David Vining's Blog

I made a deal about the short production timeline for James Whale’s previous film, The Impatient Maiden, so I noted the production timeline for this from that preceding release. Seven months instead of five. That extra two months was enough to bring back the James Whale who loved performance, characters, and visual composition in a deeply shadowed space. Heck, maybe it was just that he liked the material more and tried harder. But, we get something more in line with what he would turn out wi...

This feels…cheap. There’s no way around it. It feels like dirt-poor independent fare from the 50s. Simple sets, minimal storytelling, short running time, and long, dull takes with no real life to them. What happened to the engaged director who could get compelling performances from his actors in Journey’s End or the wrangler of minimal funds to get fantastic sights in Frankenstein? Information on the film is minimal, but I suspect this, released five months after Whale’s previous film for Ca...

When I rewatch films that appear in different lists of films, like a franchise list and then a director’s list, I end up approaching the viewings in different ways each time. With Frankenstein, going back and reading my original review, I see myself concerned more with the extension of Carl Laemmle’s vision of cinematic spectacles of the grotesque, taken from respected literature. In the context of Whale’s body of work, I actually see further adaptations from the stage (the script having bee...

I really like how James Whale’s first three films are all WWI films. I find the subgenre of war movies to be startlingly rare and only really popped up regularly in the 20s and early 30s until focus turned towards potential future and then contemporary conflict in 1939. Seeing variations on The Great War in cinema is something I’m always keeping an eye out for, and Whale adapts another play, this time by Robert E. Sherwood, to the screen with the same professionalism he’d shown in his work o...

Howard Hughes’ passion project of aerial derring-do is a mixed bag of visions and techniques that does everything it can to thrill and entertain across its 120 minutes. James Whale, brought on fresh off of his London stage success, brings a level of emotional realism to his sections that feels at odds with the sensationalist aerial footage that was Hughes’ baby. I was reminded of two other films from the period that covered similar grounds, Howard Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol and William Wellman’s...

James Whale directed the original stage production of R.C. Sherriff’s play, Journey’s End, and that job brought him to the attention of Howard Hughes who hired Whale to direct the dialogue scenes in his Hell’s Angels. It took so long to finish Hell’s Angels that Whale had enough time to go back to England, make this film adaptation of the play, and release it before Hughes’ finished his work on his flying epic. Adapting stage plays to the screen is always a challenge because the stagebound n...

I don’t have any kind of grand reason for deciding to work my way through the directed works of James Whale, the Queen of Hollywood. I’m doing my normal bouncing from old to new and back again, going from the dual Johns of Frankenheimer and Hughes to jump far back in time to a studio director with not the largest of filmographies in the world. At twenty-one total feature films, all of which are thankfully extant, Whale represents a middle-range of total output to tackle, something of a middl...

Image h/t to Inspirowl Design

Introduction: Or, how John Hughes made a movie that changed my life

I have a list of 100 movies that I consider ‘My Favorite’.  It isn’t a good movie’ list, but each of the movies on the list means something to me.  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (FBDO hereafter) is special. 

Now, FBDO isn’t just well made. The music, the cinematography by Tak Fujimoto (who worked on Pretty in Pink as well), the writing, the performances are all tip top notch.  FBDO isn’t eve...

How have a handful of teenage-focused films from the mid-80s managed to retain some level of cultural purchase 40 years later? The curious, mysterious mix of writing, improvisation, and editing that was John Hughes’ cinema. It was so mysterious, I’m not sure that even Hughes understood it because the magic obviously got lost after a certain point.

Hughes, though, had the good sense to step away from the camera after that, relegating himself to writing and producing for another decade unti...