Fritz Lang, master of silent ci-fi, westerns, noirs

They've been showing some of his noirs over here on BBC2 this week - "The Big Heat" is on tonight.

man I kinda wanna see all of those

I have the dvd of "M". Wonderful film.

I think that's the only one of that list I've seen actually - loved it when I saw it but haven't seen it since high school

Clash by Night has purplish patches but has Marilyn Monroe's least affected perf and Stanwyck's last great one. Authentic seatown ambience too.

watching Marilyn Monroe act is really painful

Oh, rubbish.

She's not painful at all here. I'm surprised she didn't melt beneath Stanwyck's withering glances.

(xpost)

How many of those American Lang films are available on DVD, I wonder? I got a set the 2 first mabuse films, metropolis, spione, and M. Supposedly Die Nibelungen is coming out on DVD in October. Easy to forget how many he made in America, though.

I've never been able to sit through any of her starring roles apart from Some Like It Hot (haven't seen Clash by Night)

I saw The Woman in the Window (excellent) three weeks ago.

M is my favourite film ever. Amongst many wonderful things, it pre-empts modern Policiers with a vengeance.

Yesterday I watched all 4 hours of the two-part silent Dr. Mabuse film, which I'd seen long ago... The plotty stuff is pretty dire, but what atmosphere and effects, esp the one where Mabuse's face is isolated at the gambling table.

I'm reading the recent bio and stopping to watch Lang films when possible. Haven't found out who he allegedly killed yet.

Which recent bio?

Patrick McGilligan from 1997?

The Blue Gardenia is on TCM at 8 AM on Sunday.

"M" is a brilliant piece of a masterpiece piece of cinema really. I don't get why they kept doing police movies after that one.

Is the bio good? Would love to read more about Lang. Love his stuff.

yes, McGilligan; I didn't realize it was that old! It's good but I'm still in the silent era -- have to rent Spiders...

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is such a wild mishmash of serial chases, horror, gangster film etc... can't forget those speeding traveling shots of the trees at night. And I didn't realize the cop was the one from M.

Fritz Lang interviewed by William Friedkin, 1975:

(split into 5 parts, that's the first part)

Just saw M for the first time. Damn, that's a film.

M didn't really do it for me. Love Metropolis, Sigfried, and Ministry of Fear though!

Sorry, it's actually spelled Siegfried.

Obviously a lot of good ones I have yet to see!

just watched the testament of dr. mabuse, which i think i'd seen before (certain scenes were very familiar), but it felt entirely new to me. what a blast! might like it even better than M, and it more than holds its own with the original dr. mabuse: the gambler. the "rhyming" structure is particularly wonderful, with each scene linked to the next by fragments of interlocking dialogue, sound & imagery. and lohmann is such a great character. love the bit where he gets his hat shot off charging up the stairs. it's an almost ceaseless barrage of jaw-dropping moments, interrupted only by the rather tedious romantic subplot between kent & lilli. kinda sad that lang soon after repudiated expressionistic exaggeration - he was so good at!

Finally watched The Testament of Dr. Mabuse myself -- must be the summer for it. Contenderizer and Morbs sum up the film pretty well in their posts, though I couldn't say it's better than M, or rather, it's a different beast. The sense of how quickly Lang had moved in terms of sound between the two films is pretty striking, though; it's not that he had improved on it but that he took more dizzying approaches with Testament. Contrasting M's rather stark opening with Testament's churning, disturbed soundtrack and visual setting says it all.

And the speaking ghost of Mabuse remains pretty damn creepy after all this time.

interrupted only by the rather tedious romantic subplot between kent & lilli

...yeah, a couple of too WTF moments there for me.

"I killed my girlfriend and my best friend, who was sleeping with her."

"Doesn't matter at all!"

Uh.

I watched Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of "M" recently (transplanted to a grimy noir LA - with several great noir actors in the cast as well) and was pleasantly surprised as to how well it stood up to Lang's original.

Watching "House By The River" again this weekend. Love that one. One of his best cheapies.

Saw Human Desire a few weeks ago -- certainly not as good as The Big Heat or Renoir's take on the same material. Gloria Grahame isn't so much fun in lead roles, I noticed.

