David Vining's Blog, page 66

A Fun Coincidence

I didn’t notice this as I was writing and watching and planning, but today’s review of The Power of the Press coincides with its entry into the Public Domain.

Not that it really affected anything at this point because I watched it on YouTube anyway without paying anything a few weeks ago because orphaned works don’t get flagged for copyright abuse. But now you can go out and enjoy it without concern for the lost royalties to the people who made the film nearly a century ago and have all b...

The Power of the Press

Frank Capra follows up a well-made but misguided naval thriller with another thriller, this one centered around a young reporter trying to uncover some corruption and crime at the highest levels of his unnamed city, and its right back to feeling like a Capra film. It doesn’t have the same warmth as some of his better-known films, but it’s got that little guy standing up alone against the big guy dynamic, all while Capra shows surprising affinity with thriller mechanics. It’s a surprisingly e...

Joe Dante: A Retrospective

There’s something Joe Dante says near the beginning of his commentary on the Blu-ray of his movie Innerspace that, I think, perfectly sums up who he is as a filmmaker. He’s commenting on the scene where Martin Short’s hypochondriac character goes to his doctor for the first time in the film, and Dante points out that the doctor was played by William Schallert who Dante cast in the role of the doctor because Schallert played a doctor in many 50s B-science fiction movies. He also mentions that he ...

Submarine

This was reportedly Frank Capra’s first A-level feature film, and you can see it in the increased number of locations and sets. However, this was the era when even A-level feature films were written in a few weeks, shot in a few weeks, and editing in a few days. If something snuck into the film without anyone noticing, there wasn’t enough time to fish it out and find another way around it, and something like that happens here, undermining the film’s entire climax making it and one of its cha...

The Matinee Idol

This Frank Capra fellow just keeps getting better and better. This quick, 56 minute long feature is a real little gem of Capra’s early career, further refining his combination of comedy and drama around winning performances. It’s also another portrait of the little guy winning over the big guy, even if the win isn’t exactly the way one might expect. I think he’s already got an authorial stamp, though there’s no need to discount Elmer Harris who had written every film Capra had made since lea...

So This is Love?

Well, that’s interesting. The first half of Frank Capra’s previous film, That Certain Thing, was the weaker of the two halves while its second half was kind of great, and we get the exact opposite here with So This is Love?, a romantic boxing comedy. Continuing to hone his ability to combine comedy with drama, Capra molds the beginning of the story that has the stronger dramatics while the second half tends to be more purely silly and operates more on coincidence rather than purpose.

I’d ...

That Certain Thing

The first half of That Certain Feeling is a gauzy, undramatic look at two people who pretty much just fall in love at first sight. The second half is the story of two people who love each other trying to forge their path in a world of harsher reality than either of them expected, filled with wonderful moments and touching scenes. It really is a tale of two halves with the first feeling like competent but unremarkable silent filmmaking and the second half feeling like highly accomplished and ...

Long Pants

Frank Capra’s second and last film with Harry Langdon marks the beginning of the end of Langdon’s career as a creative force in the final years of the silent era. He would fire Capra to direct after this, and the combination of the financial failure of Long Pants along with the poor reception to Langdon’s own directed films meant a quick and steep decline into obscurity for the silent film comedian. The film itself is a minor entertainment, more cohesive but less funny than The Strong Man, a...

The Strong Man

Frank Capra got his first feature film directing job from Harry Langdon, a silent film comic who was some kind of combination of Charlie Chaplin’s innocent face and Buster Keaton’s stonelike reaction to most stimuli. The end result is a combination of comic sensibilities that makes for an amusingly entertaining little gem of a film from the late silent era that still entertains nearly a hundred years later. Largely built on comic setpieces with less of an eye towards narrative cohesiveness t...

Frank Capra: A Statement of Purpose

I guess I need a longer break from the Oscars than that, huh?

So, why not grab one of the major names from the Golden Age of Hollywood that people actually remember, Frank Capra? His name is one of those that has an adjective attached to it (like Felliniesque) that people with only a passing familiarity with his work could potentially define relatively accurately: Capraesque.

Well, I think that defines me. I could define it in some way. I have the cultural familiarity with his work be...