ford film that really could have done good use with twenty to thirty more minutes to help flesh out some key details.

The majority of the action takes place in a boarding house for performers, and the film’s first large bulk is simply introducing them all. There are dancers, retire...