NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

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 Fritz Lang

In memory of my old friend

Fritz Lang
whom fate did not enable to
hold this book in his hand.
Fritz Lang 1974: photo by John Gray
 Fritz Lang

Lotte H. Eisner

SECKER & WARBURG

LONDON
Acknowledgements

All my thanks go first to Fritz Lang for his thorough comprehension, his patience, his interest, his sympathy
and deep understanding of my work, as well as for the beautiful stills and the scripts he put at my disposal.
Then, many thanks go to the Cinematheque Francaise and to Henri Langlois who enabled me to see all the
Lang films over and over again; to the phototheque of the Cinematheque Francaise (there especially to Miss
Sybille de Luze and the photographer Mr Jack Salom) for finding and allowing me to use many rare Lang
stills. I thank also Mr Herman G. Weinberg for the use of his filmography, and for the use of stills the
following people and institutions: Mr Charles Hofmann, Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Mr Phillip
Chamberlain, then of the Los Angeles County Museum; the Museum of Modern Art Film Department
(especially Mrs Adrienne Mancia); The British Film Institute; Mr Wolfgang Klaue of the Staatliches
Filmarchiv, East Berlin; Mr Eberhard Spiess of the Deutsches Institut fur Filmkunde, W eisbaden; Bienbrich;
the Deutsche Kinemathek, West Berlin; Mr John C. Koball, London, Mr Howard Vernon, Paris, Mr Eric
Rhode; and for the portraits of Lang, Mr Axel Madsen, London, and Mr John Gray, Moorpark, California.
I especially thank Mr David Robinson, London, for his invaluable editing of the English version, and Mr
David Overbey, Paris, for his important editorial assistance in forming the final version of the book with me
over endless pots of tea.

Fritz Lang by Lotte H Eisner

Translated by Gertrud Mander and
Edited by David Robinson
First published in England 1976 by
Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited
14 Carlisle Street, London WiV 6NN
Copyright © Lotte H Eisner
This translation
Copyright © Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited 1976

SBN: 436 14232 5

Filmset and printed in Great Britain by BAS Printers Limited, Wallop, Hampshire
 Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Fritz Lang: Autobiography

Part I: The German Films before Hitler and LUiom

1 Lang’s Early Scripts and Films 17

2 Die Spinnen (The Spiders) 1919 32
3 Der Mude Tod (Destiny) 1921 43
4 Dr Mabuse Der Spieler (Dr Mabuse the Gambler) 1922 57
5 Die Nibelungen 1923-24 69
6 Metropolis 1925-26 83*
7 Spione (The Spy) 1926 95
8 Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) 1928 106
9 M 1931 111 >
10 Das Testament des Dr Mabuse (The Fast Will of Dr Mabuse) 1932-33 129
11 Working Methods and Style: The first German Period 139
12 French Interlude: Liliom 1933 149

Part II: The American Period

13 Fury 1936 160

14 You Only Live Once 1937 177
15 You and Me 1938 191
16 The Return of Frank James 1940 ** 197
17 Western Union 1941 204
18 Man Hunt 1941 209
19 Hangmen Also Die 1943 221
20 The Ministry of Fear 1943 239
21 The Woman in the Window 1944 247
22 Scarlet Street 1945 257
23 Cloak and Dagger 1946 267
24 Secret Beyond the Door 1948 275
25 The House by the River 1949 285
26 American Guerrilla in the Philippines 1950 295
27 Rancho Notorious 1951 301
28 Clash by Night 1951 3T3
29 The Blue Gardenia 1953 321
30 The Big Heat 1953 329
31 Human Desire 1954 338
32 Moonfleet 1954 345
33 While the City Sleeps 1955 351
34 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt 1956 358
35 Working Methods and Style: The American Period 1934-1956 367

Part III: The Second German Period: 1959-1960

36 Der Tiger von Eschnapur; Das Indische Grabmal 1959—60 384

37 Die Tausend Augen des Dr Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes of
Dr Mabuse) i960 390
38 Lang’s Statements About Himself: Le Mepris 397

Bibliography 405

Filmography 407

Appendix to Filmography: The Unrealised Projects 414

Preface

It is much more difficult for me to write about Fritz Lang

than about F. W. Murnau - the subject of an earlier book.
Murnau I never met: when I came to films in 1927 he had
moved to the United States. In order to find out about his
working methods I had to spend two or three years
interviewing people who had worked with him. Scripts in
his brother’s possession, written by Carl Mayer, Henrik
Galeen, Thea von Harbou, Willy Haas and Hans Kyser,
with Murnau’s own notes and modifications, gave me new
insights, or confirmed impressions of his style derived
from repeated viewings of his films. After all this quasi-
archaeological excavation, I confined myself to a de¬
scription of his style and working method, in order not to
fall into the trap indicated by Goethe: ‘If you cannot
interpret, read into it’. I never attempted, then, subjective
interpretation of the ‘eternal emotional themes’ in the
work of this long-dead artist, which was the aim of an
author of a monograph on Murnau that succeeded my
own. For my biographical chapter I had the good fortune
of the assistance of Murnau’s brother.
In the case of Fritz Lang the undertaking is much more
complicated. I have known Lang for many years, and have
had opportunities in Paris and Beverly Hills to discuss his
films with him, ask him questions, argue - and even
occasionally quarrel - with him. I11 addition we have been
able to clarify many points by letter. Lang, moreover,
entrusted all his American scripts to me and to the
Cinematheque Franchise.
Each chapter as finished has been submitted to him lor
approval and for verification of dates and facts. While
never attempting to influence my critical point of view,
Lang commented extensively on those facts which had on

7
occasion been misrepresented.
Because he is so intensely alive, Fritz Lang and his films
cannot be summed up under one heading or given a simple
label. My training as an art historian often tempts me to
write about aspects and developments of styles. In answer
to this Lang points out to me that every film takes its
specific style from its subject matter. Though I believe that
he is right in his criticism of an exclusively stylistic
interpretation of his films, I had nevertheless occasionally
to use this approach, particularly when dealing with his
German films, in order to pinpoint, for my own and the
reader’s understanding, certain tendencies, correspond¬
ences of differences in his film work.
Sometimes too I may have yielded to the temptation of
ascribing to him certain passages in the American scripts to
which Lang rarely signed his own name, since anyone
familiar with his methods knows that during preparation
tor shooting he always brought his own stylistic initiative
to bear on the script - even though the final drafts do not
tell us anything about his modifications (as do Murnau’s
hand-written notes).
Much has been written about Lang. It is not my concern
to criticise the monographs that have been published on
him, all of which Lang himself considers inadequate. For
my own part I do not claim to have produced a definitive
study. I know that after me there will be others who will
arrive at different conclusions about many aspects of his
work. This book is, 1 believe however, the first attempt to
do justice to a creative artist who always strove for
perfection, and who meditated deeply about himself and
about others, without pursuing false illusions; and a fighter
who was interested in the battle rather than in the victory.

8
Fritz Lang: Autobiography

I was born on 5 December 1890, in Vienna, Austria. My

father, Anton Lang, was an architect and Stadtbaumeister
(municipal architect); my mother’s name was Paula, nee
Schlesinger.
My father wanted me to become an architect too. Yet I
had heard too many of his complaints about the
disadvantages of his profession to feel much enthusiasm at
the prospect of a career as Stadtbaumeister, which would
have forced me to spend my whole life in Vienna. I had
different plans, yet in order to keep the peace, I agreed to
attend lectures in engineering at the Technische Hoch¬
schule. In spite of all my good resolutions I only lasted a
term there, because I wanted to become a painter.
V To begin with I should say that I am a visual person.
I experience with my eyes and never, or only rarely,
with my ears - to my constant regret. I love folk songs, but
nothing would ever induce me to go to a concert or an
opera.
The most important of my childhood memories is the
Christkindlmarkt (Christmas Fair). This market is some¬
thing very special. On a low wooden platform only a step
or two higher than the cobbled pavement, there were
simple wooden stalls filled with cheap Christmas stuff As
the passage ways between the stalls were roofed over also,
it was possible even during a snow storm to walk about the
stalls amidst the light of many colourful candles and oil-
lamps. There were wonderful things to buy: gay
Christmas tree decorations, glass balls and stars and
garlands of silvery tinsel and red-cheeked apples and
golden oranges and dates; fantastic toys, rocking horses
and puppets and Punch and Judy and tin soldiers; toy
theatres with characters and scenes for many different

9
Self-portrait (above) in style of Egon Schiele (opposite)
plays. With these theatres one could stage real fairy-tale
shows, with changing sets. Then there was the Wurstl¬
prater with a ferris wheel, shooting ranges, side-shows
and merry-go-rounds.
I have always been an enthusiastic theatre goer - tickets
for the fourth gallery or for standing room were cheap. In
those days it never occurred to me that I might one day
become a film maker. I wanted to be a painter.
During my school years I read a lot and indiscriminately
- good literature and popular stuff alike. But gradually I
became more discerning in my reading. I still continued to
read whatever I could lay my hands on - theosophy,
history, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the
German and Austrian classics; Shakespeare, Hans Sachs,
books on occultism, Karl May and Jules Verne, Mayrink’s
Golem . . .
And then I got interested in women. I was precocious
and started having affairs very early. Viennese women
were the most beautiful and the most generous women in
the world. It was the custom to meet secretly in a Viennese
cafe during the interval of the theatres or accidentally after

11
lima cabaret or night club. Women have always been my
best friends, right down to the present day.
In spite of my interest in women I have always been a
very shy person, even today, though now less so. I found it
difficult to make new friends, was always something of a
loner, and was considered arrogant as a result. In reality I
was probably trying to find myself; and even making
films, which later became my over-riding passion, was at
first perhaps only an adventure.
At the time I definitely decided to become a painter, and
my models were Egon Schiele, who unfortunately died all
too early, and Gustav Klimt.
There was trouble when my father learned that I had
already worked in two Viennese cabarets — ‘Femina’ and
‘Hölle’ - and since I could not convince him that I would
make neither a good architect or a successful engineer, I
ran away from home - something every decent young
man should do. First I went to Belgium, and from there
my wanderings took me over half the world, to North
Africa, Turkey, Asia Minor and even as far as Bah.
Eventually I ended up in Paris. I earned my living by
selling hand-painted postcards, my own pictures, and
occasionally cartoons to newspapers.
In Paris I went to Maurice Denis’s painting school, and
in the evening to the Academiejulien to study drawing the
nude.
When I had money I went in my spare time to the
cinema, because I was already very interested in films from
a professional point of view. When I painted or sketched,
my subjects were, so to speak, un-ammated. We sat, for
example, in front of a model and it did not move; but the
cinema was really pictures in motion. There I already
subconsciously felt that a new art - later I called it the art of
our century - was about to be born.
I lived in Paris until August 1914. I remember that in
those days nobody really believed in a war between France
and Germany. I was sitting in a small cafe on Montmartre
with some friends, when somebody stormed in: ‘Jaures
assassine par un camelot du roi’. This was the prelude to the
end.
On 5 August I arrived back in Vienna as a refugee from
Paris, rented a studio, but did not manage to do much
work before I was called up, as a one-year volunteer. At

12
the front, I was promoted to officer rank, was wounded '
several times, and received some medals. In 1918 I was
declared unfit for further front-line service.
All this time I was preoccupied with the new medium of
film. In military hospital I wrote some film scenarios — a
were-wolf film I did not manage to sell and eventually two
scripts, Wedding in the Eccentric Club and Hilde Warren and
Death, both of which I sold to Joe May, then a very well-
known producer and director in Berlin.
A few months later, back in Vienna on leave, I saw a
newspaper announcement of Wedding in the Eccentric Club.
I was very proud of my success and invited a number of
friends and my girl-friend, too, of course, to come to the
opening night. There I received the first shock from the
profession that was going to be my life. When the film
began I did not find my name credited as the author -
though the script had been filmed scene by scene as I had
written it. Instead, Joe May figured as author as well as
director.
I did not like the direction of the film, and had imagined
things differently. I think I must have decided then, sub¬
consciously, to become a film director. This decision that
was to determine my whole life was hence not taken after
a lengthy weighing of the pros and cons, but emerged
with the same curious, almost somnambulant certainty
which I later felt with all my films right to the present day.
This curious instinct that made me feel that I was right in
choosing the cinema has never left me. I was completely
immune to any criticism of my films, whether good or
bad. This is not arrogance or megalomania on my part, and
requires explanation: films are, or rather were, until the
end of the Second World War, made by a group of people
to whom cinema was not only the art ot our century, but
also the sole purpose of their lives. Among these film-
obsessed mortals I count both myself and the members of
my crew - whether lighting engineers, studio workers,
property men; whoever worked on my films always
considered them their films. When my crew — author,
architect, cameramen and the rest — had worked with me
on the preparation of a film, completely giving up their
private lives, and then on the shooting and again on the
cutting, for months more; and finally at the first showing
of the film a critic sat down, after having seen it, to write a

13
review in a hurry because it had to be in next morning’s
paper; when he condemned the work it had taken a group
of men months to do, then I just could not accept his
criticisms.
And if I cannot accept a bad review, then, equally, I must not
accept a good review.
Early in 1918 I was invalided home to Vienna from the
Italian front, to spend two months in hospital. After that I
was allowed to leave the hospital during the day, reporting
back at eight o’clock in the evening.
One day I found myself in a Viennese cafe, when a
gentleman came up to me and asked if I would take the
part of a lieutenant in a play called Der Hias. I demanded
1,000 kronen instead of the 800 offered.
At one of the performances I was noticed by Erich
Pommer, who offered me a contract with Decla in Berlin.
That was in August 1918.
In Berlin I first worked as a script reader, and wrote
scenarios. Erich Pommer was more of a friend than a boss
to me. I earned little, but I was happy to be able to make
films. In order to earn a few extra marks, I played three
parts in a film for which I had written the scenario, under
the direction of Otto Rippert: a German courier, an old
priest and Death. When the Spartacus rebellion began in
Berlin I was directing my first film, Halbblut (The Half
Caste). On the first day of shooting my car was repeatedly
stopped on the way to the studio by armed rebels, but it
would have taken more than a revolution to stop me
directing for the first time.
Two years later I married the German writer Thea von
Harbou, and from then on all my German scripts were
written in collaboration with her. Since I now made films
in Germany, I acquired German citizenship, of which I
was deprived in 1933 by the Hitler regime.
After the Nazis had come to power, my anti-Nazi film,
The Last Will of Dr Mabuse, in which I put Nazi slogans
into the mouth of a pathological criminal, was banned of
course. I was called to see Goebbels, not, as I had feared, in
order to be called to account for the film but to be told by
the Reichspropaganda minister to my surprise, that Hitler
had instructed him to offer me the leading post in the
German film industry. 'The Führer saw your film
Metropolis and announced, ‘That’s the man to make

H
 national socialist film . .!’
I left Germany the same evening. The ‘interview’ with
Goebbels had lasted from noon to 2.30 p.m., by which
time the banks had already closed and I could not
withdraw any money. I had just enough at home to buy a
ticket to Paris, and arrived practically penniless at the Gare
du Nord. In Paris 1 met Erich Pommer who had left
Germany some weeks betöre. Friends succeeded in getting
me a carte de travail and tor Pommer, who represented the
French branch ot Fox, I made the film Liliom, based on the
play by Ferenc Molnar.
Atter this film I was offered a contract to work for
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, so I left France.
Here Fritz Fang’s autobiography, which provides
important clues to his development, ends. He originally
intended to give me an additional chapter on his father’s
history, but has now had second thoughts. It would in fact
have been rather the story of his father’s mother, Fang’s
grandmother, who had come to Vienna from a rural
background to work as housekeeper to an upper-class
family. The son of the house fell in love with the young
girl, and soon she was pregnant. Class barriers in those days
were as rigid as castes in India; but she married an honest
man who gave her child his name. (Fang likes to recall this
story to demonstrate that he is a mixture of peasant stock
and haute bourgeoisie.) Despite her Jewish descent, his
mother, Paula Schlesinger, was brought up as a Roman
Catholic, so that Fang grew up in a thoroughly traditional
Viennese Catholic environment.
Fang explained his change of mind about continuing
this autobiography: ‘A chapter like this would delve deep
down into one’s private life. And I have always insisted
that my private life has nothing to do with me or with my
films. If my films do not add up to an image ot myselt, then
I do not deserve the book you are writing about me.’
I have respected Fang’s wish, and have not written his
personal biography. Instead there are the two chapters on
*The troubles this working methods and style, culled from an analysis of his
perfectionist had to survive films, from comments of people who worked with him,
are in any event illustrated
and from occasional passages in his letters to me. These
by his numerous
chapters reveal more about Fang as a human being than
movements from one
production company to the small surface details of his private life or business
another. affairs.*

15
Part I: The German Films Before Hitler and
Li Horn

After the defeat in World War I, and after the obligatory

but senseless, because emotional social upheaval, followed
by an equally obligatory but much more successful
counter-revolution by the reactionary forces, because the
counter-revolution was cold-bloodedly conceived and
executed - Germany entered a period of unrest and
confusion, a period of hysteria, despair and unbridled vice,
full of the excesses of an inflation-ridden country.
Fritz Lang: Lecture for the University oj California Extension,
Riverside, 28fune, 1967

16
 1 Lang's Early Scripts and Films

The First World War brought With the exception of The Indian Tomb and Plague in
changes to the Western world. Florence, little is known about Fritz Lang’s early scripts for
In Europe an entire generation
hlms by Joe May and Otto Rippert. Film was not yet
of intellectuals embraced
despair. In America, too,
respectable enough to merit reviews in the big daily papers
intellectuals and artists turned - despite the celebrity won by The Student of Prague (1913)
to a rocky wasteland, trying to and The Golem (1914). The trade journals had their own
outdo each other in pessimistic ’distinctive publicity jargon, whose inadequacy I was able
outcry. All over the world, to test in preparing my book on F. W. Murnau. In this case
young people engaged in the
I was lucky to find a few original scripts by Carl Mayer.
cultural fields, myself among
them, made a fetish of We would have a totally false idea of these if we had only
tragedy, expressing open the clumsy and sentimental plot descriptions of third-rate
rebellion against the old critics which are our only evidence for most of the lost
answers and outworn forms, Lang scripts and films.
swinging from naive
Not even this much survives in the trade journals for
nineteenth-century sweetness
Wedding in the Eccentric Club (1917) an early Lang script
and light to the opposite
extremes oj pessimism for its filmed by Joe May; or for another May film of the same
own sake. year, Hilde Warren and Death. A fragment of the latter film
Fritz Lang: ‘Happily Ever survives in the East German Staatliches Filmarchiv; but
After’, Penguin Film Review, the scenario reveals little apart from Lang’s interest, so
No 5, 1948
early, in the death motif.*
The trivial reviews of a lost Otto Rippert film reveal
little beyond the standards of reviewing then prevalent:
Kinematograph, No 149 (1919) says of Totentanz (Dance of
*Lang does not recall any
Death), using the style fashionable at the time:
other titles from the period,
though according to Albm Sascha Gura has splendid costumes which - she doesn’t wear most of
Pötzsch there was a script the time. Shows a lot. If we had a censor** he would be in a rage most
entitled Die Rache ist Mein. of the time. The audience is calm of course. Grateful admiration.
Lang does not agree with Occasionally the director Otto Rippert should have avoided too
Eibel that there was also a scantily dressed legs. In spite of his preference for such effects.
scenario called Die Peitsche. Otherwise his work is almost perfect. He has honest collaborators.
**There was no
censorship immediately As one of these ‘honest collaborators’, Fritz Lang called the
following the World War. film ‘a nocturne in five acts’, which suggests that it was

17
Mia May in Hilde Warren and Death (1917); The Indian Tomb (1921) (opposite)
 intended to possess a certain atmospheric quality. Film, No
23 (I9I9) provides a synopsis:

The novelty of this film is its subject matter . . . The setting ... is the
strangely laid house of an even stranger cripple, Dr Sephar (Werner
Krauss). He hates the world and ‘She’ (Sascha Gura) is the tool with
which he wreaks destruction and lures people to their death. ‘She’
dances, her body attracts men as light attracts insects, though they
know that they will suffer death. One assumes that many others have
already been destroyed when she makes Harry Free die. Dr Sellin and
Frederic die, the latter without ever having enjoyed her. The first man
she loves is Stuart O’Connor. She plans to escape with him. The ever¬
*F. W. Murnau filmed a present Dr Sephar, forever spying on her, learns about this. He
similar story, though with a promises Stuart his freedom if he can find his way out of the maze
happy ending, in Der under the house. Stuart dies of his guilty conscience: he has murdered
Bucklige und die Tänzerin, Hennekemper. Sephar wants to possess ‘Her’. This revolting old man
from a screenplay by Carl on crutches wants her beautiful body, and tries to rape her. They fight,
Mayer. The hunchback’s wrestle; she is almost overcome and has been forced down on the
‘strange house’ could even divan when the apache steps out of a niche and strangles Dr Sephar.
have been suggested by Free at last, she runs to the coffin of Stuart, the man she won by her
Lang’s scenario, and would dancing; and dances until she is exhausted, collapses, dies.*
be an example of the
influence of his visual ideas
on contemporary film¬ This inadequate and ill-written plot description gives
makers. little indication of the quality of the scenario. The synopsis

19
in Lichtbildbuhne No 24 (1919) is not much more help:

In his hands the beautiful woman is a helpless tool . . . and brings death
and destruction without showing any emotion of her own . . . until
finally she is on fire herself and prepares her escape with her lover. Yet
her torturer gets there first, sends the happy rival to his death and
makes a grab for the beautiful victim himself when revenge at last
strikes him down. He is strangled by the apache, while the woman
dances round the corpse of her lost lover in despair until she sinks
down dead at his side.

We are left to speculate on such apparently characteristic

touches as the house and the Lulu figure of the femme fatale,
which was to recur in many later Lang scripts.
An advertisement for Totentanz in Film, No 23 (1919),
shows that Lang was already a well-known film writer:
‘Four of the big names in modern film are responsible for
this work: Werner Krauss, Sascha Gura, Fritz Lang, Otto
Rippert’. Yet as late as Pest in Florenz (Plague in Florence)
we find reviews which do not mention the author’s name
at all. This film, of which fragments survive in the
Staatliches Filmarchiv of the DDR, is a little better
documented. Der Film No 44 (1919) reports that its first
screening at the prestigious Marmorhaus was an event;
and there is a sentence, usual at that time, soon after the
defeat, about the resolution of the German film industry to
‘concentrate its efforts on the competition with other
countries in which it has a fairly good chance to conquer’.
Similarly, Neue Berliner 12-Uhr-Zeitung of 24 October
1919 describes it as: ‘A film that testifies to the achieve¬
ments of German film industry and that can become a fine
representative example of German film in the in¬
ternational market’.
The description of the film suggests it was a kind of
prelude to Lang’s Venetian Renaissance episode in Destiny:
‘The film, which Lang has divided into seven parts, shows
us Florence at the time of the Renaissance in a series of
colourful and evocative scenes; splendid festive sequences,
large-scale mass scenes and dramatic events to keep the
eyes riveted from beginning to end.’ Lang had already
begun his practice of giving very detailed indications of
the action. Lie recalls how he tried in one of these early
Rippert scripts to confine himself to a single sentence:
‘Here an orgy takes place’, without going into details.
Rippert came to him and asked, ‘But what shall I do there ?’,

20
 so from then on Lang made a habit of describing every
sequence in great detail.
Der Film relates the content in highly-coloured prose:

A courtesan of irresistible beauty comes from decadent Venice to the

pious town of Florence, which is governed strictly by the council of
elders. Cesare, the master of the town, falls for her charms, but his
handsome son also falls in love with the glorious woman. The whole
of Florence lapses into debauchery; the town’s youth flocks to the
courtesan’s house, which is the centre of vice, lust and love. Too late,
Cesare recognises that he has been overcome by the woman’s arts, that
she rejects him and prefers his own son. Embittered, he sends her to the
torture chamber. The son then kills the father, the churches are turned
into places of lust, all Florentines have become licentious. The hermit
Franciscus calls in vain for people to search their souls and repent. He,
too, falls victim to the immoral woman and he, too, kills his rival. The
population becomes wilder and even more licentious. Then the ghost
of Death appears; Plague. Yellow grinning Death rises up in the midst
of debauchery. It visits the palaces of the rich and the hovels of the
poor. It demands its victims inexorably. Nobody can resist it, nobody
can escape. The town ofjoy and pleasure is transformed into a scene of
horror. All perish miserably.

Again in this script - perhaps inspired by Poe’s The

Masque of the Red Death - Lang associates a fateful woman
and death.
Little is known about Otto Rippert, apart from a few
surviving episodes from Homunculus (1916), whose
powerful crowd scenes and effects of light suggest that the
youthful Lang could have learned a few things from the
older director. Contemporary reviews of Pest in Florenz
praise Rippert’s ‘highly developed artistic sense’. Die Welt
am Abend (24 October 1919) goes so far as to say ‘The Good
Friday procession easily surpasses the mass scenes in
Dubarry (directed by Lubitsch). BZ am Mittag of the same
date praises the gay festive scenes and the Dantesque hell of
the raging epidemic. It is hard to know what was Lang s
contribution. Lichtbildbühne No 49 (1919) speaks of the
astounding images that show Lang’s exquisite sense of style
and artistic understanding.
No reviews have been traced for another Rippert film
from a Lang script. The Woman with the Orchid, although
the title seems to suggest another femme fatale theme. Of
Lilith and Ly, a Lang script filmed in 1919 by Erich Kober
* Filmkunst, No 4, 4a, (a director apparently unknown outside Austria) Walter
65 ’ ’ Fritz says that only a few stills have survived. Fritz* gives

21
the following summary of the plot:

Frank Landow, a scholar and ladies’ man, is at work on an invention —

a television mirror. During a pleasure trip to India he discovers
fragments of a parchment roll from which he learns the secret of
creating life. Returning home, he brings to life a statue, the work of a
school friend, with the help of a ruby. It is the creature Lilith, with
whom Landow falls in love. He continues to work on his invention,
and soon the mirror is ready to be set up. By now Landow, who never
keeps the same woman for long, is in love with Ly. But Lilith changes
into a vampire. In his mirror Frank becomes a passive witness of her
murder of one of his friends. The vampire grows more and more
powerful. As Landow lies ill in bed with glandular fever, Lilith appears
to him in the form of Ly; and also threatens Ly herself. In utmost
despair, Frank destroys the television mirror in which he was forced to
witness the horrible spectacle, and smashes the statue from which
Lilith was made. Yet only after he has thrown the ruby, the vampire
stone, into the river, can he and Ly be saved from the horror of
supernatural forces.

The television mirror anticipates The Spiders, Metropolis

and particularly The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse.
The last script which Lang wrote for another director -
this time in collaboration with Thea von Harbou - was the
two-part Joe May film, The Indian Tomb (1921). By this
time, since The Halj-Caste (1918), Lang was a director in
his own right, and understandably disappointed that the
Joe May film company gave the subject to the older and
apparently more experienced director rather than giving it
to him, the young author. Der Film, No 41, 1921, calls The
Indian Tomb uncompromisingly ‘the world’s greatest film’
and speaks of‘the immense expense’: the two parts cost 24
million marks:

Again, unfortunately, the Joe May film does not manage to avoid an
error which seems to be common to all costume films; i.e. to use a
script that is logically and psychologically weak. The story by the
competent authoress whose writing during the war constituted part of
the ‘lay-it-on-thick’ kind of literature and is now as resolutely film-
orientated, presents an India that is too close to the ideas of the man in
the street, quite apart from the psychological blunders which one does
not expect in an author as experienced as Fritz Lang. Or does he think
it natural that the Indian prince should tell his newly appointed
architect intimate details about his married life? And similar episodes.
The apologetic prelude is most inartistic, too. Why not simply have an
Indian market with fakirs showing their magic tricks (if it is considered
necessary at all to give an explanation?)

The review praises the stunt work (which may or may not

22
have figured in the scenario), but calls Conrad Veidt a
western-type neurotic who completely lacks the pro¬
verbial majestic solemnity of Indian royalty. The critic
finds the second part, The Tiger of Eschnapur, more
powerful than the first, though,

the script s weaknesses affect this part, too. Joe May’s direction has to
make up for this by using strong and effective detail . . .

The review concludes:

The Prince s collapse by the corpse of his still ardently beloved wife is
of great human beauty. In between are coldly theatrical splendours, in
particular the totally unnecessary scene of the sacrifice to the God of
the Penitents, with its sentimental ending, ‘Your sacrifice was to make
me into your God. Through the sacrificial ecstasy of your soul, I
wanted to recover . . .’

EARLY FILMS
Halbblut (The Half Caste, 1919)
Little evidence survives of lang’s earliest films. His first
work as director, Halbblut, made for the so-called Ressel-
Orla Serial, was premiered at the Marmorhaus, a
prestigious cinema that still stands on Berlin’s Kurlursten-
damm. The Kinematograph gave the following summary:

It is the story of two men and a woman, called Halbblut, and

demonstrates the consequences of marrying a half-caste. ‘You may
take a half-caste for mistress, but you should never make her your
wife’, the young husband is told by a friend. The girl, a whore from a
Mexican opium den, hears these words and decides to take revenge for
the insult. The revenge makes up the story of this tragedy.

The review mentions as the centre of interest the

rewarding title role played by Ressel Orla, the Decla star.
The most interesting part of this clumsy notice is a rather
curious passage, which follows mention of the actors of the
main roles, and the writing and direction of Fritz Lang:

Why shoot scenes which are meant to take place in the open air in the
studio ? People permitted themselves such jokes in the past. Nowadays
one is irritated by open-air scenes which have been shot in the glass¬
house.

From this we can gather that even at this early stage Lang
was shooting outdoor scenes in the studio, as he was later
to do in Destiny and Nibelungen, for better atmospheric
effects; and also that the critic believes he is criticising a
solecism instead of understanding that Lang, the landscape

23
painter, had to work as he did. Apart from this the critic
confines himself to a complaint about the trade-mark
‘Decla Filmgesellschaft’ on all the titles, which allowed
pranksters to read the words out loud along with the rest
of the text, for comic effect.
We learn a little more about the story of Halbblut from a
review in Der Film (no 141) of 1919:
The film has Ressel Orla playing the part of a woman of dubious
character, a cross between two races, who inherits only the worst
characteristics of both. Cunning bitch! She rums two men, one of
whom dies in a lunatic asylum, the other in a penitentiary, and only
a mestizo, a kindred spirit, finds happiness with her. Together with
him she engages in card sharping in their own establishment until
their game is up. Before they succeed in fleeing from Europe,
intending to escape to Mexico with all their spoil, fate catches up with
her in the shape of a bullet from the revolver of a man whom she has
cheated, but who has still sufficient presence of mind to exterminate
‘this flower of civilisation’.
The script is dramatic and of flawless logic . . . Fritz Lang’s direction
shows taste, expert knowledge, and a rare instinct from tonal values
that are so effective cinematically that success is automatically assured.

Lichtbildbühne (No 14/1919) writes:

A characteristic merit of the film is the dramatic quality of its plot,
which increases from act to act. This, and its rather good direction and
impeccable treatment makes it into a feature film of top quality.

Der Herr der Liebe

(Master of Love, 1919)

Lang’s next film was written not by himself but by Oscar

Koffler; and the director also took part as an actor (since
Der Hias in the theatre, he had acted in a number of the
films he had written himself, in Berlin). The Kinemato-
graph, Düsseldorf edition, No 664, 1919, says very little
about the content of the film except that the plot of Der
Herr der Liebe manages to break with the conventions of
society drama:

The director tries hard to find images unusual in the medium of the
film for his plot, Gilda Langer* shows a roguish charm and passionate
devotion in the intimate scenes with her husband; she is as perfect in
expressing secretjealousy and long suffering as in expressing hatred and
the emotion of gratified revenge. Her partner de Vogt tries to emulate * This actress was to
Gilda Langer’s masterful artistry ... A number of successful masks are have played Jane in Caligari,
lifelike copies of members of the leisured aristocracy. Direction and but died just before the
photography are impeccable . . . The film may be counted among the film was shot and was
pearls of a programme, though not one of the most precious ones. replaced by Lil Dagover.

