Auteur List: Fritz Lang - Discussion and Defenses

[TMDaines]

What's the best release of The Blue Gardenia? At one point, it was the German Arthaus DVD, but that was of a German print and is now OOP.

[knives]

The one from Image I looked at is perfectly adequate.

[Drucker]

You can also rent it to stream on Amazon.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

What's the best release of The Blue Gardenia? At one point, it was the German Arthaus DVD, but that was of a German print and is now OOP.

The R2 Orbitmedia is more than adequate and there are VG copies on Amazon for under a sick squid.

[swo17]

Vote for Fritz Lang film club!

[domino harvey]

Interesting article Dom. Does that mean it was a handout promoting the film like you sometimes still get today or was it trying to sell the film to the theater owners?

The latter, it's from a newsletter/industry mag that regularly went out in the wake of the end of block booking to encourage continued Fox distribution

[knives]

That's fascinating. It makes me wonder if trade mags had to change purpose to fit in with the new distribution models.

[DarkImbecile]

The more Lang I watch, the more I'm struck by how central his ideas about and uses of gender are to his work. The virgin/whore dynamic (and his sympathies for the latter) that was noted upthread is definitely a central motif in Der Mude Tod, which features several women whose fates are manipulated by the inexplicable whims of Death/God and a series of both awful and powerful men and societal norms.

Ignoring the - um, lets call them "slightly problematic" - depictions of Chinese/Arab culture, the film's most striking moment comes during the second half of the story of the doomed couple whose story frames the trilogy of tragic tales in which love consistently fails to overcome Death. The film allows the female half of the couple the agency - denied to every woman in the anthology section - to change the fate of her beloved; however, her ghoulish quest to find a life to trade for her lover's return culminates in the character making the choice to spare a child and give herself over to Death. She is rewarded for this selflessness (shown by none of the domineering men in the middle sections) with reunification with her betrothed; Love cannot overcome Death, but can coexist with it.

I don't know that this will make my list, but it was certainly worth a watch, not least to add further context to Lang's treatment of women in his filmography.

[matrixschmatrix]

Lang- or more accurately, if i'm remembering correctly, Von Harbou- clearly had a fascination with exotica in the early years, which comes up in Hara-kiri, Destiny, the Indian Tomb script, The Spiders, and probably others, and while it's always pretty indisputably orientalist, one does at least get the feeling that (The Spiders aside) the interest is relatively benign, if not well informed- it's rare that the people of other cultures, however cartoonish, are depicted as intrinsically savage or evil, and the set design is often genuinely gorgeous and far better researched than the characterization.

I did really appreciate the ending to Destiny too- most of the movie feels like a quick tour through Lang's obsessions, and while I think it's sort of the first really Langian Lang movie it isn't nearly as fleet or fully realized as his next movie (Mabuse der Spieler, which I think is his first masterpiece)- but that ending captures something that does run through his career, where he builds up to this sickening, Greek tragedy ending in which human stupidity creates more and more misery- and then has his characters do something else, and create a far more interesting alternative. I don't want to name my favorite example of this, as even just describing the ending that way would give it away a bit, but it's for sure something that comes up again and again in his American work, and it delights me every time.

[knives]

Finally finished the early films set. I'll likely only have two more new discoveries for the time of this list unfortunately.
Harakiri
I have about zero familiarity with Madame Butterfly so this film really has to stand on its own for me. In that relative vacuum I liked it well enough. Certainly it isn't as good as the films Lang would be making in even just a couple of years, but as a formal piece of observation it is fairly nice with a story I could imagine working as a truly amazing film in the hands of someone like WONG Kar Wai. Lang's, a bit like Brecht with the Chinese Opera, love of Japanese culture is spread throughout making it much more charming than if someone who just used Japan as a window dressing would likely have it. Though in the same measure Lang's love doesn't cover up that he also seems to know nothing about Japan beyond what you'd see in a painting making the film feel like it takes place in a fantasy rather then the real world the film seems to be aiming for. At least this fantasy is very pretty though.

The Wandering Shadow
I'm in the middle of reading DeLillo's Zero K and I thought there was a weird sort of overlap here in the great first half with the visuals in particular, though even elements of the themes seem tied up in a really satisfactory way. In fact despite its incomplete nature I found myself liking this a great deal. Maybe it doesn't come together in this butchered form, but there's so many strange happenings and just plain incredible visual concepts it really has me begging for more. This felt like a really complete Lang film ironically whereas Harakiri and Spiders are clearly nascent. Some of the film is done under by how Destiny covers some of the same ground, but I would still call this easily the best mountain film I've seen. The second domestic portion makes no sense to me whatsoever, but even with that in mind there's an enjoyable logic to the weirdness that works for me.

