Auteur List: Fritz Lang - Discussion and Defenses

[domino harvey]

I like Lorre as much as the next guy (well, maybe not in dreck like Crime and Punishment), but David Wayne's take is far more complex and complicated. Plus, no way could a mannered performer like Lorre have ever pulled off the stunning long-take monologue Wayne delivers in Losey's version

[knives]

I just don't see it. Maybe if I ever watch it again I'll take those points in, but for now it ranks pretty close to my least favorite Losey.

[matrixschmatrix]

On the shouldn't work scale I always find the conflict of Lang between stylization and realism to be one of his greatest benefits building a truly other world in a way like no one except maybe Lynch in film. For instance I just finished the first part to Die Nibelungen, is it just me or does the newest release have more scenes compared to the old one, and the thing that is most consistently interesting is how so much of the film is styled to be like a lot of the wackier German films of the era, but Lang shoots it in the way you would a domestic drama, a technique that probably gets maximum exposure in The Big Heat, making the setting seem ordinary. It's as if his brain were battling against his instincts which honestly could summarize many of his protagonists. He is very famously on the record of wanting a sort of absolute realism in his films and even taking a great deal of pride in writing the end The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari yet his films don't obviously show that instead having an instinct for what you fabulously call his expressionist ghost tendencies.

I found Nibelungen ungodly boring last time I tried to watch it, but I think (hope) that my film literacy has grown since then- if nothing else, the pre-20s project is a hell of a work out for the attention span, and it feels like a movie that will reward staying with it. Eventually.

I do love Lang's constant undercutting of his own definitions of himself as a filmmaker- it means that 'Langian' as a quality is something I know when I see it, but is actually pretty hard to define, apart from his consistent belief in and treatment of evil as a force in the world. Even that, though, takes innumerable forms- he pretty rarely allows himself to localize evil into a single bad man or organization, even though his films are often structured so as to make that seem like the case; there are often, as in Scarlet Street questions of relative evil, of whether the passive intellectual who has murder deep inside him or the casually abusive sadist who is nonetheless more lovable than his counterpart is the more horrible, or whether the child killer of M is less or more excusable than the men who do comparably horrible things as a day job. Evil sometimes seems like an abstract force, something from outside that invades- the spirit of Mabuse, or of Rotwang- but just as plausibly comes up as the natural consequence of any group gathered together in hysteria or amoral capitalism. I think the tension between the ghosts and the banal comes in part from a sense that, for Lang, they both have sort of an equal claim to reality, and I always feel like his oft stated distaste for expressionism is mostly a distaste for expressions of mindsets that don't fully fit with his- they're unreal because they're not part of Lang's world, not because they're fantastical.

[knives]

After the rape it does get a little fluffy with some of the more out there elements settling in a mundane way though I'd still take it over most of Murnau's work for example. It's almost like Alexander Nevsky that way. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if GRR Martin was influenced by it given his tendency to treat fantasy more like a history of local politics. Lang also has the benefit of Hanna Ralph's incredible performance which is something out of an entirely different and better movie. It's easily top five performances alongside Lee Marvin and any of the Klein-Rogge performances. If you have the four hours it's definitely worth a second look (this is my fourth).

I think what you have about the mundane is also why I prefer his American pictures. This is where the realism seems like a more natural fit yet the ghosts still arise often in pretty surprising and weird ways. The haunting of the internal evil for Robinson and Crawford in the Renoir films leaves, I really don't have a better way of phrasing it, a ghostly derangement. The snow falling in the former film is one of cinema's most terrifying and unreal images yet when objectively looked at it does look like the real world as just about anyone could see it which I suppose is the most frightening thing. Have you seen Fury? Nearly all of your last paragraph might as well as be a summary of that film which while not his best, I find Tracy too hammy, is in many ways the perfect embodiment of Lang.

[matrixschmatrix]

I love Fury, I think it's literally the only Spencer Tracey performance I like- it's very high key, but I think it fits what the movie is going for, sort of along the lines of Mitchum's cartoonish but note perfect performance in Night of the Hunter.

[Mr Sausage]

After the rape it does get a little fluffy with some of the more out there elements settling in a mundane way though I'd still take it over most of Murnau's work for example. It's almost like Alexander Nevsky that way. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if GRR Martin was influenced by it given his tendency to treat fantasy more like a history of local politics. Lang also has the benefit of Hanna Ralph's incredible performance which is something out of an entirely different and better movie. It's easily top five performances alongside Lee Marvin and any of the Klein-Rogge performances. If you have the four hours it's definitely worth a second look (this is my fourth).