24
 Harakiri (1919)

Harakiri 1919

Between the two episodes of The Spiders, Lang filmed

Harakiri, an adaptation of Madame Butterfly by Maxjungk.
Der Kinematograph (31 December 1919) discusses the
fascination of exotic films, the clever handling that takes
the spectator straight into other people’s lives and customs,
the images of‘astonishing fidelity to nature’ (a number of
Japanese extras were used). The house in which the little
geisha spends the honeymoon of her 999-day marriage to
the European naval officer ‘lies in the midst of flower
dreams like a fairy-tale house’. There is praise for the
festival of falling leaves, with the melee of little boats with
lanterns for the Yoshiwara of Nagasaki. ‘Pretty lighting
effects heighten the charm of street life in the evening.’ As
in The Spiders, the authentic costumes and decorations
were supplied by the Ethnographical Museum run by
L F. G. Umlautf.

25
Harakiri (1919)

The review in Der Kinematograph goes on to tell us that

‘Fritz Lang’s direction renders all the subtleties of the plot
with loving attention and takes good care that taste is
never offended, even in minor details.’ Der Film (Volume
4, 11051) gives a summary of the story that had been
lengthened to six (one-reel) acts from the four acts of the
opera. A lecherous priest intends to make the girl a temple
prostitute, thus causing her father to commit harakiri. O-
Take-San consequently seeks refuge with a Danish naval
officer, and so into the story.
The reviewer remarks that ‘a careful dramatic prepara¬
tion of the plot would certainly have made things easier for
the direction (Fritz Lang) and the actors’. Surprising as this
is in view of Lang’s habitual care over preparation, it may
refer to the scenario, which was not his. Moreover it must
be remembered that he shot no less than six films in 1919,
three of which he also wrote.
The Berliner Börsenzeitung of 21 December 1919,

26
 •WAKIJN ichlchte einer jungen j tnan -
t Frei nach dem Anuj.ikar.lii
wn MAX JUNGK
Ragte: FRITZ LANG

Tekuyawa, de** Daimio.Pau! 8MWt

0-»T*k®«Sa«f sein« Tochter * * *
One Boom.G««f John
Fürst Mstahart , . ..Meinst»#« st#ur
Karan, «tee Tempe'diener.. Rudolf i,«V («gar
Ktn»h*-Araki, dar Wirt eines Teehause* , Erner
Harmkm, 0-Tah®*Sans Dienerin ...... Kits
0>»r J. Anderson ...ftu* Prima
£» ..Harts. H«44n
•**.«... Ul Dagovmr
OS« japanische Ausstattung liefert« da»
Vdlterrundhch*. Museum 1 I. F. G Umi-Hrf*

27
praising the film’s ‘vivid realistic picture of life as it is’,
affords more positive comments:

There is now much talk of the film which is nothing but pure film and
sticks to the limits set by the possibilities of the screen, using the latter
to the full. This is such a film. It is strange how close the Japanese
subject seems to come to the essential nature of film . . . the silent
mime . . .
The plot is gratifymgly progressive; only people expecting crass
literalness could call it boring . . . the more profound person will
find richness and much pleasure in scenes that resemble miniature
paintings.
The outdoor shots are quite splendid and very picturesque,
particularly those of Japanese festivities. One would not have thought
the happy grounds of Woltersdorf could produce all this ... a film
product of the highest rank.

Das Wandernde Bild

(The Wandering Image, 1920)

The outdoor scenes of Lang’s next film may also have been
shot m Woltersdorf. Liciitbildbiihne of 1 January 1921 gives
the following summary:

Mia May, who plays the female lead, has surrendered herself to a
disciple of free love, and, having given birth to a child, marries the
twin brother and Doppelgänger of her chosen lover, in his name. When
the philosopher finds out about this, he retires into the mountains,
vowing not to return to civilization until a statue of the virgin which
he passed on his way in the snow begins to walk. His brother pursues
the woman he married, but she is saved by an unknown relative and
escapes. Pursued, she meets the hermit. The pursuer goes mad and
perishes. The lost girl devotes her life to the poor. One stormy night
when the statue of the virgin is destroyed by the elements she brings a
strange child back to her home. The hermit takes her for the walking
statue of the virgin and is reunited with his companion.

The review continues:

The film’s best moments are the splendid nature shots in impeccable
photography, snow landscapes and in particular the storm scene. The
most artistic of all is a scene where the door of the hut is opened and
lightning lights up the snowscape.

The action is said to be punctuated by an explosion,

avalanches, cliff-hanger chases, a fall from a mountain -
‘almost too many good things’. Of the script by Lang and
Thea von Harbou, Film-Kurier (January 1921) says:

What seemed like promising signs of profound insight and real

28
Das Wandernde Bild (1920): Mia May and Hans Marr (above)
29
Das Wandernde Bild

problems in the first two acts turn out to be nothing but plot
motivation, and are carried along vaguely by diluted mysticism and
religion. Sentiment is called into play when Frau von Harbou is at a
loss for a rational solution ... Is the happily reunited couple intended
to be a symbolic answer to the ethical question? . . . Too easy.
So much on a subject that demands a proper and serious discussion.
As I said it has weaknesses and faults and yet it is very effective. This
is mainly due to perfect staging. The script is exemplary in the
composition of its dramatic structure, due probably to the director’s
collaboration, and achieves a much higher artistic level than the plot
because of the genuinely tasteful means by which tension and interest
is maintained . . . Fritz Lang’s direction is outstanding, particularly the
crowd scenes, e.g. the peasant wedding on the Bavarian mountain
lake, the peasant dance, the changing group scenes with ever-new
types, all very colourful and vivid. The careful distribution of effects
ensures that every one of the five acts is equally lively.

The review is notable as the first time a distinction is made

between the work of Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang’s
direction and collaboration on the script.

30
Vier un die Frau
(Four Around a Woman, 1920)

The last ot these early Lang films — also known in English

as Fighting Hearts - was scripted by Ralph E. Vanloo. Film
und Presse (516; 1921) merely talks about a tasteful feature
film,

with an original plot, logical and consistent in spite of a host of

disparate themes; dramatically well constructed, interesting right up
to its tragic ending that could be called a real film ending. The core of
the complicated plot is the struggle ot four men for one woman.
Chance, kismet and mysterious darkness, heightened by a dop-
pelgänger. Final exposure of the evil principle and victory of the good.
Contrition.

Otherwise all that we are told is that Lang’s direction is

‘tasteful, sure in its handling of effects and full of original
details. Evening and night scenes are done in superb
lighting’. Lichtbildbühne (13 February 1921) at least gives
the complicated plot:

The dealer Yquem buys his adored wife a precious piece of jewelry
with forged money, in a place where thieves and receivers of stolen
goods meet, and whither he goes disguised. There he finds a gentleman
who looks exactly like a portrait he once found among his wife’s
possessions. He follows him to an elegant hotel, where he leaves a letter,
in a faked hand-writing, inviting the man to come to his house.
William Kralft also turns up. Then, for a few hours of the night,
Yquem’s house becomes the scene of a series of violent acts and crimes
in quick succession. Florence is revealed to be innocent; Yquem’s
friend turns out to be a common criminal and is shot. The gentleman
con-man William Krafft is arrested, and Yquern also is punished for his
misguided deeds. . . .
Lang achieves good visual effects. Yet not all the implications of the
complicated action are worked out clearly.

Little of real importance can be divined from these na'ive

reviews; and it is from Lang’s earliest surviving films, the
two episodes of The Spiders that we must seek a true
impression of the young Lang’s work as director.

3i
2 Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919)

Episode One: Der Goldene See I simply wanted to film

adventurous subjects. I was
(The Golden Lake)
still very young. I loved
The first episode of the adventure series ‘The Adventure ol everything that was exuberant
Kai Hoog in Known and Unseen Worlds’ according to and exotic. And furthermore I
was able to make use of
Der Kinematograph (8 October 1919), was to be the first
memories of my travels.
film ‘produced by Decla Film Company, recently put on Fritz Lang: Choix de textes
its feet again by a massive capital injection’. As customary etabli par Alfred Eibel,
in the period following the end of hostilities, there is a Presences du Cinema, Paris
sentence to the effect that everybody is ‘very proud to 1964

produce work which may also attract attention abroad’.

‘The Decla Company’, the notice continues, ‘intends with
this series to become a rival to the American film industry,
which makes mainly Westerns . . . Our film industry can
be proud of this film work and other countries will
acknowledge with envy the advances we have been
making, when they see this film.’
The tone of this article must be attributed partly to its
appearance in a trade journal; partly to the massive
inferiority complex of a country defeated in the war, and
heightened by the difficulties of breaking into foreign
markets. (As late as 1921 Caligari had to be called Austrian
in order to get a showing in Paris.) Hence the talk about
‘massive capital injection’ and the assertion that people in
foreign countries, faced with the brilliant novelties from
the German film market would not be able to close their
eyes to the fact that in spite of all the fateful happenings of
the past the Germans remain efficient and take pride in
their work and are ‘clever fellows’ still.
Now quite obsessed by creating works of art in the
expressive new medium, Lang was quite without interest
in this side of things.
As for criticism, Der Kinematograph acknowledges the

32
 ‘scrupulous care’ which had gone into the making of this
film, including enlisting the services of an authority on
ethnography, Heinrich Umlauf!, the founder and owner
of an ethnographical museum. With his expert advice, it
seems, the buildings and sculptures of the Incas were
reconstructed, and the authenticity of Inca costumes and
customs ensured. The buildings had been built in the
grounds of the Hagenbeck Zoological Gardens in
Hamburg, thanks to an arrangement made by Umlauff, a
relative of Hagenbeck.
Surprisingly the review makes no mention of the
comparable American serials - school of Pearl White - or
of the French films aux episodes of Feuillade. The writer
enthuses about the adventurer type presented by Karl de
Vogt (who today seems somewhat colourless) as Kai
Hoog, praising him for riding ‘like a cowboy’, swimming
and climbing with great daring and skill and even
simulating a parachute jump from the basket of his
balloon, ‘which he had previously courageously climbed
into by means of a rope, while it was ascending’. Ressel
Orla is admired as his equal in acting and skilful
embodiment of an elegant sporting lady and millionairess,
daring adventuress and head of the secret society of
‘spiders’. Today we are conscious only of a mediocre and
rather plump actress, an ideal beauty of the times in long
skirts and blouse - the dewier cri of fashion.
Der Film (No 41, 1919) approaches the production of the
great adventure film in a less nationalist and more factual
spirit:

The first step was to make an adventure film deliberately restricted to a

thrilling well-made plot without any literary ambitions . . . This was
inevitable since the erotic film had lost its attraction almost
completely* and the detective film is dying.

The reviewer acknowledges the sources - return to Karl

May (Schatz im Silbersee) and to Leatherstocking - and
remarks that it is:

the first German film deliberately to use the technique of the penny
dreadful, by keeping the spectators in suspense, waiting for the next
* Perhaps an allusion to instalment.
the so-called sex education
films of the type made by The Düsseldorf edition of Der Kinematograph (1 October
Oswald. 1919) had more to say about the artistic aspect:

33
Fritz Lang offers a rich variety of fairy-tale miracles and splendours
skilfully woven and structured into an exciting and dramatic plot
which retains our interest all the time. The sensational effects which
strain the spectators’ nerves to their utmost are used so discreetly,
naturally and matter-of-fact that they seem never contrived, but are
organically and logically developed out of the story and its integral
elements.

This reviewer has discovered a characteristic of Lang’s style:

we shall find such moments of suspense which are organic
parts and logical developments of the plot, again and again
in his later films.
Alas the faded copies from weakened dubbed negatives
which are all that have survived of the film can give little
idea of the individual images which, the reviewer
continued, ‘surpass each other in striking beauty and exotic
flavour that occasionally assumes compelling force’:

The direction gives perfection to these images with its subtle, carefully
considered artistic touches and the sure instinct for cinematographic
effect; it gives the plot moments of tension which must be considered
extremely felicitous dramatic ideas.

The second part of the series, Das Brillantenschiff (The

Diamond Ship) was coolly received by Der Film (No 7,
1920), as ‘quite good’, but a second best to a comparable
film, Herrin der Welt:

Sticking close to its American models, the film is psychologically even less
convincing than these. Even the sensational bits are not consistently
successful. . . . This may be the reason why Decla brought this film out rather
quietly. It concludes, incidentally, the adventure series which was originally
meant to have been in four parts. . . . In this last film Fritz Lang, the film
writer and director, probably did not have enough funds to enable him to reach
the artistic level of his previous work.

Another indication that the producer was less interested in

the second instalment is that it was not serialised in Fihn-
Kurier as was Der Goldene See.
The reasons tor the fading away of the serial and the
abandoning ot the proposed further episodes was evid¬
ently internal, and in no way indicated a lack of interest on
the part ot the audience: indeed, reviewers did not hesitate
to predict success for the second film on account of its
‘skilful dramatic effects’. But against Lang’s protests,
shooting of Das Brillantenschiff' (originally named
Sklavenschiff) was not begun until the autumn (Harakiri
being squeezed in between); and because of bad weather

34
conditions filming had to be transferred from the
Hagenbeck grounds to the studio. Angry, Lang severed his
contract with Decla and signed a new one with Joe May.
The scenario of Der Goldene See is more straightforward
than the plot of the second part, with its variety and
numerous episodes, even though Der Kinematograph
described it as too vivid, varied and rich to summarise in a
few words:
In the beginning, unfortunately, the episodic development was rather
erratic and that made it difficult to understand what the film is all
about. But as the plot proceeded it gradually became more consistent.

Evidently German audiences of this time were not

accustomed to the skilful montages which Lang as scenarist
used to build up his stories. The film opens with a ragged
old man clambering with difficulty out of a rocky cave on
to a cliff' overhanging the sea. He writes something on a
piece of material, puts it into a bottle, which he seals and
throws into the sea. An Inca in full war dress sneaks up
behind and kills the old man.
The scene changes to a city and an evening party, much
like a party in a Feuillade serial. One chair remains empty:
Kai Hoog’s. The luscious Lio-Sha is introduced, demonic
and mondame, hair parted like Cleo de Merode.
Fritz Lang has yet to discover the accelerating power of
ellipsis. Kai Hoog’s arrival is leisurely in treatment; a
servant takes his hat and coat before he finally tells the
assembled guests why he is late. A flashback shows lum
sportily attired in a motorboat, and discovering the letter
in the bottle. There is a characteristic piece of Lang
documentary detail: in his exotic living room Kai Hoog
tries to open the bottle which is encrusted with shells and
seaweed, showing how long it has remained in the sea.
A retarding comic interlude: in the cellar, the wine
waiter tastes the guests’ wine. The young director permits
the waiter and the two little servants to overdo their
mugging; later Lang will become adept at such comedy
scenes. Above stairs Kai Hoog, who has put the piece of
material quickly into his pocket to prevent Lio Sha’s seeing
it, touches glasses with her so violently that his newly filled
glass breaks. Hostilities are declared!
The adventure now proceeds in a direct line. Kai Hoog
is robbed of the precious rag by figures in masks and black
leotards. Knocked out by chloroform, when he comes

35
Scenes from Die Spinnen (1919)

round he discovers a black spider. The similarities with

Feuillade serials are apparent, though at this date Lang
cannot recall if he saw them: when Les Vampires was
released, in any case, France was at war with Germany and
Lang himself was in the army.
Kai Hoog and ‘The Spiders’ set out individually to seek
the mysterious treasures of the subterranean Inca city
described by the rag. They travel by train, balloon and
sailing boat. Kai Hoog rescues a beautiful, improbable sun
priestess (Lil Dagover) from a snake. The descendants of
the ancient Incas kidnap Lio Sha from the Spiders’ camp,
intending to sacrifice her to the Sun God. Kai Hoog, noble
and incautious, cannot help himself from rescuing her. The
Spiders invade the sun temple; and there is a massacre. In
the golden lake the Spiders find the rich golden treasure of
the Incas, and while fighting for possession, kill one
another. Their leader (Georg John, an actor who had
played in Harakiri and whom Lang was later frequently to

36
use after he had built up his own favourite group of actors)
goes mad. There is a subterranean eruption, in which rocks
tall upon the gang of criminals; and this is followed by a
flood. Kai Hoog and the beautiful sun priestess escape in an
extravagant makeshift ark made of carpets and ropes, are
washed out to sea through a subterranean waterfall, and
saved by a ship. Lio Sha also manages to make her escape,
and gathers a new gang of criminals around her.
She invades the peaceful and exotic home where Kai
Hoog now lives with his Inca wife. Kai Hoog spurns her
threats, but later that day returns home to find Ins young
wife, whom he left lying on a garden chair, dead on the
lawn, a black spider on her bosom.
Already Lang’s style makes itself felt on a film
superficially no different from the run of melodramatic
serials of the 1910s. There is the taste for underground
chambers which leads him from Alberich’s treasure cave to
the underground town of Metropolis, the old professor’s

37
moon grotto in Die Frau im Mond, the leper caves and
temple grotto of the Indian films of the end of his career.
A psychoanalyst might produce all kinds of inter¬
pretations; yet it may be no more than a love of the
mysterious, atmospheric and unusual, a curiosity about the
mysteries that lurk beneath the surfaces of the earth. The
interior of a cave is an ideal location for chiaroscuro
effects or, as in the Indian films, colour dissolves and
transformations. Mystery, the evocation of atmosphere
and a sense of transcendence are better achieved even than
in Siegfried’s magic forest.
Alongside dream and fantasy there is always Lang’s
documentary instinct. He engages experts to recreate the
Inca temples; the gold treasure is perfectly convincing.
As well as the caves there are the cellars of the secret
organisation, the armour-plated vaults which serve the
Spiders as conference rooms. Walls glide apart, lifts and
trap doors lead downwards, sliding doors afford secret
escapes, or traps for the invader. Eminently respectable-
seeming gentlemen in top hats and tails go down in the lifts
to their sinister conferences (echoes of the nineteenth
century ‘habits-noirs’ gangs who also operated in top hats).
In the corner of the lift, cheek by jowl with the world of
formal suits and top hats, stands a Chinese guard with a
huge scimitar. Lio Sha’s boudoir is equally exotic. Her
extravagant mechanical armoury includes a desk which
can descend like a lift, taking the documents with it; and a
circular mirror in which may be seen the proceedings of
the conference room — an anticipation of television, of the
countless television screens in The Thousand Eyes of Dr
Mabuse, and the screens over which the foreman (Heinrich
George) tells Herr Frederson about the workers’ rebellion
in Metropolis.
The subterranean vaults and caves are supplemented by
an extravagant surface world. Through the glass walls of a
sight-seeing railway carriage, Lang can reveal to Kai Hoog
and his friend the world of adventure. At that period there
was no back projection. With the same simplicity as a
Lumiere cameraman would film the passing scenery from
the window of a moving train, Lang’s cameraman filmed
the view from a scenic railway, without ever looking for
the exotic.
A Western sequence has Kai Hoog in a cowboy hat,

38
looking tor all the world like William S. Hart, and a hold¬
up, in best Western style, in which Kai Hoog retrieves his
precious rag. All the Spiders set off in pursuit of him. He
barricades himself in a log house, which is besieged. As
shots are tired, Kai Hoog escapes through the skylight,
and trom the roof, with the help of a tree, mounts his
horse. The action moves between Kai Hoog’s wild dash on
horseback and a waiting balloon, with Kai Hoog’s friend
anxiously consulting his watch. At the last moment, Kai
Hoog arrives, seizes the rope hanging from the already
ascending balloon, and is saved. ‘Such sensation’, said the
Diisseldort Kinematograph, ‘makes heavy demands on the
spectators’ nerves.’
Das Brillantenschiff is, as I have said, more complex.
Indeed, the reviews suggest that Lang’s narrative exu¬
berance and rich visual texture provoked a degree of
bewilderment. The story begins with a robbery in a
London bank, guarded on the street by an unsuspecting
policeman. This well-planned and perfectly executed
operation recalls M, even to the tied-up watchman
struggling to break out of his fetters. A tilt-shot, enabling
the viewer to take in all the offices at once, adds to the
mystery of the operation.
The Spiders are after one particular diamond in their
pile of loot - a stone in the shape of a Buddha’s head, which
is supposed to make the woman who wears it the liberator
and ruler of alien-dominated Asia.
Lang employs his whole repertory of adventure
techniques. This time Kai Hoog does not use an old-
fashioned balloon, but flies by plane over the rooftops of
London to find Lio Sha’s house, and enter it by the root. ‘A
modern razzia’ runs the title (surprisingly laconic in view
of the long-winded style of most of the titles in the list,
fortunately preserved). As with the earlier robbery, the
force of Lang’s presentation is to give precise documen¬
tation to colourful improbabilities. Kai Hoog shoots the
Chinese lift attendant; police force their way into the
building; sliding doors create confusion; gas is let in;
people fight for air; walls have to be broken down.
At an alarm signal, secret doors open and Lio Sha, who
has been presiding over a conference with the new gang
leader and a high-ranking mandarin (the same actor as the
Jewish junk-dealer in the Western episode), escapes with

39
her gang. Kai Hoog only manages to snatch a mysterious
document and a strangely shaped piece of ivory from the
dead mandarin.
A quaint old professor (closely resembling the thread¬
bare apothecary in Destiny and the mad professor in Die
Frau im Mond) interprets the document and the ivory: it is
the password which admits to the subterranean Chinese
town beneath the Chinese quarter. More trap doors, stairs,
corridors, and a whole colourful and contusing under¬
ground world, guarded by Eschnapur tigers behind bars.
Kai Hoog, going to observe an assignation between Lio
Sha and the captain among the gambling establishments
and opium dens, apparently allows himself to be put to
sleep after smoking opium. Suddenly, however, he grabs
Lio Sha in order to make his escape. (A scene which
appears at this point in surviving copies of the film, with
Kai Hoog in a narrow dungeon into which water slowly
seeps, probably belongs to the razzia sequence and has been
cut in by mistake.)
The hiring of the captain of the Sturmvogel is characteris¬
tic. He is first seen sitting in a wine house. A tramp sits next
to him and, to the captain’s disgust, keeps spitting. Then
the tramp dips his dirty finger into the captain’s glass and
writes the number 100,000 on the table. By the time the
bar-maid comes up the tramp has already erased the figure,
and remarks impudently that the captain will pay.
A large and mysterious box is stowed in the hold of the
Sturmvogel. Inside, we see Kai Hoog dressed in Fantomas
style (which strongly suggests that the young Lang had
seen the Feuillade serials). Choosing his time, Kai Hoog
will emerge from his box, overpower the radio operator in
order to read his messages, and frighten the cook, who
takes him for a ghost. Pursued, he will climb on to the
masthead and jump into the sea, in order to reach the
treasure island.
First, however, the audience is taken to another
mysterious continent: Asia. The Spiders are trying to enlist
the help of a Maharahja to whom they promise the
mysterious stone. Using hypnosis (as Lang would later do
in Mabuse; had Lang seen Wegener’s Yogi?) a Yogi
endeavours to find out where the diamond is hidden. So
the new leader of the gang learns that the diamond is in the
hands of diamond king John Terry in London. Before he

40
can tell them more, the Yogi dies ol a heart attack.
In London the Spiders try to break into the safe of the
absent John Terry, but are surprised by his daughter
whom they carry off, rolled up in a carpet. As ransom they
demand the stone; but Terry insists — even to Kai Hoog -
that he knows nothing about it except that one of his
ancestors was captain ol a pirate ship. He produces his
portrait and the log ol his ship, the Seehexe, from which
some pages are missing. The log mentions a rock cave on
the Falkland Islands. In the proper style of the genre, Kai
Hoog discovers Terry’s servant listening at the door. He
tears off the man’s wig - it is the notorious Fourfinger John
ol the Spiders. He is locked up, but releases a pigeon with a
message for Lio Sha.
The action moves to the rocky cave on the Falklands,
which has the stalagmite look of Alberich’s treasure caves.
There Kai Hoog finds the diamond among the rich treasure
and skeletons of long-dead pirates. The Spiders soon
follow him and overpower him. When he denies that he
has the stone they declare (title) ‘Hunger and thirst will
make you come round in the end’. They all lie down to
sleep in the cave, but as a title (in the misleading past tense)
explains: ‘In the night the crater let out poisonous fumes.’
They struggle to reach the cave entrance, but only the
young gang leader and Kai Hoog, who has by this time
managed to free himself from his fetters, escape alive.
Kai Hoog returns with the stone to John Terry, only to
learn that the Pinkerton Detective Institute has reported
that an old man in disguise has checked into the Hotel
Royal with a young lady he calls his daughter, but who is
clearly under hypnosis. It is, naturally, the young gang
leader and Terry’s kidnapped daughter, Ellen. The gang
leader is being trailed by two turbanned gentlemen,
Indians from the Asiatic committee, which suspects him of
double-dealing. His plan is in fact to have a counterfeit
diamond made in order to use Ellen Terry (Lio Sha being
dead) to steal ‘Asia’s Imperial Crown’. The turbanned
gentlemen force their way into his room, intending to kill
both the man and the girl; but at the last moment Kai
Hoog rescues Ellen. This denouement could well come
from some Feuillade serial.
It will be clear from this deliberately lengthy rendering
of the plot how complex it must have been for a

4i
Contemporary audience. For us its importance is that in
this script, written by Lang alone (he was not to meet Thea
von Harbou until 1921 when they worked on The Indian
Tomb), there are motifs which were to appear again and
again in one form or another. Certainly he had a long way
to go before the organic and structured scenarios of the
two Mabuse films. The significant question at this point
concerns the extent of von Harbou’s contribution to the
evolution of Lang’s style after The Spiders. No doubt it
involves the emotional elements, alongside a certain
routine expertise. Judging from his known contribution to
the American films - of which only the first credits him as
co-author - it seems reasonable to assume that the organic
and logical sub-structure of the scripts after The Spiders
may be attributed to Lang himself, as a born author-
director.

42
 3 Der Müde Tod (Destiny, 1921)

With this film he has produced 'The angel who is sent to us in our last hour and whom
something of such artistic
we harshly call Death, is the gentlest and kindest angel,
purity that it can be compared
softly and imperceptibly plucking the dropping human
to Wegener’s Golem.
Freiheit, n October 1921 heart from life, to carry it away in his warm hands,
without the least pressure, away from the coldness of the
... It is Fritz Lang’s merit to
breast, high up to the warmth of Eden’, writes Jean Paul in
have discovered the genre (of
lyrical ballad) for the film.
his Leben des Quintus Fixlein.
Herbert Ihering, Berliner Lang writes: ‘I feel that in this film (Destiny) a certain
Börsen Courier, 30 Viennese tone can be discerned, specifically the intimacy
September 1923 with death. This intimacy is found in many Viennese songs’
Fritz Lang’s Film Destiny (Lang mentions the Fiaker Lied, Raimund’s Hobel Lied
opened my eyes to the poetic from the play Der Verschwender, and other songs). This,
expressiveness of the cinema. then, is the spirit of Lang’s ‘folk song in six verses’ about
Luis Bunuel (quoted in Ado
‘Weary Death’. Perhaps Lang and Thea von Harbou
Kyrou’s Luis Bunuel, 1963)
remembered the beautiful fairy tale by Hans Anderson,
The Story of a Mother, in which Death is ‘a poor old man
wrapped in a big horse blanket that keeps him warm; and
he needs warmth because the winter is cold’. He comes to
the young mother who watches by the bedside of her sick
child, and rocks himself on his chair, nodding strangely.
Lor three days and nights the mother has watched, and her
head is heavy. She nods for a moment, then wakes
bewildered to find that the old man and the child have
vanished (cf. in Lang’s film the young girl’s return from
the kitchen to find her lover gone away with the strange
wanderer).
In Anderson’s story the mother now starts out on her
desperate search. To discover the way to Death, she must
sing to Night, a woman in long black clothes, who sits in
the snow, all the songs she ever sang to her child. Then in
the dark pine forest, she has to warm the thorn bush at her
breast. The thorns pierce her flesh; her blood flows in big

43
Der Müde Tod (1921): The cemetery garden

drops, and the thorn bush grows fresh green leaves and
even flowers. In return for carrying her across to the house
of Death, the lake demands that she shall cry out her eyes
into it. Thus blinded, she reaches the other shore, and here
the old graveyard woman who guards the green house of
Death, asks the mother to exchange her black hair for her
own snow white hair. She explains that every human
being has its own tree of life or flower. Death transplants
the wilted ones into paradise. The young mother
recognises her child’s heart-beat in a little blue crocus that
is wilting. . . .
Lang or Harbou changed the green house of death
(‘where flowers and trees grow heiter skelter’) for the
much more powerful image of the cathedral in which
brilliant candles — high and straight as stalagmites or
flickering stumps almost extinct - symbolise human souls.
This image, the scholar of German, Andre Faure, points
out to me, comes from one of Grimm’s fairy tales

44
 . . . Death demands the child

Gevatter Tod. In Grimm, however, Death is vengeful and

malicious. A doctor who dares to outwit Death, his
godfather, twice, is taken by Death’s ice-cold hand, and
led into an underground cave.

There he saw a thousand lights burning in infinite rows, some large,

some medium-sized, some small. Every minute a few of them went out,
others revived and the impression was of a constantly changing scene
of flickering flames. ‘Look’, said Death, ‘these are the life lights of
human beings. The long ones belong to children, the medium-sized
ones to married people in the prime of life, the little ones to old people.
But often children or young people have only small lights.

