David Vining's Blog, page 98

The Eyes of the Mummy

If there’s one kind of film Ernst Lubitsch is known for it’s…globe-trotting adventure stories? Okay, it’s early in his career, well before he’d developed the Lubitsch touch much less made it his signature, but this is just so strikingly different from everything I know about him that it’s quite a curiosity on its own. Unfortunately, that’s about the end of the interest because the narrative limitations that Lubitsch had on display in the lightly amusing Shoe Palace Pinkus bite him harder her...

Shoe Palace Pinkus

Ernst Lubitsch began his feature film career with this self-driven star vehicle designed to introduce his character, Sally Pinkus, to the German speaking cinematic world. It worked, and he made several more films with the character before abandoning him when Lubitsch moved to America. Whenever I see attempts at building silent film comic characters, I always, as I’m sure most do, refer back to Charlie Chaplin’s Trump character. Chaplin understood the limits of silent comedy extraordinarily w...

Ernst Lubitsch: A Statement of Purpose

Why Ernst Lubitsch?

Well, let me talk about when I became aware of him.

I’d seen a couple of his films before, mostly the original To Be or Not to Be, but his name never really registered, and then the Criterion Collection announced the Blu-ray release of Cluny Brown in June of 2019, and it became something of an instant sensation because the cover art was so hilariously bad. The title character looked like a robot. If I remember correctly, they slightly redesigned it and it looks sli...

So Ends the second section of Best Pictures…

And…we’re done.

The first twenty-four films and twenty-three years have been covered, and things do seem to be improving from an artistic perspective. Do I always agree with the Academy’s choices from an artistic point of view? Not really, but nothing is nearly as bad as Cimarron, and there does seem to be a consistent desire to award good films, which is nice.

It’s also worth noting that up through 1946, the films awarded were consistently big earners, being in the top ten biggest films ...

All About Eve

A witty, sometimes vicious look at an intergenerational rivalry between two actresses and the social circle around them, one rising and the other falling, All About Eve is a movie about actors that is a showcase for its actors, leading to five acting nominations (the only one who won was the sole man nominated, which is kind of funny), and an enduring reputation as one of the great movies. Well, I’m not enamored of movie stars or actors, so the display works less on me, but there’s still a w...

All the King’s Men

There’s an interesting bit of behind the scenes information about Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men, the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Robert Penn Warren. After scripting, filming, and an initial cut, Rossen’s movie was coming to 250 minutes in length. Harry Cohn, Columbia’s studio head, was happy to release the film as it was, but Rossen desperately wanted it to be shorter, so he told his editor, Robert Parrish, to remove the first fifty seconds and final hundred second...

Hamlet (1948)

Making a movie from Shakespeare is kind of cheating, isn’t it? Laurence Olivier, fresh off of his success of bringing Henry V to the screen in 1947, ended up zeroing in on Hamlet as his follow up (Orson Welles’ long in the works pair of adaptations of Macbeth and Othello apparently helped affect Olivier’s thinking), and, after butting heads with Technicolor executives and advisors, decided to film his adaptation in black and white. Heavily influenced visually by Welles’ and Gregg Toland’s wo...

Gentleman’s Agreement

This is not drama.

It’s really not. It’s polemic with elements of drama inelegantly hanging over different parts here and there in an effort to make it look like drama, wearing a drama suit that doesn’t fit. This is didacticism at its most forceful, obvious, one-sided, earnest, and well-meaning, taking a fight for a good cause and finding no way to frame it properly in a dramatic structure. Elia Kazan himself was reportedly unsatisfied with the finished product (his frustrations resting w...

The Best Years of Our Lives

Born of William Wyler’s desire to help tell the stories of the men he served with when he filmed from a bombardier during WWII, The Best Years of Our Lives is a tender, heartfelt, and honestly quite beautiful look at combat servicemen readjusting to civilian life. Telling the story of three men coming back to their small midwestern city, one of whom is played by a non-professional actor, William Wyler showed his extreme cinematic acumen in every frame, using his command of framing to effecti...

The Lost Weekend: A Second Look

It still amazes me how well Billy Wilder‘s The Lost Weekend works because it is first and foremost a teetotalling film, a dramatic deconstruction of a man consumed by his need and addiction to alcohol where the alcoholism is the center of every single scene. However, buoyed by Charles Brackett’s and Billy Wilder’s expertly written screenplay, based on the source novel by Charles R. Jackson, it becomes about more. It becomes about a man’s self-destructive course that no one can stop but himse...