That element of fantasy and political history running beside each other is right out of the sources, where legend entwined with historical and political events. The Norse sources especially, since, being sagas, they were as much as record of Scandinavian history as they were heroic tales--myth and history fusing. The German Nibelungenlied does that, too, but to a lesser extent. The story is more focused on the story of Sigurd/Sigfried (the Norse Volsunga Saga, like a lot of the sagas, narrates a significant chunk of history before and after the life of the hero). Due to when/where the German Nibelungenlied was written, it was heavily influenced by the courtly romances popular at the time, the Romance of the Rose especially, so it ends up having considerably more 'civilization' than the Volsunga saga and its brethren. That is, it takes place in a specific political location, a court, so it's concerned more explicitly with ideas of order, stability, justice, and the proper role of the ruler. Sigfried, being the mythic hero, is the divine figure destined to bring order to a disordered land. He fights the dragon, destroys the goblin kingdom, and otherwise banishes symbols of chaos and disorder. That divine, superhuman quality is soon allied with the more human, earth-bound expression of order: civilization and the rule of law. So Sigfried helps King Gunther solidify his position and accumulate the symbols of kingship. The divine expression of order is absorbed into the human attempt to lend the world coherence through rules and laws.

Sadly and sexistly, what destroys this noble attempt to establish civilization is, of course, woman, that prime symbol of both civilization and destruction. The difficulty in navigating the strange, competitive, backbiting world of women causes Sigfried's death. With human institutions no longer allied to the divine, they are free to crumble. In the Volsunga Saga, this is represented by a perverse, degraded court, that of Atli (Attila the Hun), which is rightfully destroyed along with the Volsungs, allowing Gudrun (Kriemhild) to flee and establish civilization elsewhere. The Nibelungenlied takes a far stranger and uglier twist, with Kriemhild's wild hysteria bringing about the destruction of Etzel's basically decent court and turning villainous characters like Hagen into heroes by default. The court, that is, civilization, is ultimately destroyed by all that is wild and uncontrollable in femininity.

So the thematic thrust is that divine and human order come together to harmonize the world by defeating exterior figures of disorder, but it's all undone by the disorder within human beings themselves. The implication is that establishing civilization does not just cure the world of chaos, no matter how tamed the world becomes. The real foe of civilization will always be its creators.

Lang's film follows the German poem closely, although it simplifies the narrative. The Nibelungenlied narrates a number of key events in retrospect. Sigfried is introduced to the narrative as an already well-known hero, with the events that got him there (the dwarves, Regen, the dragon fight) being narrated in retrospective asides. The Nibelungenlied was written on the assumption that those reading it were already familiar with the story and did not need it told in sequence as tho' it were a series of discoveries. Lang's film, for obvious reasons, makes everything sequential. In addition to this being the most efficient way to tell it, the effect of that decision is to make the story much more straightforwardly mythical. As viewers, we're discovering this narrative as though the end result were not always in mind. The way it's shot, too, just emphasizes the monumentality of everything. There's a grandeur to the framing and architecture that seeks to overpower the viewer with size, depth, and sheer design; and the blocking and the movements of the actors gives a stately, deliberate quality to each scene. It's all designed to lend an overpowering heft to the proceedings. We're watching a fundamental story, one story that is all stories. And when it goes off the rails at the end, it goes off with the fury of craziness, Lang destroying that orderly, inhuman edifice he'd created in the first half with a mad, inhuman fury in the second. It's all in the realm of elemental forces.

In a lot of ways, Lang's belated sense of this material leads him astray. This isn't really a living story for him that shows human strength undone by human frailty. It's a grand and ancient myth, the origin of German cultural greatness. His movie is really enshrining the story, making a monument of it. We're not really watching humans, but ideas, and not even ideas about humans. It's all about what this story represents to the Germans as a story. What the story means seems less important.

It's a fascinating movie, but mainly, I think, in the context of its, er, context. In general, Lang seems more interested in German cultural history than in the characters and meanings of the story by itself. He certainly resists turning it into a more human drama the way William Morris did when he wrote his great version of the story, Sigurd the Volsung. Lang adds very little psychology or internalization. It's all overpowering surface. Really the best way to understand what it's doing is to read The Nibelungenlied, The Volsunga Saga, and the Sigurd parts of the Poetic Edda.

[knives]

Thanks for all of that information, though I'll have to disagree on the film especially now that I've gone through the second half (which I think is actually my first time completing it as the other editions I've tried were all scratched up). The film does possess a pretty intense psychology for its characters I feel with the women in particular maneuvering the court in a way that I'd describe as just the opposite of an epic of German greatness. By the end of the film I thought the for the German people credit had a lot of sarcasm to it. Some of this is by the way Lang fetishizes life outside of German culture with the early scenes and all of the stuff with Attila feeling much more invested in.

