David Vining's Blog, page 183

Lifeboat

Alfred Hitchcock had an experimental streak in him, and I think, outside of his mandated use of sound at the beginning of talkies, Lifeboat represents his first effort to turn an entire film into an experiment. Later films fit this sort of effort, like the one-shot technique of Rope, the use of 3D in Dial M for Murder, or the use of his television crew for Psycho, but it’s Lifeboat that feels like Hitchcock using a film as an excuse just to try something. The fact that he didn’t rest on his lau...

Shadow of a Doubt

There’s something extra sinister about this tale of lost innocence in a sleepy little California town. The dramatization and fictionalization of a real life killer takes what could have been completely standard tropes and twists them an extra degree or two by adding in an element of familial loyalty that makes the situation more than just another tale of grizzly murder. It helps that Joseph Cotton is just so great as Charlie Oakley, the alternatively charming and menacing uncle come to visit fr...

Saboteur

There are shades of Hitchcock’s other films both forward and back. The most obvious are North by Northwest and Young and Innocent to me. All three are stories of men falsely accused of crimes they did not commit and going on the run to clear their names. In particular, both Saboteur and Young and Innocent kind of forget about elements of their central mystery for long chunks. Saboteur is better made and constructed than Young and Innocent, but it’s still not the entertaining heights of The 39 S...

Van Helsing

This is not what I would call a good movie. It’s characters are too thin, the romance too contrived, the structure too loose, and the theme too scattershot, but what it lacks in some of the basic building blocks of storytelling it partially makes up for in charm and a deep seeded desire to entertain no matter what. Those two aspects make Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing something of a guilty pleasure for me. No, it’s not good, but I enjoy it every time I watch it.

Delving into the story is an exerc...

Suspicion

This movie is almost entirely built on performance, a gentle balance between Cary Grant exuding enigmatic charm, easy duplicitousness, and barely concealed malice, often within the same scene. The audience is set to interpret the variations in how he presents himself along with Joan Fontaine, our heroine. It’s a journey that starts as a rather simple romance and steadily turns more and more sinister as we, along with Fontaine, lose our grip with what could be real and what could be just a figme...

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

This is very much not a Hitchcock movie. He didn’t have any hand in writing it, and apparently Carole Lombard pushed him around a bit on set while she had championed the concept to production to begin with. It’s a bit of a sore thumb that way in Hitchcock’s filmography in that it doesn’t seem to fit in a body of work that feels surprisingly cohesive over such a long period of time, but it doesn’t do anything to affect the relative positive or negative aspects of the film. It’s just an interesti...

Foreign Correspondent

On the whole, this is an entertaining globe trotting adventure with a winning pair of leads, however I do have some issues that feel like would have been easy enough to fix and drag the film down a bit. Reading the background of the film’s production highlights some of the challenges in making a cohesive picture considering the challenges Hitchcock faced when Selznick loaned him out to Walter Wagner who wanted an up to the minute topical adventure film that reflected the reality of the European...

Aquaman

I’ll have to write through the DCEU at some point, but I guess I’m starting here. I’m one of those weird people that really likes Zack Snyder’s take on the Superman and Batman stories. There’s real cinematic ambition at work there, and while its reach may exceed its grasp, it tries to be mythic in scope. James Wan’s Aquaman is a very different animal. It’s certainly big and obviously very expensive, but the film feels smaller, and its not the stakes at play. Also, it seems obvious that Wan’s ti...

Goodbye, Mr. Kurtzman

Rest in peace, Ian Holm.

The Great Escape

One of the great adventure movies is about an escape from a German POW camp in the middle of World War II where most of the characters end up dead, murdered by the SS. Fun, right?

It’s both a great irony and a testament to John Sturges’ sure hand on the material that a story so inherently depressing doesn’t come off that way. That the tone of the film manages to move from one extreme to another without feeling like whiplash is kind of amazing, and I think it all has to do with the general appro...