Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
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… Continue reading Carmen (or, Gypsy Blood)
John Ford's The Informer seems to have been a major beneficiary of Mutiny on the Bounty's riches at the Oscars. With three nominations for Best Actor (Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, and Franchot Tone), the vote seems to have split, taking the win from the major MGM production and giving it to Victor McLaughlin in the… Continue reading Mutiny on the Bounty
#21 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. The second half of the story that began with The Tiger of Eschnapur, The Indian Tomb is the same kind of easy adventure of good men saving women from bad men as the first half, except now there's an actual ending. The film doesn't elevate into grand… Continue reading The Indian Tomb
#22 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Fritz Lang was done with Hollywood, and he took an offer from the German film producer Artur Brauner to make a film with German money in India based on a script Lang and his ex-wife Thea von Harbou had written for the 1920 silent version of the… Continue reading The Tiger of Eschnapur
#37 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Sometimes you see an entry on a list that boggles the mind. There's no accounting for taste, for sure, but when I read that Cahiers du Cinema placed Fritz Lang's Moonfleet at number thirty-two on its list of greatest films of all time I was simply confounded.… Continue reading Moonfleet
David Vining, Author 