David Vining's Blog, page 34

The Edge of the World

Michael Powell’s quota quickie period was over, and he cobbled together the money for a real feature film from American producer Joe Rock to make a movie based on an idea he had about dying communities on small islands off the Scottish coast. Writing the script himself, he took his crew out to the remote island of Foula, which he renamed Hirta for the film, and he took in the rugged beauty of the island north of the Scottish coast. What he captured was beautiful, but he also framed it all wi...

The Man Behind the Mask

Michael Powell’s final quota quickie now only exists in an abbreviated, recut form made after WWII, cutting out twenty minutes of its final runtime to get it under an hour. I feel like those missing twenty minutes would have made this a fair bit better, but the end result is interesting nonetheless. I mean, it’s not good. It’s a weird combination of Hitchcock’s British period and, of all things, Flash Gordon, but some of what makes it less than good is an abbreviated feel to, especially, its...

Crown v. Stevens

Looking at that title, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a courtroom drama. However, much to my pleasant surprise, there isn’t a single shot of a single courtroom in the whole thing. The title is something I would change (an observation I don’t often make), but underneath it is another Hitchcockian adventure in the underbelly of interwar England where the wrong man gets caught in between a murder and his own safety.

Chris Jensen (Patric Knowles) works at an interior designer...

Her Last Affaire

Michael Powell’s quota quickie period is a mixed bag overall with a lot riding on quickly written scripts as he made about five films a year. All feature length, these were testaments to work ethic more than anything else, and what’s interesting to watch across the first few years of Powell’s career is how increasingly sophisticated the physical productions are getting with time. The Phantom Light had some very nice sound design choices, and here, in Her Last Affaire, Powell shows an increas...

The Phantom Light

Michael Powell has completely grown past the early, awkward stages of the sound era and can now use sound to create interesting soundscapes in service to atmosphere. This is easily his most atmospheric film to date which is unfortunately tied to a script that just doesn’t quite work. There are too many outside views of the remote community centered around the coastal lighthouse and not enough from the inside, making it a mystery to such a level that it’s hard to grasp what the mystery is eve...

The Night of the Party (or, The Murder Party)

Obviously inspired by Agatha Christie and her stories of Poirot, Michael Powell’s The Night of the Party takes what should have been a tightly focused murder mystery and just lets out all of the tension by actually trying to follow real police procedures. What should have been a pressure cooker of tension as everyone is trapped in an enclosed location with a murderer ends up just feeling wane as police pursue one lead and then another over the course of days and weeks afterwards. It just end...

The Love Test

Possibly the least ambitious of these quota quickies Michael Powell had made since The Fire Raisers, The Love Test has the great advantage of being a light romantic comedy. It has a small enough cast of characters so that our focus isn’t diverted too much from our main characters (like what happened in Lazybones), and it has that big heart that Powell was showing so frequently. It’s a frothy bit of nothing, but it’s an endearing and frothy bit of nothing.

Touching on the obvious fascinati...

Reading Update

It’s been a little while, so what have I been reading?

Well, I picked up a couple of books that took me a very long time to get through, but there have been others. Let’s just go chronologically.

First was Rudyard Kipling’s The Light that Failed, his first novel and present on that Flavor Wire list.

It was good! I mean, not incredibly great, or anything, but Kipling’s command of language was solid and the story ended up feeling very Kipling by the end. It’s the story of a soldier wh...

Lazybones

There’s a thematic throughline developing through Powell’s quote quickies of shiftless men gaining purpose through a woman and becoming valuable members of society through the strength of their ideas. Here, it’s really truncated, though. The 60-minute runtime doesn’t allow for a lot of room in the storytelling, and Powell dedicates too much time to a supporting cast that don’t do much more than take up room. They’d be fine window-dressing, perhaps one could call it world-building, in a 90 mi...

Something Always Happens

Michael Powell returns to comedy with a combination of his visionary main character with the lighter tone of something like Hotel Splendide, and he does it to results that don’t quite come together. It’s amusing pretty consistently, but Something Always Happens has plot elements that make no sense, a heavy reliance on coincidence, and a child character who doesn’t really add much of anything. The movie is never dull or outright bad, but the screenplay really needed another pass to get everyt...