David Vining's Blog, page 156

The Big Sleep

This is pure noir. A guy, a femme fatale, and a mystery that twists and turns in every dizzying direction. Anchored by Raymond Chandler’s novel and a screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, Howard Hawks delivers a wildly entertaining descent into the Los Angeles underworld as it touches upon one fractured wealthy family and Philip Marlowe, the private investigator sent out to figure out why the family is being blackmailed. Roger Ebert described the movie as being a...

To Have and Have Not

Is this a remake of Casablanca? No, but it sure does share a whole lot with Michael Curtiz’s film.  Humphrey Bogart is a cynical American in Vichy occupied territory who has to eventually take a side in the fight all around him through an unassuming French underground fighter known to the local authorities with a woman prominently involved. It even has a similar end where Bogart chooses his side, though I feel this story, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway, is more obviously political in...

Air Force

Wow, that’s a really generic title. Anyway, this is Hawks’ second work of propaganda during the Second World War after Sergeant York, and this one works a fair bit less than his previous foray. Rushed into production after the War Department had approved the script, the model and miniature work was being filmed before the script was actually done. An ensemble piece from the perspective of the men operating the B-17 flying fortresses, it’s a fictionalized telling of the earliest days of the w...

Ball of Fire

If Billy Wilder had held onto this script for just a few more years, he might have made it himself. Released a year before his first Hollywood feature film, The Major and the Minor, it’s the same kind of fantastical but grounded setup he became well known for, but Wilder didn’t have the power to direct just yet. The assignment went to Howard Hawks who made the best Billy Wilder movie until Billy Wilder started making movies himself. It’s a distinctly un-Hawksian movie with a bookish main cha...

Sergeant York

It’s hard to create well-drawn and purely good characters in fiction because it’s so easy to write them poorly. It can be really easy to create a character so moral that he ceases to feel real, no longer a character but an extension of an idea from the screenwriter’s head which ends up making them boring. The titular character in Spartacus has this problem, I think, but this representation of Alvin York largely sidesteps that issue by portraying his earlier wayward youth clearly, giving him ...

His Girl Friday

I don’t really like how this is categorized as a screwball comedy. There are certainly screwball elements, but it gets too somber for too long. The characters also are simply too composed and professional. The only thing that really lends itself to the screwball comedy aspect is the sheer speed that the characters speak. Hawks had become well known for his fast dialogue that he directed, most evident in his drama Ceiling Zero, but His Girl Friday takes this up to an almost ridiculous level. ...

Only Angels Have Wings

This and Ceiling Zero would make a wonderful case study in how “original” isn’t necessarily a positive quality. Only Angels Have Wings is effectively a remake of Ceiling Zero, and where the earlier film was a perfectly fine little example of quick filmmaking with a focus on a commercial airfield, the latter film takes a similar setting, similar characters, and even similar plot points and creates a far fuller experience that works more completely. It does not matter that Ceiling Zero did it ...

Fellini

Federico Fellini is just one of those names that dominate cinema. Along with people like Bergman, Welles, Ford, and Griffith, his impact was so large that his movies became a cornerstone of cinema’s identity. His influence ended up wide and deep. Filmmakers like Scorsese and Terry Gilliam have heavy Fellini influences in their work.
He’s also become incredibly divisive over time.
He rose to prominence at the time with European movies were surprisingly popular abroad, especially in Ame...

You Know…

For having such a low opinion of David Lynch’s Dune, I sure did just spend over $50 for this:

I’m looking forward to August 31st.

Last Night in Soho – Trailer

I’ve watched this at least five times over the last few days. The Giallo vibes, the co-writer of 1917, the newest film by Edgar Wright…It’s all combined into a package that I cannot help but obsess over. I may be looking forward more to this than to Dune.