David Vining's Blog, page 78
September 12, 2023
The List of Adrian Messenger
I have this feeling that John Huston kept on with the directing gig because it paid him to hang out with his famous friends, and the hidden cameos (revealed showily in its final moments, breaking the fourth wall) at the end of The List of Adrian Messenger is probably the best evidence for that. There are certainly other elements in the film that would obviously draw Huston’s attention (the setting and the fox hunting for sure), but the actual mystery in this wannabe mystery obviously wasn’t ...
September 11, 2023
Freud: The Secret Passion
I’ll give this to John Huston: he liked to experiment from time to time at levels that Hitchcock enjoyed. What Huston seems to have wanted to do when he set out to make this curious biopic of Sigmund Freud’s life and work was to make something more surreal and dreamlike than a typical film, and that’s where it is most interesting. In terms of actually connecting emotionally, I find the mechanics of the film unnatural and clanky, a natural outgrowth of heavy reliance on Freudian analysis as t...
September 10, 2023
The Battle of Lake Erie: 210 Years Ago today
September 9, 2023
The Samurai by Shusaku Endo
So, I think I might have previously read the first half or so of Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai. The references to the “Bishop of Japan”, Father Velasco’s secret desire for his mission of taking three envoys and over a hundred merchants from Japan to Mexico to Spain to Rome and back were just too familiar, were just too familiar, but the rest of the book felt unfamiliar. Were there references to an ambition to be Bishop of Japan from Rodrigues in Silence that I’ve forgotten? I don’t remember. Th...
September 8, 2023
The Misfits
Was John Huston really no better than the scripts he was working from? After a few missteps in a row, John Huston comes roaring back, working from an original script by Arthur Miller while he was working through his final days of his marriage with star Marilyn Monroe, and making one of his best films in years. He’d been working with capable actors that entire time, with serious budgets, but the scripts always had these massive issues that he either didn’t see or didn’t care about. Here, work...
September 7, 2023
The Unforgiven
John Huston seems to have been in a rut. This isn’t as bad as The Roots of Heaven, but we’re still a very far ways away from the heights of stuff like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo. Taking on racism as his topic du jour, John Huston takes a script by Ben Maddow and David Wolff based on a novel by Alan Le May and turns into something passably professional but ultimately confused about its central idea to the point where nothing makes a lick of sense, and we get a big shootout...
September 6, 2023
The Roots of Heaven
Well, this is a complete and total mess. It’s weird how a movie about protecting elephants actually has fears of nuclear proliferation at its core, but that goes to show how this film ultimately is so totally out of its mind with competing fears, ideas, and subplots that it really feels like what was being filmed was an afterthought to Huston as he went back to Africa to film another film after The African Queen. This time, though, he had Zanuck and Fox money behind him, which we all know me...
September 5, 2023
The Barbarian and the Geisha
Probably not as bad as its reputation, but still rather deeply flawed, John Huston’s The Barbarian and the Geisha is one of those films that purports to tell a true story but almost never feels true in its own right. That’s not to say that it’s actually bad, just that it leans so far into melodramatic tropes that I simply stopped believing that there was even a tenuous connection to actual historical events or that things would play out like this in the realm of the world the movie itself cr...
September 4, 2023
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
Based on the novel of the same name by Charles Shaw, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is the tale of two people alone on an island who can never consummate any feelings they may develop towards each other all while under the threat of violence being on a small Pacific Island in the middle of WWII. An actors’ showcase for its two stars, the film is a nice little experience with some muted impacts here and there that prevent it from really reaching its full potential. I think Hitchcock could have mad...
September 1, 2023
The Battle of Lake Erie – A Giveaway
So, I finally decided to try my hand at this: a Goodreads giveaway.
Starting with the book that has the most reviews, I give you a chance to own one of 100 free Kindle copies of The Battle of Lake Erie: One Young American’s Adventure in the War of 1812.
I hear it’s pretty good.
Sign up here! And tell your friends!
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