David Vining's Blog, page 65

Platinum Blonde

Something of a precursor to the screwball comedy, a genre largely devised to dramatize problems in sexual relationship without actually resorting to depictions or description of sexual relationships, Platinum Blonde is a lightly dramatic affair about two people who shouldn’t be married to each other. In some ways, Capra is beginning to form, in my mind, as a kind of anti-Lubitsch in terms of his point of view regarding the war between the sexes and classes while still telling entertaining fi...

The Miracle Woman

Frank Capra reteams with the woman he could have married had they both been single at the time, Barbara Stanwyck, for a romantic drama about a woman who fakes the ability to perform miracles to get rich, except the film does everything it can to never make her a villain, making this a nice little romance that avoids having any real bite at the same time. Capra would say later about his work in general that his generation of filmmakers treated their work like a newspaper man treated his: to b...

Dirigible

The third of Frank Capra’s military themed romantic triangles, Dirigible is the one that addresses my issues with character that happened in both of the earlier films, Submarine and Flight, and it ends up working better than either of the previous two. This is also probably Capra’s most ambitious physical production with an impressive combination of special effects and real, documentary footage of airplanes and dirigibles all while much more effectively telling a character-based story in bet...

Rain or Shine

Imagine a Marx Brothers movie where they took the plot seriously. That’s pretty much Rain or Shine, a revue to highlight the vaudeville talents of Joe Cook and a few others but matched with this lightly melodramatic take on the troubles of a financing a traveling circus. It’s such a weird combination that only ever really works in one moment, perhaps by accident, creating this dichotomy that clashes more than anything else.

Frankie (Louise Fazenda) has inherited her father’s circus upon h...

Ladies of Leisure

Well, this is an interesting little change of pace. Another melodrama, but much more female focused and the film that saved the ailing career of Barbara Stanwyck, Ladies of Leisure seems like a frothy little bit of predictable nonsense for its first half, and then it steps things up to be a much more interesting and touching bit of predictable drama. If this had been made a couple of years later, it’d be slathered with an overbearing score, but much like Howard Hawks‘ Today We Live, the lack...

Flight (1929)

Frank Capra’s first full sound film doesn’t have sound anymore, so looking at his second sound film, Flight, shows a technician doing everything he can to take advantage of the new sound while filming a lot outside, challenging himself by pushing against the limits of the contemporaneous technology, and yet it’s all in service to a story so thin spread out over one hundred and ten minutes that nothing really connects. If this had come in at a more reasonable 80 minutes instead of 110, I thin...

The Donovan Affair

I cannot review this film. It is a sound film where the sound has been lost. Perhaps there had been a silent version made contemporaneously, but it seems a miracle that this copy survived at all.

I remember a class with Stephen Prince at Virginia Tech where we were discussing the advent of sound, and the obvious answer to the problem of combining image and sound seemed to be a phonograph. He nodded and then just started listing the seemingly minor but increasingly problematic issues with ...

Corstae – A Historian’s Note

I have completed 99% of the work to get Corstae ready for publishing, and so begins the promo process. To start, I share the historian’s note that begins the novel.

Corstae publishes in eBook, paperback, and hard cover versions on March 1, 2024. Pre-order today!

 “The earliest days of Corstae, as the nation we know today, are a surprising challenge for the modern historian. The tale of King James and the mercenary general The Marquis have become more legend than fact in our culture, he...

The Younger Generation

Based on a play by Fannie Hurst, The Younger Generation might be Frank Capra’s most personal film up to this point. We’ve had films that felt like he was just for hire (Submarine and both the Harry Langdon films) and films where he was saying what he wanted to say (pretty much everything else to one degree or another), but this almost feels somewhat autobiographical. Sure, Capra was Italian and not Jewish, but it’s about the immigrant experience and the difference between people who came to ...

Steamboat Willie

No review or anything (it’s a silly little short), just noting that Corridor Digital uploaded a halfway decent print of the short film that is the last cause of serious copyright harm in America (and across the world since places like Canada and Japan are adding in pauses to their public domains to align with America’s stupid copyright regime).

I like that they uploaded this at midnight.