David Vining's Blog, page 20

The Haunted Palace

This might be the best script that Roger Corman ever worked from. Written by Charles Beaumont (who also wrote Premature Burial, The Intruder, and a good amount of The Twilight Zone), The Haunted Palace was sold as part of the Poe cycle, but there seems to be more influence from the later H.P. Lovecraft than Poe (also, the story isn’t based on anything Poe wrote, the Poe connection coming from the final two lines of poetry in the film that are from Poe). There’s this great sense of symmetry t...

The Terror

It seems like whenever this movie comes up for discussion, the only thing worth discussing is the production history. Originally envisioned by Corman as a quick thing to throw together at the end of the production of The Raven, much like She Gods of Shark Reef was thrown together at the end of the production of Naked Paradise, Corman was only able to shoot for two days before he had to break for months. He then enlisted the help of four other young directors, most notably Francis Ford Coppol...

The Raven

I didn’t hate the comedy in The Raven, but it’s obvious that everyone involved was straining to find the funniness in every moment. There’s nothing naturally funny about any of the actors or the script by Richard Matheson, so everyone kind of feels lost when they’re not mugging for the camera. Since that’s the main driver of the film, it seems apropos to open with the critique. Outside of that, though, The Raven is a perfectly serviceable bit of macabre derived from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. C...

The Young Racers

Well, that’s a terrible title. I mean, these people don’t seem that young, but Roger Corman was trying to make movies for teenagers. So, selling to them the idea that it was about young people fit the bill. I mean, one lead was about 30 and the other was in his 40s. These aren’t teenagers. I did coincidentally watch Patrick H. Willems’ video essay about racing in film a couple of months before I watched The Young Riders, and Corman’s propensity for frugality seemed to have led to something o...

Tower of London

“Whoa…tone it down there, buddy,” William Shakespeare said to Roger Corman. Corman, along with independent producer Edward Small at United Artists, decided to give his exploitative spin on Richard III, dolloping heavy helpings of Macbeth on top to give it that spooky veneer that was part and parcel of Corman’s Poe cycle. What comes out is this macabre, sensationalist take on what was already a sensationalist bit of anti-Plantagenet propaganda from Shakespeare, and Corman’s propensity for fas...

Sergei Eisenstein: The Definitive Ranking

Sergei Eisenstein made nothing but agitprop for the Soviet Union, and he was very good at it.

The star pupil of the inventor of montage, Lev Kuleshov, Eisenstein popularized non-linear editing more than anyone else in the medium. His work on Strike and Battleship Potemkin helped demonstrated the power of editing in unconventional ways to accomplish conventional goals. However, his career was largely determined on the whims of those in control of the Soviet Union, first the early successor...

Ivan the Terrible Part II: The Boyars’ Plot

This is something trippy. Sergei Eisenstein took his success from the first part of the intended trilogy about the life of the first Tsar of the Russias, that success based largely on Stalin’s approval, and went even further into formalism with the sequel. The second entry famously angered Stalin, seeing in it a critique of his own rule, and it was suppressed for more than a decade until after both Stalin’s and Eisenstein’s deaths. I suspect that Stalin also didn’t like the film because it’s...

Ivan the Terrible Part I

Having redeemed himself in the eyes of Soviet authority, Eisenstein was allowed to make a trilogy of films based on the life of the first Tsar of the Russias: Ivan IV. Seen as a parallel with the ruling Joseph Stalin, the project was a continued departure from Eisenstein’s earlier emphasis on montage and masses of crowds, focusing on a single character and telling the first third of his story. Made during WWII when the entire Soviet film industry had to decamp to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan becau...

Alexander Nevsky

Sergei Eisenstein’s drought of finished films finally came to an end in 1938, nearly a decade into the sound era. After the failure of Que Viva Mexico and the disaster that was the production of Bezhin Meadow, Eisenstein found a way to re-ingratiate himself with Stalin and get another job making a movie, this time with the assistance of Dmitri Vasilyev as his codirector (or assistant director, the credits are somewhat unclear). The essay that comes with the Criterion Collection release actua...

Que Viva Mexico!

I was going to skip this because Eisenstein never finished it. He filmed for months without completing what he wanted. He had to return to the Soviet Union, the film got impounded, and he had no access to the footage for the rest of his life. After his death, his codirector on October: Ten Days that Shook the World and The General Line, Grigori Aleksandrov got access to the footage and put together a short feature that approximated what Eisenstein was supposed to have wanted. This is that re...