These comparisons illustrate how the musical, ballad-

like character of Lang’s film connects with German
romanticism. This quite deliberate intention was not
always understood even at the time the film appeared. Der
Film (No 46, 1921) declares pedantically and chauvinisti-
cally, for instance, that a German folk song would not
mention the Orient or the Venetian Renaissance, but

45
would have a more ‘national’ setting - missing the point
that the film’s romanticism is more concerned with the
linking story, set in a small, timeless town in the middle of
nowhere - the world of German poetry. It is neither the
picture-book mediaevalism of a Moritz von Schwind nor
the simplified Biedermeier version of Ludwig Richter. It is
not by any means unimportant that the sequence of the
little apothecary searching for mandrake roots under
gnarled trees by night evokes the enchanted romantic
world of the painter Caspar David Friedrich, which is
atmospherically related to Destiny.
Interviewed by Gero Gandert (Protokoll zu M) Lang
declared: ‘In treating a romantic theme like that of Destiny
. . . the direction had to take into account this roman¬
ticism, but that does not mean that the feelings of the
characters had to be falsified romantically in any negative
sense.’ So his characters act ‘very simply, every one
according to his nature’.
Today it is the linking story of the two lovers, separated
by the strange wanderer, Death, which is the most
powerful and purest aspect of this many-faceted film. The
little town is brought to life by Lang’s feeling for realistic
detail and his sense of comedy - the young man who teases
the goose in the mail coach, the grotesque town dignitaries
in the tavern, the little apothecary. Lang’s sense of humour
had already taught him that tragedy must be com¬
plemented by its opposite. He recalls the impression made
upon him by the Shakespearean stage direction ‘Enter the
bear': after the tragic climax, the great dramatist brought
on clowns and jugglers to give the audience a necessary
relief from dramatic intensity.
In the United States, Lang’s style became ever simpler,
as he learned to free himself from ‘playfulness in the
handling of details, secondary episodes, characters and
symbols’ that in his view resembled the ornate baroque of
his native Vienna. At this period however he was still
inclined to give symbolic meanings to incidental details.
When Death enters the tavern, flowers wilt, the cat arches
its back. The handle of the walking stick is seen to be
shaped like a skeleton.
Yet the essential elements used to evoke a dense
atmosphere are already assembled with mature
confidence. A sense of the supernatural is instantly

46
 conjured by a swish ol sand at the crossroads, heralding the
appearance of the figure in gabardine and broad-brimmed
hat. When he appears in the wine tavern, the wandering
figure seems to carry with him his own solitude, an
invisible wall separating him from the living. The majestic
figure contrasts with the plain humanity of the comic city
dignitaries; the gateless wall rises menacingly up alongside
the enchanting little Nuremburg-like toy-town devised
for Lang by Herlth and Röhrig.*
The transition to unreality is hardly perceptible. The
shadow figures of the dead appear in superimposition
before the eyes of the girl searching for her lover,
approaching her to go through the wall. The trick of super¬
imposition (which in those days had to be done in the
camera, not in the laboratory) does not intrude itself as a
trick and illusion: it is an extra dimension of a surrealist
rather than the expressionist world, and we are irresistibly
drawn into the spell of Lang’s fantastic realm. Pommer
had early given the young Lang the advice of studying the
* The settings are very camera, ‘because it is with the camera that you will write
different from Röhng’s your film’.**
work as collaborator on
In the apothecary’s dusty little shop, with the phosphor¬
Caligari. Only one camera
escent outlines of round-bellied bottles, bundles of herbs, a
angle, from the graveyard
(cf. picture) shows, says stuffed owl and a skeleton, there seems a permanent
Lang ‘the direct influence of struggle between heaven and hell. There the girl finds the
the Caligari architecture: ancient volume in which she reads the Solomonic verse:
the view into the graveyard ‘Love is as strong as death’. In her eagerness to save her
garden over the wall where
lover, she takes this to mean ‘Love is stronger than death’;
the girl leans in despair. . . .
and so decides to take the poison on the first stroke of
Today we would call this a
“perspectival midnight. But between the first and the last stroke of
construction” twelve, from the beginning of the night-watchman’s song,
** Lang told me how he like Die Meistersinger (‘Hört Ihr Herrn und lasst Euch
used to go to the Prater in sagen . . .’) is unfolded the whole trilogy of the woman
Vienna as a High School
who claims to defeat death.
student where he was
The gateless wall opens up for the girl: a gleaming
particularly attracted to the
Kratky-Baschik Magic arched door, behind which stand floodlit flights of stairs
Theatre. On the stage leading to eternity. Death is no abyss, nor the descent into
illusionists performed tricks hell. The realm of death is revealed as the vast expanse of a
by means of large mirrors cathedral in which candles grow up like the pipes of an
which must have been
illuminated organ, reaching into the far distance, their
similar to the mirrors used
misty vapour intermingled with a streaming flood of light
in Melies’ Theatre Houdm
to make devils and ghosts that three years later would be recalled by the light in
appear and disappear. Siegfried’s magic forest.

47
Der Müde Tod: The First Light episode

Death graciously allows her three chances to save her

beloved; and three flickering candle stumps from which
the wax inexorably drips symbolise these three attempts.
Three times the beloved is drawn ever deeper into his
doom by the efforts of the loving girl.
The three chances and the three stories they introduce
give Lang the irresistible opportunity to play freely with
one motif, trying out all the possible permutations that
lead to the same end result, while constituting variations,
as in music. Moreover, in treating a series of three separate
episodes, Lang still stays close to the series film, with which
he had already experimented in The Spiders.
The story of The First Light is set in the world of the
Arabian Nights. A Franconian infidel is in love with the
sister of the Caliph of Baghdad. The adventure story with
its chases, disguises, suspense and exoticism recalls The
Spiders. An episode of the hero’s escape in the stairs
suggests reminiscences of Pastrone’s Cabiria; the most

48
 characteristic Lang sequences are the scene on the roof
terrace, in a stumato half-light, and the nocturnal garden
where El Mors, the gardener, has dug a grave for the
beloved.
The story of the second light is set in Quattrocento
Venice. Like Max Reinhardt, Lang delights in the joie de
vivre and visual exuberance of paintings on old Florentine
bridal chests. Scholars in pleated waistcoats lean casually
against pillars like some Ghirlandajo painting, or throw
their springy bodies like Damascus steel blades against
their enemies. Some passages echo Reinhardt productions
of Shakespeare, particularly in those moments when the
sets are no more than sketches. Dark waves lapping the
palace steps reflect the light and the shadow of a gondola
pole cast across it; the arch of a high bridge is still half
Gothic in its curve; steps are placed at an angle to the
picture, for a carnival crowd to come whirling and
dancing down them, just as Reinhardt might arrange it.
Then the flame of torches, bursting through the darkness.
Bela Baläsz must have had one of these Lang sequences in
his mind when he wrote in Der sichtbare Mensch:

It is the task of a director to look for the ‘eyes’ of a landscape: the black
silhouette of a bridge and a swaying gondola underneath, steps which
lead down into the dark water where the light of a lantern is reflected,
produce a more truly Venetian atmosphere - even when shot in the
studio - than an actual photograph of St Marks Square.

Ernst Lubitsch’s parody of Expressionism in Die

Bergkatze, directed against the ornate architecture of Ernst
Stern, Reinhardt’s favourite designer, was superficial,
confined only to decor. In Lang’s third story, about the
Chinese emperor who desires the magician’s daughter, the
parody of Expressionism has become an integral part of
the plot itself. Of course the overturned Baroque roofs
built higgledy-piggledy together, the little bridges, the
warped trees with their tortured curves and bends, are a
good rendering of the bizarre contortions of Ex¬
pressionism. But Lang’s invention goes further: the rolled-
up parchment of the imperial letter that orders the
magician’s death, should he bore the great lord with his
tricks, wriggles in expressionist curves, and bows. The
magician, turned into a cactus by his daughter, is stretched
into a grotesque expressionist diagonal. By means of trick

49
Der Müde Tod: the cactus scene

camerawork, one transformation or whimsical idea

follows another. We see in close-up, under the hem ol the
imperial robes, which form a palanquin, an army ot
hlhputians on the march, past pillar-like legs and gigantic
slippers (which were built in mammoth proportion on
the lot to produce a trick of scale). The climax of trick
photography is the flying carpet with its unwilling
passengers. Douglas Fairbanks bought the film, which he
never released, in order to be able to adapt the trick work
for The Thief of Bagdad. Lang told Herman G. Weinberg,
‘Naturally, having much more money and technical
possibilities, he improved on them tremendously’.*
Failing at each of her attempts to save a human life from
extinction, the girl is graciously given one more chance by
death: she may offer another soul in exchange for that of ,
,her ,beloved,
, j oheel rushes
, to find
r i i i
those who seem weary of
r
c
* Murnau s sequence ot
lr ,
1 raust travelling on the cape
life; but the little apothecary is indignant when she asks for Qf Mephisto in Faust had
his life; a beggar who had apparently nothing to live for the same inspiration.

50
 rejects her pleas angrily, and the old people in the Old
People s Home who had been complaining a moment
before at having been forgotten by death, run away from
her terrified. As they tumble down the dilapidated
wooden steps, a lamp is overturned and fire breaks out.
Lang s superb art of lighting is brought into play in all its
subtlety. From the Rembrandt chiaroscuro of the evening
lamplight in the Old People’s Home, a whole spectrum of
half-tones is created, right up to the brilliant glare of the fire
itself. A baby has been left behind in the Old People’s
Home; and the girl rushes to snatch it, in order to have
another life to offer to Death. But when Death appears, she
cannot bring herself to give him the little child. Instead she
leans out of the window and hands down the baby to the
desperate mother in the waiting crowd. Thus she offers
herself to death as the sacrificial victim who can save the
life of her beloved — the only solution of implacable fate.
As the burning beams crash all about her, salvation
is achieved.
In the hospital mortuary - the crypt, so to speak, of the
Cathedral of Death, the lovers are united on the bier.
Death raises them - as Liliom is later to rise. In
superimposition the figures leave behind their own dead
bodies, to walk for ever in the realm of the blessed.
‘I shall never forget,’ writes Robert Herlth, Lang’s film
architect, in his memoirs:

How Lang, who always did everything himself, worked the trick with
the letter sent by the magician to the emperor of China in Destiny,
with a temperature of 25 degrees centrigrade in the old glass-house.

‘The letter’, the script stipulates, ‘bows to the Emperor.’ Because in

those days there was no such thing as an optical bank or back
production, Lang produced this trick ‘directly’ or ‘in the original’ on a
9 foot by 12 foot black velvet-covered wall, where the letter,
measuring about 15 feet by 12 feet was pinned up in the desired
position and moved between every frame. Shooting thus in stop-
action, each frame separately exposed, the letter had to be rearranged
some 800 times to produce 50 seconds of film. Every time Lang
himself jumped up and changed the pins supporting the giant letter.
He worked incessantly, the sweat pouring down his face, but he was so
involved that he forgot time and place. After this the exposed negative
had to be rewound and remain in the camera in order to allow the
main action to appear on the same strip. In places where the letter
unrolled there had to be no other movement. The scene thus had to be
fitted in accordingly. The action had to be played with the letter
remaining imaginary. Only Lang seemed able to see it already, and

51
that is why his behaviour seemed to us like magic-making. But how
astonished we all were, we who had been in on every phase of the
work, when we watched the film re-run, with the superimposition.
The letter really unrolled itself, bowed to the emperor, and was read
by him.

Herlth’s remarks show something of how Lang worked

in the studio, trying to do everything himself; though
Herlth’s memory is at fault: the letter was not directed to
the emperor, but was sent by him to the magician.
Perhaps because of the Expressionist parody in the
Chinese episode, Destiny is often considered in France as an
Expressionist film. Lang rejects such an arbitrary label: he
is too much of an eclectic, in the best sense of the word, to
embrace indiscriminately one particular style of the
period. Yet like any sensitive artist, unknown to himself,
he was certainly influenced by tendencies of the Zeitgeist.
The Expressionist experience inevitably left visible traces
in his work.
The mode of calling the characters only The Young
Man, The Girl, The Wanderer and so on is characteristic of
Expressionist drama. The little town in the middle of
nowhere, however, smacks more of romanticism than
Expressionism. Yet sequences like those in the
apothecary’s laboratory or the ‘Crypt of Death’ are only
made possible by Lang’s deep comprehension of Ex¬
pressionist effects of light. On this point of lighting, Lang
writes to me:

In the Spring of 1919 I made my second film, Der Herr der Liebe in a
small studio somewhere north of Berlin. The cameraman was Carl
Hoffman, who did all my first films, because he had a Decla contract.

We filmed a scene in a big room, such as the Americans would call a

living room. On the walls were a number of three-branch
candlesticks. I was still very inexperienced, and when we started the
shooting and Carl Hoffman shouted ‘lights’, all the lights were turned
on, yet the bulbs in the candlesticks were not burning.

I shouted, ‘Stop’, and told Hoffman. Little Hoffman replied: ‘Doesn’t

work: it is not tonal’; and I had apparently learned something.

Then we were helped by an accident. It all happened during the

Spartacus rising 111 Berlin. The small studio had hired a number of
temporary electricians, and when Hoffman called ‘light’ again, the
electrical candles in the wall came on too. The temporary electrician
believed they had to be plugged into the system too.

52
 Never mind , said Karl Hoffman, ‘They won’t show; and anyway it
will take too long to disconnect them’. We went on shooting. When
we viewed the rushes later on, we were astonished: the electrical
candles were burning happily and made the whole scene singularly
atmospheric.

Well, well , said Hoffman, ‘They are on after all’. And from then on
in all the following scenes we had any electric lamps connected up.

This made me think. I had never liked the blue tinting which was used
to make scenes shot in daylight look like night scenes.

My next experiment came in Destiny. For the fire in the old people’s
home I shot the scene where the waterbuckets are handed along a chain
of people, late in the afternoon. Since the house could only burn down
once, and I had to shoot the fire willy mlly, I went on shooting into the
dark.

The effect of bright flames clearly picked out against the dark sky was
excellent and relatively easy to understand (we had lit up the house
with floodlights).

But how atonished we were when the scene which we had shot in late
afternoon, with the human chain passing the buckets, also turned out
to be a night scene.

The cameraman this time was my beloved Fritz Arno Wagner, who
shot many of my films.

From this it emerges clearly that certain scenes of Destiny

were shot out of doors.
Conversations with Fritz Lang also revealed other new
points about Destiny. He says, for instance, that he put the
Renaissance story first in order because it seemed to him
stronger than the Franconian episode, which he felt went
better as the middle story. Yet all the copies of the film
known to me are in the sequence I have described, and
contemporary reviews also confirm this. In the known
copies, also, there is no title to explain why the young
man ‘went with the wanderer’. Before the scene with the
old people who complain that Death has forgotten them,
however, a title states that a young man who has been run
over by the mail coach horses has just died in hospital.
In relation to titles, Lang says that the film had originally
three decisive verses though today even German copies
have only prose titles. He still remembers the first ol these:

There is a little town somewhere

Dreaming in a valley;
In it there lived and loved
Two young people, full of life;

53
Yet from all the trees
The golden leaves are falling
Like tears in the red glow of dusk.
At cross roads which
Have seen many things,
Stands waiting for them
Lonely
Death

Lang thinks that the second of the three verses appeared

after the lover has disappeared with the wanderer, on the
return of the young girl to the kitchen:

She looks for her sweetheart everywhere

And roams through all the streets.
She has left the town.
At the graveyard all the graves
Are encircled by a wall.
Cold winds like presentiments
Of death are blowing round her head.
(?)
(?)
Love is fighting
With Death
And believes!

The third verse apparently followed the three episodes;

and a film enthusiast, Albin Pötzsch, from the Meissen
film school, remembers the opening lines:

Death remained triumphant in the fight

Yet he puts fate,
with a smile
Into the hands
Of her suffering once more.

Despite the musical structure and atmosphere of Lang’s

film ballad, and the rhythmical sense of Lang’s later films,
Lang, the painter and architect, believes that he is not
musical. He has told me that music — apart from folk-song
- is the only art he cannot understand. It might be truer to
say that though he never studied harmonics, he uses certain
elements of music instinctively through his innate sense of
rhythm. (Architecture, after all, resembles in many of its
works the structures of symphonies.)
In his interview with Peter Bogdanovich Lang em¬
phasises one aspect of his work which may be the key to
this film ballad:

54
 I think the main characteristic of all my pictures is this fight against
destiny, against late. I once wrote in an introduction to a book that it is
the fight which is important, not the result of it . . .

Similarly, in the interview with Gero Gandert, already

quoted:

The fight oi the individual against destiny is probably the basis of all
my films, the struggle of a primarily good human being against higher
and superior forces, be it the power of a generally accepted social
injustice, or the power of a corrupt organisation, society or authority.
Or be it the power of one’s own conscious or subconscious drives .

As for death, I believe that it is sometimes preferable to life lived under

inhuman conditions and that one should fight for whatever one
considers right, even against superior forces and at the risk of dying.
The struggle, the (gesture of) rebellion is important.

Lessing said that if God held in one hand truth, and in

the other the search for truth, he would call out: ‘Give me
the search tor truth . Likewise, the main concern in Lang’s
first masterwork is the fight against destiny.

APPENDIX: ON BENEVOLENT DEATH, by Fritz

Lang - Berliner Tageblatt, i January 1927

The childhood dream which most influenced my life and

work was concerned neither with friendship nor with
love. Yet it awakened in me an emotion of fear, growing
into love of such force, that I have never since been able to
free myself from its almost mystic force.
I was ill, on the threshold of boyhood and adolescence,
and it happened on a night when I was very close to the
fulfilment of the saying that whom the gods love, die
young. I felt the closeness of death with a kind of drowsy
lucidity, yet I was too exhausted by fever to fight the
approach of the dark stranger. I was slipping away on my
faint breath, which got weaker and weaker, and the tear-
stained face of my adored mother was disappearing from
my view.
I slept and dreamed - or was I awake ? With undimmed
eyes, almost too clearly, I saw the familiar room in which I
was lying. The shutters of the window were half open -
the moonlight was streaming into the room. And 1 saw
myself face to face, not terrifying, but unmistakeable, with
Death. Made of black and white, light and shade, the rib
cage, the naked bones. On top of it the head, barely

55
recognisable, shaded by the wide-brimmed hat.
Death and I gazed at each other. I don’t know whether I
should call the feeling I experienced at that moment one of
fear. It was horror, but without panic. And even the
horror made way for a kind of mystical ecstasy which gave
me, boy though I still was, the complete understanding of
the ecstasy which made martyrs and saints embrace death.
I raised myself in order to accompany him. In my weak
state I collapsed. People came and lifted me up. Death had
disappeared.
I recovered quickly. But the love of death, compounded
of horror and affection, which the Gothic master depicted,
stayed with me and became a part of my films: humanized
in Destiny, symbolic in Die Nibelungen, living Gothic in
Metropolis.

56
 4 Dr Mabuse Der Spieler (Dr Mabuse the
Gambler, 1922)

Film as an archive of its time. Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou called the first part of
That’s new, at least. The
this him, ‘A portrait ot our time’ and the second part,
reflexes of an epoch
‘Inferno characters of the time’. Two years later, Lang
immortalised in celluloid,
preserved for posterity in described it unambiguously as ‘a document of its time.’
moving pictures which will The distributor’s hand-out which accompanied the film
convey the rhythm of our is not at all characteristic of public relations cliche, and
present time with much more might well have been inspired either by reviews or by
directness than a book could
Lang himself:
do .. . The director Fritz
Lang presents this panorama The world which opens up before our eyes in this film is the world in
of our time with great devotion which we all live. Only it is condensed, exaggerated in detail,
and a strong gift for concentrated into essentials, all its incidents throbbing with the
observation. feverish breath of those years, hovering between crisis and con¬
Vorwärts, 30 April 1922 valescence, leading somnambulistically just over the brink, in the
This film is a document of our search for a bridge that will lead over the abyss. This gambler, Dr
time, an excellent portrait of Mabuse, was not yet possible in 1910; he will perhaps - one is tempted
high society with its gambling to say hopefully - no longer be possible in 1930 (sic!) But for the years
passion and dancing madness, around 1920 he represents a larger than life-size portrait, is almost a
its hysteria and decadence, its symbol, at least a symptom. Mankind, decimated and trampled under
by war and revolution, takes its revenge for years of suffering and
expressionism and occultisms.
misery by eating its lusts and pursuing pleasure . . .
Die Welt am Montag, 1
May 1922 It is illuminating to compare with this Lang’s own picture
The director Fritz Lang has of the age in his talk on Spies to the University of
tried hard to concentrate the California, Riverside Extension. (See p8o). Even Das
insanity of our period into its
Tagebuch, a magazine normally very critical of the cinema,
characteristic types and milieux.
uses words not unlike the left-wing Vorwärts and the
While the novel by Norbert
Jacques concentrated on the popular newspaper Berliner Lokalanzeiger:
character of the criminal
No vice of our time is forgotten ... It is a mirror of the age, not
Mabuse, Lang, himself a
specially uplifting, not ennobling in its effect. Yet it is genuinely felt,
restless type who was once a
visually powerful in Fritz Lang’s direction.
painter in Paris, aims at
presenting a panorama of the The strictly middle-class B.Z. am Mittag declares that
times and does so with here the film:
imagination, wit and visual
inventiveness. All the has understood its true function as the portrait of an age set in motion.

57
Sensations, adventures which follow one another in rapid succession, a characters are taken from our
condensation of the spirit of the age, a playful re-enactment and a hectic, corrupt, confused epoch,
mirror of life. and get fused into it again . . .
The director tries to visualise
It points out that Lang’s understanding of this essential fact the confused and bewitched
leads to a reworking of the novel that was first published in atmosphere by using a furious
the Berliner Illustrierte, ‘according to the highly volatile speed and an enthusiastic
character of the time, with sure instinct’. temperament and it seems
stimulating merely because
This review, moreover, perceives quite clearly what
over-stimulated people exist
matters about this film whose infectious vitality bursts the in it . . . This film will have
closed form of the drama: an enormous success
everywhere, . . . because
The success of this film does not he in its plot . . . but in the episodic
millions of people who sense
details, not in the sequence of events as a whole but in the individual
dimly the confusion of our
events which vividly express an age and are held together by a
time are confronted tangibly
conscious artistic intention, by rhythm and speed, by style and
and visibly in this visual and
atmosphere. There is a concentration of dance and crime, of gambling
highly rhythmic embodiment
passion and cocaine addiction, ofjazz and razzias. Not one important
with the collapse and madness
symptom of the post-war years is missing. Stock exchange
with which we are all forced to
manouevres, occultist charlatanism, prostitution and over-eatmg,
live.
smuggling, hypnosis and counterfeiting, expressionism, violence and
Das Tagebuch, 6 May 1922
murder!
There is no purpose, no logic in this demonic behaviour of a de¬
humanised mankind - everything is a game. Yet while other people
are enjoying themselves in gambling, Dr Mabuse gambles with
human lives and human destinies. Everything else is only a means to an
end for him . . .

‘At last’, wrote the Roland von Berlin of 4 May 1922, ‘a

film that has something to say to us’:

that represents the present, daringly shot, contemporary history

relentlessly photographed. The novel by Norbert Jacques has been
reworked skilfully by Thea von Harbou . . . yet it is really due to Fritz
Lang’s direction that the Wedekind lamps have been kindled to throw
a phosphorescent glow of grotesque unreality over the hectic dance of
death going on during those unbalanced, hysterical post-war years,
over a Marquis of Keith world, immensely exaggerated.
It is marvellous how in his hands architecture and photography
have achieved a force of expressiveness hitherto unheard of.

These extensive quotations trom contemporary reviews

- notably more colourful and informative than most
reviews of the period - illustrate how strongly critics felt
that the him reflected their own age, and how normally
mediocre journalists were stimulated to find the right
words to describe it. They somewhat contradict Seigfried
Kracauer’s assertion, in From Caligari to Hitler that ‘from
these expressionist and similarly stagey products emerged

58
the overall picture of an emotionally heated pseudo¬
world’.
According to Lang the film has lost its original
introductory sequence: a brief, breathless montage of
scenes of the Spartacus uprising, the murder of Rathenau,
the Kapp putsch and other violent moments of recent
history. Lang maintains that when it first opened this
sequence was intact; and it is unclear when the prologue
was cut — whether in the twenties, when people did not
want to be reminded of the troubles of the time, or later,
by the East German archive, which owns the negative and
may have preferred to excise the Spartacus material.
As it survives today the film opens with a circle of still
portraits of Mabuse in various disguises. Mabuse, sitting at
his dressing table, shuffles the stills like playing-cards and
selects one which he hands to his cocaine-addicted,
homosexual mask-maker to indicate his next disguise.
Originally, Lang recalls, the opening montage was linked
to this scene by two titles: the first,

WHO IS BEHIND ALL THIS?

The second title, a single word which rushed towards the

spectator, growing and growing until it filled the entire
screen:

The most remarkable advance over The Spiders is in the

characterisation. The characters are no longer con¬
ventional figures from conventional serial films but (said
the B.Z. reviewer) ‘representatives of a certain social set¬
up from our times’. Today they still seem to be well-
defined individuals of their own time, decadent and
unstable in moral matters, rather than merely types of the
richer class during the inflation period.
Countess Told is the sort of woman who might have
been encountered at any Berlin fancy-dress ball or first
night, yet she has distinctive individual traits. A neurotic,
bored, heavy-lidded, hypochondriac, disappointed in love
and possibly rather frigid, orchid-like and thus the
ultimate in smartness according to the styles of the time.
Unable to live the Ibsen life she would wish, she observes
other people and their emotions in the gambling clubs

59
where she herself never touches a card. She can establish no
contact with these people, and is alarmed when State
Prosecutor von Wenck tries to involve her in action as his
accomplice. Even her long cigarette-holder - a typical
accessory of the sophisticate ot the period — serves to
distance her, as it were, from her environment.
When she is bored during a spiritualist seance, her
fingers trace the outlines of the Soutache pattern on her
gown - a detail which Lang characteristically enjoys for its
revelation of the superficiality ot her character: she is even
incapable of concentrating. She resists Mabuse’s advances
not out of a married woman’s propriety, but out of
genuine frigidity, the congenital outsider’s reluctance to be
involved.
Like the Countess, the rich Count Told is a decadent,
and probably a latent homosexual. He is ‘sensitive’, self-
centred and spineless. As an art collector he is intoxicated
by works of art as if they were opium. Barely participating
in his wife’s soirees, he only comes to life when he is
allowed to show off his collection. Momentarily vitalised,
he asks a guest - Mabuse - ‘What do you think of
Expressionism, Herr Doktor?’ — a reference which at the
time Lang feared was too obscure.* Exposed, the veneer of
savoirJaire once pierced, this aesthete is a weak and helpless
creature: after the incident where, though he normally
never plays, he is hypnotised by Mabuse and made to cheat
at cards, he runs to Wenck through the rain, to cut a
wretched figure in the prosecutor’s office.
Wenck himself is a less earthy figure than Lohmann in
M, belonging to a social class where dinner jackets are
worn with nonchalance: Lohmann, with the vitality of a
man of the people, belongs to a later period of realist
perception. Played by Bernhard Goetzke (Death in *Mabuse’s response
Destiny) Wenck with his inborn noblesse is nevertheless not (‘Expressionism is just a
game, but, nowadays, in
very scrupulous. As a man of the inflation years, when
life everything is just a
everyone had to learn to go with the tide, he is essentially game.’) can be seen as
an adventurer in his battle against his opponent Dr double-edged: a remark
Mabuse. indicating Mabuse’s nature
As to Dr Mabuse himself, the B.Z. called him ‘a (‘The Gambler’ in the
widest meaning of the
criminal of genius’ while the critic of Kinematograph (7
term) and an ironic joke
May, 1922) wrote naively:
from Fritz Lang who has
always refused to play
This Dr Mabuse is a kind of ideal figure of our time. He is not like the aesthetic games.

60
 gangster king ot the past with his crude methods; it is not accidental
that he is a doctor, and has put all the intellectual powers of his
academic training into the execution of his gigantic plans.

Mabuse can be seen as a tragic figure, a fallen angel; and it

was not accidental that Lang in one scene puts him beneath
the picture ot a gigantic Lucifer, lit by the firelight as if by
flaming phosphorus. Lang recognises that Dr Mabuse
could only have been invented in Germany, the country of
kadav er gehorsam (absolute obedience), where Nietzsche’s
idea ot Superman was born. There is a revealing passage in
the original novel;

For the prosecutor Wenck a criminal was no longer an inferior person.

In his eyes he turned into a man of higher impulses in the sense of
constituting a hellish force whose ever intensifying actions he was
trying to stop by demonic means.

The only negative figure in the film is the young

millionaire, Hull - a weak image of the so-called Lang
hero who was to acquire his full contours in such a
character as Mobley in While the City Sleeps. Might Hull
have been deliberately kept in vague terms (‘a young man
in his thirties, a touch calloused, a touch casual, with an
unusually unruffled and easy-going manner . . .’) in order
to throw Mabuse into still higher relief?
The B.Z. review again:

Yet not only are the characters typical of our age, but their way oflife
and the environment in which they are placed are also characteristic.
Thus the scenic side of the film, its architecture - an astonishing
achievement by the architects Stahl Urach and Otto Hunte — gains in
importance.

The review also mentions the ‘expressionist rooms at the

Tolds’ and ‘the expressionist nightclub’; but it is possible
that more Expressionism has been read into the film than
was intended. Writing about it, the Berliner Börsen-Courier
(30 April, 1922) even takes on a touch of Expressionist
language:

This film works at breakneck speed, imparts a harassed restlessness.

Klein-Rogge’s Mabuse is the embodiment of tense will-power; he is
concentrated will-power, and, when necessary, shows a mesmerising
* Cf. page 12/13 °f The demonic force.*
Haunted Screen and my
The only genuinely Expressionist feature is the restaurant
remarks on Expressionism
as ‘gestraffterwille’ with its flame walls, where Wenck and his friend (played
(tensed-up will power). by Falkenstein) have dinner. The gambling room with its

61
Dr Mabuse Der Spieler (1922): The entrance to the gambling room

'bizarre furnishings’ (B.Z.), whose round shape Kraucauer

interprets as ‘the circle as symbol of chaos’, rather recalls
the ornamental stylisation of the Viennese or Munich
workshops. The Viennese Secession style is identifiable
also in such features as the croupier who is raised
hydraulically from below, and sinks down again on the
arrival of the police, or in the lowering of a dancer —
anticipation of the false Maria in Metropolis - on a kind of
giant chandelier. Nor are Told’s rooms Expressionist,
though some of the works ofart in them are. Here, as in the
Countess’ tea salon, we see the typical Art Deco of the
time. The Count’s gaming room would be called
‘modernist’ if it appeared in a film by Marcel L’Herbier; it
is the world of Iribc and Lapape, of the year 1910,
prolonged, as in France, into the twenties. Only the mood
is, at moments, Expressionist: Dr Mabuse under his
Lucifer picture, or Count Told roaming his collection at
night by candlelight which momentarily picks out a piece

62
Dr Mabuse: In the gambling room

of sculpture or an African mask which starts like a cry out

of the darkness. Later, on the open staircase, there is a
similar chiaroscuro contrast that produces the shock effect
characteristic of Expressionism in painting. The eclectic
Lang uses this style in order to reveal the Count’s
confusion of mind and despair. He employs it again for the
scene of the murder of Hull and his friend, under the
flickering gaslight - anticipating also the night streets of
Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street.
One aspect of the film seemed particularly astonishing,
indeed almost unbearable to the contemporary spectator.
Berliner Lokalanzeiger reported that:

The first big applause which spontaneously arose in the large

auditorium during the first public showing of Dr Mabuse occurred at
the night scene in which the cars are racing through the streets, the
lights of which can be seen stretching for miles into the darkness like
stars.
The same applause was repeated during a similar scene whose effect
Dr Mabuse: Alfred Abel as Count Told

was heightened by an elevated tram that passes over a dark viaduct in

the foreground, with its windows lit up and flashing out in the
dark. ... In these terms the film of Dr Mabuse constitutes a success of
German film technique, a triumph of the arc light.

B.Z. am Mittag shared the same enthusiasm:

In this film the techniques of the film camera (Carl Hoffman’s brilliant
photography) are brought to perfection. The problem of how to film
lit-up streets at night has been solved for the first time. It is
unbelievably impressive to see the glaring lights of speeding cars flash
through the night or the rapid passing of an elevated train or the
initially blurred, then gradually focussed glimpse through a pair of
opera glasses on to the variety stage, the nuances of light and shade -
these things alone prove the value of film documentary.

Although today we take for granted such refinements as

the view through the opera glasses or the effect of light and
shade, they had to be first ‘invented’; and Lang even then
knew how to invent. It was immediately recognised that
this film was a unique act of cooperation by Lang and his
associates - the cameraman Carl Hoffman and the

64
Dr Mabuse: Mabuse and the captive Countess Told

architects. Carl Hoffman, wrote Vorwärts,

without toning or touching up a single picture concentrated in his

camera work purely on atmosphere and achieved the most refined
nuances. Some ideas are utterly fascinating, for example Dr Mabuse’s
eyes approaching the spectator at rapid speed, the lettering that is
gradually enlarged, with suggestive force, the view through a pair of
opera glasses which changes from an imperceptible blur to a lucid
picture in the course of adjusting the glasses . . .

Berliner Fremdenzeitung (i May 1922) adds:

Fritz Lang’s merit is, however, to have worked out the details in such a
way that they fit into the whole like the stones of a mosaic, and yet
produce the utmost suspense in the spectator. This director is a master
in the way he focusses on apparently minor and unimportant details to
an extent that makes them into an experience (like the splendid
gambling scene with the Chinese glasses in which the ingenious
gambler’s suggestive powers, rendering his victims powerless, are felt
also by the spectator).

Lang succeeded in making the audience actually feel the

65
force of hypnotism. ‘Fascinating’ wrote Neue Zeit (4 May
1922):

the fight between Mabuse and the prosecutor, where Mabuse’s face
gets bigger and bigger and he literally hypnotises the spectator.

