David Vining's Blog, page 85
July 4, 2023
The Best Years of Our Lives: A Second Look
Another one I watched what feels like yesterday, and a much more positive experience. I don’t dislike Mrs. Miniver, but amidst its many qualities, I still find it a frustrating experience. The Best Years of Our Lives, though, doesn’t have a wrong note in it, and I could watch it over and over again.
This is almost purely a character piece, and the three men who come home from war are met with a country already moving on from the experience that was already distant. Unrelated, but I watche...
Mrs. Miniver: A Second Look
It feels like I just watched this yesterday. I’m going to have that feeling again a couple more times soon, aren’t I?
No real surprise here, but my opinion on Mrs. Miniver‘s strengths and weaknesses has not changed in the previous few months. I still think the movie is at war with itself. On the one hand is a lightly dramatic look at class differences in a small suburban English community, and on the other is a dark, gritty look at life on the homefront in the early days of the Second Wor...
The Little Foxes: A Second Look
The Little Foxes was one of those early films I reviewed randomly, mostly because I had discovered that William Wyler was more than Ben-Hur with The Big Country and The Little Foxes was readily available on Amazon Prime. It still is, actually, because Amazon has ready access to the Samuel Goldwyn library, and I eagerly looked forward to revisiting the film on this watch. I remembered certain specific shots that stuck with me, helping form the basis of my opinion that Wyler was one of the lea...
The Letter
William Wyler goes full noir in this remake of the film of the same name made by Jean de Limur and based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham, and the results are really fun, noirish action. It’s a look into depravity in an exotic locale with great writing and great performances. It’s nice to see Wyler elevate his material once again after making several, merely good, films leading up to it. It kind of feels like Wyler slumming it by going to Warner and falling in a bit with their house style ...
July 3, 2023
The Westerner
Another accomplished, star-driven vehicle with heavy melodramatic tones from the team of producer Samuel Goldwyn and director William Wyler, The Westerner is a character-driven western about a man trying to find a middle ground in a burgeoning war between mutually exclusive interests. It’s hard not to find some level of subtext about the new war in Europe with antagonism being unbending leading to inevitable confrontation, but the focus is the on this weird little fictional birth of Texas st...
June 30, 2023
Wuthering Heights
One of those prestige studio pictures made from well-respected English literature of the 19th century that the studios liked to go back to pretty consistently to try and make their output classier (the best of these is probably David Lean‘s Great Expectations), Samuel Goldwyn’s production of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, directed by William Wyler and written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, is a handsome and clear, if abbreviated in feeling, retelling of the novel’s story. Elevated by...
June 29, 2023
Dune Part 2, trailer 2
More Dune! Looks neat. Atomics go boom. Lasguns go pew pew.
Eastwood has started filming Juror #2
Yes, I was wrong. I get it! Stop rubbing it in!
The 93 year old director is working in Savannah right now, just a couple of hours south of me. It’st he same city he made his worst film, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Hopefully this turns out better.
Jezebel
Pushed into production by Samuel Goldwyn to beat David O. Selznick to the screen in terms of adaptations of works about Southern belles in a Southern city who pines after a man she can’t have before a disaster strikes the city, Jezebel is the smaller, more dramatically focused version of Gone with the Wind, and we see the effects of a story where Scarlet O’Hara was so unredeemable as to be completely repellant. Buoyed by Bette Davis’ very strong central performance and William Wyler’s incred...
June 28, 2023
Dead End
Another well-regarded play, another adaptation by Lillian Hellmann, and the best showcase for William Wyler’s visual sense as heightened by the great cinematographer Gregg Toland. It’s a handsome, well-acted showcase for its actors, director, and cinematographer, but I get the sense that the play Dead End by Sidney Kingsley was more of a timely cultural touchstone than a really compelling piece of drama on the stage. It ran for dozens of weeks on Broadway, igniting interest all around, espec...