Even without that in mind though I think Lang skirts around the broad platitudes of say Metropolis and more into the dark irony of Spies here with a Passolinian message of how life was better without civilization to drag it down. The forcing of the narrative into a linear fashion emphasizes this quite a bit since as an audience we are introduced to a land of heroes with wild beasts and magic to hunt alongside wise teachers and this overall sense of wonder. Likewise the Huns of Attila don't know chaos and destruction (which itself is naive in that Passolinian way but my point is how it undermines that Gilgamesh narrative of the civilization of man) and are treated by the film as more honorable and worthwhile if dumb (which I suspect is a carry over from the original text). Civilization itself breeds the chaos and disorder with only its destruction as a hope (this making the ending one of Lang's most bitter tasting to me as if the whole brick was now too big to fail).

Getting back to psychology I don't think Lang is in the text of the film terribly invested in myth with it as just a thing that exists (if I recall correctly he made the film at least in part as a way to undermine Wagner's opera which of course is very much steeped in that sense of nationalistic epic). True the film is never interested in Siegfried except as a plot device and he might as well have been played by cardboard, but the rest of the characters, particularly the women, are really complicated in a way that makes it impossible to say who Lang views as the good guy if anyone. At first the film, and I suspect there's elements of what I'm about to say of this in the original story, seems to treat Kriemhild as the white queen of purity as a comparison to Brunhilde's manish black queen (I take her rape by the way as less a civilization thing in and of itself than as a common epic trope to add to the power of the character the either results from the rape or is doing it. Look to Sundiata for a comparison from a very different part of the globe) and she certainly serves that purpose, but from his death on she transforms like how Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible transforms from the loss of his beloved. Also likewise to Eisenstein, who admittedly does all of this better, this transformation seems to be not exclusively to signal the tragic, but highlight the potential for evil she had from the beginning (which goes well with what Matrix was talking about).

Speaking of does anyone recommend this book?

[matrixschmatrix]

I have to say, the last time I watched Wagner's Ring Cycle, I wasn't overwhelmed by it forcing a sense of German identity onto the text- it's inextricably there, but Wagner (who iirc wouldn't have thought of 'German' as a particularly unified identity) doesn't seem to have been highlighting it, just highlighting elements that German nationalists really latched on to. Which I believe those particular nationalists did to Lang's film as well.

I will say that even the smallish (about half of the first half) chunk of Lang's film that I watched seemed to have an interest in simultaneously laminating and undermining the mythic quality that Wagner blasts at 1000%; Siegfried hacking the dragon apart is a fun effect, but it's very undignified, and has as much of butchery as of heroism about it. Lang's pictorial sense in it (again, in the part I got through) reminded me a bit of medieval tapestries- very representational, not much sense of movement, but a certain earthy quality, Pasololini-esque as Knives describes it, that still keeps it out of the rarefied heights of pure heroic mythology. I can't imagine Ludwig II building a castle celebrating this narrative.

[knives]

What I really love about the dragon scene is how nice the dragon seems. It's this dopey little animal that is just protecting itself from this asshole intruder. Likewise the scene with the dwarf makes Siegfried seem like a jerk as well. Also to the nationalist thing the making of suggests that when the film was reissued during the third reich the second half was not part of the release because of it going against their narrative.

[Mr Sausage]

I should point out that my criticisms of Lang's 2 films are meant to be gentle. I did enjoy watching them, even if they are a bit slow at times. I'm extremely fond of this myth (I mean, I have a pet snake named Fafnir) and very glad to have a version of it done by one of cinemas great artists.

Thanks for all of that information, though I'll have to disagree on the film especially now that I've gone through the second half (which I think is actually my first time completing it as the other editions I've tried were all scratched up). The film does possess a pretty intense psychology for its characters I feel with the women in particular maneuvering the court in a way that I'd describe as just the opposite of an epic of German greatness. By the end of the film I thought the for the German people credit had a lot of sarcasm to it. Some of this is by the way Lang fetishizes life outside of German culture with the early scenes and all of the stuff with Attila feeling much more invested in.

Let's put it this way, the film contains just enough psychology to tell the story. The women's machinations are certainly the most complex element of the original story, although it's a lot more complex in the Norse version, where Sigurd is initially betrothed to Brunhilde, but is given a forgetfulness potion that wipes the betrothal from his memory. So Brunhilde has a far more complex motivation, having not only been deceived and wed to a man she doesn't love and who is plainly second-string, but having to watch her fiancee, the love of her life, blissfully wedded to someone else. She's a more tragic and sympathetic figure, and her interactions with Gudrun are less haughty and competitive and more sad (Gudrun, if I remember, feels sorry for Brunhilde). There's far more going on than the sense of injured merit in the Nibelungenlied. Lang's film shows the events of the Nibelungenlied with the same amount of psychology as in the poem, and it's probably the best part of the film. But compare it to William Morris' version, where he adds to this Gunther's jealousy at needing Sigurd to secretly win him Brunhilde, a jealousy which Gunther does not acknowledge to himself but which builds throughout the narrative and is finally manipulated by Brunhilde. That added psychological complexity is not in any of the originals, and is not even attempted by Lang. I just don't think that's where Lang found himself interested.