Four Around a Woman
Wow, this starts off with a shortened version of the casino shot from Dr. Mabuse which is worth the price of the film on the whole. I wound up really adoring this not least for really highlighting what a versatile filmmaker could be. While everything is still etched in a certain darkness with a sense of his city fantasia the genre models it is working in are unlike anything else I have seen from Lang. The movie is about as light as he gets mixing up some underworld danger with sex comedy plotting and a little turn of the century anti-romance. The movie balances all of these things well into a nice story though it lacks the thematic punch of The Wandering Shadow. It's good to now have seen all of Lang's surviving early films to know that Dr. Mabuse was his first complete show of greatness even if the five are entertaining and often show flashes of where his genius would go.

There is a small scene of antisemitism and another of blackface that caught me off guard, but it's no worse than Breakfast at Tiffany's.

[Rayon Vert]

Fifties Fritz revisits.

House by the River. A quirky but fun mix of a pulpy thriller, Gothic horror and a melodrama that I liked again, quite a lot. Surely a minor film in Lang’s oeuvre in terms of ambition but not quality. There are many potent images, notably with the prominent river, like the unconscious, dredging up refuse. The film starts off strongly, immediately effective both narratively and visually, and there are some enjoyable scenes throughout. It’s striking how many Lang films have deranged characters figuring prominently.

The Blue Gardenia. I noticed that apart from the restaurant scene I couldn’t remember any of it. Other members’ comments have allowed me to have a perspective on it I might have missed. Still, though I thought it was a good film and very well executed, for some reason I’m having difficulty discerning and articulating (not the same amount of visual panache in some other Lang favorites?) I wasn’t as enthused in the second half, after a very strong start. It's still likely to end up at the very bottom of my list, or just outside it.

Between The Woman in the Window, House by the River and this one,

SpoilerShow

that’s already three rewatches I notice where the film starts with a character accidently committing murder (or seeming to) and trying to hide the evidence.

While the City Sleeps. I was pleased to see in this thread that this is well appreciated by a few members. I remember beings struck when I first saw it at how much I enjoyed and valued this one, and I thought so again. I’ll echo what others here have said about the cast: I was surprised again to see the names of Andrews, Price, Lupino, Sanders and Mitchell all together, for one thing, in a somewhat low-budget film for a dying studio (which, like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, apparently accounts for why Lang’s last two American films have a unique - stark and flat - look that I find appealing and that, in the words of Tom Gunning, for many Lang critics, “represent a final winnowing of Lang’s vision, a miniminalist style cut to its essentials”. Yes, it’s not Lang’s most suspenseful film, though what’s there in that regard is good, but the thematic and emotional center of the film is really the betrayals and portrayal of this cynical dog-eat-dog world (not to mention the recurrent trope of controlling or manipulating people through media).

[Rayon Vert]

Re: Gardenia. I was wondering about the significance, if any, of the heavy use of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. I see this has received some attention, like here. (Spoilers)

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Back on Gardenia again. Here's an interesting article on the mirroring/doubling aspects http://sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/1 ... denia.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
One element not so far mentioned which dovetails such doubling and the female solidarity elements referred to in previous posts

SpoilerShow

is that of Anne Baxter's sympathy for the real culprit with whom she so easily could have shared the same fate.

.
On the subject of this last scene Knives I still don't see any substantial change of style and rhythm that suggest a documentary mode. We are still wallowing in high melodrama schtick with Tristan driving the crab dolly in sweeping tracking shots and resorting to shadowplay to up the ante. Still whatever does it for you. It's not a complaint just an observation.

[swo17]

For the next two weeks, film club is devoted to discussing M.

[Rayon Vert]

Hangmen Also Die! I'm really glad I got the BR and gave this a second chance. I think on first viewing I was disappointed with the relative lack of striking visual set pieces that characterize Man Hunt and Ministry of Fear in the anti-Nazi trilogy and, not encouraged by a sub-par transfer, didn't really get into the film. This is quite an ambitious undertaking, where Lang creates another one of his distinctive, bleak paranoid worlds. A European flavor (I doubt this is only Brecht's influence, since this concerns the directing as well) evokes Lang's earlier work- an unusually unconventional American film with a complexly-plotted narrative that's more spacious, a focus that isn't on a single set of characters but, to some extent, moves to different sub-groups as the film advances, a relative absence of score, and many elements that recall the German work, like the meeting of the underground in a room that creates a setting reminiscent of the kangaroo court in the distillery in M, or the Gestapo inspector Gruber as a revamped Inspector Lohmann. Quite a remarkable film, very likely to make my list.

[Rayon Vert]

Two virgin watches for me.

You and Me. A com-dram about two paroled ex-convicts falling in love in a department store. The film can be connected to the previous Fury and You Only Live Once because of the presence of an imperiled couple (one half of which is Sylvia Sidney) in a context of repressive social forces, and inviting social commentary. There’s also a slight meta quirkiness because of the inclusion of a few Kurt Weill numbers. All that doesn’t make this film in any way the equal of its predecessors, with nothing in the script or performances to create an engrossing film experience.

Western Union. I’m with most of the forum members here, finding this really pedestrian and almost forgettable. The last half-hour did get better, however, with some fun or intensity deriving from the scenes involving showing the telegraph to the Indians, the near-apocalyptic attack on the WU camp, and the reckoning between the brothers. But, boy, none of Lang’s westerns look good.

