Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
Dracula was a big success for Universal and producer Carl Laemmle Jr. set out to follow up the gothic romance with something similar in terms of tone and reputation. What he ended up picking was an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel about man conquering nature to create life and the fallout that follows. Eventually… Continue reading Frankenstein
The early sound period has always fascinated me, especially in how studios suddenly needed to find ways to release films in different markets with different languages when changing out intertitles had been enough since the advent of the medium. One thing they did was simply film multiple versions of a movie. This is probably the… Continue reading Drácula
The first official cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker's seminal novel (the tales of the illegality of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu tickle me), Tod Browning's Dracula is a handsomely produced gothic romance that manages to capture enough of the novel to retain a semblance of a story while removing any kind of emotional investment. At only 74-minutes… Continue reading Dracula
This is the first time I've decided to spell out why I'm doing a group of films before I actually get into it. I just thought it would be a nice marker for establishing what and why I'm doing what I'm doing, so it feels a bit less random. I mean, it's ultimately all kind… Continue reading The Universal Classic Monsters: A Statement of Purpose
Fritz Lang is one of those directors who is largely known for a single film. For him, that's Metropolis. Like many other directors, he had a much wider and deeper body of work than that one film implies. Where Lang is different is the direction his career had to take when he fled Germany in… Continue reading Fritz Lang: The Definitive Ranking
David Vining, Author 