Admittedly, it's been a few years since I saw the films, but I do remember coming away with the impression that I'd been told about the story as much as told it.

Even without that in mind though I think Lang skirts around the broad platitudes of say Metropolis and more into the dark irony of Spies here with a Passolinian message of how life was better without civilization to drag it down. The forcing of the narrative into a linear fashion emphasizes this quite a bit since as an audience we are introduced to a land of heroes with wild beasts and magic to hunt alongside wise teachers and this overall sense of wonder. Likewise the Huns of Attila don't know chaos and destruction (which itself is naive in that Passolinian way but my point is how it undermines that Gilgamesh narrative of the civilization of man) and are treated by the film as more honorable and worthwhile if dumb (which I suspect is a carry over from the original text). Civilization itself breeds the chaos and disorder with only its destruction as a hope (this making the ending one of Lang's most bitter tasting to me as if the whole brick was now too big to fail).

You're probably right that Lang likes the naive, prelapsarian (to borrow a loaded but appropriate term) world of the first half more than the human ugliness of the second. A world of dragons and goblins is fun and exists to be subdued. That kind of disorder is quaint and far from any real problem. The madness and death of the second half is less easy to be fond of. It is indeed a lot more fun to imagine yourself slaying dragons and subjugating goblin kingdoms than being massacred in a hall, however bravely you fight.

Getting back to psychology I don't think Lang is in the text of the film terribly invested in myth with it as just a thing that exists (if I recall correctly he made the film at least in part as a way to undermine Wagner's opera which of course is very much steeped in that sense of nationalistic epic).

I don't know. I don't think you'd make a story like this into something so titanic and remain uninterested in myth. At least part of you has to feel this story is grand and important and epic beyond just the content of the narrative itself, so much so that your set design and framing constantly reduces the human element. Imagine a British man making a film in this style about King Arthur--you just wouldn't look at that and think Arthur as a cultural product was of no interest.

Speaking of which, just the choice to adapt this epic poem says something. Lang isn't adapting Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal or Gottfried von Strassbourg's Tristan--German epics that probably surpass the Nibelungenlied, as great as it is, but whose content is Celtic rather than German. The Nilbelungelied is fundamentally German and played a central role in the later attempt to establish a German literary tradition and heritage.

That being said, I do agree that Lang is probably uninterested in this story as a myth of Germanness (did he really think Wagner's operas a monument to German nationalism? Too bad--I like Shaw's reading of them as socialist allegories). It's all probably more about the importance of stories. There is a cultural value to having this myth of the struggle to achieve civilization and how it all ended in sorrow and ruin. Overall I think viewers are more likely to take away the titanic, epic quality of the story than any particular insight into human psychology (most of the psychology in these films is broad and stereotyped enough that viewers will come in already assuming it to be true generally, or at least generally assuming it to be believed to be true). But overall I think these films, more than anything, feel this story to be important as a story, and serve as a monument to that idea.

[Mr Sausage]

Lang's pictorial sense in it (again, in the part I got through) reminded me a bit of medieval tapestries- very representational, not much sense of movement, but a certain earthy quality, Pasololini-esque as Knives describes it, that still keeps it out of the rarefied heights of pure heroic mythology. I can't imagine Ludwig II building a castle celebrating this narrative.

I see a lot of German romanticism in that 'earthy' element, of the kind that latched onto these types of mediaeval fairy tales in the 19th century. The movies' sense of heroic narrative is heavily mediated by the 19th century. It's not 'pure' heroic mythology, but for different reasons than I think you meant.

[matrixschmatrix]

I see a lot of German romanticism in that 'earthy' element, of the kind that latched onto these types of mediaeval fairy tales in the 19th century. The movies' sense of heroic narrative is heavily mediated by the 19th century. It's not 'pure' heroic mythology, but for different reasons than I think you meant.

I just intended to contrast it to Wagner, who seems much more concerned with gods and purity and also incest I guess than with like, the more Sancho Panza side of life.

