David Vining's Blog, page 157

Bringing Up Baby

One of the great examples of the Screwball Comedy, Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby was a complete financial dud upon release in 1938 that further cemented Katherine Hepburn’s reputation as box office poison and Hawks’ reputation at spending too much time allowing his actors to improvise. Hawks ended up speaking poorly of the film in later years, wishing he had made at least one of the characters a more straight-laced character on which the audience could latch their emotional involvement on. ...

Come and Get It

This is Howard Hawks’ first movie about getting old. I’m not sure if there will be others, but this feels like a small landmark in his filmography. It’s also a movie where Hawks was fired from the production with only a couple weeks left to go and replaced at the last second by William Wyler. There’s some debate on how much Hawks directed and how much Wyler directed ranging from the final half hour to about ten minutes of footage. Hawks, apparently, strayed from the source novel by Edna Ferb...

The Road to Glory

This is a hard-edged look at life in the trenches during World War I with a couple of major subplots that don’t gel as well as they should. I’d argue that one should have been jettisoned entirely while the other needed a little bit of smoothing over to make it fit better. However, much like Ceiling Zero, even if there are some subplots that don’t come to complete fruition, the core of the film is so strong that it ends up carrying the whole film strongly enough to make it something kind of s...

Ceiling Zero

This is bread and butter Hawks. A professional man in a dangerous professions falls for another man’s girl, and he ends up having to make a serious, life altering choice that he takes fervently but lightly at the same time, making his choice like a man, one might say. Watching so many of Hawks’ movies in a row it’s becoming obvious where Hawks’ narrative tics were. I’m not saying this like a bad thing, he can say similar things endlessly as long as he’s entertaining, but what’s amazing is ho...

A Martin Scorsese Film

When one describes the work of a given filmmaker, it’s often easy enough to explain what movies within that filmography are going to entail. A Federico Fellini film is circus. An Ingmar Bergman film is a dour exploration of deep meaning. A Terry Gilliam film is a fantastical movie with great production design. A Stanley Kubrick movie is a coolly calculating film of exact precision. A Christopher Nolan movie is a Stanley Kubrick movie but with wider mass appeal. An Alfred Hitchcock mov...

Barbary Coast

This is a surprisingly toothless historical drama that carries my interest through the entire film, but leaves me feeling unfulfilled. Reading up on it afterwards, Barbary Coast was adapted from a novel by Herbert Asbury that was far more lurid in its depiction of life in San Francisco in the early 1850s. Softened down to a film that could pass the Hays Code, we end up getting a decent little love triangle with a heavily sanitized look at a really rough town around it. The need to make the c...

Army of the Dead

You know the thing about ensemble pieces? They’re hard to do right. This is a great example of an ensemble piece having a dozen different elements swirling around each other, the majority of which never come to anything at all, and the movie as a whole suffers greatly for it. What could any of this matter if the trailers are right that this is just a crazy and epic example of zombie action? Well, if more than half the run time is dedicated to thinly written characters that never really amoun...

Twentieth Century

I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a John Barrymore movie ever until Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century, and, from what I’ve heard, it’s all downhill from here. This is where Barrymore’s over the top acting was, supposedly, best utilized for comedic purposes, and it is a wonderful thing to witness. Adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from a play they wrote, it’s the story of a director and an actress that have become dependent on each other but can’t really stand each other. It’s almost a s...

Today We Live

This movie’s IMDB rating is a shame. 5.9/10? No, not in the least, does this movie deserve that. This is very good, a missing ten minute segment from actual greatness, and if the general reputation of the film is in line with that appalling rating, then that’s a travesty. I’ve seen it dismissed as melodrama, and while it does have melodramatic elements, it’s handled soberly and intelligently in a way that creates actual emotional connection. This is an absolute gem from Hawks’ thirties outpu...

Tiger Shark

This is a fine little movie from the 1930s. Anchored by a rather outrageous performance from Edward G. Robinson, it’s the story of two men in love with the same woman set to the backdrop of the tuna fishing industry out of San Diego. It’s perhaps too short, but it effectively uses its time to tell its story well enough.

Mike Mascarenhas (Robinson) is the captain and owner of a fishing boat who lost his hand to a tiger shark when he was lost at sea, and he has incredible trouble with women...