David Vining's Blog, page 150

The Iron Horse

There’s something evidently different about this film from Ford’s previous surviving feature films, something from the very beginning. It’s bigger and grander in feel from its opening scene than anything he had made up to this point, and that feeling continues through its runtime as The Iron Horse manages, not always the most gracefully, to tell a very largely scoped story with a strongly intimate human story at the foreground. This is the sort of stuff that Hollywood really became known for...

North of Hudson Bay

This is a fifty minute long movie that’s missing ten minutes, a full fifth of the runtime. That’s unfortunate, because what survives is an amusing little adventure tale from John Ford, thrusting the action into the great white north of Canada instead of the American Old West. Like most of his early feature length films, especially those that only run 50 minutes, North of Hudson Bay relies heavily on thin characters and sensational filmmaking to provide entertainment while telling a familiar ...

The Thing

Wow, John Carpenter really loves Howard Hawks, doesn’t he? Well, he was hired onto this project after it had been through several drafts, managing a new draft written by Bill Lancaster, and didn’t originate the idea, at least. Still, what Carpenter helped script and ended up directing is an ideal remake. Returning to the ultimate source, the short story “Who Goes There?” by John Campbell, Carpenter recast the whole concept with a twist while firmly planting the new film in a new time, never ...

Escape from New York

There are three movies I most closely associate with my father, The Hunt for Red October, The Great Escape, and Escape from New York. Of the three, I still unabashedly love the first two, but my affection for the third has diminished over the years. I still enjoy it, finding it an entertaining 100 minutes worthy of recommendation, but it also ends up feeling like a lesser Carpenter work, which isn’t what I really expected to see when I decided to do this retrospective. This movie is weird, a...

The Fog (1980)

Made for about a million dollars, John Carpenter’s cinematic follow up to Halloween tries to find terror in fog, and you know what? It works remarkably well. The key was never to try to elicit horror from the fog itself, but to have the fog hide something we could never quite see. In some ways, it’s a throwback to an older kind of horror where the threat was never seen and only alluded to, allowing the audience’s imagination to pick up the slack. Carpenter obviously doesn’t really go that fa...

Elvis

Off of his musical compositions in Halloween, John Carpenter was offered the job to direct the television biopic of Elvis Presley’s life from his childhood to the start of his 1970 Las Vegas tour that revitalized his career. Beset by several of the largest cliches of biopics in general, the film manages to rise above its fairly generic construction to a certain degree on two things. The first and foremost is Kurt Russell’s turn as Elvis, the second is that the first half of the film actually...

Someone’s Watching Me!

Made before Halloween but premiering on television a month afterwards, Someone’s Watching Me is John Carpenter’s tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. It seems like most directors born between the 40s and the 60s felt like Hitchcock’s influence was so important to them that they all wanted to replicate his style of filmmaking at least once (or, in Brian De Palma’s case, all the time). Scorsese had Cape Fear. What Lies Beneath was Zemeckis’ effort. This television movie was John Carpenter’s.

Leigh ...

Halloween (1978)

Made after Someone’s Watching Me but released just before, John Carpenter continued his low-budget streak of filmmaking with this deceptively simply horror film set on the titular holiday. That it went on to gross more than 100 times its budget is a testament to how it triggered the cultural moment at the time. That it’s actually a great little thriller is just icing on the cake.

As I get deeper into John Carpenter’s filmography (skipping around a little bit for different reasons), I’ve n...

Cameo Kirby

There’s an attempt at a more sophisticated storytelling here with Cameo Kirby from John Ford, but I don’t think he quite knows how to fill in the gaps, leaving a finale that feels somewhat curious mixed with thrilling at the same time.

Cameo Kirby (John Gilbert) is a gambler on a riverboat with a shady past in New Orleans. He killed a man in a quick fight that ended with Kirby shooting the man dead with a pistol and getting out of the bar by the skin of his teeth in an opening flashback s...

Assault on Precinct 13

Well, John Carpenter really loved Howard Hawks and George A. Romero, huh? His second film, Assault on Precinct 13, is a mashup of Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead so obvious that it could have been a concept conceived by Max Landis. That’s not the denigrate the film which is a perfectly solid urban thriller with strong character work and a wonderful sense of efficiency, but jeez, the mashup is just so on the nose, you know?

The film is about a remote, mostly decommissioned police st...