David Vining's Blog, page 158

The Crowd Roars

Two men bond over their mutual, masculine profession, and their women get an inordinate amount of screen time, confusing what the actual point of this short movie about racing is supposed to be. Is it about brothers finding a common, dangerous interest, or is about the women who have to deal with the men who find thrill and pay by racing cars? The lack of focus and limited runtime prevents anything from really connecting as it needs to skip through a lot of emotional footwork in order to fit...

Scarface (1932)

This is the prototypical gangster movie of the 30s. It wasn’t the first major example (held up for a year by the assorting censorship boards across America in a protracted battle with the film’s producer Howard Hughes), but it’s been so influential in no small part because of the controversy around it at the time. The tale of Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte, inspired by real life gangsters including Al Capone, is a lurid look at the out of control criminal element in the middle of Prohibition, but ...

The Criminal Code

I was with this movie until the end. A hard look at the ironic effect the criminal justice system can have on men caught up in it through happenstance, it suddenly gives our characters an easy way out instead of taking the story to the darker places it probably needed to go. Up until those final minutes, Hawks’ The Criminal Code was a solidly told tale, but it simply cannot follow through on the promise of its first 90 minutes.

Walter Huston plays Mark Brady, the district attorney in an u...

The Dawn Patrol (1930)

I was not ready for this movie to come out great. The Air Circus is completely lost and Trent’s Last Case is impossible to find, so I don’t get the look at the fractured path Hawks took to getting sound to work cinematically like we can with Hitchcock’s early sound pictures. Instead we get a film as confident with sound as Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, but it’s a far different picture overall. The Dawn Patrol is a sober war drama about young men having to grow up way too fast or die...

Fazil

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this romantic drama from the earliest days of the sound era (though only with a dedicated sound track and some sound effects, this is no talkie), but there’s also nothing particularly right with it either. It’s a rather bland and shallow clash of cultures that never convincingly establishes its characters or central relationship enough in order to actually pull any emotional reaction from the audience. It’s technically adept but kind of an empty, forge...

A Girl in Every Port

This is quite the bromance from Howard Hawks. The tale of two men who connect through friendship more completely than they can with any romantic relationship with a woman. This is Hawks’ first real movie that feels like a Hawks movie. This is his The Lodger, a solidly good silent film that presages what his future career would become.

Spike is a sailor going from port to port, packing up a ship at one and unloading it at the next. At every stop, he gets off to look for a woman in his litt...

Paid to Love

Hawks’ third movie, The Cradle Snatchers, is partially lost, so we skip that and head to Paid to Love, a romantic comedy with mistaken identity tropes that plays surprisingly entertainingly. It’s an unchallenging little comedy, but it understands character-based comedy well enough to have aged quite well.

The king of a small Balkan nation is desperate to secure a loan from an American bank, represented by Peter Roberts. The king has a son, Michael, and a nephew, Eric, and the two couldn’t...

Fig Leaves

Howard Hawks’ first film, The Road to Glory, is lost to time, so I start here with his first comedy and second film, Fig Leaves. A comedy about the unchanging nature of the relationships between men and women over time, it is surprisingly funny 95 years after its production, but it also bears some of the more problematic conventions of silent films that end up making this 70-minute movie drag a fair bit.

The movie begins with an extended sequence of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and...

The Big Heat

Fritz Lang film noir: how could you possibly go wrong? What starts as a rather routine procedural noir gains a surprisingly extra emotional punch through the curious relationship that develops between its two leads, Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. This is a special example of the genre, demonstrating the strong results that could be had from hard-edged detectives and femme fatales that became cliches decades ago when applied with skill and intelligence.

Ford plays Dave Bannion, a homicide ...

David Lynch: The Definitive Ranking

David Lynch is a fascinating filmmaker. Talented in more traditional ways, he chooses to mainly exist in a more abstract plane of narrative filmmaking than most. Two of his films (The Elephant Man and The Straight Story) are as normal as anything any other independent filmmaker could make, but his body of work is dominated by the abstract.

Formed in the 50s and 60s, he’s concerned heavily with nuclear power, industrialization, and Transcendential Meditation. He’s also a family man with wo...