The effect still works today. Mabuse plays with the glasses
he has taken off, and their sparkle is a true Expressionist
shock effect. The head of the old man (Mabuse in disguise)
moves forward, growing bigger and bigger until it almost
bursts out of the screen. Again, when Wenck, trying to
resist Mabuse’s will, picks up the cards and the Chinese
letters Tsi Nan Fu on them light up, expand menacingly,
and seem to fog his consciousness, a sympathetic effect
is produced in the spectator. Again and again the con¬
temporary reviews return to this; B.Z. am Mittag tor
instance concludes:

It is astonishing how a title is used as an expressive means, how the

hypnotic gaze of Dr Mabuse casts its spell over the public as it does
over his victim, how psychological processes are externalised.

The reviews also speak of the new and so far

unprecedented speed of the film. Thus, Neue Zeit (4 May
1922):

Speed, horrifying speed characterises the film. The incidents chase one
another. This is the present, the hustle and bustle of its life-style. The
six acts take no less than three hours to finish, yet one was not aware of
the passing of time until it was ended. Is there better proof of a
gripping story?

Unreality and documentation of a Zeitgeist, at one and the

same time, patterned into rhythm and suspense - these
were to remain the characteristic features of Lang’s films.
Talking about filming the night scenes in Destiny, Lang
commented (see above, p. 53) ‘Yet we still had not really
understood what we were doing’. The night scenes of
Mabuse were filmed in the studio. The elevated train which
so thrilled contemporary spectators was a toy train, shot in
the studio and subsequently superimposed on to the
previously shot scene of the street at night.

Many years later, in The Last Will of Dr A4 abuse, Fritz Arno Wagner
and I discovered that genuine night scenes were best shot with a wide-
angle lens during the short moments of dusk, the five or six minutes of
transition between day and night; or early in the morning between
night and day. We dress-rehearsed the scenes in question carefully
before we shot them - never more than one scene in one day. . . .

66
 There is more to say about the animated titles that were so new at the
time. They proved a veritable sensation, particularly the hypnotic TSI
NAN FU in the playing cards, which puzzled critics and audiences
alike. They were simple letters, cut out of a piece of wood-grained
paper, lit from underneath.

The greatest sensation was caused by the recurring title MELIOR that
ran ahead of Wenck’s car, eternally renewing itself and dragging him
mesmerically towards the Melior quarry and thus to his death, as
planned by Mabuse.

We deviated from the book, using only the fundamental outlines. 1

seem to recall that a producer friend of mine sent me a book about A1
Capone from Hollywood. It may have influenced me a little. I also
used a cause celebre of the time: the defensive battle fought by the car-
robber Chavrol, beseiged in a Paris house by the police. Yet my main
theme was man’s helplessness.*

It is interesting to discover Lang, so early in his career,

already drawing inspiration from items in news clippings.
The seige of Mabuse’s house and his escape into the sewers
are shot in a pure documentary style. There is the
objectivity of documentary, too, in the organisation of the
criminal set-up, with its flawless operation in the execution
of the trade contract robbery near the beginning of the
film. Side by side with this element we have hypnosis, the
* Interview with Gero
superimpositions of Told, who resumes the game with his
Gandert, in Fritz Lang, M,
Kinemathek No 3. own protoplasm. When Mabuse’s madness sets in, we see
Hamburg, 1963. his victims in superimposition, while the big printing press
** Echoes of Lang’s becomes a giant monster like the machine centre in
films are to be found Metropolis that becomes Freder’s Moloch. No-one but
again and again in the
Lang could arrive at such an alliance of documentary and
work of other film¬
the fantastic.
makers. Among the more
obvious from Mabuse are The astonishing montage of this film had a profound
the circle of hands during effect on Eisenstein when it arrived in the Soviet Union;
the spiritualist seance shot and Sergei Yutkevich has told me that in order to study its
from a similar angle in sophisticated cutting technique, Eisenstein rearranged the
Marcel L’Herbier’s Feu
scenes, putting them in new orders, only to arrive back at
Mathias Pascal (1925), the
fitting them together in their original form.**
use of the stock exchange
in a similar way in the
same director’s L’Argent
(1928); the battle in the
besieged house in von
Sternberg’s Underworld
(1927); and the escape of
the criminal into the
sewers in Carol Reed’s
The Third Man (1949).

67
Die Nibelungen (1923-24): Siegfried’s arrival at Gunther’s court (above); The flowering tree (below)
 5 Die Nibelungen 1923—24

From the beginning to the end Thea von Harbou appears to have published the Nibelun¬
the films (Siegfrieds Tod and
gen script retrospectively, just as she was subsequently to
Kriemhilds Rache) possess
write the novel Metropolis after the completion of the film.
Greek tragedy, a quality of
inevitability, but their
This published script reveals how over-rich in detail
emotional impact accrues not so Harbou’s language is. For Lang this detail provided a
much through specific welcome possibility of revealing character and motive, and
identification with these of developing symbols - and the Lang of the silent German
abstract characters, but rather period took it for granted that he had to use symbolism.
from their becoming the
Without a means of verbal explanation, the symbol was a
embodiment of a stirring saga
oj projoundly mythical appeal. structural necessity, helping to convey to the spectator the
In this the films resemble the things which could not be spoken. It might be argued that
multi-part Japanese period such visual symbolism is necessary to achieve the necessary
spectacles with their awesome stylisation in a Homeric and epic sense. Certainly Lang
samurai heroes.
refused to attempt a remake of Die Nibelungen in the sixties
Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles
because the sound dialogue would destroy such stylisation
Times, io October 1969
and make the characters appear bombastic and ridiculous.
So when Kriemhild reveals to grim Hagen, before the
hunt, where Siegfried’s vulnerable point lies, in order as
she thinks to protect him, Lang uses a symbolic image to
express the presentiment of coming disaster. Kriemhild
stands beside a flowering tree, waving goodbye to her
smiling hero. A moment later, she sinks desolate into the
arms of her mother Ute, because before her eyes and ours
there is a terrible apparition: the flowering tree turns into a
mass of leafless branches, and finally into a death’s head.
Thus the spectator is prepared by a symbol tor the coming
event.
For some curious reason many people still regard the
well-balanced, symmetrical, spacious sets as Expressionist.
Yet there are none of the ecstatic distortions, the oblique
angles of Caligari or Raskolnikoff. Lang and his architects,
Otto Hunte and Erich Kettelhut, inevitably had to pass

69
Die Nibelungen: geometrical design and architectural composition

through the Expressionist experience of their age; but the

only trace of it surviving here is a tendency to abstraction,
to anonymity and stylisation of form.
For the most part all is harmony, balance, structure.
Arcades and niches predominate, with figures practically
fitted into them and framed by them. This is particularly
apparent in Hunte’s sketches now preserved in the
Cinematheque Franchise (cf. illustration, page 71). Often
the figures become part of the decor; for instance the row
ol soldiers like pillars in the foreground, their backs to the
camera, all dressed identically with geometrical ornament,
and parallel in posture, one hand on the hilt of their
swords, the other holding their shields; and behind this
pallisade of bodies the procession of kings and heroes
slowly approaches on its way to the cathedral. Fang uses
the soldiers here to symbolise the sheer power of the
Burgundians. In the use of extras, the anonymity of
character may well be a hangover from Expressionism.

70
Die Nibelungen: the harmony and balance of Otto Hunte’s design (above) realised by Lang (below)
71
Die Nibelungen: the monumental figure of Hagen
 Similarly, when Brunhild leaves her ship, the soldiers
line up on either side, visors down and shields held up to
form a kind of pontoon bridge. Their helmets and
shoulders seem to rise out of the water like decorative
railings. On shore other extras, also motionless, silhouetted
against the light (Lang explains they were positioned in
Iront ol a blue-painted wall) to form a lattice. Yet again, in
Kriemhilds Rache, when Kriemhild says farewell to her
husband’s tomb before departing for the country of the
Huns, she is surrounded by her women. Faces and figures
disappear in the heavy folds of their coats and head-dresses.
The bowed heads and shoulders seem part of the curved
vaulting, depersonalised into decorative motifs, the mosaic
ornaments of the apsis. The people, the extras, appear
faceless in this stylised world of heroes because they
constitute a kind of chorus, with no motive function in the
development of the action.
The main characters too, however, are sometimes
treated ‘architecturally’. After the Nibelung’s gold has
been stolen and sunk in the Rhine, the two arch-enemies,
Kriemhild and Hagen, are seen standing like pillars,
flanking the heavy gate of the treasure-chamber.
Lang chose to divest the Nibelung saga of its Wagnerian
pathos. No-one except Hagen wears a beard, or resembles
the stout heroes and heroines of the operatic stage. The
decadent world of the Burgundians is treated with
appropriate stylisation, and the wonderful costumes
designed by Guderian resemble early miniatures.*
To portray this world demanded a certain strictness of
form. Structure is all. (Heme, talking about the Nibelun¬
genlied and its expressiveness cannot find a tower as high, a
stone as hard as the grim Hagen and vengeful Kriemhild).
Nothing in Lang is fapade; everything is three-
dimensional and spatial. His mise en scene makes constant
use of this space and he composes with it. The white-robed
followers of White Kriemhild and the dark followers of
* There had been earlier Brunhild meet to form the shape of a wedge on the
attempts at modernising cathedral steps, in just the same way that the masses were
Wagner’s heroes. In 1908, employed in Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus pro¬
for example, the costume
ductions of Greek tragedy.
drawings for Tristan and
The sets had likewise to be structured. Lang says that if
Isolde by C. O. Czeschka
anticipated the geometrical he had had the use of the American Redwoods, he might
costumes of Die Nibelungen. have done the forest scenes in natural exteriors; but as it

73
Die Nibelungen: atmosphere created by the lighting potential of the studio:
Klein-Rogge as Attila

was, the atmosphere he sought was only possible with the

lighting potential of the studio. Nothing is accidental: the
spirit of the sets is conjured up by Lang’s will alone,
inspired by pictures he recalled. Though Böcklin may now
appear kitsch to us, he was important for his own age, and
Lang used his Great Pan (also called Schweigen im Walde)
as inspiration for Siegfried’s ride through the mysterious
sun-streaked, misty forest. The flowering meadow with
the spring where grim Hagen’s spear strikes the blond hero
is a combination of two other Böcklin pictures; the images
of the naked children with wreaths about their hair, and
Attila in black armour (Kriemhilds Rache) were inspired by
an etching by Max Klinger.
These atmospheric landscapes were built in the grounds
of Neubabelsberg, since they were too big for the studio
itself. The dense tree-trunks ot Siegfried’s magic forest
were made ot long wooden frames coated with cement to
look like bark, and ending half-way up the trunk. Real soil

74
and moss were heaped about their roots. They were
enclosed by a cyclorama which was open only at the point
where the camera and lighting equipment were pos¬
itioned. The top ol this cyclorama was covered with laths
and bits of sacking.
The shooting began in autumn, and the two parts of the
film took about nine months to complete. Lang was
therefore able to wait for real snow to cover the earth for
the scene where Kriemhild kneels to pick up the soil
stained with her husband’s blood, to carry it to the country
of the Huns, and for real flowers (sown by Vollbrecht) for
the flowering meadow in Siegfrieds Tod. For the scene
where Hagen drops the Nibelung’s treasure into the frozen
Rhine, the unit waited for a pool in the grounds to freeze
over, adding some ice from the Wannsee.
Elsewhere atmospheres were created inside the studio
proper. The misty sequence where Alberich, made
invisible by the tarnhelm, tries to strangle the hero, was shot
on a small stage at Neubabelsberg, and the dense mist in
which a filigree of twigs can faintly be distinguished was
produced by the use of fire extinguishers. Since it was a hot
spring day, the wan sunbeams pouring through the glass
walls and roof gave the suspended vapour and eerie
atmospheric affect. Lang attempted to repeat the effect, but
at the next try the fog simply dispersed about the studio.
All the time there were new inventions ard experi¬
ments. Lang wanted a rainbow for the scene where
Kriemhild’s ship travels up the Rhine. Carl Hoffman
objected that rainbows could not be filmed, but Rittau, the
second cameraman, had the idea of drawing a rainbow on
black paper and superimposing it. The weird flickering
aurora borealis which appears in the sky when Brunhild
first sees the heroes’ arrival was produced by Rittau with
the help of spotlights and a moving mirror. In his
programme note to Die Nibelungen Lang praises the talents
of his cameramen. Carl Hoffman, he said, was able to
realise everything the director had imagined visually, by
means of light and shadow:

He knew the secret of photographing a woman, so that while looking

at her face a light in the corner of an eye, a shadow across her forehead,
a luminous line across the temple revealed not only her externals but
also the spiritual content of a scene.

75
Günther Rittau’s talents were more experimental:

Together with Carl Hoffman he experimented for entire nights. He

approaches the visual aspects of the cinema by way of mathematics.
Every third sentence he uttered began: ‘What will happen if. . ?’
What happens when mathematics, technology and imagination
combine may be seen in the northern lights in Die Nibelungen and the
petrified dwarfs whose mouths are still moving in a scream while their
bodies have already turned to stone.

This petrification of the dwarfs in Alberich’s treasure cave

is an astonishing feat. As they gradually turn to stone, their
faces stay alive for a while before they, too, freeze.
Günther Rittau achieved this not by ordinary super¬
imposition, but by superimposing from below to above —
all, it must be remembered, done directly inside the
camera by a footage and frame count, since the German
cinema did not yet have special effects departments like the
Americans. Even the ghostly effects of the silhouette of
Siegfried made invisible by the tarnhelm, while assisting
Günther to defeat Brunhild in the contest, was achieved in
this way by superimposition in the camera.
Another technical difficulty was presented by the
dragon. At first, Lang recalls, it crawled along ‘like a
decrepit old man’ and, according to Vollbrecht, collapsed
the moment it was moved. Finally a mechanism was
devised to give it suitably life-like movements.
The narrative flair Lang had displayed in Destiny comes
into its own in the confrontation of the Burgundian world
with three other worlds and three other styles. In 1966 he
recalled, in a talk at Yale:

I was interested in bringing to life a German saga in a manner different

from Wagnerian opera, without beards and so on. I tried to show in
the Nibelungen four different worlds: the primeval forest, where lives
the crippled Mime who teaches Siegfried to forge his sword, the
dragon and the mystic subterranean realm of Alberich, the deformed,
dwarfish keeper of the Nibelung treasure, which he curses when slain
by Siegfried.
Secondly, the flame-enveloped caste of the Amazon Queen of
Iceland, Brunhild.
Thirdly, the stylised, slightly degenerate, over-cultured world of
the kings ot Burgundy, already about to disintegrate. And finally the
world of the wild Asiatic hordes of the Huns, and their clash with the
world of the Burgundians (who changed their names to Nibelungen
after taking over the treasure).

76
Brunhild’s entourage is shown as less static than the world
ot the Burgundians. There is movement, a to-and-fro of
maidens as Günther performs the tasks in which he is
assisted by the invisible Siegfried (perceived by the
spectator through superimposition).
Both these worlds are contrasted to the fairytale idyll of
Siegfried’s magic forest. The highly stylised Burgundian
world is, however, softened by the appearance of
Siegfried: when the Nibelung treasure is being brought in
by carts, Siegfried leaps onto the piles to distribute jewelry
to the people, who no longer appear as anonymous faces,
but as individuals.
The stylisation of the Burgundian world is again
emphasised, however, when Siegfried and his vassal king
enter the Burgundian castle, riding in procession over the
drawbridge, and reaches its peak in the scene of Siegfried
and Günther swearing blood brotherhood, with Hagen
towering in the centre and the two royal brothers placed
symmetrically to either side; again, too, at the marriage,
where Seigfried and Kriemhild kneel with similar
symmetry.
The gathering for the hunt - remembered by Marcel
Carne in the hunt scene of Les Visiteurs du Soir - is
conceived with the earthy vitality of a medieval tapestry.
When the hunters take their rest, Lang ingeniously brings
the forest to life. The final idyllic images of this tragic song
shows Siegfried refreshing himself at the spring where
Hagen’s spear is to kill him. Then, one of the most
beautiful passages: shot from beneath, the high draw¬
bridge where earlier Seigfried’s vassals and their followers
in serried ranks had asked for entry, is again crowded -
with Siegfried’s funeral cortege. The same wind that a
moment before made the curtains of Knemhild’s chamber
flap menacingly now tears at the curly hair of the dead
hero, lit by a pale light, while Siegfried’s white horse rears
ominously.
The epilogue in the cathedral shows Siegfried’s bier
surrounded by candles. To the left is a dark figure, half
fallen to the ground; to the right, Kriemhild, still in white,
bends over before turning to tell a messenger to bring
Günther the news of the Queen of Burgund’s death. It is a
different Kriemhild from the gentle loving wife, who now
kneels at her husband’s bier. The static spatial conception is

77
already being broken by passion; we sense Kriemhild as
the avenging woman she is to become. Momentarily the
scene recalls that earlier scene in the cathedral, the light
pouring like a shimmering mantle through the rose
window as the closed ranks of the followers kneel in prayer
on both sides, and Kriemhild stands between her two
brothers.

The second part of Die Nibelungen, Kriemhilds Rache,

replaces static stylisation with dynamism, as nemesis drives
the action onwards, as the introduction of the Asiatic
elements destroy the monumental stillness of the heroic
epic, and as Kriemhild’s revenge acts upon all the other
characters like a violent maelstrom. In Germany at the
time the film appeared, critics seemed only to notice the
heroic, Teutonic elements of Siegfrieds Tod. This approach
tended to produce enthusiastic nationalist and ill-written
reviews like that in Filmwoche (No. 7, 1924) where a
positive fanatic maintained that Siegfried was by birth and
character ‘the most German of men', and thus anticipated
the ideology of Blut und Boden.
I am indebted to Wolfgang Klaue, director of the
Staatliches Filmarchiv of the DDR, for a remarkable
quotation from Friedrich Engels, who had a totally
different view of the Siegfried figure, stated long before
Lang’s film:

What can it be that moves us so forcefully about the legend of

Siegfried ?... It is the deep meaning given to his personality. Siegfried
is the representative of German youth. All those among us whose
hearts are still untamed by the oppressions of life know what this
means. We are all filled with the same thirst for action, the same
resistance against the conventional. . . in us, the eternal weighing up of
things, the philistine fear of quick action is something we hate with all
our soul . . . we would like to tear down the barricade of
circumspection.

(Marx-Engels: Uber Kunst und Literatur.

Berlin Ost, 1953)

Small wonder that this German him was the favourite

viewing ol Hitler and Goebbels, dark-complexioned men
who saw themselves as blonde heroes of a heroic race.
Lang and Thea von Harbou were conscious that a
Siegfried who betrays to Kriemhild a secret which he

78
should have kept is not entirely without weakness and
fault. It is significant of the growing nationalist feeling in
Germany that when they discussed this problem in a
magazine article, their ideas were not welcome; the
magazine itself did not survive its first number. The views
expressed then must have been similar to those stated by
Lang at Yale in 1966:

It is easy to be a hero when you make yourself invisible with the help
of the tarhelm. And though it may perhaps be forgivable that
Siegfried gets the Virgin Queen Brunhild into the connubial bed ofhis
weak King Günther of Burgund by trickery, it is quite unforgivable
that he cannot keep his mouth shut, and brags to his wife Kriemhild
about his deeds. The final destruction of the Nibelungen has its origins
in this bragging.

Such a realistic view of his hero hardly accords with

charges of racism in Lang’s portrait of the world of the
Huns.
Siegfried Kracauer alleged that Lang’s Alberich has
markedly Jewish features, and he reads into this a
deliberate gesture ofanti-semitism. In reality, Lang and his
make-up artist Otto Genath were simply influenced by the
grotesque character make-up used by the Russo-Jewish
Habimah ensemble that was currently visiting Berlin.
Alberich was played by Georg John, an actor Lang
regularly used; and the mask had to be a total disguise since
he also appeared as Mime and as one of the principal Huns,
Attila’s brother. It was also Genath who discovered how to
make Siegfried’s blond wig glitter appropriately (it was
finally achieved by adding blue streaks to the fair hair) and
who created Attila’s make-up, giving Klein-Rogge a bald
head and false chin.
For documentary accuracy Lang again consulted
Umlauff of the Hamburg Ethnographical Museum.
Umlauff supplied the barbaric Huns with native African
and Asiatic weapons, and dressed them in rags and furs
which were strapped to their bodies with leather thongs.
The shaggy, bow-legged forest inhabitant Mime is
contrasted to the blond Siegfried, and to the decadent and
stylised world of the Burgundians; but if anyone at Ufa
enjoyed the emphasis on racial differences, it was certainly
not Lang or Pommer, who simply followed the action ot
the saga.
The first premonition of a different world comes with

79
the scenes where the Huns are seen sitting in the bare
branches, spying out the arrival of Kriemhild, and
afterwards make off on their horses in a wild chase over the
hills and across the steppes. This scene illustrated how
generous Pommer was as a producer, even though this was
the inflation period, with prices soaring up throughout the
period of filming Siegfrieds Tod.
Before the sequence was filmed, Pommer asked Lang to
think again about whether the scene, involving 400 extras
and horses, was really essential. ‘It is going to be very
expensive and anyway we shall never be able to compete
with the Americans with crowd scenes. Let’s discuss it
again tomorrow.’
Next afternoon, Lang said : ‘I think that we do not need
the scene. Thea and I will think up something else.’
Whereupon Pommer answered: ‘I’ve done some
thinking too. I think we should shoot the scene as it was
originally planned.’
Forceful visual contrasts like that between the Huns,
crouched and winding along the ground like reptiles after
their prey and the Burgundian heroes, as well as with
Rüdiger and Dietrich von Bern, are helpful in clarifying
the pell-mell of battle; similarly, in Siegfrieds Tod, where
Lang dressed Kriemhild and her husband in white and
Hagen and Brunhild in black. Apart from the obvious
symbolism - good and evil, light and dark - it helps to
clarify the mise en scene: the whole becomes a kind of chess
board where black and white become formal adversaries.
In the course of their mortal battle, the Burgundian
heroes lose more and more the cold styhsation of the
culture they have left far behind. Even their companions-
in-arms become more individualized (as the anonymous
workers in Metropolis will acquire individual faces in the
course of their rising).
Attila’s tent, his royal palace with its cramped pro¬
portions, the mud floor, the animal skins on the walls: all
are in marked contrast to Kriemhild’s native castle.
Conscious of this difference, Attila drops his precious coat
before Kriemhild’s feet so that she may tread on it on her
path to the throne. Attila, God’s scourge, is more human
than the rigid Kriemhild. He honours the strangers until
Hagen, again the agent of nemesis, kills his beloved little
heir.

80
 Ruins, smoke and flames constitute the grand orches¬
tration ot the fall of the Nibelungs. Fortunately even here
there is no trace of Wagner, but something nearer the
austerity ol the ancient Nordic Edda sagas. The impact
Nibelungen made on Eisenstein is attested by whole
passages in Alexander Nevski, as well as by such details as
the helmets of the Teutonic knights, so like the angular
helmet of Rüdiger. The heroic stylisations of Ivan the
Terrible, too, are often reminiscent of Lang’s Die
Nibelungen.

81
Metropolis (1925-26): the design by Erich Kettelhut
6 Metropolis 1925-26

Die Nibelungen is a drama of the past; Metropolis is a

drama of the future, set around the year 2000; yet we feel
much more intensely in this film the twenties style, from
which we have not as yet been able to distance ourselves
sufficiently to understand its evolution and importance in
the documentation of an age.
It is of primary importance to recognise the positive
aspects of this film, for instance its grand prelude. In this
silent him, sound has been visualised with such intensity
that we seem to hear the pistons’ throb and the shrill sound
ol the factory siren with their radiating trumpet-like rays
of light. There is movement up and down, backwards,
forwards; the pistons are placed in three-dimensional
space, and are substantial in spite of the misty flood of light,
in spite of the superimposition to indicate them as
monumental symbols of labour. The wheels turning
within wheels and the thudding of the pistons constitute a
fusion of surrealist-expressionist vision with the tech¬
nological achievements of the avant-garde.
In the stylised world of the workers, everything is of an
equally intense visual force. The working class is portrayed
powerfully — slaves dressed in black, heads bent, anony¬
mous creatures of labour walking through vaulted
corridors, rhythmically keeping time like the Ex¬
pressionist revolutionary choirs, sharply outlined ranks in
which the individual no longer counts as a human being.
In the machine centre, they turn into hands on enormous
dials, jerkily executing their mysterious work to keep the
gigantic wheels moving. They are more machines than
human beings - more machine even than the robot that
struts towards the camera.
There is a transformation which echoes Pastrone’s

83
Metropolis: the underground meeting

Cabiria: in Freder’s eyes the machine centre is transformed I enjoyed it beyond my wildest
into the image of the God Moloch, with gaping mouth dreams.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
and gleaming eyes. A new shift of workers march into the
(quoted in Ray Lee: A
threatening maw on their way to the machines, in the same Pictorial History of
serried ranks. Hollywood Nudity)
There is an accident, viewed through a screen of smoke
The other day I saw the most
and the horrified eyes of Freder - all elegant in white silk -
Joolish film. I cannot believe it
who is frozen into an Expressionist diagonal as the dark would be possible to make a
figures bearing the casualties file past, shot against the more foolish one.
light. The scene immediately preceding this, with dark H. G. Wells, quoted in
figures glimpsed merely as silhouettes in the dusty air and Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 May
1927
hazy light of the machine room, is again of great visual
impact. The scene is presented without symbolism, with The narrative is trivial,
just that documentary approach which is Lang’s great bombastic, pedantic, of an
antiquated romanticism. But if
strength and which succeeds in counteracting the pom¬
we put before the story the
posity of much of the film. plastic photogenic basis of the
The scene in the catacomb where a crowd of dark film, then Metropolis will
figures with pale faces is contrasted with the white crosses come up to any standards, will

84
„ . . and Maria helping the children

overwhelm us as the most in the background, and the touching figure of the good
marvellous picture book Maria, is intensely dramatic. The telling of the parable of
imaginable. Imagine, then,
Babel, during which the images are lit from the corners
two antipodean elements held
and the interpolation is thus visually distinguished from
under the same sign, in the
zones of our sensibility. The the main story, is experienced as a powerful legend. Along
first of them, which we might streets resembling the tentacles of an octopus, thousands of
call pure-lyrical, is excellent; shaven-headed slaves drag the great square stones ot the
the other, the anecdotal or tower.
human, is ultimately irritating.
Light is allowed to pour in from all sides; the protesting
Luis Bunuel, in Gazeta
liter aria de Madrid, 1927
figures on the steps seem to be surrounded by an aura, their
tense bodies picked out in shining contours. The energy of
their will, pitted against the bright figure of The Chosen
One, is vividly sensed. The tower itself, inspired by
Breughel, is very effective.
Effective too is the chase in the catacombs, even though
the debutante Brigitte Helm as Maria goes off into strange
contortions that anticipate her robot Maria, when the
beams of Rothwang’s lantern reveal to her the horror of

85
her surroundings, with skeletons and skulls. As Rothwang,
Rudolph Klein-Rogge, in fact, is the only actor who
never overstates the ecstatic elements ot the film. His
nervous, transition-less gestures seem appropriate to a
magician. He is a seer, outside time and gripped by holy
madness. When we see him at work in his laboratory,
switching levers or creating flashes ol lightning while
bright vapours rise from his jars, we are far from the
grotesque laboratories of the old Frankenstein films. The
futurist fantasies are masterly, controlled, credible.
Lang’s vision of skyscrapers, an exaggerated dream ofthe
New York skyline, multiplied a thousandfold and divested
of all reality, is splendid. It has become truly the town of
the future, reaching up into the sky in luminous immensity
— quite unlike Godard’s cold Alphaville. Again it is the
encounter of Expressionism and Surrealism. Light and fog
mingle to produce an atmosphere of weightlessness, of
shimmering brightness. Towers soar with the pious thrust
of Gothic architecture; corridors and hanging streets link
them together prophetically, so that we hardly notice the
toy airships from a bygone age.
Freder’s fevered dreams are similarly expressionist-
surreal. When he runs to his father, with whom the false
Maria is coyly flirting, the wheels suddenly begin to rotate
around the ill-matched couple. Then Freder seems to be
falling through circulating shapes into an abyss; and finally
everything is turning about him - a visual effect which
would later be echoed in the fainting sequence in The Blue
Gardenia. Here real pandemonium should have begun; but
in the surviving versions only Freder, in his fevered
dreams, can see the woman who sits on the beast of the
apocalypse during the party. The statue of death with its
scythe, in the city cathedral, comes to life, with all the seven
deadly sins. Lang had originally planned much more
powerful visions of the evil forces loosed by the creation of
the robot, but he feared his audience would not have
followed him. As well as Freder’s visions, he wanted to
show demons let loose and death and the deadly sins walk
away from the cathedral, where they had been imprisoned
by the Catholic faith. Again, fantastic and documentary
realism were to have been mingled: the workers were to
have destroyed the freeways above the city, overturned
cars and set them on fire. The surviving versions of the

86
Metropolis: The Master, Rothwang and the Robot

film contain only the destruction of the machine centre.