Looking for typically Langian elements, the communication technology jumps out. It’s amazing how frequent it’s there throughout the oeuvre. I have no doubt that in some cases these auteurial motifs are there by chance (Lang just happened to get hired to do this studio film, like some others, etc.), but it’s still a bit freaky - like the director's work was involved with strange synchronicities.

p.s. I've just found this fairly amazing web page that rather exhaustively details a plethora of Langian narrative & stylistic tropes throughout almost all of the films. Interesting reference source if you want to make connections between the films that aren't always obvious, or picking out potentially meaningful elements that are easy to miss. Or seeing something of value because it connects to the body of work whereas in isolated fashion a specific film can seem less worthwhile.

[Rayon Vert]

My other two previously unwatched Langs.

American Guerrilla in the Philippines. Based on real events, Tyrone Power plays a naval officer who, at the battle of Bataan’s end, finds himself hiding in the Japanese-controlled Philippines with some other recruits. They wander around the different islands and try to escape and sail to Australia, until they are enlisted to build - yes, that's right - a communications system (including telegraph wire!) to execute surveillance on the Japanese until MacArthur’s Return.

I went into this with low expectations but, while I wouldn’t mistake it for a very good Lang film, I found enough to like about it and I'd be curious to see some appreciations apart from domino's very negative one! (I have a hunch this film might be somewhat underrated.) The movie is somewhat episodic in nature, and enough scenes are suspenseful and well staged, and there’s a sense of adventure through much of it. There are also some handsome Technicolor shots throughout as well (all filmed on location).

And the workings of the native resistance movement (allied to the American forces) against the Japanese invaders evokes a parallel with the context dramatized in (the admittedly much superior!) Hangmen Also Die!

Moonfleet. Conversely, I went into this with slightly higher expectations and got chastened. My opinion happens to often agree with estimations of the 50s Cahiers critics, as exotic as they sometimes are, but not this time. Very similar setting and story elements to Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn – with a boy in lieu of Maureen O’Hara -, but the comparison is incontestably unfavorable to Lang. As an adventure piece, this is fairly lifeless, and aside from a good (but underused) Sanders and Greenwood, as matrix noted, the rest of the actors are flat. More than anything, lackluster sets ruin any chance of establishing the requisite Gothic atmosphere that is obviously sought (e.g. the Angel of Death statue).

This is Lang’s only color Scope picture (if I remember correctly, the Indian Epic is in the Academy ratio), so it’s a shame it’s visually so disappointing. I read a blog article that compared it to Hammer’s Captain Clegg, and yes that’s about where the level of artistry lies (I’d give the edge to Clegg – I’m not slamming Hammer films by the way, I love them). It’s not terrible, but I’ll take the westerns over this.

[knives]

I've been trying to get a copy of AGiP for awhile, but the library is being quite stubborn (they have a copy somewhere). Nevertheless hopefully I'll join your boat of better than expected.

[Rayon Vert]

Nevertheless hopefully I'll join your boat of better than expected.

This is the second lowest-rated Lang title on IMDB after Harakiri but I found a few very appreciative reviews, one of which said this film was likely overshadowed by the Bataan and Back to Bataan films (neither of which I've seen).

The link I posted to a little higher up says this about the film:

Lang's sense of composition in this film is masterly. His location filming in the Philippines opened a whole new set of vistas to him. The best reason to watch American Guerrilla in the Philippines is to see all the creative compositions here formed out of these locations. Many compositions have strong vertical lines, formed by trunks of palm trees or bamboo. These serve as anchors in shots full of foliage, often with a trail winding through the center of the shot from foreground to background.

I must say, though, that that failed to catch my eye significantly. But I did enjoy all of that location shooting, which contrasts strongly with the almost all-set style of Moonfleet.

[domino harvey]

Bataan is the most violent studio era picture I've ever seen, and a great film. Back to Bataan isn't. The idea that AGitP has any unique visual style is laughable

[matrixschmatrix]

It's honestly hard to imagine Lang as a sensitive on-location filmmaker, I can't recall him leaving the studio prominently in any of his best work (though I'm sure I'm forgetting things)

[knives]

The Mabuse films and M all had significant on location work.

[matrixschmatrix]

Did they? I know Thousand Eyes wasn't studiobound per se, but I thought most of the location stuff was indoors- I got the impression Lang was making due with what he had there- but apart from the car chase I'm not recalling anything from Testament. At any rate, maybe my statement would be more defensible if I excluded location work in Germany, where Lang obviously had a particular connection.

[Rayon Vert]

The Mabuse films and M all had significant on location work.

Some nice shots in Human Desire too. But yes I'd say he's more in the "artifice"/visionary-style camp rather than realist, so it makes sense his work is foremost grounded in sets.

[Rayon Vert]

I've only seen the first half, and don't really remember it that well, but doesn't the Indian Epic have a lot of location shooting?