David Vining's Blog, page 64

You Can’t Take It With You: A Second Look

You Can’t Take It With You would make an interesting double feature alongside Come and Get It. Not only do their titles oddly compliment each other, but they both star Edward Arnold as, alternatively, a man who loses everything and a man who wins everything. In both, he has to learn how to live well with those situations. The earlier one was Hawks (and Wyler, but only on a perceived technical level) showing a great man of industry being brought low by his loses, in particular a love triangle...

Lost Horizon

This is Frank Capra’s most ambitious film, an effort to create a new world and the closest he ever got to making a science fiction film. It’s also where Capra got almost completely lost in the world that he and Robert Riskin created based on the novel by James Hilton. It’s probably his most self-indulgent film, and it happened while he was at the height of his power. The film did not meet the levels of success of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town at the box office, knocking Capra down a peg, but while ...

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

So, my mother gave me the novel All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, I think, because I had been going through the Best Picture winners from the Oscars and I reviewed the film version by Robert Rossen. One definitive trait of the cinematic adaptation is how clipped it feels, Rossen having cut out the beginning and end of every scene to drive down the runtime to a more manageable length, accentuating the studio era feel of the adaptation where the emphasis is on getting from moment to mo...

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

The precursor to this was American Madness, the first fully Capra film, but this is where Frank Capra entered that stage in his career where he completely became what he’s become known for: the optimist in the midst of the Depression, the one who insisted that the American had it within themselves to help each other in the desperate times of fiscal and legislative mismanagement that kept the economy from running again. In the face of the death of the American dream, as Capra became one of th...

Broadway Bill

From 1934 to 1946, Frank Capra’s movies are all well known and beloved…except this one. His golden age started the year before with It Happened One Night and would last through his second film after returning from his efforts to help document the Second World War, but this little horse racing comedic drama is all but forgotten. It’s not at that high level of something like American Madness, but it’s a perfectly fine little film about one man using his moxie to make his own way, something muc...

It Happened One Night: A Second Look

Another example of why I really like revisiting these films I’ve seen before in the context of a filmmaker’s body of work because certain larger narrative aspects to the filmmaker’s career become clearer. It’s interesting to hear Frank Capra talk about It Happened One Night late in life with Letterman, he describes the script as a leftover, the coming together of the project as almost an accident, and the casting of Clark Gable as punishment from his home studio of MGM. This wasn’t something...

Lady for a Day

Often described as a modern day fairy tale, Lady for a Day is a tale of hope in the middle of the Depression, of a community coming together to help one woman create a façade of wealth to help her daughter marry the man of her dreams. It’s an extension of the idea at the heart of American Madness that we all had it in ourselves to help each other in the trying times of the Great Depression, not that we could necessarily fix the problems completely, but with a generous hand and giving heart, ...

The Bitter Tea of General Yen

Frank Capra’s productions are getting larger and more impressive as he racks up more and more successes for Columbia and Harry Cohn. It’s unfortunate that the impressive physical production isn’t matched by the script which, I think, doesn’t connect at the level it needs to in order to really work. Moving back into the realms of melodrama after the more purely Capraesque American Madness and bringing back his favorite leading lady, Barbara Stanwyck, Capra tells the unusual romantic tale of a...

American Madness

Frank Capra has made movies that dealt in the themes, character types, and situations that have felt Capraesque in part, but it’s finally in American Madness, a largely forgotten and underseen gem of a film, where Capra brings it out completely. Essentially the story of a bank run, part of an effort by Hollywood to try and reignite confidence in big business and big banks after the early bank failures of the Great Depression, Capra brings forth the first peculiar rich man out to try and use ...

Forbidden

Well, if I was a bit gobsmacked at the openness of Platinum Blonde to things like drinking and divorce, oh boy, was I not prepared for how Forbidden, a movie from 1932 dealt with its own look at some of the seedier sides of the human experience. This is all about an illicit romance, and it doesn’t shy from it. Apparently, Columbia tried to re-release the film in 1935 after the implementation of the Hays Code, and they were simply rejected. There was no way to cut the film down to make it acc...