I watched Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of "M" recently (transplanted to a grimy noir LA - with several great noir actors in the cast as well) and was pleasantly surprised as to how well it stood up to Lang's original.

The interview with the son of M's producer on the Criterion edition goes into that remake a bit, I'm interested to watch it just in terms of location as apparently a lot of the architecture of that area of LA soon disappeared due to new construction and the like.

M and Testament are both monuments to how to convey information via a combination of off-screen action and sound or lack thereof.

Ned - PM me if u want some Lang

William Friedkin interview of Lang video here:

http://emissions.tumblr.com/post/11737740158/highlights-include-viewing-william-friedkin

i don't mean to get all challopsy but so far my favorite american langs are moonfleet and you and me.

some of the ones that get critical love -- manhunt, ministry of fear -- have some awesome setpieces but aren't so hot overall.

Manhunt is eh, agreed. Do you like The Big Heat, The Woman in the Window, or Rancho Notorious? Those were my entry points.

yeah i like those, not as much as the ones i mentioned though. rancho notorious is bizarre.

is manhunt the one where joan bennett does the worst cockney accent ever. i am not exaggerating in the slightest BTW.

tot missed that Pashmina posted that interview in '08.

Scarlet Street is amazingly good for a remake of a Renoir masterpiece.

I have missed Moonfleet and You & Me on multiple occasions.

yeah scarlet street is better than it has any right to be. it's not a patch on the original though IMO.

i mean it's really good but it's not great-great if you get my drift.

for one thing the main character is more interesting in the original. i loves me some edward g robinson, but his character is more one-note than michel simon's.

also the ending to the renoir is 1,000 times more shocking. now lang could have never gotten away with it, thanks to the code, but i don't think renoir's approach would have suited lang anyhow.

I really dig 'You Only Live Once', though part of that is pure undying love for Sylvia Sidney

http://classiq.ro/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/henry-fonda-sylvia-sidney-you-only-live-once.bmp

sylvia sidney is the awesomest. you ought to see "you and me," too--there's a lot more of her in that one than in "you only live once."

Prefer TWITW over Scarlet Street when it comes to the Robinson, Jr-Lang pictures. We were talking about filmed dreams in the Inception thread; the most poignant moment of realism in what's ostensibly a dream comes when Robinson settles into a chair near the end of the picture and mumbles, "I'm tired. So, so tired."

you ought to see "you and me," too--there's a lot more of her in that one than in "you only live once."

Right, I'm ordering this NOW

it's on a german DVD. du und ich.

i think.

I must sing the praises of "Dr Mabuse - Der Spieler" (in English as The Gambler, Player, and so on). It is a far better film than Metropolis, with a better (if bizarre) plot and more memorable characters.

"You And Me" such a fun film. Totally panned (I think) on its release. One of my fave Langs. The mobster "types" almost right out of "M". And, yes, Sylvia Sidney at her most adorable.

yeah dr. mabuse is probably my favorite lang film, tied with spies.

3-pack of his silent "juvenilia":

http://blogs.artinfo.com/moviejournal/2012/11/06/fritz-lang-long-ago/

YOU & ME is one of the most Brechtian Hollywood films I've ever seen, not least in its extraordinary opening montage about money, as I recall. It even has songs by Kurt Weill.

or Bert Brecht as the credit on HANGMEN ALSO DIE has him

Yes, another tremendous film. I only didn't list it above because I didn't think of it as American ... but I suppose it is.

the BERT has always made me chuckle which is why it sticks i think

is manhunt the one where joan bennett does the worst cockney accent ever. i am not exaggerating in the slightest BTW.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, October 24, 2011 2:55 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

They really should've just rewritten Bennett's part with some American backstory or something so she didn't have to sound like that. Her accent has a vocal uncanny valley effect, really criminal that they just rolled with it. I wonder if Fritz Lang couldn't really tell the difference and everyone else on set just shrugged.

Just turned it on again to George Sanders rushing his way through his phonetic German. It’s almost like some Mirror, Mirror version of Sid Caesar doing it, with the opposite effect. Sid Caesar’s shtick was uncanny. On the one hand he was clearly an English speaker mixing some words from his Muttersprache with some German words within some kind of Kino approximation of the grammar, sentence structure and overall sound of German. On the other hand it is easy to just close one’s eyes, listen to the melody of the words and imagine he is actually speaking some kind of underheard Germanic dialect. Whereas with Sanders it sounds like he is reading or reciting the words but didn’t practice enough to speak them quickly in a convincing manner.