The grimacing gargoyle figures were also supposed to
come to life and fly down from the cathedral, attracted by
the flames of the welding machines with which engineers
were mending the hanging streets. Perhaps this failure to
express, as intended, the mystical symbolism is the reason
why the sentimental symbolism favoured by Thea von
Harbou seems so embarrassing, striking a jarring note in an
otherwise grandiose vision of the world.
Among the other unrealised details is an intended,
characteristic von Harbou motif. Abel, the master of
Metropolis, and Rothwang once loved the same woman,
Hel, who became Freder’s mother. The curiously medi¬
aeval gabled house with the hex sign on its door was
intended to contain a gigantic head of Hel, rather like the
head of Althea in Pabst’s Die Herrin von Atlantis.
The excess of emotion, the abundance of stylised-

87
The crew on the set of Metropolis', during the flood scene (below)
symbolic ornamentalism - lor it is the symbolism that
counts — have to be judged by the standards of the age that
produced them, along with the exaggerated styles of post-
Secession design. People are gushingly sentimental and
noble, like the characters ol D’Annunzio novels; and this
extravagance should also perhaps be seen as the con¬
sequence ol, and the reaction after the unemotional war
years. It was common at the time to admire works that
now seem to us pure kitsch - for instance Stuck’s and some
ol Klinger’s pictures, that have a fatal Bocklmesque
tendency. ‘We were all effusive and sentimental in those
days’, Lang now recalls.
While Freder’s bedroom is designed with extravagant
arabesques, the office of the master of Metropolis
resembles in its sober simplicity Lang’s own study in the
twenties (and even now his house has no pictures and
hardly any decorations on the wall apart from some
African straw shields).
The kitsch reaches its extreme in the dance of the false
Maria, inspired by the expressive gymnastics of Mary
Wigman (and usually aggravated today by being shown at
sound speed), while Fröhlich’s make-up and playing are
typical of the conventional jeune premier of the period.
Yet as soon as Lang escapes from the arts and crafts
stylisation and the kitschy emotionalism and ‘sophisti¬
cation’, the ‘architect’ Lang takes over, triumphantly: the
workers’ sarabande in the destroyed centre; the dance
around the bonfire in front of the cathedral; most notably
the crowd that pushes forward in a wedge shape near the
cathedral; the children who form a pyramid around Maria
during the flood. The geometrical or architectural
structuring of bodies expresses a conception that has
nothing to do with emotional excess. This technique of
‘concentration’, while still semi-expressionist, is already
far on the road to the so-called ‘New Objectivity’. Lang
moreover complements the formal geometrical structures
with individual gestures and montage of actions, as when
Maria clings to the attic window, trying to break the
lattice, while Freder, hearing her, cries and hammers at the
gate, the double movement constituting a counterpoint.
Admirable, too, are the ‘documentary’ techniques used
for the flood-scenes, when the water spouting from the
destroyed tanks mingles with the steel structures in the

89
luminous mists, or when the surging flood nibbles at the
asphalt m front of the workers’ barracks, and begins its
gradual rise. Wherever the film concentrates on documen¬
tary and technological details, the private sentimentalism
of the story is supplanted by genuinely dramatic effect.
The ending of Metropolis is, however, overwhelmed by
the excess of emotionalism. Fulfilling the spirit of the good
Maria’s appeal to the mediator between the brain that does
the thinking and the hands which put the plan into action -
the heart - there is a superficial reconciliation between
capital and labour. First Heinrich George has to wipe his
sweaty yet honest hands, then put them back into his
pocket once more when he gets no response. Finally,
however, the good Freder grasps his father's hand and puts
it into that of the worthy foreman. Lang had intended a
quite different ending; Freder and Maria were to leave the
world and go by space-ship to another world - Metropolis
would have become a kind of prelude to Frau im Mond
(Woman in the Moon).
Even at the time, when people were still close to the
ecstatic mood of the preceding years, the film - parti¬
cularly the ending - was not received uncritically. Lang
himself now smiles about the notion of the mediator — a
kind of sentimentality far removed from the harsh social
criticism of his American films. In an article on Vienna, he
seems to attribute the ornamental tendencies, the playful
attention to detail, secondary episodes and symbolism to
the legacy of the imperial city’s convoluted baroque.
Lang has told me that what interested him most in
Metropolis was the conflict between the magical and occult
(the world of Rothwang) and modern technology (the
world of Herr Fredersen). In his care — out of deference to
the audience, not to go too deeply into the magical and
occult, he failed to fulfil his innermost intentions, which
may be why he feels that Metropolis is not stylistically
unified. In later years he would have had the courage of his
convictions - a fact which explains certain closely related
aspects of his Indian films.
For Thea von Harbou, however, the film’s importance
lay mainly in the ‘motto’ notion, which she clearly
declares in her book Metropolis (possibly written before or
during the shooting):

90
This book is a story based on the idea:
The mediator between brain and hand should be the heart’.

The old-fashioned emotionalism must not be allowed to

obscure the enormous technical achievement of the film.
In Dr Mabuse, when Wenck’s desk explodes, Lang first
shows the blast and then the flash of the explosion. For the
explosion in Metropolis, during the flood, Lang again
wanted to show first the blast and then the flash. To
achieve this he had the camera fixed on a kind of swing,
which first swung towards Freder — before whose eyes the
explosion is to be seen. During its forward movement,
Freder seems to be compressed against the wall; so that
when the camera swung back, the spectator seemed
actually to have experienced an explosion. What is
important is that at this time such effects, however much
we now take them for granted, had to be ‘invented’.
Eugen Schüfftan’s mirror process, for instance, the first
successful method of combining models with full-scale
scenes, gave Lang wonderful decorative possibilities in this
film. Shuftan (as he now spells his name) remembers that
the workers’ barrack-like houses were built up only half
way, and beyond that were ‘mirrored in’. Lang however
maintains that they were fully built, while the stadium of
the rich and the gigantic head of Hel were ‘mirrored in’ by
Schiifftan.
As with the Emperor of China’s letter, Lang again
helped himself to whatever tricks were necessary. Stop-
action shots of aeroplanes and cars on the freeways, filmed
in the old glasshouse studio, took six days to film, Lang
recalls, and barely lasted one minute in the finished film.
The scene in which Abel sees foreman George on a huge
television screen was something completely novel. Lang
believes it to have been the first time that back projection
was used, although he had tried something comparable in
The Spiders, when Lio Sha observes on a screen the people
gathered in the cellar.
Few critics have ever understood the film better than the
young Luis Bunuel, who wrote an exemplary review for a
Spanish journal in 1927. Metropolis, he concludes, ‘is two
films glued together by their bellies’. Already at that time
he distinguished between the contributions of Lang and
von Harbou, attributing to the writer the ‘dangerous
syncretism’. Yet he is full of admiration for the film’s great

9i
Hfmi

Metropolis: studio work for the shots of aeroplanes over and cars on the freeways
moments, the wheels within wheels, the throbbing
pistons, the skyscrapers and their transparent fountains of
light, in which ‘physics and chemistry are transformed into
rhythm’ and where there is ‘never a static moment’. When
he saw the film, the titles evidently also formed part of this
movement:

Even the titles which ascend and descend, twist round, dissolve into
light and shade, fuse with the general movement; they also burn into
images.

Bunuel makes a clear distinction between the ‘pure lyrical

element’ and the irritating anecdote:

From the photographic angle, its emotive force, its unheard-of and
overwhelming beauty is unequalled. It is of such a technical perfection
that it can stand a prolonged analysis without for an instant betraying
its model.

APPENDIX: Walter Schulze Mittendorf: THE ROBOT.

ITS BIRTH

problems of form? No!

Expressionism lived.
Technological form had been discovered as motif for
painting and sculpture.
Primary, in this case, was the question,
‘Which material?’
Thought - at first chased copper plate to have real metal.
That meant — searching for and finding a suitable chaser to
execute the work.
‘Complicated’, I thought - when Fritz Lang tried to
interest me in the work.
But which material really?
An accident helped us.
A workshop making architectural models gave us
decisive assistance unintentionally.
I went there because of another job.
My attention was drawn to a little cardboard box
labelled: ‘Plastic wood’ - ‘trade sample’ - a postal parcel.
This ‘trade sample’ - not interesting for the workshop -
was given to me. One trial brought the proof straightaway
- the material for our ‘machine creature’ had been found.
‘Plastic wood’ turned out to be a kneadable substance
made of wood, hardening quickly when exposed to the air
- allowing itself to be modelled like organic wood.

93
 Now it needed a procedure that was not very pleasant
for Brigitte Helm - namely the making ol a plaster cast of
her whole body.
Parts resembling a knight’s armour, cut out ol Hessian,
were covered with 2 millimetres of the substance, flattened
by means of a kitchen pastry roller.
This was then stuck on to the plaster Brigitte Helm, like
a shoemaker pulls leather over Ins block.
When the material had hardened, the parts were
polished - the contours cut out.
This was the rough mechanism of the ‘machine creature’
which made it possible for the actress to stand - to sit and to
walk.
The next procedure — furnishing it with detail - to create
a technological aesthetic.
Finally - cellon varnish mixed with silver bronze - and
applied with a spray gun - gave the whole its genuinely
metallic appearance which even seemed convincing when
looked at from close range.
The work took many weeks however. In those days,
films were carefully prepared - and thus the realisation of a
piece of work unusual for a film like this one was ensured.
In striking contrast to the present-day German film
industry!

94
 7 Spione (The Spy, 1926)

The mad Dr Mabuse, ‘a When The Spy was shown at the University of California
symbol, a metaphor of the (Riverside Extension) on 28 June 1967, Fritz Lang, in an
decaying morality and malaise
introductory talk, gave a vivid description of the Berlin
of postwar Germany’ shows at
least in one episode of his
twenties, the restlessness and despair which was to lead to
criminal career . . . something the Hitler regime:
like a human trait . . . Haghi,
Atter the defeat in World War I, and after the obligatory but senseless
the master spy, is nothing less
- because emotional - social upheaval, followed by the equally
than what we would call today
obligatory but much more successful counter-revolution by the
a human computer . . . Haghi
reactionary forces (because the counter-revolution was cold-bloodedly
has no human feelings
conceived and executed) Germany entered a period of unrest and
whatsoever. He has an utter
confusion, a period of hysteria, despair and unbridled vice, full
disregard for human beings.
of the excesses of an inflation-ridden country. I remember those
They are for him nothing but
times very clearly. I was shooting in those days of inflation in
chess men, which he moves
Neubabelsberg, where the Ufa studios were located, half an hour by
according to his mathematical
car from the capital of Berlin.
mind.
Fritz Lang: Introductory Money lost its value very rapidly. The workers received their money
speech to The Spy at the not weekly but daily, and even so when they arrived home after
University of California, working hours, shops were closed and the following morning their
28 June 1967 wives could hardly buy a couple of rolls or half a pound of potatoes for
a day’s work.
With Fritz Lang’s films it is
At the same time the nightclubs were in full swing, supported by the
never a question of being
easily earned money of uncaring war — and inflation; the profiteers,
fascinated by the incidents oj
who thought or knew they could buy anything and everything,
the ‘action’, but by the
including the starved and impoverished women of the former upper
‘succession of images’, the
and middle classes. In cellars and private flats obscure little night spots
impact of visual impression,
popped up nightly only to disappear two or three days later — as soon as
the consistency of visual
they became too well known to the general public and the police.
events’.
Friedrich Porges: Mein Film In these places the up-and-coming classes of the new rich could gamble
(123, 1928) Kritik zu Spione and the sky was the limit. Their rich and jaded wives visited them too,
morbidly looking for unequivocal invitations, vulgar and sordid as
An immense wealth of
they came - every sex deviation found fulfilment.
happenings is set in motion
already with the first picture. Crime prospered. From time to time some loner tried to stop this
There is so much that every witches’ sabbath. One morning there appeared wall posters through¬
individual event has to appear out Berlin showing a half-naked voluptuous woman in the arms of a

95
skeleton with the caption: ‘Berlin — you are dancing with Death'. But small, marginal, episodic in
who cared? After four years of war, Death had lost its terrors. itself. It is only much later
that one realises how all these
Religion? God? He had been sent to peddle his heavenly wares
distinct little episodes constitute
elsewhere.
in reality the precisely ftting
In such an atmosphere of‘And Devil take the hindmost’ there thrives wheels oj a super-sophisticated
the constant, ever-present yearning for the fantastic, the mysterious, plot.
the macabre, for the strangling terror of the dark. A. Kraszna-Krauss:
Filmtechnik (no 7, 31 March
During the first half of the twenties, the German film mirrored the
1928)
sombre, hopeless times and moods in equally sombre and foreboding
pictures. The inmates of the weird insane asylum and its sinister Fritz Lang has abandoned the
director in Dr Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Murnau’s deadly formalism andstylisation of his
vampire Nosferatu, or Wegener’s Golem could only be created in such Nibelungen and Metropolis
an era. films. He has returned to the
style of Dr Mabuse. He has
I myself joined these film makers with two characters: the master
made a film, a thrilling,
criminal Dr Mabuse the Gambler and the master spy Haghi in The Spy.
breathtaking adventure
Lang went on to speak about the story of The Spy: film . . . Fritz Lang has
moved more a>id more Jrom the
In my work I always used and still use real events, culled from the daily pictorial and visual to
papers. In both of my films that I mentioned before, the Dr Mabuse movement and incident.
films - four to be precise - and in The Spy, I got my first ideas from Herbert Ihermg: Berliner
newspaper clippings . . . Börsen-Courier (23 March
1928)
The incident on which The Spy was based was the so-called Arcos raid
m London towards the middle of the twenties. The Russian Trade
Delegation, Arcos - the word stands for All Russian Co-operative
Society - under suspicion of being an espionage centre, was raided by a
special branch of Scotland Yard. Therefore, as you will see, the
invented super-spy Haghi was played by the actor Klem-Rogge in the
make-up of the political master-mmd Trotsky.

The Spy, like Dr Mabuse, goes all out for suspense. Y et the
character of Mabuse has much more psychological depth
than Haghi, who is simply the criminal mastermind par
excellence. A woman like Cara Carozza might actually fall
in love with the demonic doctor; but Sonja - Gerda
Maurus - fears and hates Haghi, who has forced her to
work for him, ostensibly to give her a chance to revenge
herself for her father and brother. Finally Haghi must
replace her with the indifferent Kitty (Lien Dyers) whose
avarice may safely be relied on.
Again, as in the first Mabuse film, Lang achieves the
polished technique of the adventure film in which all the
links interlock, one event calling forth and precipitating
the next by an association of ideas; the same use of ellipsis
to accelerate the action; the same mathematical logic. The
only retarding element again is the sentimentalism of a pair

96
of lovers, the contribution of von Harbou - strongly
contrasted to the effective episode between Kitty and the
Japanese diplomat (convincingly played by Lupu Pick) in
which the relationship is based not on love but on cool
calculation.
The opening of the film is fascinating for its effortless
assembly of exciting events and minor details dashed on
the screen like vivid brush strokes. Incidents are just
hinted, but never too rapidly, and always logically linked.
The theft of a secret document echoes the first Mabuse
film: mysterious hands open a safe; policemen shout
(silently!) into telephones. The close-up of a motor-cyclist,
looking like some gigantic spider in the grotesque fore¬
shortening later to be used in M for the celebrated close-up
of Inspector Lohmann, is not ornamentally conceived, but
an organic development of the action. Lang explains that
this exciting evocation of speed was achieved by suspend¬
ing the motor-cycle on a wooden post and producing dust

97
clouds with a wind machine.
Lang is already a master of suspense. A man calls out that
he knows who is at the centre of all the terrorist activities
when there is a shot from outside the window, killing him
before he can speak the name. Yet Lang allows this secret
to be revealed to the audience. Another shot shows
Haghi’s back, and lined up before him the emissaries who
will report to him. Lang, confident that the knowledge
does not affect the suspense of the film, will proceed in the
same way in M and The Last Will oj Dr Mabuse. In The Spy
he reveals the man-behind-the-scenes after a title; in the
sound films after a spoken question.
Without prejudicing the suspense, the methods of the
spies are methodically revealed. A post office; and a
mysterious figure removes all the pencils and breaks all the
pens, so that Tremaine will be forced to use a particular
desk on which to write his coded telegram. The moment
Tremaine leaves the office, Haghi’s man appears and pulls
out a carbon copy from beneath the blotting paper. Again,
the spies are shown operating from inside the security
police: Tremaine is photographed by a police employee
with a button-hole camera, as he enters the office disguised
as a tramp.
In these scenes Lang’s humour is always in evidence.
Fritz Rasp, an elegant Rastaquere in waxed moustache,
collects a poste restante letter by means of a complicated
logarithmic trick, leaving the amazed detective with a
piece of paper left blank by vanishing ink. In the cut
versions available today Rasp appears merely as an
amusing episodic figure. In fact the character was based on
the real-life case of the Austrian Colonel-General Redl,
who betrayed his country’s secrets, and whose tragic story
was recorded by Egon Erwin Kisch. Lang was fascinated
by the story, and in the original version of The Spy it was
developed right up to his suicide, at the advice of the
general staff (which provided the revolver) to save him
from public disgrace.
Even apparently episodic sequences, however, are never
irrelevant or unimportant; everything is interconnected.
Lang often uses important actors in small roles, since there
are really no minor parts as far as he is concerned. Even the
little post-office clerk in all his comic self-importance, is
developed as a vigorous character. Lang devotes the same

98
Spione: Fritz Rasp - an elegant Rastaquere
99
Spione: Lien Deyers as Kitty
care to the tics and idiosyncracies of his main characters,
tor instance Haghi’s habit of pulling his upper lip, lost in
thought, as he dictates to Sonja the letter from Tremaine;
or the security inspector’s way of scratching his nose, or
gasping for breath with his fish mouth. Small details
support the illusion of reality.
Lang enjoys the use of visual parallels. For Tremaine,
disguised as a tramp, has left a dark smudge from his dirty
hand on the light-coloured chair of the hotel. The next
shot shows the hand of the beautiful Sonja, pointing a
revolver at the unseen emissary of Haghi, as if threatening
him. Again, Dr Masimoto (Lupu Pick) strokes Tremaine’s
hand, in sympathy because he is getting blind drunk in a
pub after losing the beautiful girl-spy. In the next shot
Sonja, captured by ITaghi, lovingly stroke a picture of
Tremaine secretly taken by a Haghi spy. And this shot of
Sonja, in evening dress and filmed at an oblique angle, is
directly followed by a shot of Kitty (Lien Dyers) in a
similar pose and also in evening dress, lounging on Haghi’s
desk. Such parallelism is not only decorative but a means of
speeding up the movement of the film. It can be ironic too
as when Masimoto no sooner warns Tremaine against the
beautiful girl-spy than he falls victim to another.
The realist surface, the precise documentation of the
incidents in Haghi’s labyrinthine spy centre are suddenly
contrasted with a dream image, when Lupu Pick, betrayed
by Kitty and about to commit harakiri, seems to recognise
the emissaries with their bloodstained document, who have
gone to their deaths for him: the contours and images are
blurred and smudged in Expressionist style, by the spectral
lighting.
At once the film returns to documentary realism with
the train crash, produced by the machinations of Haghi.
This was the first film made by Fritz Lang’s own company,
for distribution by Ufa, and Lang was obliged to
economise wherever possible. The train crash was
‘filmically’ simulated without an engine, which would
have been too costly. Hence the scene was shot at night and
in a tunnel. Spotlights were fixed in pairs on a moveable
framework to look like the lights of an engine and were
quickly moved forward to produce the impression of an
approaching engine. Another technical trick was turned to
gripping visual effect:

ioi
Spione: elements of documentary and impact

I had not yet found the artistic shape fitting the event, the impact of the
catastrophe, the mood of those last seconds.

So he showed in the gleam of the approaching spotlights

the frightened and horrified face of a passenger who is
conscious of the danger and the imminence of death. The
scene was completed with clouds of steam, splintering
glass and broken fragments of metal thrown before the
camera. Economy proved a stimulus to Lang’s invention.
Even more than Frau im Mond, Spione indicates the
imminence of the sound film. To save titles Lang
sometimes has Tremaine’s servant explain events to his
master by gestures very different from the sign language
used by Haghi to communicate with the deaf-and-dumb
nurse who is, perhaps his mother (and is perhaps not deaf
and dumb, but another deliberate deception like the
apparently lame man). Superimposition is used with
characteristic expressiveness. Sonja notices a paper on
Haghi’s desk, inscribed ‘Europa Express 33-133’. When

102
103
her train stops at a station she sees her lost lover in a
sleeping compartment on the train travelling in the
opposite direction; and when his train begins to move she
notices the number: ‘33-133’. As her train moves off, Lang
shows how the numbers are hammered into her mind:
wheels seen in close-up, rolling on and on, with the
ominous numbers superimposed. We seem almost to hear
the sound of the thundering wheels. Sonja reacts, too,
almost as does Peter Lorre in the sound film M, when he
presses his hands over his ears to shut out the Grieg music
he hears in the garden-terrace of the little cafe. From the
wheels Lang makes a transition to the undercarriage of
Tremaine’s compartment and to the act of sabotage, as
Haghi’s man disconnects the wagon in the tunnel.
The pursuit of the culprit along country roads is a direct
anticipation of The Last Will of Dr Mabuse, with the trees
turning into blurs; while Lang deliberately uses echoes of
Spiders, in the scene where Tremaine, searching for the
hostage Sonja, explores the walls of the Haghi bank with
his hands.
The Spy is accented by Lang’s interest in the play of
light and shade. As Sonja and Tremaine’s chauffeur-
manservant, tied to chairs, try to break loose in the gaseous
tumes, and when a Haghi man is wrestling with
Tremaine’s servant, they cast gigantic shadows on the
wall. Occasionally shadows precede the event in menac¬
ing anticipation - a typically German cinematic effect used
by Lang as a means of heightening suspense. Again, in the
scene where the spies are arrested when emerging from a
sewer, or in the great staircase in Haghi’s bank, elements
that are at once functional and organic to the narrative, and
pictorially ornamental, reinforce the documentary and
adventure elements in Lang’s film.
Cinemagazine of 17 February 1928 gives a ‘studio report’
by Robert Spa about the filming of The Spy. Lang, he says,
was working in a studio four times as large as a French
studio; and the reporter was struck by the silence, unusual
in the filming of silent films:

Short orders are given with a firm voice

Wagner the cameraman explains that they are shooting an explosion.

(The scene where the wall is demolished in order to break into the headquarters
of the spy ring.)

104
The studio visitor is ‘blinded by the lights’; apparently they are using
eight cameras. (In fact Lang now says he never used more than two cameras
in those days.) A nurse stands by with a first aid kit. The wall collapses.

Lang shouts: ‘Once more. Rebuild the wall!’

Lang takes Spa to see the previous day’s rushes - the

shadow sequence of Gerda Maurus tied to her chair — and
explains that it is ‘only a small film compared to Metropolis,
but a him full of action’. The reporter mentions the
tremendous uninterrupted work. They snatch ten minutes
for a meal, working from nine in the morning till eleven at
night. Everybody survives on sandwiches and a little fruit.
The electricians and machinists are working three shifts.

Lang sees everything, makes everything himself, supervises the make¬

up of actresses (actors do not use make-up). He controls all the details
of the costumes, furniture and props; he is ‘infallible’.

105
8 Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon,
1928)

Woman in the Moon cannot be easily dismissed as a Thinking back, 1 realised to

modernist re-hash of Melies’ 1902 Voyage dans la Lune. my own surprise that it (the
count-down) had first been
Lang anticipated everything. Because of his concern for
used in the film Frau im
documentary precision, he consulted experts: two rocket
Mond. This was a silent
specialists, Hermann Obert and Willy Ley were his movie, and at one point the
advisers. It was to increase the suspense of the count-down words ‘ten seconds to go’
that he invented the notion of counting down from 6 to 1 flashed on the screen, followed
instead of ending on the higher number. by the numbers, ‘6-5-4-3-2-1-
o-FIRE' Knowing that Fritz
Lang’s primary interest was in the rocket sequence, and
Lang had been in the Austrian
it is justifiable to assert that a passage in Deutsche Army in the First World
Filmzeitung signed by him was certainly by a public War, I asked him whether he
relations man or by Thea von Harbou: had adapted some military
practice which used a count¬
Four men, a woman and a child - a handful of people brought together
down. He replied that he had
by fate. Speeding in a never-before seen vehicle, the space ship, to a
thought it up for dramatic
never-before entered spot, the infinite loneliness of the moon, they
purposes when working on the
remain yet tied to their fates, to the law of their blood, their passions,
film; on a proving ground
their happiness and their tragedy. To bring this out was my dream.
nobody would possibly think
This has the same tone about it as von Harbou’s summing- of that side effect!
up: Willey Ley: Rockets,
Missiles and Men in Space
Incomparable opportunity of planting the destinies of human beings
onto the flower gardens of the stars, to let them come to a fateful Especially noteworthy were
flowering in a new world and - watch them perish, experience their the remarkable, realistic
smiles and their tears in face of the immense size of the world as studio-made sets and such
something even bigger . . . scenes as the rocket’s
departure, scenes inside the
Lang rightly points out that much of this kind of rocket, during its flight, and
emotionalism has to be seen as a necessary concomitant of the wonderful luminosity of
the silent film with its need to replace words by facial the lunar landscape.
expression, mime, gesture and posture. A sequence now Paul Rotha: The Film Till
Now
missing from surviving copies illustrates this: in the space
ship Gerda Maurus, wishing to express sympathy with her
fiance who lies in the next room, puts her hand to her heart
and her mouth to send him kisses.

106
 Frau im Mond (1928)

Another element missing from present-day copies of the

film is all those sequences involving men in black leather
jackets, who attempt to steal the plans of the space ship;
and it is possible that they have been recently cut from the
original negative now held by an Eastern European
archive, on the assumption that these men in black leather
were intended as spies from an Eastern power. The loss
includes the introductory sequence of the thelt which
Deutsche Filmzeitung (no 42, 1929) described as having ‘an
almost unreal stylised shape in its fast-moving actions’; and
certainly deprives whole sections of the him ol their
intended rhythm. The five ‘brains’, with their cheques -
the five financiers — remain; and since they are such useful
representatives of capitalism this may be further indication
of recent censorship.
Lang, as always, understands how to add poetry to the
technological documentary, to create vivid imagery.
When the space ship is brought out of the hangar, it is lit up

107
Frau im Mond: working on the moonscape

by enormous spotlights, whose beams cross in the evening

light, to appear like rhomboid figures of light floating in
the air. In this light, the moon rocket acquires a strange life
of its own. While remaining quite concrete, the technical
process is in this way transformed into an optical dream of
prophetic quality.
Perhaps the ‘luminous’ moonscapes too should be seen
as optical dreams, rather than as studio sets. Stills of work
in progress show how bleached sand was poured over
the studio floor, with mountains piled up in the grounds.
Inevitably however the most effective features were caves
and grottoes, packed with mystery, and the lava soil from
which steam rises and bubbles burst.
Originally it was intended that the mad professor
should find the gold statuary of a pre-terrestrial culture on
the moon; and the rock to which he clings ecstatically still
shows some traces of a figurative form. In this cave, too,
the professor was to have seen a free-floating crystal ball,

108
Frau im Mond: working inside the rocket

representing our earth and created many thousands of

years ago by the first human beings from Atlantis. When
they landed on the moon and discovered that they could
not return, this was a wish and a dream of nostalgia, a
symbol that they worshipped. Like the pandemonium
sequences in Metropolis, Lang scrapped these optical
parables in deference to the realistic temperament of
German audiences.
The film lacks the sustained suspense of The Spy. Its most
memorable aspects are the photo-reportage ol the launch
of the rocket, with the clever deployment of the moments
of tension, superb orchestration ot light and shade,
magisterial handling of an immense crowd. (For one shot
of the wheeling out of the rocket, the waiting crowd is
seen at a very great distance. In this scene, according to
Lang, the people were nothing but pins with large glass
heads.)
On the night of the premiere a postal rocket was to be

109
sent off. The attempt, undertaken rather unwillingly by
Oberth, failed dismally: in those days rockets were even
less predictable than now. The launching ol the rocket in
the film however was so authentic in all its technical
details, as were the drawings, still valid today, on which
the trajectory from the earth to the moon was mapped,
that the Nazis withdrew the film from distribution. Even
the model of the space ship was destroyed by the Gestapo,
on account of the imminence of the VI and V2 rockets on
which Wernher von Braun was working from 1937
onwards. (Willy Ley had escaped to the United States,
while Oberth had become a Nazi.)

110
 9 M (1931)

For murder, though it have no

tongue, will speak with most
miraculous organ. This film was originally to have been called Mörder unter
Shakespeare: Hamlet, uns (Murderers amongst us). When Lang tried to hire the
Act II, Scene 2
Staaken Zeppelinhalle, which had been converted to a film
Gradually, and at times studio, to shoot his crowd scenes, he was unexpectedly
reluctantly, I have come to the turned down: Lang himself ought to know the reason
conclusion that every human why, said the studio manager. Astonished, Lang asked
mind harbours a latent
why he should not make a film about a sex murderer?
compulsion to murder . . .
Fritz Lang, quoted in Los
Ah, well; if it was a film about a sex murderer, Lang
Angeles Herald Express, 12 could have the studio, came the answer. Lang understood
August 1947 this when, in the heat of negotiations he seized the

I have tried to approach the

manager’s lapel and discovered the Nazi badge on its
murderer imaginatively to reverse. The Nazis had taken the original title to refer to
show him as a human being them.
possessed of some demon that In a 1947 article, ‘Why I am interested in Murder’, Lang
has driven him beyond the explained how he came to film M (about child murder),
ordinary borderlines of human
Fury (the internal stresses of an intending murderer),
behaviour, and not the least
part of whose tragedy is that Woman in the Window (the tell-tale fears of a successful
by murder he never resolves killer), and not least, Secret Beyond the Door:
his conflicts.
If I were the only producer to be making murder films or if my interest
Fritz Lang: Why I am
in murder were abnormal or unique there would be no point in
interested in murder. New
pursuing the question publicly, but the fact is that millions of people,
York, 1947
of peaceable, law-abiding American citizens are fascinated by murder.
Lang’s camera seldom shows Why else . . . would the newspapers devote capitals three inches high
any prejudice, whether and millions of words to print the gory details ... r It seems there is a
viewing the police, the latent fascination in murder, that the word arouses a tangle of
underworld, the populace or submerged and suppressed emotion. Shall I ask, why are we interested
the child murderer . . . and in murder? First of all, a murder story, whether it is a work of fiction
because of this impartiality, or an actual murder case reported in the newspapers ... is a puzzle
Lang’s picture is almost against which to match the sharpness of the mind.
mathematical in structure.
Yet this, he says, is only the fringe of the matter. The
Joseph FLmson: Fritz
criminal has brutally outraged a well-established code of
Lang’s M, in Daily Bruin,
UCLA, Los Angeles, society. First we are ‘horrified and disgusted’. Thus our
7 November 1969 ‘emotions have got involved’, we are concerned about the

111
‘sanctity of human life’; it is a matter of the ‘self-
preservation of society’. Then follows a typical Lang idea,
expressed again and again in his films: we begin to feel
something like sympathy in the strict sense of the word;
and Lang quotes his favourite Sanskrit saying, Tat Warn
Asi - ‘there, but by the grace of God, stand L. Lang again
and again reverts to the idea that ‘Any one of us might turn
a murderer in certain circumstances’.
Has personal experience given Lang this understanding ?
His first wife committed suicide after she found Thea von
Harbou, who was working with him on a screenplay, in
Lang’s arms; and Lang was at first suspected of murder.
For the first time he learned how ‘unstable’ circumstances
and reasons for suspicion can be; and because of this he
began his longstanding habit of noting down every event
of his day. A fat diary records every event of his day, every
telephone call, every visit, even the menu of his meals.
Without writing everything down carefully in this way,
he believes, it is impossible to remember a few days later
what happened on any particular day.
At the same time, Lang looks for an ‘explanation of
human behaviour’, particularly when sex is involved in it:

Nevertheless, though civilization may have tamed us and curbed our

destructive desires in the interests of society at large, there is enough in
most of us of the wild, uninhibited creature to identify ourselves
momentarily with the outlaw who defies society and exults in cruelty.
The desire to hurt, the desire to kill ... is closely joined to the sexual
urge, under whose dictate no man acts reasonably.

This feeling explains the sympathy, or rather the empathy

that we feel when Peter Lorre calls out to the gangster
court:

But can I. . . can I help it ? Haven’t I got this curse inside me ? The fire ?
The voice? The pain?

Again,. . . again and again I have to walk the streets. And I always feel
that somebody is following me. ... It is I myself. . . . Following.
Me . . .

(This monologue of despair was, on Lang’s testimony,

written without his help by Thea von Harbou; and
excuses many of her faults of taste in other screenplays.)
Here also we have the explanation of why Lang allows
the police to come in, and why he leaves an open ending
after the verdict, ‘in the name of the people’. ‘The pictures

112
 argue , he says simply, ‘for a democratic procedure’.
He likes to quote the devil in Lessing’s Faust who
answers, when asked how fast he moves, ‘as fast as the
transition from good to evil — that’s me’. In his interview
with Gero Gandert Lang goes even further, when he says
that guilt and innocence are in reality one and the same
thmg. He is interested in man as such, and in the motives
behind his actions - ‘what makes him tick’. . . . ‘And I
always feel that somebody is following me ... It is I
myself. . . .’

The murderer in M is an inconspicuous man, a man in

the street who has to be marked with the chalk sign ‘M’ on
his shoulder in order that he may be recognised. He is not
even a Hoffmann ‘demonic citizen’; Lorre rightly invests
him with a certain amiability as well as a trace of retarded
development. Lang’s murderer, it must constantly be
stressed, is based neither on Haarmann nor on Kürten.,
who had not yet been convicted when the film was made.
In those restless times after the end of the war and the
abortive attempts at revolution, the mad investment and
the vast unemployment that were to give Hitler his
opportunity, there was - what else could be expected? - a
crop of mass murderers. In his talk to the students of the
* In this light it is
unfortunate that Lang was Riverside Campus of the University of California, Lang
unable to make the film he gave the vivid picture of the period already quoted, in
had planned before Fury - explanation of the background of Spies.
The Man Behind You. This In his Why I am Interested in Murder article, Lang
was to have dealt with the
mentions ‘the sadistic practices in primitive tribes before
problem of the Jekyll-and-
the sexual act’, calls cannibalism ‘the desire to possess the
Hyde double nature of
man. The problem of the body of another person’; tells of an attorney who had said
doppelg'anger - which jokingly, ‘everybody is a potential murderer’ and admits
underlies many German that he himself enjoys reading the obituary pages. For
films, from Mack Mack’s most people, he concludes, reading about murder in the
Der Andere to the three
newspapers or detective fiction is a ‘sufficient outlet for
versions of Der Student von
Prag - was one of the great
their atavistic desires’. There is significantly less interest in
themes of German bank robbers or burglars. Murder is a dramatic event;
romanticism, and occupied ‘death makes a climax, death speaks the last line’:
Lang again and again. Lang
was, as he admitted in a
television interview with Murder springs from the dark places of the human heart; it is born of
Godard, after all, in a urges and desires whose fulfilment, as long years of civilisation have
certain sense a romantic shown us, leads us to unhappiness and further frustrations. This is the
himself. tragedy of the murderer himself.*
The documentary element in M
Lang told Gero Gandert: ‘I am a more than attentive
newspaper reader. I read more than just one country s
newspapers, and especially try to read between the lines.
Even when his sight was failing, Lang still went through
an enormous pile ol newspapers daily — and particularly on
Sundays. He was accustomed almost to eat newsprint,
which pours into his house from every part oi the world.

