David Vining's Blog, page 97

Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli

When I make my rankings, I like to feel some comfort from the fact that because I have written reviews of everything in the ranking, people reading them can feel confident that, at a minimum, the ranking is seriously considered. I have seen everything, and in doing the ranking it’s coming from a place of knowledge. I start these brief thoughts on the novel Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli, noted Tory politician under Queen Victoria, because I am slowly working my way through a list from Flavor...

The Wildcat

It really is obvious at this point that Ernst Lubitsch needed dialogue to shine. I don’t think he’d made a bad film yet (well, except for The Eyes of the Mummy which I’ve mostly pushed out of my brain), but he was consistently held back by the silent film medium’s inherently different approach to building character than sound films or stage plays. His best films are comedies that take a broader approach to things, which The Wildcat tries to fit in, but, at the same time, this film embraces a...

Anna Boleyn

Am I the only one who thinks it’s kind of weird that none of the intertitles re-Anglicize the names of Anne and Mary, leaving them as Anna and Marie, in this German rendition of the story of Anne Boleyn? It’s just kind of weird. Anyway, Ernst Lubitsch continued his silent, historical epics with this tale of Henry VIII’s second wife, from her return from France to her execution, and it’s the same kind of handsome but distant affair his other films of this vein like Madame DuBarry and Sumurun ...

Sumurun

Ernst Lubitsch made a handful of historical epics in a row in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and Sumurun is the second of the four. It is more fully a melodrama than Madame Dubarry was without the benefit of real history to help inform its dramatic and tonal swings. It also boasts a rather large cast of characters, to the point that I would call this an ensemble piece, but it manages that load much more deftly than in the previous film. Dotted with moments of farcical fun but weighed down b...

Madame DuBarry (or, Passion)

Another romantic historical film in the line of Carmen, Ernst Lubitsch adapted Memoirs d’un medicin by Alexandre Dumas and told the story of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame DuBarry, bringing along his regular female star Pola Negri to lead the film. It’s a story with a lot of moving parts and a lot of characters, but it has trouble managing all of that in the medium of silent film, leaving a lot to be explained in intertitles while juggling a large host of supporting characters that tend to look...

The Oyster Princess

Much more in line with the urbane farce that was The Doll than the attempts at vaudeville that were the Sally Pinkus/Meyer films, The Oyster Princess is another delightful little entry in Ernst Lubitsch’s early career that might not quite make the most sense but keeps its focus on the light comedic antics that drive the narrative. Demonstrating the early form of the Lubitsch Touch as well, piling punchline on top of punchlines, this is Lubitsch more firmly finding his feet as he moved from o...

Meyer from Berlin

I don’t think Ernst Lubitsch’s comic sensibilities lent themselves that well towards vaudeville and slapstick. His was a more urbane and witty comedy that wasn’t the best fit with things like physical comedy. His recurring character of Sally Meyer (formerly Pinkus from Shoe Palace Pinkus) was a successful attempt at making a German version of Charlie Chaplin, at least contemporaneously. I don’t think the character aged all that well, but Meyer from Berlin wasn’t exactly a terrible experience...

Erich von Stroheim: A Retrospective

Erich von Stroheim has one of those faces that people tend to recognize from the silent era. Helped in no small part by roles he had in two films by Billy Wilder (Five Graves to Cairo and Sunset Blvd.) as well as Jean Renoir’s Le Grand Illusion, Erich von Stroheim’s look as the stereotypical Teutonic officer was part of the marketing campaigns of even his very first film as a director, Blind Husbands. Born in Vienna in 1885 to a middle class hat maker, he moved to America in 1909 and slowly made...

The Doll

The opening shot of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Doll announces wordlessly that it’s going to be…different. A man, Lubitsch himself, comes out and sets up a house and yard with paper on a table, which we then zoom in on and two characters exit the house to start the story. What follows is an unrealistic tale of love and fantasy that delights and entertains while providing what seems to be the earliest form of the Lubitsch Touch. This isn’t the tale of high society and wit that Lubitsch became famous...

Carmen (or, Gypsy Blood)

Adapted from the later parts of the novella of the same name by Prosper Merimee, Carmen is Ernst Lubitsch’s third surviving feature, and he was still firmly in the part of his career where his voice was muffled by studio needs. There was room for him to operate a bit within the bounds of this story of a Spanish army officer who allows himself to fall to his lowest through the wiles of a gypsy woman, but mostly this feels like Lubitsch continuing his early education in how to make films work ...