Think some of the other Joan Bennett movies in the series may be better, including the three Raoul Walsh’s.

Yes, they are.

Nobody told me “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” is heard in this.

Fury was very good, You Only Live Once was downright magical. I want so badly for You and Me to continue the trend because it seems a shame for Lang's Sylvia Sidney trilogy to end any other way.

I dunno - I really like all his American films including the Westerns.

Yeah I think his US work only suffers in comparison with the history-making stuff he did in Germany.

Cloak & Dagger for instance has a lot of interesting stuff! The nuclear angst there before pretty much anyone else (yes it's toned down from the original concept but still there), a depiction of war torn Europe that acknowledges the conflict was quite different for those who lived where it took place, and of course that brutal fistfight.

I have read (possibly in Tom Gunning's long book on Lang) the idea that Lang mostly used slightly second-string actors in the US, was considered a second-string director perhaps?

Thus Sylvia Sidney and Joan Bennett rather than ... Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor? George Sanders and Glenn Ford rather than James Stewart and Montgomery Clift? Can you even imagine Archie Leach in a Lang film?? Though the great Gary Cooper in one picture is a counter-instance.

But then the counter-argument must be that this actually makes Lang more interesting somehow, or that the quality of his work elevated these actors above what they would otherwise be known for.

I think this was an evolution? Thus he starts with a listers like Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper, ends up with Glenn Ford and Dana Andrews.

This overall turn in the discussion is interesting and I tend to agree in general that even with the decline of his budgets, his authority over the crew and the star power he was able to command he is still more interesting than lots of others. Something like The Blue Gardenia, for example, is considered minor, but if another director with a different career path had made it, no doubt somebody would be saying “Hey, check out this guy!”

Also, the eponym of my current screenname resents the implication that his first wife was some kind of Less Than B-Lister.

Lang captured actors on their way to stardom though: note Lee Marvin in The Big Heat.

I know you didn't mean "slightly second-string" disparagingly, and the "slightly" is the correct equivocation, for Silvia Sidney and especially Joan Bennett were known quantities, and Bennett herself took advantage of the brief window in the late '40s for female leads in noir (Sidney was starting to fade).

Slightly Scarlet Thread

Ooh, pretty tempted by this new graphic novel biography of Fritz Lang.

https://www.froelichundkaufmann.de/out/pictures/generated/product/1/540_540_80/fritz-lang-biographie-graphic-novel_1414879.jpg

cool!

Sylvia Sidney has been such a revelation as I've been working my way through countless '30s films over the past couple of years. She was sooo good throughout that decade and then she more or less dropped off the map until Beetlejuice. IDGI.

Roddy McDowall plays the kid on the ship in Man Hunt! First Hollywood role, I think.

very taken with "ci-fi"

Never noticed that before.

Anyway Man Hunt had its flaws but still looked great, had some nice sequences, and was much better than expected given some things people were saying. Joan Bennett’s cockeyed cockney that outdid Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins- she apparently even had a vocal coach by the name of Queenie Leonard! - didn’t bother me that much as overall her performance was pretty good, seems like it was considered a next level breakout role for her at the time. What did bother me, more than some plot points that I couldn’t follow and didn’t care about, was wooden Walter Pidgeon, who makes certain lackluster Gregory Peck performances seem like Marlon Brando in comparison. Seems like he was much better with Roddy McDowall in How Green Was My Valley, directed by John Ford, who originally was supposed to direct this, hence the Dudley Nichols script, which nonetheless led to further Lang collabos, said film being shot later but released earlier. Still haven’t actually seen it. Maybe I will watch Scarlett Street next, which maybe I have seen before bit have no recollection of for some strange reason.

Was wondering how many typos and what their nature would be, lol at Scarlett Street.

Bonus trivia question for identifying the singer who originated the musical motif, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

The only movie where I've seen Pidgeon come to life is in Advice & Consent as the stolid majority leader.

I don't actually know anything about Roddy McDowall, but he did also have a child-actor part in CONFIRM OR DENY (1941), a Blitz drama that as I recall begun by Lang (uncredited) and finished by Archie Mayo.