Whenever I have started to believe in an idea and to become obsessed

by it, I do a lot of research on it. I want to know as much as possible
about every little detail (nothing is really a little detail) down to the
minutest aspects.

He told Gandert, as he had described in his article ‘Some

Random Notes About M\ how he sought advice from the
criminal police at the Alex (the nickname given to Berlin
police headquarters, at the Alexanderplatz) and was told
about their techniques of investigation, and given access to
the department’s records and memoranda. He talked also
to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, and, not least, to
characters from the ‘milieu’, some of whom he later used
as extras in the film, notably for the scene of the gangsters’
court.
Interviewing Lang, Gero Gandert suggested that the
sequences of the beggars’ exchange are ‘romantic ele¬
ments’; but Lang explains that they are based on fact. A
beggars’ exchange, based on a sandwich currency, really
did exist in Berlin, and a crime magazine of the period
published articles and pictures about it. Moreover in his
article ‘Some Random Notes on M’ he states that he had
seen notices in which the gangster organisation offered
their aid to the police. In recent times there has been a case
similar to Lang’s notion: Dutch gangster organisations,
the press reported, offered to help the police in their fight
against the Provos, the rebellious ‘fils a papa’, their motive
being that they could not pursue their ‘trade’ in peace
because of continued police raids. One might also compare
the report in France Soir of i December 1967, that during
the trial of the child murderer Jürgen Barsch, at
Gelsenkirchen, a group of upright citizens formed a secret
action group, called ‘Operation Nemesis’ to punish sexual
crimes by death or castration, to make up for the abolition
of capital punishment in Germany. (It is interesting that

114
M (1931): one of the designs by Eric Hasler
the news report actually mentions M.)
The documentary element that is of decisive importance
in this film is achieved not by shooting in actual streets.
The camerawork itself is designed to produce the
impression that newsreel material has been used - in the
shots of the police raids in the allotment gardens; even in
scenes where the pictorial composition is emphasised - the
singing children and the old organ grinder, or the street
where the murderer is confronted by the gang of beggars,
filmed from above. Unlike Herlth or Röhrig, Emil Hesler,
Lang’s designer here, does not seek effects of light and
shade; and his cool, precise manner makes for the realism
which Lang required.

Ornamental romanticism or realistic detail?

The resemblances between the beggars’ organisation in M
and that in Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper have often been
stressed. Lang does not deny the influence of Brecht upon
every intellectual of the period:

Did Brecht influence me? Of course he did. Nobody who tried to

come to grips with the time could escape his influence. ... We
develop only with the help of influences received from outside.
(Interview with Gero Gandert)

The documentary and the ornamental are indivisible: in

the shot of the yard of the flats, seen from above with the
circle of children and the miserable row of dustbins, a
social indictment of the poverty and lack of sanitation; in
the street, also shot from above, with the beggars pitting
themselves against the murderer. The celebrated shot of
Inspector Lohmann in his office, filmed from above and
angled to show up his great belly, and make him look like
some enormous toad in the foreshortened perspective, has
been assumed to be ‘ornamental’ in purpose. Yet no shot in
Lang is only playful or gratuitous; his compositions always
reveal something - here it is Lohmann’s earthy vitality.
Lang’s love of detail, of human traits, always contri¬
butes to the characterisation: for instance when Lohmann,
being told that the child murderer is captured, rushes to
put his head under the tap; or again, where he corrects a
spelling mistake and underlines a couple of words in the
report he is reading, revealing his punctiliousness in
matters of procedure at the same time as it emphasises a
 clue. (The words underlined are ‘alter Holztisch’: the idea
ol an old wooden table will lead to the discovery of Lorre’s
rough windowsill.)
When Lang shows a shop window (as he was often later
to do in his American films) it is not only for the sake of
composition that he shows the objects arranged in it.
When the murderer looks into the window of the
hardware shop, his face seems to be framed in the light
reflecting off sharp knives. This is a portent as well as a
symbol. Next he makes the figure of a little girl appear -
quite logically - in the same frame; and we see Lorre react
to her, wiping his mouth with his hand, his already
bulging eyes almost starting out of his head, his breathing
growing faster.
Later Lang shows us the window of a shop selling art
books: an arrow moving up and down on a spring, a
rotating, infinite spiral, is designed to attract the passers-
by. For the murderer and the spectator too this latently
symbolic decoration assumes a positive sexual meaning.
Other considerations account for the shadow sequence
in the scene of the gangsters’ council. Deliberately, an
abstract, anonymous image is created at the climax of the
council’s discussion, when Schränker proposes that they
shall use the beggars. As when the shadow of the murderer
falls on the police poster, and then bends over to his next
victim, the sound introduces a new element. A scene like
this is not intended to be purely ornamental; its effect is
enormously gripping, like the other scene in which the
black-gloved right hand of Schränker is seen in close-up,
hovering like a menace over the town map.

Sound as a dramatic factor

In his first talking picture, Fritz Lang uses sound with
astonishing mastery and maturity. Sound is a central
dramatic element, never additional or accidental, never an
afterthought, but the counterpoint and supplement of the
image. The ‘overlapping’ of sound which Lang was to use
so expressively in The Last Will of Dr Mabuse is a material
and organic part of the whole, and employed very
deliberately. It gives the film speed, and strengthens,
rather than blurs the pictorial montage, emphasising its
essential structure.
After the murder of Little Elsie, a crowd gathers about a
M: . . . little children playing in the courtyard
 new police poster, and since the farthest off cannot see it,
they ask tor it to be read out. Someone begins to read:
‘Once again it has to be stated emphatically . . And the
reading is continued — . . that it is the most sacred duty of
every mother and lather . . - by a gentleman reading
his newspaper in a club restaurant. The cut from one
trame to the next is thus bridged, yet by changing the
location and at the same time showing a common factor
between the two scenes, the action is speeded up by the
ellipsis, while we have been made to understand that
everyone is equally alerted to the horror of the murder.
The same movement is continued: the bald man at dinner
in the club who is suspected by a drinking companion of an
interest in little girls, cries ‘Insult! Slander!’ and his words
lead into the next sequence where in the midst of a raid
provoked by an anonymous denunciation, the accused
man shouts ‘Slander!’ So Lang reveals how the psychosis is
spreading.
During the police raid the criminal inspector (who will
later contribute to the discovery of the murderer; no detail
is wasted in Lang) states, ‘Every person in the street . . .’
and while his voice continues, ‘. . . could be the culprit’,
we are shown one of these persons in the street, a little man
with spectacles and bulging eyes and a bowler hat, who
stands under a street lamp and is approached by a little girl
on a scooter who asks him the time. Imprudently the man
asks her where she lives, and a bystander asks fiercely,
Im

‘What do you want from the little girl’. A pickpocket who

has just been arrested by a policeman on the upper deck of
a bus takes up the cry: ‘Better catch the child murderer’,
whereupon the crowd, hearing the ominous word and
seeing the arrested man gets out of hand.
This ‘better catch the child murderer’ cleverly prepares
the way for the future idea that it will be the gangsters who
catch him, because the outsider interferes with their trade.
A similar piece of anticipation is the scene where the bar
proprietress tells the police inspector: ‘They’re all curious
about the fellow who is responsible for all the raids.
Particularly the girls. They may be whores, but there’s a
bit of mother in every one of them’; and later, ‘I know a lot
of rowdies who get wet eyes when they see little children
playing in the streets.’
Sound may be carried over more simply. The news-

119
M: the weary atmosphere of the police headquarters

vendor calls out the headline, ‘Who . . .

. is the murderer’; and the murderer whom we have
so far seen only as a shadow on the ‘Wanted’ poster, or as a
silhouette, seen from the rear with the balloon-vendor, is
seen at his window-sill, writing his letter to the news¬
papers.
The overlapping of sound in this way is perhaps most
intensely dramatic when Schränker says, during the
discussion by the ring organisation, ‘I request . . .’ and
makes a gesture which is completed by the president of the
police, along with the half-finished sentence ‘. . . your
opinions, gentlemen’, during the discussion at police
headquarters.
As with sound and content, counterpoint is also applied
to atmosphere. The light from the lamp on the round table
at which the gangsters sit, barely penetrates the thick
smoke; and around the long conference table at police
headquarters too the smoke becomes thicker and thicker,

120
as the two conferences drag on. As the discussions grow
more heated, both groups disintegrate. The gentlemen at
police headquarters have got up leaving most of their seats
empty as they walk about or stand about in the back¬
ground, deep in thought. There is a similar depletion of
the gangster table; only Schränker and the pickpocket
remain seated.
One word, one sentence can be the trigger for a
new scene, without necessarily overlapping directly. As
Schränker says ‘The beggars; the organisation ... of
beggars’, we cut to the beggars’ exchange. This cor¬
responds also to the ‘illustrated’ telephone conversation
between the minister and the president of police, in which
each measure which has been taken is directly illustrated
by a still as the president refers to it. When the president
mentions the little crushed paper bag which was found, we
see the way in which all the sweet shops within a given
radius are investigated.
It is notable that the more the drama of the action itself
develops, the less Lang has recourse to the device of
overlapping. He reverts to it however when the forgotten
burglar is caught, and creeps out of his hole grumbling,
‘and this time I was really innocent . . the sentence being
continued in the next shot in the inspector’s office, ‘. . . like
a new-born babe’; and again when the inspector says
meaningfully, ‘One of the . . . guards’, suggesting that the
guard might have been killed. At the word ‘guards’ we
are shown the honest guard with an enormous plate of
black pudding and sauerkraut, taking swigs of Berliner
Weisse - a picture of healthy appetite and vitality (another
instance of Lang’s regular practice of introducing comedy
on the Shakespearean principle of‘Enter the bear’).
Much earlier, at the beginning of the film in fact, the
cuckoo clock in Frau Beckmann’s flat strikes midday,
followed by the clock on the tower. Frau Beckmann -
whose life consists of washing laundry, standing at her tub
- brushes the suds from her hands to begin to make Elsie’s
dinner. Dramatic irony: in front of the school gates, a
kindly policeman stops the traffic to let Elsie cross the
street. The unsuspecting child throws her ball against the
police poster on the advertising column, just as the shadow
of a man in profile falls on it from the right. The voice of
the invisible murderer invades the picture, dominates it,

121
M: the search for clues to the murderer

almost painfully: ‘You have got a beautiful ball’. The

shadow inclines more: ‘What’s your name?' ‘Elsie
Beckmann’. So simply is the encounter of murderer and
victim presented.
The next shot shows Frau Beckmann slicing left-over
potatoes into the soup. Hearing two little girls tripping up
the stairs, she asks them if Elsie is with them. In the next
shot the blind hawker sells Elsie a balloon, while the
murderer whistles a few bars from Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of
the Mountain King’, which is to be a sinister leitmotif all
through the film, and eventually leads to his discovery.
The blind man hears the child say ‘Thank you’.
As Frau Beckmann is putting the soup in the oven to
keep warm, the doorbell rings; someone is bringing her
the latest instalment of a serial novel. This messenger has
not seen Elsie either. The cuckoo clock shows 1.15; and
stikes once. The mother leans over the balustrade of the
empty stair well and calls ‘Elsie, Elsie!’ The cry echoes in

122
an empty attic, where washing hangs on a line; then the
camera lingers on Elsie’s empty place at table, the unused
plate, cutlery, mug: and the empty chair as the cry still
echoes, distantly, ‘Elsie’.
The sandy ground and straggling undergrowth. From
beneath a bush slowly rolls Elsie’s ball. Her new balloon is
caught in the telegraph wires. Distantly we still hear the
mother calling her name.
That is all that Lang shows us of the murder. It is
incomparably more impressive than if we had seen the
deed itsell in all its details. Lang writes of it:

Because of the loathsome nature of the crime M dealt with, there was a
problem ot how to present such a crime so that it would not sicken the
audience, yet would have full emotional impact. That is why I only
gave hints - the rolling ball, the balloon caught in the wires, after being
released from a little hand. Thus I make the audience an integral part in
the creation of this special scene by forcing each individual member of
the audience to create the gruesome details of the murder according to
his personal imagination.

The telescoping of time is masterly. Instantly following

the murder of Elsie Beckmann is a shot of a newsboy
running along the street, shot from above: ‘News extra!
News extra! Who ... is the murderer?’, and so back to
Lorre.
It is sound which betrays the murderer. Lang does not
stop at the familiar truth that the blind have often
unusually acute hearing; but puts it into visual terms and
demonstrates it audibly. He first shows the blind hawker in
the beggars’ exchange. Nearby in the fitting chamber,
where the beggars try on their professional wardrobes,
another beggar is being shown an organ which is squeaky
and out of tune. The blind man reacts at once by holding
his hands to his ears. Then, when they try out a better
organ, he reacts enthusiastically to the sound, moving his
hands like an orchestra conductor.
The murderer’s whistling is both a motif and a
psychological quirk. It is resumed when he perceives a new
victim in front of the window with the knives. We first see
the murderer still munching his apple calmly, as he looks at
his reflection in the window (the scene provides a parallel
to the moment in his room when he grimaces at himself
before his mirror). Suddenly he stares mesmerised into the

123
M: the gang tracking down the murderer

pane, as the little girl’s figure appears in the frame of

knives. Now he follows the child, whistling the Grieg
theme tunelessly.*
Then the child runs to her mother, and the whistling
which had increased to a paroxysm, suddenly stops. He * During the shooting,
stares after the two disappearing figures. In the shop Lorre confessed that he
window the arrow now seems to penetrate the rotating could not whistle; it would
spiral. Frustrated, the murderer scratches the back of his have to be dubbed into the
hand with his nails. sound track. Others tried,
including Thea von Harbou
On the garden-terrace of the restaurant he starts
and the film’s editor, but
whistling again, only to close his ears with his hands, with a the results were somehow
tortured expression. Two glasses of brandy do not, not exactly what was
apparently, quench his frustrated desire. Whistling again, needed. Finally, Lang
he leaves, and whistling still will be heard by the blind himself did the whistle. For
once his being non-musical
street hawker. Thus the circle is closed.
served him well: the off-
While the beggars are closing in on the murderer, the
key, tuneless whistle exactly
police are also closing in, tracking down the murderer fitted the unbalanced
with their clue ‘Ariston’. At the scene of one of the character of the murderer.

124
 m wL\ 4) ?
m-idmr 4 •/ <**■
Bs
B*
W&L
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M: the underground trial

125
murders, three cigarette ends of the brand ‘Ariston’ were
found. The inspector tells Lohmann ‘But the table was not
an old wooden table . . and at that moment his eyes fall
on the window-sill: simultaneously there is a close-up of
the window sill in the murderer’s room. A hand (probably
Lang’s own) with a magnifying glass enters the picture,
searching the woodgrain lor pencil marks.
Such elliptical effects speed up the action; but at this
point Lang introduces a cleverly contrived and visually
impressive retarding effect which enhances the atmosphere.
The murderer has bought oranges in a fruit shop lor his
next little girl victim. In the street he takes a knife from his
pocket, the blade flicks out audibly, and gleams in the
darkness. The spectator - along with the boy on screen,
hiding - holds his breath: will he use it? . . .
But Lorre’s knife only cuts into the peel of the orange.
The boy jostles against the murderer, to leave a chalk
‘M’ on his back. The murderer drops his knife in horror;
but ironically the polite little girl retrieves it and hands it
back to ‘uncle’.
Again Lang makes dramatic use ol sound. The little girl
tells the murderer that he has a white mark on his clothes.
Startled, he turns to look at his image in a glass window.
There is a whistle. Alarmed, he lets go of the child’s hand
and runs. The whistles multiply all around; the beggars are
signalling to one another.
Finding the street blocked, the hunted man runs into a
gateway. Two fire engines race past the gate, screaming
and ringing their bells. When the engines have passed, the
murderer has disappeared. Once again sound has served to
achieve a dramatic climax.
The sound effects of the sequence which follows have so
often been described that they need only brief mention.
The guard finds the door to the attic of the building open,
shakes the wooden partitions to make sure that everything
is in order, and calls out ‘Is anyone there?’. Receiving no
answer, he locks the door. The audience now hears the
heavy breathing of the murderer in one of the partitions.
A knocking betrays the murderer to the pickpocket;
Lorre is trying to make a skeleton key out of a nail, since his
knife is broken. From the moment the gangsters enter the
building, sound dominates the events. Noisily, the
partitions are broken down and the wooden boards

126
 M: the three mothers

splinter. Besides the sounds, there is the dramatic use ot

light: in the conical beam of a torch, the murderer is
discovered, Ins face distorted by terror.
Lang and von Harbou allow the pickpocket to describe
proudly to the con man what he has done, and thus distract
his attention from the trussed-up guard, who reaches for
the alarm button. Thus the search for the hidden fugitive is
given an additional dramatic twist. With only minutes
before the police will arrive, there are still six partitions to
be opened and searched. ‘Only one minute left’, calls out
Schränker; and at that moment the murderer is disco¬
vered. The gangsters escape with their captive tied in a
carpet.

The Three Mothers

In the end it is left open whether a legal court will
condemn the murderer to death or put him in a mental
hospital. Lang tells Gandert:

127
In MI was not only interested in finding out why someone is driven to
a crime as horrible as child murder, but also to discuss the pros and cons
of capital punishment. But'the film’s message is not the conviction of
the murderer but the warning to all mothers, ‘You should keep better
watch over your children’. This human message was felt particularly
strongly by my wife at the time, Thea von Harbou.

The copies of the film that are available today no longer

contain the shot of three mothers dressed in mourning,
sitting on a bench in the corridor of the court-room. One
of them is Frau Beckmann, who sighs: ‘This will not bring
our children back to life! One should keep better watch
over them . . This last sentence survives today only as a
voice-off in the fade-out.
Lang himself clearly wanted to go beyond the ‘human
interest’ and the emotional interpretation of von Harbou.
What he wanted to say was that the ultimate reason for the
murders is the unequal distribution of wealth. Frau
Beckmann is forever at the tub; hence she has no time to
look after Elsie properly, or to fetch her from school.
So the film ends as it began: with the misery of the
backyard amid the dustbins where children have to play in
the dreariness and hopelessness of working-class life.

128
 10 Das Testament des Dr Mabuse (The Last
Will of Dr Mabuse, 1932-33)

This film meant to show The Last Will of Dr Mabuse is much more than a repeat
Hitler’s terror methods as in a performance of the earlier adventure film, or an epilogue
parable. The slogans and
to it. The stylisations of the first Mabuse, made little more
beliefs of the Third Reich were
placed in the mouths of
than ten years earlier, reflected the mentality of the
criminals. By these means I inflation period; The Last Will seems the summing-up of
hoped to expose those doctrines these restless years.
behind which there lurked the Although in the past (cf. Kracauer’s From Caligari to
intention to destroy everything
Hitler) there has perhaps been an exaggerated tendency to
a people holds dear.
see in every German film portents of Hitler’s rise to power,
Fritz Lang on the occasion
of the film’s showing in
Dr Mabuse the Gambler was indeed the prologue to an
New York, 1943 epoch of ferment. Only a few years later, heavy industry,
right-wing extremists among the petty bourgeoisie, and
the increasing masses of the unemployed were ready and
susceptible for the dreams of a new and strong Germany
under the Hitler regime.
In The Last Will of Dr Mabuse, Lang once again deals
with the characters of the age, yet now in a politically and
sociologically much more conscious way, no longer
purely for the sake of adventure and suspense. He is
warning his audience of an imminent menace, which was
very soon to turn into a reality. He puts into the mouth of
his mad Mabuse words which the Nazis themselves still
did not dare speak out aloud, but which were already
apparent in their confused thought. It is not a very big step
from Wilhelm II’s assertion that ‘Whoever is against me
will be destroyed by me’ to the senseless terror, the
gratuitous crimes perpetrated for power’s sake, conceived
in the mad mind of Mabuse and inculcated by hypnosis
into Professor Baum.
It was a matter of course, then, that the new Mabuse
film should be banned by the new Government as early as
March 1933, ‘for the legal reasons’, reported Kinemato-

129
Das Testament des Dr Mabuse (1932-33)

graph on 30 March, ‘of endangering public order and

security’. It was significant that instead of its showing
planned for 23 March 1933, Blutendes Deutschland (Woun¬
ded Germany), the film depicting Germany’s national
rising, was announced for the Ufa Palast. In turn this also
had to be put off, for technical reasons, and in the end the
nationalist film Der Choral von Leuthen was held over for a
further period.
Goebbels is quoted in Dr Goebbels, a book based on
notes made by members of his entourage and edited by
Karina Niehoff and Boris von Bonesholm, as saying: ‘I
shall ban this film . . . because it proves that a group of men
who are determined to the last . . . could succeed in
overturning any government by brute force’. The
Morgenpost for 30 March took the same line: ‘The
presentation of criminal acts committed against human
society is so detailed and fascinating that it might well lead
to similar attacks against lives and property, and terrorist

130
actions against the state’.
Despite the ban, the director of Die Nibelungen and
Metropolis evidently seemed a useful man to the new
masters of Germany - perhaps on the strength of
Metropolis’ welcome message of reconciliation between
creative brain and working hands. The banned Last Will
could be forgotten: Goebbels did not mention it when he
invited Lang to see him at the Ministry of Propaganda, and
offered him the role of leader of the new racist cinema, on
behalf of the Führer. (Even the objection that Lang was
half-Jewish could be disregarded. After all, neither
Jannings, the idolised German actor, nor Lem Riefenstahl,
the ideal of German womanhood, were quite Aryan.)
All the same, Fritz Lang ignored all the marvellous
promises of a magnificent future, and took a train for Paris
the same evening. As for The Last Will of Dr Mabuse, the
film’s producer, Seymour Nebenzal brought both the
German and French versions safely into France when he, as
a Jew, was forced to leave Germany.
The forgers’ silent workshop from the first Mabuse film,
with the unspeaking blind workers, has come to life. In the
opening of the film we can hear - along with ex-Detective
Hofmeister - the noise and rhythmical beating of the
machines, which becomes so intense that Hofmeister is
dazed and forced to close his ears.
Everything that follows is brief and rapid, geared to
suspense and tension. Two gangsters come to get new
sheets for the forging of banknotes, and notice the feet of
the hidden Hofmeister. The audience nervously anti¬
cipates a shooting, but the brighter of the two is against it.
The two men whisper together, but their words are
drowned by the noise of machines. For a moment, nothing
happens. Hofmeister sneaks up and narrowly escapes a
series of accidents. A heavy piece of stonework from the
roof parapet crashes to the ground just beside him. He
hurries on and promptly a group of ominous-looking men
appear at the street corner. When he turns back, a barrel
falls from a beer-cart standing by, and explodes.
All these accidents are carefully prepared and ’doc¬
umented’ with Lang’s characteristic, precise logic, and
pared down to the minimum. Hofmeister has to escape, to
prepare the spectator for further attacks; and also in order
to telephone Police Inspector Lohmann, though he is
The Last Will of Dr Mabuse: a ghostly superimposition
unable to tell him anything precise, but only put him on
the scent of the mysterious organisation.
The atmosphere in Lohmann’s office is entirely
authentic. The Inspector - already familiar from M in all
his earthiness, humour, Berlin wit, characteristic obsession
with his work — is on his way to a Wagner opera.
Hofmeister’s irritability on the telephone reveals his
instability, as he endeavours to ingratiate himself with
Lohmann again, following trouble over a bribery affair.
He is fidgety, confused, incoherent and it is clear that the
organisation will get to him before he can give Lohmann
the facts.
We do not see what happens: like Lohmann we hear
only a scream from the other end of the telephone, the
thud of a chair falling over, and then a silence which leaves
Lohmann and the spectator to speculate what horrible
thing has happened. After the silence comes the mad,
inarticulate, tuneless sing-song of‘Gloria, Victoria’. Only
much later in the film is a clue to what happened
vouchsafed: when Lohmann and the doctor visit Hofmeis¬
ter in the madhouse cell he sees, not them, but a
superimposed image of the fair-haired murderer and
the driver approaching him.
Again, towards the end of the film, the mad professor
opens the door of the cell and introduces himself to the
frightened Hofmeister who is crouching on the floor:
‘Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Dr Mabuse’.
At once the image cuts to the corridor with the open door.
We do not see what happens, but only hear Baum
screaming and Hofmeister shouting ‘Mabuse!’. Warders
hurry to the scene, but the spectator does not see what they
see inside the cell; and is left to imagine that Hofmeister
may have attacked the professor and tried to strangle him.
The stunned warders lead out the demented Hofmeister;
and only in the next shot do we see inside the cell. In place
of Hofmeister, the professor now crouches, totally mad,
slowly tearing up the leaves which Mabuse had covered
with his writing.
Even after the introduction of sound, Lang chose to
use visual effects of superimposition to suggest hypnosis
in the new Mabuse film. Entering the mad Mabuse’s room,
the professor puts his hand to his head and turns quickly:
the ghostly apparition of Mabuse’s protoplasm appears

133
on the wall before him. Later, when he starts to read the
writings of the dead Mabuse, a superimposed image of
Mabuse, his dissected open skull showing the convolutions
of his brain, appears in the chair opposite him, half
crouching. The atmosphere is heightened by enormous
African masks staring from the dark with phosphorescent
glow, and pale skulls in glass cases. The ghostly Mabuse rises
from his chair and ‘enters’ the seated professor, becoming
one with him. The doctor’s ghost reappears later to lead
the wild car chase, and again, to open the door and force
the professor to go into Mabuse’s own old cell, now
occupied by Hofmeister.
Today Lang feels that he would no longer use
phantomatic superimpositions for a film essentially realist
m style, but would represent the voice of the subconscious
that dominates the professor, by voice-off. The fantastic
element of the superimposition, he considers, offsets the
reality.
Even so the atmosphere is richly suggestive. When
Professor Baum, whom nobody recognises, leaves the
police commisariat, Lang makes him pass, long and
slowly, a wall on which are posted the police notices about
the murder of Dr Kamm. This slow and solemn progress
indicates visually the weakening of the professor’s stamina.
Here the soundless image is very impressive; yet as in M
Lang uses sound expressively. A word in one shot is used
associatively in the next, to clarify a situation; a sound
effect may overlap into another scene. In the curtained
room at the criminals’ headquarters where a time bomb
ticks menacingly and a voice from a loudspeaker has just
told the imprisoned young couple that they will not leave
the room alive, Kent taps the wall to seek possible escapes.
The tapping carries over into the next shot, where an
elegant gangster is daintily tapping his boiled egg. At
another point the loudspeaker in the curtained room
metallically calls out orders to the criminal action groups.
Elsewhere, in the professor’s house, the same tones call out
‘I do not wish to be disturbed now’ when the door handle
is turned. Lohmann will later discover the ingenious
mechanism which starts off a gramophone whenever an
intruder touches the door handle.
One episodic scene, the murder of Dr Kamm, is
especially memorable. The doctor is on his way to inform

134
the police of the coincidences between the writings of
Mabuse and the robbery, when he stops his car at a red
light. Another car stops near him. Someone hoots; and the
hooting is playfully taken up by the impatient drivers to
become a tumult in which the sound of the gun, pointed
by the driver ot the second car, cannot be heard. The lights
change to green; the cars drive on - except one, which
stays behind. The policeman who approaches it finds Dr
Kamm collapsed over the wheel. Lang was to repeat this
scene, with necessary modifications, in his last Mabuse film.
The end ot the film is excitingly dramatic, with the
chemical iactory in flames and one chimney after another
collapsing. Smoke belches and hisses from the engine
carrying the chemicals away from the danger zone. Fire
engines with bells aclatter race to the scene from opposite
directions: water squirts from the hoses to mingle with the
fire and smoke. There are police signals, enormous
searchlights raking the bushes, the rat-tat of motor-cycles
revving up, the hooting of cars; a grand finale of light, fire,
movement and sound of every kind.
In the chase which follows, the ghostly expressionist-
white milestones by the side of the road are eerily lit up by
the headlights of the racing car. Bushes seem to give way in
bundles, leaves above the heads of the pursuers race along
and finally dissolve, impressionistically, into blobs of
movement and light. Again the atmosphere is prepared for
the ghostly apparition ot Mabuse.

APPENDIX I: Fritz Arno Wagner: Cinema sensations seen

from the camera angle
In all my many years as a cameraman, I never experienced
the reality of the words ‘fear’ or ‘getting the creeps’ until
the day I was standing on the ten-metre practicable beside
Fritz Lang and his crew, preparing to shoot the blowing-
up of the chemical factory. Beside me was a small,
harmless-looking model of a factory, with a number ot
coloured buttons. From the buttons mysterious leads went
out to the real factory that lay spread out before us in the
glare of innumerable spotlights. Then Lang started
blowing up the factory, simply by pressing the buttons.
When the first of the four gigantic chimneys, seventy
metres high, fell sideways amidst thunderous noise and
enormous clouds of dust and piles of rubble, I realised the

135
The Last Will of Dr Mabuse: the flood (above)-, the exploding factory (below)
great danger we all were in. I must confess that even today,
weeks after these sequences were shot, I feel cold sweat
pouring down my back when I recall those nights in front
ot the exploding factory and the individual shots of the
whole sequence — but fear? I never felt any sensation like
fear in spite of the obvious danger. Because of Lang’s
presence, his confidence, the calm with which he gave his
directions, which had been rehearsed and calculated in
their smallest detail, this feeling could never arise. Not
even when the shots were made in the mysterious curtain
room that was to be blown up by a time bomb. Our
architects Hasler and Vollbrecht had built a construction
from an amazing array of technical gadgetry that should
have eliminated from the outset any anxiety by the
participating expert - and yet we were not all very happy.
But everything went as planned. The explosion worked;
the water that was supposed to enter the room flowed
according to plan, and apart from getting soaked through,
I did not experience any negative consequences or
unpleasant feelings during this sequence. Yet I tried with
the help of my camera to catch the inherent suspense of the
scene, its immense danger and difficulty.
Die Filmwoche, Berlin, No 12, 22 March 1933

APPENDIX II: Lotte H. Eisner: Visiting Lang’s Shooting of

The Last Will of Dr Mabuse

The Fritz Lang film The Last Will of Dr Mabuse which is

being shown in France, has been banned in Germany on
the order of the Ministry of the Interior, because the film
board (Filmprüfstelle) found it dangerous ‘on account of
its cruel and depraved content’.
I had the good fortune to be present at the creation of
this fantastic piece of work. Fritz Lang did not start his film
in the studio; the first scenes were filmed at night on an
outdoor location.
To get there I travelled by car through a very dark
night. I passed quickly through a little town near Berlin,
whose small bourgeois houses alternated with public
buildings of dimensions reminiscent of the big city. I
passed a number of bridges in succession, and the Havel
river’s reflections gleamed in the darkness.
I arrived at a vast area of wasteland, where the ruins of
abandoned factories reared up like phantoms. During the

137
war they had been used as ammunition plants. One of Fritz
Lang’s associates remembered the spot where he had often
been on guard duty as a soldier.
For three weeks the workmen had been at work, and
had completely changed the appearance of the forest. They
had cut down trees that were in the way and had planted
others elsewhere. An artificial forest had been erected,
to blend in with the real trees. Some practicables
supporting enormous lamps seemed to grow out of the
ground, and the moveable bridge with its projectors and
ladders added to the impression of gigantic dimensions.
At an order, hundreds of lights went on. The light
spread in waves over the forest, and the lighting chief gave
orders over a loudspeaker. His men were so far apart from
each other that it would have been impossible to direct
them only with a megaphone.
The cables stretched in all directions, winding like
reptiles over the plants on the forest ground . . .
(The light) . . . detached itself in many silver patches,
the tree trunks shone, they cut through to the bottom and
the plants received a particular impact from it. Lang’s eyes
surveyed the whole scene, and he said enthusiastically: ‘I
have always wished to be able to shoot an illuminated
forest in the middle of the night. Nobody has ever
achieved that effect!’
The set-up ot this natural decor still did not satisfy him.
This forest was for Lang what the forest of Dunsmane was
for Macbeth. He wanted it changed, and continued to
transform it. Again trees were cut down and transported
from one place to another. Lang himself took out some
bushes, and planted them in places where he thought that
he needed them.
He modified, changed, transformed with his own
hands; modelled the shape and tamed the scenery
according to his will. He climbed on to the practicables
with his cameraman, Fritz Arno Wagner, took aim with
the camera, and made it slide on the rails. He set it to fix the
horizon he wanted to catch. While the shooting went on,
he corrected every small detail.
He smiled. ’It is maddening’, he said, ‘that there is such a
disproportion between the visualising power of the eye
and the camera. We should have eyes all round the head.’
Intransigeant, Paris, 19 May 1933

138
11 Working Methods and Style: The First
German Period

In dealing with Fritz Lang’s first German period, which

lasted from 1919 until just before the Hitler regime in
1933, it is important to emphasise that it is not safe to rely
on statements allegedly made by Lang at the time - for
instance, the often-quoted article in Dr Beyfuss’s
Kulturfilmbuch. Wrapped up in his film work, he fre¬
quently signed articles submitted to him by public relation
men or written on his behalf by Thea von Harbou. Some
of these are undoubtedly fascinating in their own right, for
instance the statement about Die Nibelungen in Beyfuss’s
book:
Man as an idea needs to be presented with super life-size emotions . . .
He needs the pedestal of stylisation as much as ever he did in past
centuries. Statues are not placed straight on the asphalt. To make them
effective, they are placed above the heads of passers-by.