On another note- I just rewatched While the City Sleeps, and it absolutely holds up. It's an odd mixed bag of a movie- there's a plotline that later shows up in Michael Mann's Manhunter of psychologically profiling and attempting to lure in a serial killer, a killer who himself prefigures Psycho (except insofar as both his performance and the pseudo Freudian gender psychology informing it are absolutely awful and the week point of a great movie) and kind of slotting into something that is more broadly a The Front Page esque newspaper story; it hangs together both because it's expertly made, where all the individual pieces are great, but also because this thing has one of the best casts I've ever seen- despite sticking Vincent Price into a weird rube role, it has a lengthy cynicism off with Dana Andrews, Ida Lupino, and George Sanders (oddly playing a highly similar amoral man willing to pimp out his partner to his character in Moonfleet), and the whole thing is just a delight to watch. It has a pleasantly adult quality, too- Andrews and his betrothed bicker, but their disagreement isn't farcical misunderstanding but a genuine character flaw (abetted by what seems like a pretty serious case of alcoholism) on Andrews' part. Price's wife cheats on him, because he takes her for granted and treats her like a trophy. Ida Lupino sleeps around, because she's an adult and she has every right to do so. I'd forgotten one of my favorite beats, late in the movie-

SpoilerShow

Price's wife, who is in the apartment of her lover, is attacked when the killer is unable to get at Andrews' fiancee- but rather than killing her off, and thus implicitly punishing her for her infidelity, she fights the man off and escapes to join forces with the fiancee. It makes perfect sense, but it also flies in the face of the kind of noirish sense of Greek tragedy inevitability that often really gets up my nose.

The killer is just awful, though- he spends the whole movie sweating and staring, and might as well have a sign that says 'murderer on his head'; nothing of the relative humanity of Peter Lorre in M, just a crazy monster, driven to kill because... his mom treated him like a girl sometimes? It's frustrating, as it's not that far from a reasonably plausible motivation- simply that he was his mother's golden child, his parents inflated his ego to the point of toxic narcissism, and he therefore believes he can do whatever he wants, a la the killers in Rope- but it keeps insisting on it being some kind of incoherent idea of gender confusion, and Barrymore plays it as though the quality of a performance were measured in how many stares per minute one pulls off.

Whatever, though, it's an excellent movie, well worth seeking out, and up there with the best of Lang's American period.

[lubitsch]

There's by now a pretty strong consensus that the Nibelungenlied can not be interpreted in a coherent way. It's such a jumble of different narratives (combining the Sigurd saga with the Attila saga) and different modes of narration (the mythic clashes with the high court style) that it defies any attempts to tackle it successfully which is nowhere more obvious than in Hagen's role. He is specifically labeled as bad in the first part just to become a hero in the second.
Since the Nibelungenlied was the one medieval work which was genuinely German and not an adaptation of French stories it became and had to become in progressively more nationalistic times a key text, a German Iliad. Whenever authors of these times adapted the Nibelungenlied they picked out certain parts of it and downplayed the others, first it was Siegfried's love story, later the second part with the honor and bravery of the Nibelungen fighters emphasized. And this later part fit obviously the needs of a national epic ... with the notable exception that it's the story of a downfall with almost everybody dead at the end. That may seem bizarre, but it was the only available text and people are pretty good at overlooking everything that doesn't fit their preconceptions. That also goes for the role of Siegfried or the women where it's rather unclear if we have to sympathize with them or despise them (technically however the men are the culprits because they deceive Brunhild though this is more of a problem in a non-mythical mode of storytelling).

With this baggage at hand Thea von Harbou (we should keep in mind that she wrote the scripts) had essentially no chance to form something coherent, Friedrich hebbel an important 19th century dramatists had already tried and failed. It's a picture book and a collection of great moments or great story parts which can not be told in a way which makes "sense".

And no I wouldn't recommend Levin's book which like almost anything out there including Gunning's book (yes the later chapters are ok, but what he has to say on the silents is just embarassing to read) is rather painful academic writing. Those who don't do that often are pretty uninspired like Eisner who herself admitted the weaknesses of her book. Also few take into account that auteristic approaches don't always work for people which worked in a studio system.

[knives]

Dang, that's a lot of stuff and there's no way I am going to be able to properly respond to it all so sorry ahead of time. Also to clarify my position this isn't going to be making my list (realistically only two of his German films will though there are two maybes), but I think counter to a lot of his other films of this period there's a great deal of complexity to the story and character that makes it engaging beyond the surface and unusually mature for his German films. Now all this complexity may be small and primarily there to make sense of the text as Sausage says, but that's okay as the narrative is in and of itself engaging through its complex machinations. I see, looking at Lubitsch's comment, Hagen as still pretty awful as a person in part two, he's quite scheming and an albatross for the other characters, but because of the film's view of the potential for evil as well as good it makes sense that he's allowed to be right on some things and Kriemhild allowed to be very wrong and evil on some things (though I think the film maintains a loyalty to her throughout as the more interesting character.

