David Vining's Blog

A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau, there’s something…a bit off about Otto Preminger’s take written by Howard Koch. Edges around characters have been sanded down, making the underlying drama slightly less urgent, and then the ending feels too Hollywood. One should never compare remakes to the original, to be honest. They should stand on their own. However, it’s hard to separate them, especially when the latter version just doesn’t quite hit as well as the original.

Dr. Pearson...

Orson Welles is awesome, bruh. Watch his movies, bruh.

But first, watch the video all the way through, bruh.

Here it is. Here is the Otto Preminger I always thought was lurking behind the studio interference and assignments from Zanuck at Fox. Noirish, process-focused, and cleanly told, Where the Sidewalk Ends is Preminger’s best film so far. Precisely written by Ben Hecht, it never loses sight of its characters, their complex motives, and complex personalities as Preminger weaves this web of deceit and corruption and zeal that all undercuts each other.

Detective Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) is a c...

I will never quite understand the mid-century obsession with psychoanalysis, especially the way that people seemed to imagine it had magic powers. I mean, hypnotism was not a new thing in 1950, but give it a coat of psychoanalysis paint, and people just kind of eat it up, I guess. Still, whatever. Whirlpool uses it largely as a hook to a mystery, and I just could not get that interested in the mystery itself. I found it just…unengaging.

Ann (Gene Tierney) is caught trying to steal some sm...

You don’t adapt Oscar Wilde by largely removing his dialogue and turning his play, Lady Windemere’s Fan, into a melodrama. It’s just not done. Instead, you make it silent like Ernst Lubitsch did. Wait…I’ve lost the plot. Trying to suss out what movies were near and dear to Otto Preminger’s heart and which were just studio assignments is not an easy task, but I think this one is near and dear. Adapted from a play (his background directing theater) with reports that Daryl Zanuck largely ignore...

Ozu listened to me, bruh. Gave him advice, bruh. Made that Godzilla movie, bruh. #1 all time, bruh.

Otto Preminger makes a…Douglas Sirk movie? Watching this, I was convinced that this was…finally…a movie that Preminger cared about. The touch on government power, the melodrama, the black and white photography that allows a heavy use of shadows: Finally, after several assignments, Preminger was making what he wanted to make. And then I read that Preminger had no memory of making the film at all decades later. Couldn’t have been that important to him. Still, assignment or passion project, Dai...

Gone with the Wind but set in post-Puritan England, Forever Amber is the story of a social climbing young woman, torn between a series of men with one of them being her true love that she can never quite hold onto. And yet, despite having the same basic bones as David O. Selznick’s grand epic entertainment, Otto Preminger’s film is surprisingly wane. This is another case where Preminger was brought in to finish a project, this time to scrap and completely reshoot the work of John M. Stahl af...

I traveled back in time, bruh. Put myself in an Ozu movie, bruh. Proof’s right there, bruh.

Yes, I’m actually 12 years old.

And yes, you should watch more Ozu movies. Expand the club! Expand the cult!

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Is there going to be a movie where I say, “This was made because Otto Preminger wanted to make it?” Perhaps that was Laura, but being a studio man willing to take any assignment just makes it harder to find where Preminger begins and the demands of studio filmmaking end. Was it really his great desire to make the cinematic, musical version of Albert Idell’s novel? I kind of doubt it. The adaptation seems slapdash, especially the inclusion of musical elements, unable to mesh its setting that ...