Though this was signed by Lang, it was far from his

opinion:

In fact I was thinking the exact opposite. I did not intend to blow up
the characters in Nibelungen into exaggerations, or place them on
pedestals, but to get them down from the Wagnerian pathos, back to
earth. And the first step in that direction was to take away their
Wagnerian operatic beards.
(Letter of 3 October 1968 to the author)

No article is of certain authenticity before the contri¬

bution to The Penguin Film Review, No 5, ‘Happily Ever
After’, in which Lang discusses his views in retrospect.
Even later interviews, where the interviewers may have
inaccurately ascribed opinions to Lang, or where Lang
himself may have been deliberately reticent, can be
suspect.
Critics writing about Lang have frequently pointed out
the recurrence of thefemme fatale who rums men in his early

139
scripts and the first films he himself directed. It is more
important to recognise, on closer inspection, that there is on
a deeper level a thread connecting the subject matter of
Lang’s German films: something akin to Nietzsche’s myth
of superman, which could only flourish in a world of
abject obedience (kadavergehorsam).
Lang’s predilection for the exotic, the novel, the
strange, his imaginative flair for narrative, his talent lor
suspense, can be traced through all these so-called
‘adventure films’. It is perhaps reasonably safe to quote
from an article signed by him which appeared in Die
Filmbühne, Volume i, April 1927:

The film director needs speed. That does not mean hastiness, but
telescoping, tightening-up, underlining, accelerating, and bringing to
the climax.
It is necessary to keep all the strings of the instrument we are trying
to master vibrating in tune, because relaxing or overtightening of the
strings would mean dissonance and discordant notes.

Lang’s films are characterised by their peculiar mixture

of realism and fantasy. His American scripts, which have
been entrusted to me and to the Cinematheque Fran^ais,
invariably contain newspaper clippings which caught his
attention and inspired his stories, or at least details for
individual sequences. He began this habit in his German
period, particularly in M and The Last Will of Dr Mabuse.
Lang’s awareness that it is the faits divers and the
documentary touches which make his films so impressive
is revealed when he tells Peter Bogdanovich that he always
advised his cameramen to avoid ‘fancy photography’ and
demanded ‘newsreel photography’. ‘Every serious picture
should be a sort of documentary of its time.’ Even during
his German period, in which so many critics find evidence
of Expressionist influence - for instance the three-
dimensional effects achieved in Metropolis or M by means
of lighting - the films demonstrate Lang’s mastery in
combining documentary structures and adventure fantasy.
Again and again Lang declares that every film must
evolve its own style according to the subject matter. Yet in
every film we encounter the characteristic Lang elements -
not only in Metropolis where the documentary element is
projected into the future, or in Destiny where the fantastic
elements dominate the realistic. Bunuel once said that in
fact an artist always makes the same film; and Lang’s films,

140
like those of every great cinema creator, reveal a profound
underlying unity.

Lang and Expressionism

Like Paul Wegener, who always insisted that his film Der
Golem, of 1920, was not an Expressionist film as many critics
maintained (mainly on account of Poelzig’s sets), Lang
rejected the suggestion of an Expressionist influence on his
films. As President of a round table on Expressionism
arranged in Venice in i960, he would say, ‘What is
Expressionism? Neither Brecht nor I was ever an
Expressionist’. (Brecht’s Baal, it must be said, shows
Expressionist characteristics. In the first Mabuse Count
Told asks the sinister doctor what he thinks of Ex¬
pressionism: ‘Expressionism’, he replies, ‘is only a game
. . . but then nowadays everything is only a game.’
Like all other artists of his time, Lang went through an
experience of Expressionism, moulding it to suit his own
purposes and his own style. ‘I do not reject Expressionism’,
he told a later interviewer; ‘but I did not follow it for long.
All that is passe. When I started to make films in the United
States, I shed the uses of symbolism.’
In a very comprehensive interview with Jean Domarchi
and Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du Cinema No 99, Lang said:
‘One cannot go through an epoch without taking
something from it. . . . I have made use of it (Ex¬
pressionism) ; I have tried to direct it’. That Lang was fully
aware of what Expressionism meant is made clear by a
contemporary statement on the occasion of the 1924
Vienna Kinoreformtagung (Film-kurier, 20 and 21 May
1924), which was clearly not composed by a public
relations man or by Thea von Harbou. Speaking of the
‘artistic structure of the film drama’, Lang states what he
will emphasise again and again: every film has its own
rules and laws. There are no strict formulas. Every period
has its own art forms. Lang describes the havoc caused by
the war in all countries, and explains why Expressionism
was its apt artistic expression.
If you try to fit Expressionism into a formula, you will find this
formula to be the absolute expression ot reality. Look at Expressionist
pictures and you will get the impression of exploding shells from the
colours and shapes.

Lie points out further that women’s clothes also tended to

Fritz Lang

Expressionism. 'It cannot be put into simple words; it is as

if their clothes had been torn from their bodies in shreds.’

Screenplays and collaboration with Thea von Harbou

It is very difficult today to distinguish the respective
contributions of Lang and Thea von Harbou to their
collaboration. The only real clue is the episodic film The
Spiders, written by Lang alone. Though its original title list
still exists, it is hard to determine to what extent Lang was
still caught up in the emotionalism of the post-war period
which affected generations of young people in all
countries. War had demanded a repression of feelings.
Now everybody abandoned themselves freely to their
feelings. Even taking into account, however, the excessive
emotionalism and sentimentality of the period (which can
also be seen in the films of Abel Gance and Marcel
L’Herbier of the same time), one is still left with the rather
sensitive critical problem of the collaboration. Con-

142
temporary reviews, unkindly it not inaccurately, tended to
attribute such excesses to von Harbou and the realistic
structure to Lang. The rather embarrasingly non-logical
and overly sentimental emotionalism of, for example, the
head and heart motif ot Metropolis and the love story of
Frau im Motid, do not exist in Lang’s work before or after
his collaboration with von Harbou; his later Indian films
and The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse present another
problem entirely in this regard, as we shall see. Still, as has
been noted, her contribution to M seems almost entirely
and constructively in keeping with Lang’s basic vision.
Thea von Harbou was a product of the first decade of the
twentieth century. Her photographs show her as the
handsome ‘Germanic’ type, and suggest an Ibsen charac¬
ter, oscillating between Hedda Gabler, Hilde Wangel and
Soveig. Feminine and emancipated at the same time;
domestic and maternal and yet sophisticated; sensitive and
psychologically orientated. The Ibsen reference is sug¬
gested because the Germans of that time were deeply
interested in Scandinavian literature. Thea von Harbou
was one of two popular women authors of the time whose
fluent style, which now seems rather conventional, made
them what might be considered the Fran^oise Sagans ol
their place and period. Vicky Baum was the Jewish
counterpart of Thea von Harbou, whose name suggests a
descent from Huguenot emigres - like Fontane, more
German than the Germans. The two writers were at
opposite poles from Anna Seghers, Annette Kolb or
Ricarda Huch.
Few actors recall anything about the Harbou-Lang
collaboration, though Lil Dagover recalls the devotion
with which his wife assisted Lang during difficult scenes in
the studio.
An article in Filmkünstler (Sybillen Verlag, Berlin,
1928), ‘Wir über uns selbst’, purporting to be by Lang,
discusses his collaboration with von Harbou, though it is
hard to know how far to rely on its statements. In Thea
von Harbou, the article states, Lang had

found an invaluable assistant who out of profound understanding ot

my intentions creates the manuscripts which become the basis ot my
work.

While this suggests that von Harbou herself wrote the

143
screenplays, the term ‘basis’ must be seen in the light of
Dudley Nichols’s statement (page 370) that the script was
for Lang no more than a blueprint. Moreover we have the
evidence of Theo Lingen, an intelligent and excellent
character actor who worked in M; who recalled his first
meeting with Lang in his villa at Berlin-Dahlem: The first
thing he noticed was an enormous script on Lang’s desk:

I had never seen a scenario before, but I never saw one quite like that
again. In minute detail, everything was annotated, accentuated, fixed
and defined. And I believe that it was just this minute detailing and
preparatory work which was the secret of Fritz Lang’s success. The
work in the studio followed the script to the letter.

Work in the Studio

Lang wrote to me in retrospect about the way he worked
in the studio. In one of his letters he says that he always
worked out the outlines of every sequence and even every
individual camera angle the evening before. In early days,
inevitably, there was still an element of experiment and
improvisation, for instance in the lighting and shooting of
Destiny. New territories were being opened up in those
days.
Among these experiments are the grand visions for
which Lang was obliged to work out methods of
realisation within the camera, since the German studios at
that time were not yet expert in trick work. Even now he
dislikes revealing the secrets of these tricks, because he does
not want to destroy their magic; but occasionally he will
disclose some secret, such as the way the magic circles
around the head of the robot in Metropolis were achieved (a
silver ball was whirled around in a velvet-lined funnel, and
then superimposed) or the effects already described - the
magic letter in Destiny, the hanging streets in Metropolis.
Theo Lingen recalls:

One did what one was told to do to the letter of the time table, by
which I mean that no improvisation was tolerated. Everything, from
the position of the camera, the sets, the positions of the actors, the
accent ot the dialogue, the end of every scene and even the montage
was fixed and calculated in advance. This might suggest precision
work which could have degenerated into pedantry, but that is the
exact opposite of the truth: the mastering of all aspects, the intelligent
use of this method and the conviction that technology can only be
mastered by technology - these were probably Lang’s mam strengths
as a film director.

144
 Work in the studio

Lingen is the only actor who worked with him at this time
who has so well indicated the essential features of Lang’s
method. Carl de Vogt, the leading actor of The Spiders,
says only:

He was dominated by a fanatical love for the cinema and the demands
he made on his actors were enormous. He had one great quality: in
contrast to other directors he always knew exactly what he wanted.
He was indefatigable in his work and was never self-indulgent. This is
why I obeyed him involuntarily, even though there were occasional
misunderstandings between us. But these were always quickly
resolved, because he was a wonderful director, human being and
friend.

Lil Dagover (Der Goldene See, Harakiri, Destiny) em¬

phasises his dynamism, and above all his obsession with
work:

He demanded a lot. One had not to fear fire, water or snakes. These
dangerous episodes were always repeated without mercy until his idea
of how the scene should be had been realised.

H5
A studio shave

Gustav Fröhlich, the main actor in Metropolis, says ‘I have

never met a work fanatic like him since’. Robert Siodmak,
then still an assistant director and assistant editor, recalls:

One was afraid of him because of his particular temperament, by

means of which he managed to keep himself and his collaborators in an
atmosphere of frenzy and rage.

Siodmak tells how Lang, determined upon perfectionism,

refused to show the last reel of Die Nibelungen on the
opening night, because it was not finished to his complete
satisfaction.*
From an account of Ihering we know how much capital
and working time was permitted to Lang for lus more
mature films. Pommer always supported him because he
knew the quality of the work he would get. When
Pommer left Ufa, Lang also decided to leave. Already
* For reminiscences of
before finishing Metropolis he had determined to found his actors, see Eibel, Fritz Lang
own company, in partnership with two acquaintances choix de textes.
 called Fellner and Szomlo, and be independent. (In any case
Ula at this time was in financial difficulties and was to be
taken over by a German bank.) The first film made by the
Fritz Lang G.m.b.FL, though still distributed by Ufa, was
The Spy.
Les Princes des Annees Folles describes how Lang, sur¬
rounded by his entourage, drove in style to his own studio.
Even allowing tor some journalistic exaggeration, the
substance of the report is confirmed by Robert Herlth’s
private recollections:

When Lang turned up on location early in the morning with three cars,
the rest ot his following, technicians, make-up artists and costume
designers were already there; and even before he had left his car, we all
succumbed to the spell of his authority.

Dictator though he was, he still had to attend personally to everything.

He put the finishing touches to the actors’ make-up, worked out
difficult trick scenes, and even shot the arrows in Die Nibelungen.

During the cutting, which in those days was done by the director
himself he sometimes did not leave the studio area for weeks. He slept
next door to the cutting room because sometimes he got up in the
middle of the night to continue the cutting.

He was as extravagant as a renaissance figure. Like Cellini he knew no

mercy for himself or for his associates. Hard though he drove his
collaborators, he always stuck to them with boyish loyalty and the
secret of his success is that his example always won the day.

Outlook
In an article called ‘Happily Ever After’, written in 1947,
Lang discussed his change of views in the United States,
due to time and geographical climate. The ‘prearranged
fate’ and the ‘man trapped by fate’ of his early films, he
now considers as a negative attitude, ‘showing the triumph
of evil and a waste of human life for nothing’. From now
on character will determine the fate of man.
He expresses a similar view in a letter to the author - in
which we find the explanation of his film Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt:

I no longer believe in mystical Jate. Every human being makes his own fate by
the way in which he uses his experience (or does not use his experience), by
the choice or rejection of events and situations he partakes in, by what he
manages to achieve or not to achieve, for whatever reasons. No mystical fate,
no God or whatever is responsible for his fate except himself. And this is
why one cannot get away from what one has created for oneself.

147
 Thus character determines human fate: character is the
demon of man. All Lang’s American films will demon¬
strate this belief, with their recurrent questions: Where
does guilt begin? What is innocence? What is good and
what is evil?

148
 12 French Interlude: LUiom (1933)

The scenes in heaven, designed For the Austrian Fritz Lang, the stage play by the Austro-
in a sort of thirties futuristic,
Hungarian Ferenc Molnar is not merely the story of
have a great deal of charm,
Liliom the incorrigible, but somehow too the bitter-sweet
and the echoes on the sound
track of earlier happenings on love story of the little Viennese girls about whom
earth are handled with great Schnitzler wrote, transplanted with striking success to the
skill . . . Lang’s film never milieu of a Paris suburb. Lang has an infallible instinct for
becomes soggily sentimental. catching the atmosphere of the country in which he
Richard Whitehall, Los
happens to be working: the life of the colourful little
Angeles Free Press,
suburban fairground is presented with popular humour
3 October 1969
and much comic detail, at once playful and homely. The
Lang makes this point about joys and suffering of ordinary people are depicted with a
the eternity of injustice without musical lightness which Clair could not have bettered, and
indulging Liliom, who, after which mingles earthy reality with the seductive, ephe¬
all was a heel. Liliom with its
meral atmosphere of the fairground.
abundant comic touches, is
unique for Lang whose films We are never shown more than a small section of the
are characteristically dark- fairground, and everything is achieved without any
toned. Yet it is the very emphatically virtuoso camerawork. Instead the loving
embodiment of Lang’s major efforts of the studio miniaturist achieves an impression of
theme, the struggle of the
endless variety. Working for the European branch ol Fox,
individual against an unjust,
run by his old friend and fellow-emigre Erich Pommer,
omnipotent fate. For once,
however, that individual Lang had to economise, and thus find ever new variations.
succeeds in beating his nemesis This little tragi-comic fantasy in gay picture-book style,
to a draw. rises to a melancholy poetry in the deathbed scene of
Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Liliom, and with the austere loveliness of Julie (Madeleine
Times, 3 October 1969
Ozeray), recalling at once the folk-song qualities of
The striking thing about this Destiny and the ne’er-do-wells of Villon ballads. Lang’s
Liliom is that at this early Liliom is a gars du milieu from somewhere like Belleville or
stage Lang showed no evidence Foire du Trone, purely Parisian, and he provided Charles
whatever of making a silent
Boyer with his best role.
film in which occasionally a
In the dusky evening the merry-go-round with its
few people talked, or of a
talking picture in which people glittering garlands of light turns round and round. The
did nothing but talk. He came fairground organ attracts the passers-by, dominating

149
Liliom (1933): the merry-go-round and . . .

every other sound. Liliom, the merry-go-round tout, to the new form fully prepared
swings along with it, singing his song in which everyone t0 use itJor w^at lt was ~ new-
joins. With such a rival the neighbouring strong man gets Jamcs Powers- Hollywood
c , . , j ill Reporter, 6 October 1969
no customer lor his hammer; and even the drunken sailor
is lured to the merry-go-round. Moving shadows fall on
the little wooden pay-box and on the buxom figure and
round face of the proprietor, Madame Muscat, who casts a
proud glance at Liliom - her property too.
She is understandably not pleased when Liliom flirts with
a girl, and even gives her a flower. Liliom’s character is
already revealed. At first he gives way to Madame and
agrees to throw Julie and her friend out. But then he is
touched by the appalling helplessness of the girl and
offended by Madame’s undisguised triumph. Resistance is
aroused: Liliom does not allow himself to be manipulated,
to be considered someone else’s property. He prefers to go
off with the two girls.
With ruthless realism he appraises his new companions,

150
 . . . the charming love scene

and unhesitatingly indicates to Julie’s coquettish and

experienced friend that she is not required any more. A
charming love scene on a bench dimly lit by a street lamp
beside a meagre tree, is not disrupted even by the
policeman who warns the little servant girl against the
‘Dangereux seducteur des bonnes’. Liliom does not mince
his words or try love talk on the ‘drole de petite fille’. But
Julie is from the same mould as the loving girl in Destiny.
‘When I love somebody I am afraid of nothing’, although
she proves more real and realistic than the earlier romantic
anonymous heroine of Destiny. She is not going to die with
her lover, for she must bring up his child. Instead, she will lie
to her daughter about her splendid father, in pious memory.
Time flies; and other couples’ love mementoes have
covered the entwined hearts Liliom cut on the bench. Julie
has given herself without reservation to her Liliom. She
works hard for his aunt in the little photographer’s booth.
One day she is taking a picture of a well-intentioned shop-

151
keeper, posed with his hat and his dignity against the
plaster pillar and the ornamental table. He tells her that he
would like to marry her ‘in spite of everything’.
Meanwhile Liliom is lounging about, his heart secretly
longing for the fairground, whose organ sends out siren
wisps of sound. He will not hear of the well-paid porter’s
job the aunt finds for him. He is an artiste.
Julie gets to know his tempers. A trivial incident about a
coffee pot leads to him boxing her ears. Summoned to
police headquarters, Liliom is made to wait for hours in the
desolate corridor with ‘Defense de . . .’ notices plastered
everywhere; no smoking, no spitting, no loud talking and
so on. Liliom encounters his mate Alfred, who smells out a
criminal offence and offers his services as a witness. Liliom
accepts. While waiting they start to play a hand of cards on
the hard bench . . . But cards are forbidden also.
While Liliom waits, patiently as befits the poor, an
elegant gentleman is politely led to the inspector out of
turn. The selectivity of justice will determine Liliom’s
further behaviour. It is a factor already present in M, and
which will play a still larger role in Lang’s American films.
Finally Liliom and Alfred see the inspector. In a
characteristic comic touch, Lang manages both to create a
realistic human being from a stereotype and to comment
lightly on social reality. The inspector attempts to stamp a
paper for Liliom’s file, but is frustrated by a dried-up ink
cushion; he only smiles again when a new cushion allows
the stamp to work. Anyone dealing with bureaucrats —
especially in France - will immediately get the point.
Allowed to leave, together with his witness, Liliom lies
on the lorry with his friend; and Alfred tells him of a
profitable prospect: a robbery. Liliom is reluctant to get
involved, and prefers to go to the bistro and play cards
until the small hours, while little Julie waits up for him.
Madame Muscat’s raised hopes of winning back Liliom -
based on his indifference to the fact that Julie is upset -
dwindle when Julie reveals she is expecting a child. Having
broken the news, Julie runs away without waiting to see
Liliom’s reaction - which is an Indian war dance of delight,
and the firm dismissal of the overconfident Madame
Muscat.
With this prospect of a child Liliom needs money, and
he therefore plans with Alfred to rob the payroll-postman.

152
The scheme is as primitive as Liliom and Alfred
themselves; and Liliom rehearses without enthusiasm the
charade ol stopping the postman to ask the time, to give
Alfred the chance to attack him. For the discussion
between Liliom and Alfred Lang uses a device which
recalls the scene of the gangsters’ council in M, in which
only the shadows on the wall are seen, as voices are heard
off. Here we see only the two men’s reflections in the water
as we hear their discussion.
The gay and fantastic symbol which occurs at this point
comes directly from Molnar, but must have pleased Lang’s
Viennese taste: a knife-grinder with his cart (played by the
great writer Antonin Artaud) turns up and asks if anyone
needs a knife sharpened. His bell rings merrily; and
Liliom, dazed with fear clutches even tighter the knife
which he has stolen from the aunt’s kitchen. The postman
arrives, armed with a pistol, and Alfred takes to his heels.
Liliom is about to be arrested, but rather than fall into the
hands of the law, plunges his knife into his own breast. At
the same instant, in the photographer’s booth, Julie
anxiously clutches her hands to her heart as if she too felt
the thrust.
The death of Liliom provides the film’s most intense
moments, as Julie’s rigidity softens to love and under¬
standing. Madeleine Ozeray -Jouvet’s Ondine - manages
a transition to the lyricism of the folk song, as we hear the
sound of the distant fairground organ, which somehow
envelops the dying man. Julie strokes his hand, sitting
beside him in self-effacing constancy, revealing the courage
of a Solvieg.
It is a tragi-comedy of misunderstandings: Liliom has
not had the chance to speak of his love, and Julie only
emerges from her rigid daze after Liliom has closed his
eyes. Only then is it possible for her to tell him of her love,
without knowing of his love for her. But why should a
loving woman who only cares for one man in the whole
world need an echo at all?
In the fairground Madame Muscat bursts into tears; and
requests a few moments silence: one of‘our own people’
has died, she says. The merry-go-round turns slowly, the
shadows moving; then stops. Everything stops - move¬
ment and sound. Like a dark and heavy cloak, a sinister
silence settles, almost audibly, upon the fairground ... It is

153
Liliom: going up to Heaven

a scene, in terms of visual effects, of movement and sound,

such as few directors could bring off today.
Like the couple in Destiny, signalled by Weary Death,
Liliom sits up out of his dead body as dark-clad figures
approach - angels in mufti, with black felt hats. (These
figures were to give Cocteau the idea of the dark,
motorised messengers in Orphee.) Viewed from below, the
broad brims of these felt hats look surprisingly like haloes.
Raised up to make a journey through the sky, Liliom
looks around him with curiosity and pleasure. In bold
camera angles we look down upon the roofs of Paris, the
Seine, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower - today familiar
vistas, but then novel and remarkable photographic tricks.
Falling stars and rotating planets mingle with the mist and
luminous light in a harmonious fugue, rising up rhythmi¬
cally and flowing along in streams of darkness and light -
tribute to Lang’s gift for the treatment of light and shade.
Liliom’s heaven could not look different from this, with

154
155
the heavenly armies innocently showing their baby
bottoms and Fra Angelico’s heavenly prospects charm¬
ingly paraphrased as a great, airy auditorium made out of
clouds. Some critics have found the heavenly police station
- an ironical copy of the petty bourgeois terrestrial system
- too Prussian; but bureaucracy is universal, and the
‘Defendu . . signs can be found in every police station in
the world. Liliom is a simple man; in his childlike belief‘le
bon Dieu’ is a picture-book notion. In heaven, too, God,
the Chief Inspector, with whom Liliom feels he could get
on good terms, is not available for a poor man. He must
make do with a subordinate; and even for him he has to
wait. Here, too, everything is forbidden. Here, too, the
business with the recalcitrant rubber stamp is repeated. All
is much the same as in Lihom’s former, earthly world,
apart from the occasional sparkle of stars and the gay little
wings of the topless typist and the inspector. Naturally, the
under-devil who drags all kinds of documents into heaven
looks exactly like Lihom’s friend Alfred.
Yet even in this heaven that corresponds to a comic
everyday reality there is a serious tone: Lang’s perennial
motive: where is innocence and where guilt? Is there a
social justice, and who is permitted to cast the first stone?
What are Lihom’s ‘mitigating circumstances’; and how
much to blame is the environment in which he grew up?
There are other things then in this heaven which is so like
earth. Liliom is told about contrition, about purification in
purgatory. He learns that the knife-grinder was his
guardian angel who had come to warn him.
Lang now recalls an episode from Lihom’s earthly life;
the scene of the quarrel over the coffee pot is shown on a
celestial television screen. Wilfully, Liliom refuses to admit
his fault, even when the sequence is shown to him again,
this time with his own subconscious thoughts, in which he
accuses himself as a selfish rascal, superimposed. To the
disappointment of the under-devil, he is not condemned to
hell, but to sixteen years in purgatory.
Liliom would like to know one thing: will his child be a
girl or a boy? There is no answer. Only after the heavy
gates of hot and smoky purgatory have closed behind him,
does the heavenly policeman with his long white beard,
half Santa Claus, half‘Last Man’, open the gate a crack to
call after him, ‘A girl’.

156
 Fritz Lang with Charles Boyer

Grey-haired and parched by purgatory, Liliom is

discharged after sixteen years to go down to earth and do a
good deed, to give his little girl ‘the most beautiful
present’. He is led down by the dark-clad figures in felt
hats. On the way, the incorrigible Liliom filches a
sparkling star to give to his child.
Yet Liliom the incorrigible, despite all his good
resolutions, allows himself to be carried away and box the
little girl’s ears because she does not believe him when he
tells her that her father was a selfish rascal. The twinkling
star falls into a sewer and is extinguished. The dark-clad
figures take the still obstinate man away from earth. The
celestial knife-grinder, now turned street-sweeper, picks
up the dead star with his pointed stick to carry it back to
heaven.
The under-devil/Alfred is already triumphant in anti¬
cipation as a mighty set of scales is produced in heaven.
The side with Liliom’s misdeeds sags heavily. But down

157
on earth, Liliom’s daughter asks her mother, ‘Are there
beatings which do not hurt, mother!’; and little grey-
haired Julie nods amid her tears. It is those tears which
weigh down the other side of the scale to save Liliom from
damnation.
Seeing Liliom again today, it is a mystery that this film,
with its youthful freshness was not more successful when it
was first released in France, despite its favourable reviews.
Perhaps the French were too Cartesian and rationalist in
those days; or perhaps they would have preferred a tragic
ending; or perhaps their objection was the same as that of
the producer Sol Wurtzel, when Frank Borzage wanted to
film Molnar’s play (as Carousel) in 1929: ‘I don’t like a
picture where the hero dies in the middle’.
Perhaps today the French reaction would be more
favourable. Certainly in the United States (where the film
was never shown in the period it was made) it has been a
popular success 111 its few recent public screenings. For
today’s generation, with its healthy mistrust of Establish¬
ments, the episodes in the earthly and heavenly police
stations have assumed a new relevance.
Part II: The American Period

. . . When Fritz Lang does a gangster movie or a

melodrama, he gets things into it - a mood, a spell or
feeling, that an ordinary director won’t. This is what mise
en scene is - the ability to invest this kind of thing on screen
with a kind of life and force.
Andrew Sarris: Symposium on Cinematic Style, Film Culture
No 42, Fall 1966

Throughout Lang’s career in Hollywood, regardless of the

adverse pressures upon him by studios or the seemingly
impersonal nature of some of his assignments, Lang has
made films which are unmistakably individual . . . Lang’s
split career between Germany and America (with the one
French film in 1934) and his ability to create a coherent
thematic continuity over a half century of film-making
serves to demonstrate the affinity of his outlook to a
variety of social situations. He is more easily characterised
as a product of the twentieth century world of mass
murder, technological upheaval, and the world war, than
as simply a transplanted German director ... In the
attempt to recognise the consistencies in his complete
ouevre, however, we shouldn’t lose sight of the particular,
the singularly interesting qualities of each film.
Stephen Mamber: The American Films oj Fritz Lang, Daily
Bruin 15 October 1969

159
13 Fury (1936)

In France, Lang - still suffering from shock and resentment The trilogy of Fury, You
at having to give up his own place of work - shot Liliom Only Live Once and You
and Me stands in a rather
before he was really at home in the new environment.
ambiguous relation to the
Before he filmed Fury for MGM in the United States, he American social cinema of the
had had plenty of time for looking around. Even though jos. In one point . . . they
he had been invited by David O. Selznick, he shared the remain its most daringly
experience of many other foreign film directors and stars conceived contribution, in
another they scarcely belong to
whose film careers were retarded in the United States.
it at all. The difference lies
In collaboration with Oliver H. B. Garret he had
deeper than in the extreme
written a screenplay based on the Moor Castle ocean harshness of temperament in
disaster. Selznick, in Christmas mood, said he liked it a lot; the first two films: it is in
but three days later, under the influence of others, he found what the films are about.
it very bad; intrigue and slander spread quickly in the film Fury ... an almost abstract
study of mob hysteria; this
world. He had already rejected a previous Lang script, The
hysteria has a number of
Journey to Hell or Passport to Hell. For himself, Lang had
results, of which the attempted
written a Jekyll and Hyde plot: The Man Behind You. In lynching is one and the
this modern version, it would have been a very suitable ferocious destructive bitterness
theme for the creator of M; but he never presented the it arouses in the victim . . . is
script to MGM. another . . . Fury, the most
realistic of a progressively
MGM had given Lang only a one-year contract, and
formalist trilogy, is conceived
had no intention of renewing it. Right at the start he had with an intellectual rigour
committed the grave error of slighting Louis B. Mayer; quite uncharacteristic of the
when the producer called, Lang had told his secretary to American ‘problem’
say he was not home. After that the company considered picture. . . .
Gavin Lambert: ‘Fritz
Lang unapproachable and arrogant, though the truth was
Lang’s America’, Sight and
he had acted out of shyness in consciousness of his
Sound, Summer 1955
inadequate English.
After about a year without work, Eddie Mannix, a
one-time ‘bouncer’ and former vice-president of MGM,
telephoned Lang, whom he liked, to tell him that the
studio intended to drop him. Lang fought back. Among
other apparently unsuitable scripts he had found a synopsis