Also thanks on the view of the book, I tried looking up review but a surprising number of them were by nazis.

[matrixschmatrix]

Wasn't the auteur approach literally created to describe the work of directors who were locked into the studio system

[knives]

Yes.

[Mr Sausage]

Lubitsch is right about the Nibelungenlied being a bit of a patchwork, but I think he oversells the incoherence of it. It's still likely the work of a single author, but one who, rather than picking and choosing the parts of the tradition that would form the most coherent whole, tried to reconcile the different bits that he obviously felt were essential parts of the overall story, but which were sometimes at odds with each other. This is apparent in certain major places: in the first half, Hagen is characterized as a villain (as are the other Burgundians following Sigfried's death), and Kriemhild is a sympathetic victim whom Hagen imprisons, steals from, and marries off to the disfigured Etzel, all as cover for the crime of murdering her husband. In the second part, the rhetoric shifts and suddenly Hagen and co. have heroic epithets piled on them and the narrator repeatedly mourns their coming doom. Kriemhield suddenly becomes this unredeemable harpy, a figure of all that is horrible and uncivilized in humanity, and the narrator is very happy when she is killed. There are other, much smaller inconsistencies along the way. But overall, this is not some Satyricon-level fragmentation. The story forms a coherent narrative for the most part, has an apparent overarching structure, and has enough baseline coherence as a story for these interruptions to be obvious and disconcerting. The story in its general outlines is coherent enough, and we have a full, unified account of it from the exact same time period in The Volsunga Saga.

When assessing the Lang, we do have to take into account that he takes this poem as it is, so there are inconsistencies built into it that make interpretation difficult (tho' probably not impossible, as Lubitsch suggests). Wagner was craftier, and he relied on the Norse stories as much (or moreso) than the German ones, and his own considerable invention, to work up a much expanded and unified narrative out of these stories.

Lang's film is more than just a collection of scenes--the generic outline of the story is still strongly evident, and the simplifying of the narrative into a straight temporal progression lends it more unity than the poem. But I think Lubitsch is onto something by calling it a "picture book." The movie is taking all the best parts of an old story and showing them off in a grand style, a kind of celebration of fairy tales and wonder stories. As much as it's meant to work as a story, it's also meant to work as a celebration of everything that thrilled German children right before bedtime (or that thrilled 18th or 19th century Germanophiles looking to codify German national identity with a concrete link to the past). As I said above, I understand it to be as much an enshrining of the story as a telling of it.

[Drucker]

Got started last night by watching Western Union, a rather medicore western that fell below my already low expectations. Eisner seems to be stretching a great deal as she praises a few aspects of the film: the shot from the Indian's arrow to the cavalry of Indians; the shot of Shaw approaching the encampment as it burns. These moments are strong visually, and there are a few other great moments, too (the shot approaching the transaction for the horses in the bar, for example).

Unfortunately, these moments are few and far between. The film spends more time with hokey jokes, and there's a stretch where it seems every scene ends with some bad punchline. If Shaw is indeed a forerunner for the protagonist in psychological westerns, and a conflicted man with a troubled past and important moral arc, it's not exactly fleshed out in a way that makes the viewer feel for him.

There are a few moments of great "Lang-ness" in the film as I said, but ultimately the film falls short. I also find it sort of bizarre how important and seemingly uncritically Western Union itself is portrayed in the film. Everyone from Shaw to the Indians seems to eventually have a worshipping view of WU. WU feels central to the reason Shaw finally faces his brother down, and it's positioned as critical to the Union cause versus the Confederacy. I can appreciate the role of technology in the film, but I'm perplexed that there doesn't seem to be a downside associated with it.

[lubitsch]

Wasn't the auteur approach literally created to describe the work of directors who were locked into the studio system

Sigh. Yes it was that, too. But do I really have to point out where this ended? The Cahiers best film lists where every bad film by declining directors was seen as gospel should be a warning to everybody. And that goes for Lang, too.
The most problematic aspect is the focus on story elements or little directorial touches which are either not the work of the director or tell very little of use.
Barry Salt has done good work at analyzing statistically what auteurism really means in commercial studio cinema because it's most often about blocking, camera movement, angles and so on.

As for the Nibelungelied I'm just relaying the modern critical literature, I had the debatable pleasure to be examined about it after having sat in multiple university courses on the topic. But I agree very much about it. Sometimes the tone and attitude changes within a few lines because the author can not reconcile the different source material. It's very interesting to see the cracks and what later authors did to patch over them.

[Drucker]

After watching about all of the (easily available) German Langs early in my cinema-exploring days a few short years ago, I noticed that the tenor of this forum leans towards preference for Lang's American output. I started to wonder if there was something I was missing with those American films and if I was drastically overrating the German ones. A few years went by and I couldn't recall much about any of the German silents short of Metropolis.

