David Vining's Blog, page 93

Cluny Brown

Ernst Lubitsch’s final full film, Cluny Brown is a light comedy full of innuendo in pre-war Britain. Not his best work but reminiscent of what made him so wonderful as a filmmaker in general (much like Alfred Hitchcock‘s final film, Family Plot, did something similar at the end of his career), the film is a small joy of post-war optimism, which creates an interesting contrast since the story is actually set in pre-war Britain.

The titular Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is a curious young wo...

A Royal Scandal

Ernst Lubitsch was due to direct this screenplay that he helped develop with the screenwriter Edwin Justus Mayer, but he fell too ill to actually go beyond the pre-production process. The executives at Twentieth Century Fox tapped studio director Otto Preminger, another European émigré to Hollywood, to take over the production, and I think this proves the necessary presence of Lubitsch on his own film sets. It was more than just guiding the script until they found the Lubitsch Touch. It was ...

Heaven Can Wait (1943)

This late period of Lubitsch’s career (he only had one more full feature film in him after this before his untimely death in the early days of production on That Lady in Ermine) is a largely subdued, melancholic, and charming period. I do wonder if he was considering his mortality at the time, which is an easy question to ask when a man makes a film about an old man looking back on his life, focusing on his love life, as one of his final films. I think I prefer Lubitsch’s bawdier pre-Code fi...

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – First Trailer

It certainly looks like an adaptation of the book.

Well, it should fix at least one broken aspect of the source material: the rather dull telling of the actual Hunger Games. Other than that, I see everything that the book does, so I don’t really expect the film to fix anything else. It does look great, though. I’ve come to admire Francis Lawrence, the director, a bit, and that was because of Red Sparrow, a surprisingly well put together Cold War thriller, in addition to the best of...

Dune Part 2: Variety’s First Look

Legendary Pictures and WB gave Variety some stills for Denis Villeneuve’s second half of Dune, a film I liked as a handsome adaptation that seemed to embrace Frank Herbert’s intention in the source novel. The talk about this one so far has been about it being more action and war focused, which would make sense considering what happens in the final half of the book.

At least those action set pieces should look better than what John Harrison was able to accomplish with Sci-Fi Channel money in 2...

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

It’s interesting to contrast Ernst Lubitsch’s effort at directly dealing with Nazism against Fritz Lang‘s. Lubitsch had the advantage of leaving Germany in the early 20s, well before the rise of Hitler while Lang left in 1933 right as they claimed power over the legislature and Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship. Lubitsch had a certain distance to what had been going on in his home country, and he was able to thrive in his fantasy versions of Central and Western Europe for more than a decad...

Scream VI

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#4 in my ranking of the Scream franchise.

This franchise simply will not let go of the idea that its rule breaking. It’s not. It may not bend to every rule of the slasher genre, but it bends to every rule of the Scream franchise that have been established since the first film. That explicit insistence that it’s constantly breaking rules while actually keeping extremely close to rules just irritates me through all of these movies because it’s where the films keep most of their attention. O...

That Uncertain Feeling

Lubitsch, after the critically positive but less than stellar financial receptions of his previous few films, moved into independent production along with business partner Sol Lesser to film a remake of one of Lubitsch’s earlier films (Kiss Me Again, which is lost). Having been a producer on  most of his own films for more than a decade, it’s not like Lubitsch was entering completely uncharted territory when he did this, but he was operating without the established resources of a major studi...

The Shop Around the Corner

This is so warm, gentle, touching, and funny that it almost feels like it comes from a different filmmaker who made the much bawdier early sound films like The Smiling Lieutenant and The Merry Widow. It took a couple of films, but with both Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner, Ernst Lubitsch figured out how he was going to make moves when needing to submit them for approval from the Hays Office. What he came up with was his style and thematic focus at their most elegant and subtle. In a...

Ninotchka

There really did seem to be growing pains with Ernst Lubitsch as he entered the early days of the reign of the Hays Office. Angel was a drama that really skirted the line that the Hays Office had its eye on, working in a genre that Lubitsch didn’t really call home. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife was a return to comedy that ended up feeling far too opaque for the comedy to land as well or for the emotional contents to pull through completely. However, it was on Ninotchka that Lubitsch, along with hi...