David Vining's Blog, page 80

Key Largo

The first seventy minutes of Key Largo is the best movie John Huston made. The last thirty minutes are really good, but still a small step down from the cinematic purity of the descent into paranoia combined with the oppressive power of Nature. Freely adapted from the stage play by Maxwell Anderson by both John Huston and his cowriter Richard Brooks, the film is a look at heroism in a post-war world filled with great performances and great visuals. It just gains a certain extra character at ...

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

John Huston’s second screenplay that he directed himself, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre feels closer to his heart than anything else he’d made up to this point which had all been within the Warner Brothers house style of, alternatively, noirish thrillers or women’s pictures. Adapting the novel by B. Traven, Huston went to Mexico with his father and WB’s biggest star to make a tale of desperation, greed, and murder that, for reasons unknown, did not excite the masses into making it a box o...

Across the Pacific

Made in the immediate wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Across the Pacific is a combination of thriller and propaganda film, in a similar vein to Howard Hawks‘ Air Force but without the incredibly unnatural ending, though the ending of this isn’t exactly great itself. John Huston reteams with a good chunk of his cast from The Maltese Falcon, getting through most of the production before he was called up to serve the US military’s efforts in the war, the ending being taken over by ...

In This Our Life

John Huston makes his second film, adapting a novel by Ellen Glasgow from a script by Howard Koch, and showing his Wyler influences crystal clear, helped in no small part by his casting of Bette Davis as one of the leads. Apparently sanding down all of the rough edges to satisfy both the Production Code and Southern states and their treatment of race relations, Huston efficiently worked through the script, spending all of his free time with Olivia de Havilland, and ending up with a handsome ...

The Maltese Falcon

John Huston starts his directing career proper by creating a movie star in Humphrey Bogart. Bogart had been a supporting actor for WB for a few years (notably in things like Wyler’s Dead End), but his turn as Sam Spade in the adaptation of the novel by Dashiell Hammett done by Huston himself put him on the cinematic map. And watching the film eight decades after its release (for the third or fourth time, to be honest), it’s easy to see how he could capture the audience’s attention in this sa...

John Huston: A Statement of Purpose

John Huston is another one of those filmmakers who had an appreciable affect on the cinematic culture in America through a handful of films. His first directing job was actually filming the duel scene in William Wyler’s Jezebel. He went on to have his own directing career from the early 40s to the late 80s, and he made more than forty films, but people mostly remember only a handful.

There’s The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and The Man Who Would Be ...

Peter Weir: The Definitive Ranking

The Australian New Wave arose in response to Australian government incentives to restart the film industry in the country after it had flagged to essentially nothing in the 1960s. Chief among those who benefited from this was Peter Weir who became known for his early critical darlings like Picnic at Hanging Rock that were both very well made and extremely Australian at the same time.

Hollywood came calling by the early 80s, and he was off, making mostly American features after that (Gree...

The Way Back

Peter Weir’s final film was not meant to be his final film. In an interview with Mark Kermode after a David Lean lecture a little bit after The Way Back‘s release, Weir talked like he was going to continue trying to make films, but, more than a decade later, all we have to show is Ethan Hawke (star of Dead Poet’s Society) talking about how Weir had retired. This doesn’t feel like the kind of film that a director would go out on, like Kurosawa‘s Madayayo (not his final film, admittedly), or B...

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

There are films from great directors towards the end of their career that feel like are the culminations of all of their talents in one package. I first noticed this with the intricate craft that Ingmar Bergman brought to Fanny and Alexander, and I see it again here with Peter Weir and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. It’s been obvious since Picnic at Hanging Rock that Weir was a literate and intelligent filmmaker, almost never failing to entertain at a basic level while offe...

The Truman Show

And we come to Peter Weir’s best known, most beloved film. I find it interesting that the producers were calling this the most expensive art film because while the end result is an intelligent, intricate character study, it’s still ultimately a story about a likeable lead who overcomes a series of obstacles to reach a goal. The very basic storytelling mechanics are just very standard. What gives it this sense of being an art film is the intimate care take towards the character-based storytel...