I don't know why Frau Im Mond didn't do much for me the first time I viewed it, because viewing it tonight it certainly could make my top 10. So much of what Lang does well is here, there is tons of suspense, and yet Lang doesn't seem to have any trouble discarding his own ideas when convenient. From the opening scene, which is lit and shot beautifully and does a fantastic job of setting up the plot, the film is gripping.

Notice the "little details" Eisner remarked about loving in Western Union. The way Helius chops up the flowers while on his neighbor's phone. The way Turner dismantles the phone as they have their first conversation. These little character ticks work wondrously and help build well-rounded characters.

The film fits altogether as a piece better than, say, Western Union. There's a fabulous comedic moment as Helius looks out the window and the cabbie and little child return. One can imagine a similar scene in one of his lesser films being just a little hokier and over the top. Even the domestic plot/love triangle, which is so central to the film, fits in better, from the tone of the relationship to the way it's shot. Even though it's not the kind of storyline one associates with Lang, it works really well here and ends up being incredibly touching.

I often see comments here about the contradictions inherent in Lang's films. I think there's an interesting gap between the initial story of each character and where they end up. Lang draws the viewer in with a variety of plotlines intersecting with the passengers aboard the flight, only to discard with the one that built much of the tension in the first place and enabled Turner to join the flight. The plot ends up being about survival, and the little plots that set the story in motion are somewhat discarded.

Foreshadowing the real experiences of astronauts decades later, it's as if Lang is trying to make a point about the drama and time we waste on earth. As Lang is quoted in Eisner's book:

Four men, a woman and a child-a handful of people brought together by fate. Speeding in a never-before seen vehicle, the space ship, to a never-before entered spot, the infinite loneliness of the moon, they remain yet tied to their fates, to the law of their blood, their passions, their happiness and their tragedy.

And yet in the beautiful ending of the film, all of those worries matter! The final scene is unlike anything I can remember in a Lang film. To show man totally separated from his environment, others he knows, and his surroundings is a unique way for Lang to show how a man's environment can impact him. And yet when that final reveal occurs, I was totally shocked and moved in a way I rarely am with a film. I found it incredibly dramatic and powerful.

If there's one criticism I have of the film, is that the film really slows down as the group goes to space, and while the special effects are superb, the other halves of the film were more interesting.

[matrixschmatrix]

I watched Western Union as part of preprep for this list maybe two or three months ago, and I already have almost no memory of it, except the nigh religious admiration for the telegraph that ran throughout it- siding entirely with the forces of civilization seemed uncharacteristic of Lang, and there wasn't really anything to hold on to. I still need to see Frank James, but Lang's other Western, Rancho Notorious, is much weirder and better, and lives in my head more richly years after seeing it than Western Union does after a tenth of the time.

Frau im Monde is really likable, though it suffers a bit from all the space movies from the 50s that drafted off of it a fair amount- it feels formulaic, despite being the founder of a lot of the formula (though it's actually pretty similar to the 1918 A Trip to Mars, and feels indebted to Wells The First Men in the Moon). There was a discussion earlier of Lang's habit of treating extreme material in an almost documentary style in a lot of cases, and I think that one is the extreme of the formula; it was fairly flung science fiction at the time, but it's not very interested in invention or the future, and steers completely clear of aliens or anything entirely fantastical; one could transpose the story to an undiscovered island without changing all that much. I really enjoyed Fritz Rasp's performance as an early beta version of Dr. Smith from Lost in Space, too. I don't know that it's among my favorite Lang work- it doesn't do a lot of the things I think he does best, and the places aren't places that are all that important to me- but I think it's worthy of admiration nonetheless.

[HJackson]

Western Union is a pretty watchable Randy Scott western but as a Lang film it's basically worthless. Rewatching it last night I was surprised at how little time is given to what should be the central conflict between Scott and his outlaw gang. Unlike Drucker I don't mind a lot of the goofy stuff around the camp with the cook or Robert Young's flirtation with Creighton, but there's so much of it that the thrust of the film is lost and the whole thing feels a little limp. I do always enjoy watching these early colour films though.

Scarlet Street will almost certainly be my number one here. YOLO is the only picture I can see conceivably winning out on a revisit. It takes the piss a bit and the catalyst for the climax is unbelievably contrived, but I'm just fascinated by how dark the conclusion is for a Hollywood film of 1945. Although I had vivid memories of the final scenes where Robinson is haunted by his conscience, I totally forgot that he actually

SpoilerShow

tries hanging himself.