My recollection is that exactly the same thing happened with MOONTIDE (1942).

Patrick McGilligan says William Wyler did a screen test of 12-year old Blitz evacuee Roddy McDowall which impressed Lang so much that he changed the age of the character named Vaney so he would be a cabin boy. He also has some stuff about both those walkouts the pinefox mentions: in the first case, Lang claimed he had gallstones, in the second he picked a fight with Jean Gabin by bragging about an earlier affair with Marlene Dietrich! Who denied it when confronted by Gabin when he came home that night but, according to her daughter Maria Riva, she always did that.

Roddy McDowall seems to show up in a lot in Silver Screen bios of actresses to sing their praises as one of their friends and confidants.

She set to work on Gabin’s English pronunciation. His French accent did not have the lilt of Chevalier’s, nor the sexy softness of Boyer. Gabin growled; in French his voice could give a dead fish goose pimples, but in English, he sounded like an angry headwaiter. She fought for him at his studio and made enemies for him in absentia. She even persuaded someone to assign her old lover, Fritz Lang, to direct Gabin’s film. Fortunately, he was replaced in the first four days of shooting. As it was, the film turned out to be such a nonentity, it wouldn’t have mattered who directed it! Still, Lang must have had enough time to have a man-to-man talk with Gabin, for he came home one day and accused her of having had an affair with Lang, to which she replied, utterly amazed: “That ugly Jew? You must be joking, mon amour,” and enclosed him in her embrace. Throughout her life, Dietrich did that constantly—erased lovers from her memory as though they had never existed. Not just a convenient trick to get out of a sticky situation, but true mental erasure. She could do it with other things too, a frightening trait.

Riva, Maria. Marlene Dietrich: The Life (p. 687). Pegasus Books.

Whatever the stated reasons or pretexts, it might well have been that he was chafing under the yoke of working for Zanuck at Fox.

Did Archie Mayo ever do anything good? I seem to recall having just read something unpleasant about him goossing some young starlet on her first day on the set with a joy buzzer, much to the amusement of the crew.

Ah, it was Gloria Stuart, she of Titanic, according to this Myrna Loy bio I have.

In her autobiography the actress Gloria Stuart describes being goosed by a buzzer—to much hilarity on the set—on her first-ever day of shooting. The man with the buzzer turned out to be her director, Archie Mayo, also Myrna’s director in State Street Sadie, Crimson City, and Beware of Married Men, all from 1928.14

Leider, Emily W.. Myrna Loy . University of California Press.

James...

Someone else says that Dolores del Rio once slapped him for similar behavior, which I can also believe, although the source is gossipy and unreliable.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Get on the Oscars thread. We're distracted tonight.

Unless somebody wants to start an Archie Mayo thread. *ducks*

Oh wait, I already started it.

Do not listen to them James, strongly support your counter-programming for those of us who don't give a fuck about the Oscars.

Archie Mayo as a creepy practical joker is surprising, since most times I've encountered his name it's been in stern faced message movies. I do love Petrified Forest, stagey and overblown though it may be.

Well, the Oscars have ended.

Huge if true.

People watching Lang.

The thing that made fascism click for me as an ideology before and beyond a specific political formation was watching Metropolis. Brilliant propaganda film and all the more so because few people clock it as one, even today. I'm not even sure Lang did. Anyway, check it out.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) March 14, 2023

Not sure about this "few people clock it as one", everyone in the ILX Film Club seemed to.

Not surprised to hear that Lang was unsatisfied with the ending, though I did laugh at the last line.

― That shit right there is precedented. (cryptosicko), Saturday, January 17, 2015 1:23 PM (ten years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i enjoyed MINISTRY OF FEAR but have to agree about the ending, which seems to come very abruptly. however, it's such a bizarre change of tone, and the last line is so funny, that i couldn't really be disappointed.

the scene that struck with me most is when Ray Milland follows the man from the train into the field during the air raid. there was something so creepy and unpleasantly nightmarish about how he seemed compelled, seemingly against all rationality, to keep moving forward through this dark, menacing, pulsating landscape. it caught me off guard and instilled a very real sense of dread

I need to rewatch this one along with "Spione" and "Man Hunt". Some of my favorite Langs.