Interesting to learn that Robinson didn't like the picture and hated making it. He's so perfectly cast in the role as the world's biggest sucker that it doesn't really matter. Bennett and Duryea do well too and the latter of course plays a slimy piece of shit like nobody else. I look forward to giving The Woman in the Window another look but, whereas Scarlet Street is totally made by the ending, the conclusion of that one kills it for me.

[Drucker]

HJackson: I'm definitely okay with jokes and cheesy humor/bits in classic cinema, especially American westerns. But as you pointed out, there is very little development by way of the sibling bad blood in Western Union, and that imbalance between jokes and actual plot development is what rubbed me the wrong way.

The first two American Langs I saw were Scarlet Street and Fury and I'll be shocked if both don't make my list. I've yet to see an American film as good as either, but am eager to see YOLO. If memory serves me, one of the reasons I prefer Scarlet Street to La Chienne is that the female lead seems more evil in the Lang film, and the dark ending fits better than the comical tone in Renoir's film.

[DarkImbecile]

Lang is somehow a huge blind spot for me - despite all his iconic works, I've only seen Scarlet Street in its entirety, and that was 15+ years ago - so I'll be that guy posting about the classics that have already been thoroughly worked over in other threads over the years, but who as a bonus is also more or less incapable of drawing connections between or larger conclusions about Lang's work.

To wit: Hey everyone, The Big Heat sure seems like a pretty significant film! Lang's influential crystallization of the elements of the rogue, lone wolf cop seeking his revenge on a corrupt society had been touched upon elsewhere but never to my knowledge executed like this. Lang also plays up multiple striking and unique elements that make it both an essential noir and a shockingly brutal critique of post-war America, to say nothing of several great performances, not least the one given by a vicious Lee Marvin.

Michael Mann says as part of his short appreciation on the Twilight Time disc that the film technically isn't an example of noir because it lacks the general hopelessness and cynicism about its protagonist that so define the genre. On the contrary, I think it's very possible (and maybe standard) to read Glenn Ford's Bannion as so invested in his upstanding morality - in contrast to the more seedy or compromised characters and institutions that surround him outside of his idealized home life - that his stubbornly superior refusal to openly stoop to the level of those he constantly labels cowards and thieves and the women who "belong" to them is what gets most of the characters in the film killed. The combination of unyielding commitment to perceived virtue without concern for the likely consequences and a willingness to use others to achieve the same ends he isn't willing to dirty his hands to achieve himself could make Bannion a pretty harsh stand-in for Lang's adopted homeland, if one were inclined to view the film that way.

Lang's more iconic imagery from this film is well known, but some of the more subtle moments are equally effective. Just off the top of my head: the shot in the hall that glides away from the old lady from the auto shop identifying Larry Gordon to reveal Bannion waiting for her signal; the juxtaposition of Bannion's warm but small home with Lagana's opulent mansion; and the way the camera follows Gloria Grahame around the penthouse framing her against the mirrors that seem to be her reason for being in the first half of the film, contrasted with her being nearly always shadowed or obscured after the scalding until she finally tears away the bandages.

In all, a very good way to kick off a deeper look into Lang's work, and one that I hope reflects recurring thematic and stylistic trends of his.

A few other notes:

- The variety of ways and extent to which the women of this film overshadow, dismiss, control, and kill the men who are supposedly the main heroes and villains is pronounced even relative to the femme fatale archetype in other noirs. Grahame's Debbie rightfully gets a lot of attention in this regard, but Jeannette Nolan's Bertha Duncan icily manipulates events to her benefit in defiance of police and crime lords alike, and Jocelyn Brando as Bannion's wife makes more of an impression as an individual than he does and lingers over the rest of the film after that still-shocking explosion.

- Minor point and possible dead end, but I want there to be significance to the recurring use of the Three Little Kittens as the requested bed time story by Bannion's daughter; a nursery rhyme about three kittens being punished for carelessness certainly seems applicable to this film, anyway.

- I loved how Lee Marvin's Vince Stone is so terrifyingly threatening and violent to the women around him, but so constantly deferential to the crime boss Lagana and fairly easily apprehended and beaten into submission by Bannion. The only time he stands up to a man, if I remember correctly, is when he berates the meek, corrupt, and insipid police commissioner after burning Debbie. An all-time great villain performance.

- Despite my implied criticism of Ford above, his emotional moment upon leaving his now empty house for the last time is genuinely moving and expertly done.

- In addition to the Wilderesque levels of cynicism and criticism of his characters I read into the film, Lang's frank handling of sexuality and the shocking violence throughout The Big Heat both makes me very excited for his other noir works and makes me curious: does anyone know how this film was received at the time in terms of its more potentially controversial elements?

[knives]

If nothing else here's the NYT review from the first release. Spoilers abound.