160
by Norman Krasna, Mob Rule, which interested him. It
seemed to be his last chance.
During this period when he had nothing to do but get to
know hte in the United States, he had continued in his
habit of noting everything that seemed different and
important to him. He read everything he could lay hands
on - particularly newspapers, to learn English and also to
understand the mentality of the people. He still insists that
comic strips are the best introduction to America, and give
the outsider special insights into American life, character
and humour, so different from European styles. He at once
realised that there must be something especially important
about the comic strips, since they are read by so many
people from such a wide cross-section of the population,
year in and year out. He learned above all American slang,
local idiom and stock replies - anything, in short, that
seemed typical.
Violent as was his revulsion against the Nazis, he tried to
stop speaking German. Though he still retains a trace of a
Viennese accent in his speech, he is master of all the nuances
and subtleties of colloquial American.
From the moment he arrived, he travelled all over
America, talking to everyone; taxi drivers, van drivers,
garage hands, shop assistants, bar-tenders and their
customers. He went to Arizona, and in order to find out
about the Indians, lived among the Navajos for eight
weeks. Such experiences help account for the veracity of
Lang’s Westerns.
From the moment he became interested in Mob Rule,
which deals with the attempted lynching of an innocent
man, he started to add clippings about comparable
incidents to his already growing American collection.
Even now he regrets that he noticed one of these clippings
too late: a report of how San Francisco drivers of long¬
distance buses would stand by their vehicles attracting
customers by shouting: ‘Get in, get in! There’ll be a
lynching in San Jose at io o’clock’.
It is impossible today to disentangle Lang’s contribution
from that of Bartlett Cormack, to the script that bears both
their names, though we know that at that time Lang’s
English was far from perfect. For his own part he is too
modest to lay claim to individual passages, though such an
idea as the use of the newsreel film in court to lead to the

161
conviction is very characteristic of his approach. At the
time this incident was criticised as improbable; since then
film has often been used as courtroom evidence.
Lang recalls that directly after the preview of a two-
and-three-quarter hour version of the film (during which
he was horrified to hear people whistling at the most
interesting bits, until someone explained to him that
contrary to European practice whistling in the States
signifies approval) he was summoned to the presence of a
very angry Eddie Mannix. Mannix accused Lang of
making an arbitrary addition to the approved script during
the shooting. Lang replied that his English was not good
enough for him to improvise any dialogue during the
shooting. While the script was being fetched to settle the
point, Lang was obliged to wait for one and a quarter
hours in the ante-room; no-one spoke to him; he was not
offered a drink when they were brought for other people.
‘They knew I was in the doghouse.’
Finally he was called into the office. Mannix, with the
script before him admitted: ‘Yes, it is written down here —
but it sounds different on the screen." Whatever the faults
of his English, Lang’s ability to bring out hidden aspects of
the written word in his mise en scene was unimpaired.
The anecdote is significant. A director under contract
for a period rather than for one film must learn to submit,
to be a mere employee. Lang had been accustomed to the
prestige accorded to film directors in Europe. After this
experience he was always to contract for single films, until
the time when he was blacklisted during the McCarthy
witch-hunts, when he signed a yearly contract with Harry
Cohn, of Columbia, the only producer with the courage
to engage him.
At MGM there were constant harassments in the
studio. In Berlin Lang had been accustomed to continue
shooting until he was satisfied with the day’s work. He
would start early in the morning and go on filming
obsessively until late at night. The custom was for the
technicians to work in shifts, with the lighting men who
were not immediately needed, for instance, going for
breakfast and then returning to replace the others. Nobody
at MGM thought to inform Lang that at certain points of
the day the whole crew stopped to eat, and that union
regulations stipulated a meal break at least once every five
 f, ~ t j * y
« M 4; T

■f /,
r 7 1

Ü< m kit

Lang with Sylvia Sidney between scenes of Fury (1936)

hours. There was trouble then when Lang became
involved in a shot or sequence and went on working
obsessively without regard to breaks.
There were other troubles. A disagreement between the
producer Sam Katz and Lang’s co-writer Cormack over
rewriting led to tension in the studio. Nor did it add to
Lang’s popularity that he was involved in the founding of
the Screen Directors’ Guild - a sharp thorn in the flesh of
the MGM executives, since for the first time it united
Hollywood creative workers in a kind of union.
In working on the script Lang learned something of
fundamental importance. In the first draft, the hero
suspected of kidnapping was made a lawyer, because Lang
felt that a lawyer would convincingly be able to defend
himself and talk articulately in court. Joseph L. Man-
kiewicz, who read the first few pages in the producer’s
office, said that this was impossible. The hero must be an
ordinary man of the people, a kind of Everyman or, in the
local idiom, ‘Joe Doe’. Later Lang recognised that every
comic strip has its Joe Doe or Jane Doe. The average
American is most interested in things that happen to the
average American, people with the same background as
himself. The spectator wants to identify with the hero.
This is in contrast with German taste. In the land of
authoritarianism and ‘abject obedience’, the country of
imperialism and later dictatorship, the hero could be a
superman like Mabuse. Such a notion was unthinkable in
the United States, where A1 Capone was merely a public
enemy. Thus Fury (the new title for Mob Rule) acquired its
Joe Wilson, an uncomplicated hero, a Joe Doe.
Nor would it have been acceptable that the man who is
almost lynched should be black, regardless of the fact that
black lynchings occurred again and again in real life. At
MGM Mayer had decreed that ‘Coloured people can only
be used as shoe-shine boys or porters’.
Other things in the script were excised. A scene in which
Joe’s fiancee Catherine is reading some of his old letters by
an open window, perhaps because outside a young negro
boy washing a car is listening to a girl singing a Stephen
Foster song as she hangs out the washing:

. . . Oh carry me ‘long
Dere’s no more trouble for me . . .

164
 PA">

Fury: Spencer Tracy as Joe Wilson

I’s gwine to roam

In a happy hour
Where all the darkies are free.

Similarly the too-liberal views expressed by the teacher

in the barber’s chair had to go. In the script, the barber tells
him:

. . . and let me tell you, professor, if you young geniuses at the high
school keep trying t’fill our children’s heads with these radical ideas,
we parents’ll have to get a law.

The teacher replies, laughing:

It’s not possible to get a law that denies the right to say what one
believes. In peace-time, anyway . . .
Jorgensen: Who says so ?
Teacher: The Constitution ot the United States.
Second Barber: You should read it sometime. You would be
surprised. . . .
I had to read it to become an American.
You never had to b’cause you were bom here.

165
Another excised passage had someone say to the deputy
sheriff:

You public servants quit playin’ cards all day and maybe you’d bring
someone to justice once awhile.

A scene which narrowly escaped being cut is the one

which shows an old black man sitting in a dilapidated Ford
with a young black couple, listening to the radio. He nods
approvingly as the district attorney condemns lynching.

Fury starts off simply: a story of everyday. Joe Doe, alias

Joe Wilson, an anonymous young man with his fiancee
admires a bedroom suite, ‘For the Young Couple’ in a
shop window. A pair of not very tasteful beds represent for
them the embodiment of bourgeois happiness. Spencer
Tracy invests Joe with the affected heartiness which
paradoxically seems rather effete - chewing peanuts, rather
cocky, assured in his stable solidity. All that is lacking is the
ultimate embodiment of bourgeois happiness, a bank
account. The girl is sensitive, and sufficiently better
educated to correct him when he uses ‘mementum’ for
‘memento’.
This might easily remain just an ordinary couple, if fate
had not decided otherwise. Joe and his fiancee part at the
station, as she goes back West to earn and save a little more
money. He dreams of a better job, so that he can marry
her. The parting is under a depressing, endless rain. To
make matters worse, he tears his rain coat. The girl insists
on mending it, even though she has only blue thread in her
sewing kit. The raincoat with its blue darn will later play a
dramatic part in the story; while Joe’s evident embarrass¬
ment is already an indication of his character. There is
another portent in this parting in the rain, with the
atmosphere of melancholy and foreboding accentuated by
the weighty close-ups of the engine and the train. Joe
misses the last goodbye at the train window when he tries
to catch Catherine’s hand.
In the original script, this sequence was preceded by a
scene in a cinema which vividly revealed Joe’s character.
Someone in the audience abuses the Americans as ‘sheep’
and Joe retaliates aggressively: ‘I suppose it wasn’t the
people who made this country what it is today?’, at which
an elderly black man leans forward and says to Joe:
 Brother, you ought to get around more’. On the way out
Joe calls to his opponent, ‘If you don’t like it in this country
why don t you go back where you came from ?’; to which
comes the answer: ‘Not me, Buddy. I came from
Scranton, P.A.!’
Again, the original script showed Joe losing his job
because he leaves his work to warn his brother, who has
become involved with delinquents, of an impending
police raid. In the finished him there is no crisis, no
unemployment in Joe’s world. The decent, hardworking
man gets ahead, and within a year Joe’s dream of running a
filling station has come true. He is even able to take his two
brothers in with him, including the one who almost
strayed from the straight and narrow. Secure in his posses¬
sion of a bank account, Joe — a secure, tax-paying citizen —
travels West to fetch his girl.
He is not even ‘momentarily oft'guard’ as so many of
Lang’s later heroes fatally are. Camping at night with a
clear conscience, he uses a newspaper to kindle the fire.
The paper, with the story of the kidnap, is seen by the
spectator in close-up.
In fact we know little about Joe’s reactions until the
moment when, unprepared, he is caught like a fly in the net
of so-called justice. Circumstantial evidence mounts up:
an ownerless bitch whom he took home after the parting
at the station, just for company, turns out to be
incriminating; peanuts, small crumbs of which were found
in the kidnap note; a bank-note with a number which
corresponds to the ransom money and which he must have
been given in change on his journey. The upright sheriff
stubbornly keeps him locked up in order to verify the
evidence.
So far all this is introduction, economically and
vividly sketched, to make the audience understand the
character and the situation of the man the film is dealing
with. Now the acceleration of the mass hysteria builds up.
A harmless bit of gossip after the barber’s telephone call to
his wife starts it off. It continues in the neighbour’s kitchen,
in the grocer’s shop where the neighbour tells another
woman of the kidnapper’s arrest. The journalist is grateful
for material for a big story; in the bar a natural malevolent
works on the honest citizens who are delighted with the
publicity attracted to their little town, and urges them to
Fury: the gossipping neighbours

go with him to the sheriff and call him to account. Then

the sheriffs office, with the sheriff resisting the over¬
excited people who threaten to take the law into their own
hands. Then back to the bar and the honest citizens and a
meddling stranger (characteristically, a strike breaker)
who makes subversive remarks. After that, the street
where the upright bourgeoisie and the workers gather and
start to march. A Jewish mother who wants to prevent her
child from witnessing a lynching, and the boy who begs
her; ‘But mother, they are going to ride somebody on the
rail! ’
In the Governor's office, politics enter the affair. The
senator advises not to send in troops, because that could
lose votes at the coming election. Finally, in the evening,
the growing and increasingly hysterical crowd and the
hecklers recall parts of the gangsters’ court in M. The
forward surge of the crowd becomes an uncontrollable

168
 Fury: Lang directing the crowd

mob. Stones are thrown at the window; a battering ram is

pushed against the prison gate. The vibrating door is seen
from inside, and is finally broken down. The mob surges
in, breaking up chairs and piling up inflammable material.
The sheriff and his deputy have thrown tear-gas bombs,
and smoke adds to the confusion. As Joe waits anxiously
behind barred windows, his dog comes running up to him.
All is marvellously orchestrated, to bring the suspense to
its climax of intensity. Between are the flashes ot news
cameras, unnoticed by the mob, and close-ups oi
individuals in the crowd : a man who has climbed a lamp-
post, another who amuses bystanders by addressing the
sheriff as ‘Popeye the sailor-man’, a woman who lifts up her
child to give it a better view, a man who clutches a hot dog
in his hand as he stares into the flames of the fire started by a
hysterical termagant. Catherine runs up terrified, sees Joe’s
figure surrounded by flames, and taints.

169
Fury: the first flame-thrower

The orchestration builds up to its crescendo with the

intensity of a fugue, until the belated arrival ot the militia.
In the meantime the jail has burned to the ground. The
crowd disperses.
In contrast to the furioso of this first part, the structure ot
the second half of the film follows a different rhythm. So
far, in revealing how Joe has to learn that his world of
respectable bourgeois decency does not exist, Lang’s main
concern has been mob behaviour; and he carefully notes
every detail.
The second part of the film is dominated by cold hatred
and bitterness. Without emotion, Joe, who has managed to
escape, tells his brothers as they make to embrace him
happily, ‘Pull down the shades’. He is a man returned from
the beyond. His eyes are feverish; he has pain in his side
where he was burned by the fire; he is unshaven. At first
we see only his silhouette - he will not allow his brother to
light a lamp even when the shades are drawn - and the

170
heavy darkness and menacing shadows seem still to belong
to the period ol Lang’s German films.
This scene is the key to the film. The darkness which Joe
demands both because the light hurts his smoke-inflamed
eyes and because he does not want to be seen by the world
outside, is appropriate to his frozen appearance, his abrupt
gestures, his shrill, ugly, mirthless laugh. The flames in
which we last saw him have destroyed all his human love
and confidence. What is the point of being decent and
living right. His child-like belief in the American people
has been burnt out of him.
He is, by chance, still alive. Yet he has been murdered;
and for this the twenty-two people - they at least - must be
put on trial. Lynching is first degree murder. Like
Kriemhild’s his only thought is of revenge. He is just.
Again Lang makes believable the reversal of a character;
and this single sequence reveals to us ‘what makes him
tick’.
Even though the dialogue, with its American idiom, is
no doubt Cormack’s work, we can in retrospect identify
elements which Fury has in common with Lang’s other
films. Screen court-room scenes in the films of other
directors often appear heavy; but the man who devised the
thrilling sequence of the gangsters’ court in M, in
collaboration with Thea von Harbou, knows how to
manage his effects, to place his pauses, to show the
reactions of Joe, who turns off the radio to which he is
listening when Catherine is giving evidence, then turns it
on again later, thus creating suspense by ellipsis.
Regardless of who actually scripted the dialogue, the
dialectical and sophisticated way in which every detail ot
the game of question and answer is worked out is
unmistakeably Lang, as is the notion of confronting the
smug defendants - now converted once more to ordinary
hypocritical citizens, with the newsreel of the lynching, in
which they behave like wild animals. Here again Lang
achieves his effect through variation. We see one
defendant, Mr Dawson, who has produced a witness to
swear he was elsewhere, at the head of the crowd storming
the prison building, and once inside pouring petrol on
matchwood beneath a window. A stop action image
freezes the hatred on his face. Mrs Humphrey, who has
claimed to have been twenty miles away on her fiance’s
Fury: behind prison bars
farm, is seen in the film throwing the burning rag which
starts the hre. First seen in longshot, an enlargement picks
out her infuriated face, while a close-up contrasts her fear
in the court-room. Finally Garret, one of the main
agitators, who had ‘sat at home peacefully’ is seen trying to
axe the firemen’s hose. Lang and Cormack confine
themselves to these three cases: they are sufficient.
In laborious preparation for this court-room sequence,
Lang sat in on innumerable court sessions to learn the pro¬
cedures which are quite different in the States from Euro¬
pean practice. He watched and learned, and questioned
experts. Happily he did not always follow their advice, for
they told him that no judge had ever allowed films to be
shown as evidence in a court-room. Though the law still
leaves it to the judge’s discretion whether film may be
brought in evidence, Lang’s idea seems to have set an
example.
In the trial scene, every link of the chain is established
with impeccable logic. Here we have the first of many
Lang court-room scenes, foreshadowing in particular the
dramatic dialectics of the trial in Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt.
Other recognisable Lang touches are the radio an¬
nouncement that the trial is broadcast by courtesy of the
‘Magical Desert Homalar Mafat’, and the sudden flight of
the customer when the barber remarks that an impulse is
an impulse and that for twenty years whenever his razor
was poised over an Adam’s apple he had felt the desire to
cut. This is again Lang’s sense of‘Enter the Bear’; but the
barber incident has a practical dramatic purpose: it
provides the opportunity for the barber to telephone his
wife not only to tell her the story of the fleeing customer,
but at the same time passing on the news that the
kidnapper has apparently been arrested. This triggers offa
sequence which recalls the backyard gossip in Murnau’s
Last Laugh. Lang yielded to the temptation of cutting from
the gossipping women to a flock of cackling hens and
ducks - an effect very characteristic of the 1920s (cf. Strike;
Eisenstein’s cross-cutting of murdered workers and
slaughtered oxen was admired by critics as powerful
emotional intensification’). Lang says that he would no
longer use that kind of symbolism; and recalls that Sam
Katz said to him at the time: ‘Americans don’t like

173
symbols. They are not so dumb that they don’t understand
without them’.
Another familiar Lang technique is the use of close-ups
of news articles and small ads. Replacing explanatory
dialogue, they become focal points which also drive on the
action. After the kidnap headline glimpsed at the camp
fire, there are two later close-ups in the sheriff s office, one
of the peanut crumbs in the blackmailer’s letter, the other
of a small notice offering a reward of 10,000 dollars and
giving the description of one of the gang members, which
the sheriff hands to the astonished Joe.
Again in the governor’s office after the lynching, the
newspaper article with the news that the real kidnappers
have been arrested is immediately followed by a close-up
of the article which reports that an innocent man has been
lynched and burned alive. In the same way Joe shows his
brothers the page torn from a legal text-book which we
see with them in close-up and which states that lynching is
first degree murder. Other comparable examples are the
anonymous letter produced in the court-room with the
word mementum mistakenly used for memento; the page of
the calendar hanging in the solitary bar, with the ominous
number 22.
Lang recalls how during the time he was shooting
Liliom in Paris he witnessed at first hand the way a mob
develops. From a stationary taxi, Lang saw a man rattling a
stick along an iron railing. People were laughing at him
and stopping to look on; and the more they laughed the
more vigorously the man rattled his stick. Then the
railings came to their end, and he hit a shop window,
breaking it. What had started in a spirit of nonsense now
became a not, and the police moved in. Suddenly the
indignant crowd had become a mob; people were no
longer individuals. A mob, Lang realised, is utterly
without responsibility. But the vivid and graphic way in
which Lang shows how a mob is born in Fury probes
greater depth. I can discover no abstract formula here, as
Gavin Lambert does in his Sight and Sound article. Lang
had been witness to the way the Hitler movement grew
gradually from nonsense which 110-one took seriously into
the terror which did not stop short of murder in the gas
chambers. It is not fanciful to find a parallel between the
gradual and menacing growth of hatred in a crowd

174
lusting for a lynching, and the Hitler terror.
The associative overlapping, counterpointing and
juggling ot two interconnected situations — familiar from
Lang’s German films, such as M or The Last Will of Dr
Mabuse — is in evidence here too. The sheriff tells the crowd
that the militia is on its way. The next shot shows the
armoury court where the militia are waiting for their
marching orders, which will not be issued. A shot ofjoe in
his cell, terrified as he finally reveals the name of
Catherine, whom he had wanted to protect, so that they
can ask her to provide his alibi, is followed directly by the
shot ot Catherine in the highway drugstore where she first
hears of Joe’s arrest.
The point ot one very Germanic symbol (cf. Lupu
Pick’s Sylvester) has been somewhat obscured. Joe,
tormented by conscience, stares at the calendar page for 22
November in the lonely bar. The screenplay indicates a
previous sequence which was apparently not filmed, in
which Joe is frightened by a large ‘22’ on the taximeter.
The subsequent apparition of the 22 defendants in the shop
window, with ghostly footsteps, as of skeletons, rattling
down the street and up the stairs, is yet another
reminiscence of the German Lang. Today, many Euro¬
pean prints lack this section; even the copy of Fury
preserved by the Cinematheque Franchise, which retains
the spectral vision in the shop window, has an altered
soundtrack in which staccato music replaces the footsteps.
Lang thinks, however, that the American version still
retains the original elements.
There is, finally, the question of the happy ending. Joe
finds himself again, and renounces his determination to
seek the punishment of the 22:

I came to save them, yes. But not for their sakes. Men or women who
lynch another human being are a disgrace for humanity. They who
pretend to be humans, showed themselves at the first smell ot blood to
be cruel and brainless beasts.

He does not forgive them:

They lynched what mattered to me . . . my liking people and havin’

faith in them.

The decision to present himself in court is taken for

himself, not even for Catherine and the brothers who love
him. He has realised that he cannot live in isolation, away

175
from home, without roots, under a false name. This is
what has been symbolised in the walk in the night street,
the escape into the empty bar where the chairs are stacked
on the tables and the only human sound is the radio. It is
therefore untenable to claim that MGM and the demands
of the box office forced a happy ending on Lang. Logic
dictates that Joe cannot go on in exile, unable to see his
family. Only the happy-ending kiss was forced on Lang
against his wishes: originally the script ended with
Catherine smiling proudly through her tears. The question
still remains, whether this kiss really constitutes a happy
ending; for Joe after all has been turned into a completely
different person.
The first screening - to which MGM had invited no-one
of any importance - was an enormous success, even
though one of the studio executives had told a journalist
who asked what film was being shown: ‘a lousy one from
this lousy German son-of-a-bitch - not worth looking at’.
The studio was astonished with the success and in¬
credulously asked journalists, ‘You really think it’s a good
picture?’ Lang (who had been forbidden to touch the film
at a late stage ol the editing) went to the opening with
Marlene Dietrich, and left during the applause.
Twenty years later he had an offer to make another film
for MGM, after the departure of both Louis B. Mayer and
Sam Katz. Eddie Manmx engaged him to make Moon fleet.
So successful was Lang’s first film in the United States
that his second, You Only Live Once was announced by the
distributor thus:
‘Directing: Fritz (FURY) Lang’.

176
 14 You Only Live Once (1937)

There are again only three \ ou Only Live Once is Lang’s Song of Songs, his
characters: the outcast hero,
American equivalent, so to speak, of Destiny. Man is
his girl friend, society ... It
trapped by fate: the loving woman cannot halt her lover’s
is this arbitrariness that gives
to the film its curious and inexorable destiny; her involvement makes things worse
memorable force. Critics of the and she must finally perish with him.
time reproached Lang with Just before the fugitives arrive at the Mexican frontier
sacrificing social comment to which means freedom, Jo is recognised as she gets
melodrama: but they
cigarettes from a slot machine. With his sense of the
misunderstood, I believe, his
ambiguity of fate, Lang wanted the cigarettes to be ‘Lucky
purpose. From the opening
scene of Eddie’s release - asked Strike'. This ironic symbol and profound pun - worlds
if he will go straight, ‘I will if removed from his German symbolism - was not permitted
they let me’, he replies - a by the producer, on the grounds that advertising was not
world of inexorable foreboding allowed in films.
and melancholy is created, a
‘The Gods let poor humans err, then leave them to their
world of terrible angst in
guilt,’ says Goethe. It is the ananke of Greek tragedy in its
which guilt and innocence,
calculation and fate are crushing, merciless force. Then secular social justice takes
confused. over, without heart, and makes things still more bitter for
Gavin Lambert: ‘Fritz Lang’s miserable humans.
America’, Sight and Sound,
You Only Live Once is the first, barely perceptible
Summer 1955
appearance of the ‘Once off guard . . .’ motif of later Lang
You Only Live Once was in films. At 16 Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) beat up a boy
my view a completely
because he sadistically pulled off frogs’ legs; and was sent
American film without any
to a reformatory. There, through bad influence and
trace of Europe in it.
Fritz Lang (Textes, Eibel, resentment, he began on the downward path . . .
P 61) The frog story as the fount of a tough career is told in
passing in one of the most lyrical love scenes in the cinema.
In the garden of the Valley Tavern, an ideal honeymoon
setting, Lang, without fear of sentimentality, sets up the
young couple’s paradise and fulfilment of their love,
complete with a background of croaking frogs and in a
setting of shrubs and flowers.
They want only to live. ‘We may never find happiness’,

177
says Jo (Sylvia Sidney) during the escape in which she has
already learnt so much; ‘but we have a right to live’. (The
French title of the film is Nous avons le droit de vivre.)
There is a sudden contrast of mood. The selt-righteous
middle-class citizens cannot allow a jail-bird to remain
under their roof till the next morning. This produces a
touch of Lang’s humour. The proprietor of the Tavern, a
hen-pecked ninny who reads every number ot ‘True
Detective Stories’ wants to impress his nagging wife who
threatens to burn his magazines it he proves to be
mistaken. They come upstairs together; ‘When I’m
aroused. I’m . . . I’m . . . aroused’ he says unconvincingly.
The pair of them, something from a Hogarth sketch,
hesitate at the locked door. He may be dangerous. The
would-be hero falters until the woman loses her patience
and hammers at the door. When Eddie appears, the man
stammers:

Mr Taylor . . . my wife has something to tell you . . .Tell him Hester.

Whereupon she barks:

Tell him yourself. . .

The man lies:

We-11 - you see, this room was reserv’d - for some folks coming in
from Brattelboro . . .

Until finally Hester shouts at him:

Convicts and their wives are not welcome in this Tavern. — So we’re
asking you in a nice way — to leave at once . . .

Jo tries to calm Eddie:

Darling, you promised you wouldn’t let things like this bother you.

Hopeless, Eddie replies:

I must have been hopped up — crazy - to let you marry me.

And again Jo:

What do we care what these people think - What do we care what

anybody thinks - As long as we have each other?

The frog story, contrasted to the unpleasantness of the

‘decent’ couple trom the Tavern is more than a mere foil. It
introduces a characteristic Lang element into the script. In
Liliom in the scene where the two no-good friends discuss
their robbery we hear their voices but see only their

178
reflections in the water. In a similar manner, we see here
only the reflected images of the two lovers in the pond as
they talk. Four frogs squat cosily on the water-lily leaves.
In The Frog and I (see Eibel, p 84) Lang relates how
he struggled to persuade one of the frogs to jump into the
water so that the image of the loving couple might be
shattered by the splash. This discreet symbol hints at the
coming catastrophe — much more effectively than the
flowering tree that turns to leafless branches for Seigfned
and Kriemhild.
Lang introduces the film’s leitmotif: almost shyly Eddie
asks Jo:

You know something about frogs? If one dies - the other dies . . .

And then, when Jo smiles, puzzled, and asks:

That’s funny. Why?

I don't know, except that theyjust can’t live without each other - You
know - like Romeo and Juliet.

Later in the film Jo asks Father Dolan to tell Eddie one

thing before he is executed:

Just before the end - not before - at the very last moment - will you
tell him . . . that ... I haven’t . . . forgotten the frogs —

The action rapidly shifts location; but the action is

linked. As the boss is sacking Eddie for being late (the
lovers have been inspecting the dilapidated cottage which
is to be their haven) he is shown in a foreshortened angle
while he talks into the telephone - a reminiscence of the
famous foreshortening of Lohmann in M. There the
purpose was to reveal the man’s earthiness and folksy
Berlin style. FJere the same device - though this time the
man is seen from above - is used to expose the smug
incomprehension of the plain, decent citizen when faced
with the despair of a man who begs, for Jo’s sake, for
another chance. It is more important for the boss to discuss
with his wife who should be invited to their poker party.
His ironical ‘If you don’t mind - I’d like to speak to my
wife’ excludes Eddie from any kind of every-day security.
The man adds: I’m not running the social system - I’m just
running a trucking business’.
Lang and his co-writers Gene Town and Graham Baker
stress the failure ofimagination and the narrow-mindedness
of the socially and economically secure. The stern but

179
kindly warden keeps eating chocolates from an enormous
box while handing out good advice to Eddie on his
discharge. Ironically Eddie asks his defence lawyer ‘Does
he know I’ve been pardoned ?’ as the warden warns that a
further conviction would mean a life sentence. The lawyer
explains Eddie has a job with the Ajax Truck Company:
‘He’ll make good’.
Eddie, without illusions, adds: ‘I will if they let me’; to
which the warden, unconvincingly, remarks, ‘That’s up to
you’.
There is no false pathos in this. From the start Eddie will
encounter people who are no worse than the rest, but
simply without understanding ot the situation or suffering
of others. This failure of understanding is shown contin¬
uously in the film, even when Eddie is not on screen - for
instance the gum-chewing editor indifferent to which of
the headlines will be used: TAYLOR NOT GUILTY,
with a happy picture of Eddie; TAYLOR JURY
DEADLOCKED, with a non-committal portrait; or
TAYLOR GUILTY, with a gloomy face.
When Eddie is pardoned and let out into dubious
freedom, Lang sketches a few apparently insignificant
details which are nevertheless portents. Bugey, the halt-
crazy lifer trusty remarks innocently:

So long Eddie - I’ll be seein’ you

To which Eddie replies:

Not if I can help it.

Then a murderous-looking thug says,

I’ll look you up when I get out, Eddie,

which produces a cool reply from Eddie:

Don’t do me any favours Monk.

Monk becomes threatening:

Lay off the high hat, Taylor. You’re still one of the boys.

Monk will, in fact prove to be Eddie’s nemesis.

Father Dolan’s first appearance is another such pointer.
Eddie tries to avoid the priest; and when his lawyer tells
him he owes his pardon to Father Dolan, Eddie’s answer is
that he is full of‘That love thy neighbour and have faith
my son stuff. This characterises both Eddie’s current state

180
 You Only Live Once (1937): the attack on the bank

of mind and Dolan’s innocent belief in the goodness of

man. Dolan’s character and the toughness of Eddie’s jail
companions is illustrated further in the scene ol Father
Dolan umpiring a prison baseball game and being
ferociously booed when he declares a foul.
When Father Dolan remarks to Eddie that he looks
unhappy for a man about to be discharged, Eddie’s answer
prepares us for coming events:

I cheered the first time I got out - and they rammed it right back down
my throat. They’re not all like you on the outside.

Like Father Dolan - and like Joe Wilson at the start of

Fury - Jo believes injustice and man’s decency. She has a
safe job as secretary to Whitney, the public defender. Her
boss is in love with her in a simple way, and is unselfish
enough to get Eddie out of jail before his term is up, and
help him marry Jo. The Valley Tavern scene shows how
their love began.

181
 No sooner have they discovered the cottage (‘one thing
- nobody can throw us out of it at four in the morning’)
than Eddie is dismissed, leaving his intransigent, poker-
host employer with a crack on the jaw. Before he can tell
Jo over the telephone, she excitedly reveals to the desperate
man that she has already moved into the cottage. How will
he pay for it?
While he is still talking to her on the telephone, Monk,
who has moved into Eddie’s hotel room, goes down to the
street, taking Eddie’s hat, with the initials E. T., on which
the camera momentarily lingers. Thus the links ol the
chain are forged.
Again we admire Lang’s documentary skill in the attack
on the bank truck, recalling the Mabuse films and Spies
with its precise timing. The tension is heightened because
we cannot see the bandit’s face, and are left to wonder it the
gas mask disguises the desperate Eddie. Already we have
glimpsed a revolver under his mattress.
Gloved hands lift the blind of a car window and lay
Eddie’s hat on a cheap suitcase . . . The truck opens up;
armed police get out; others approach and clear the
passers-by. It is raining. A bomb is thrown and a wall
of gas rises. Dimly outlined, police and bystanders are
seen grasping their throats, rubbing their eyes, falling
suffocating to the ground. Recalling the sound of the
second Mabuse film, more sirens are added to the noise of a
second bomb. Through the clouds of gas and pouring rain
the bandit hurries to the truck. As it moves off, the camera
rests on Eddie’s hat, lying on the pavement.
Fade-in on a detour sign on the highway, at dusk. The
truck roars into the picture and disappears around a bend
in the road. There is only one more sound - the noise of the
truck crashing; and we know that Eddie has lost all chance
of proving the identity of the real bandit.
(Films have strange fates, Lang recalls going to see a film
called Dillinger a few years later on the recommendation
that it had an excellent bank raid in it. He was astonished to
find that the sequence was in fact some 200 metres of the
bank raid from You Only Live Once, which fitted quite
easily into the new film since the bank raider was
unrecognisable in his gas mask. The material had been sold
to Walter Wanger and inserted, uncut, into his Dillinger.
Lang had no remedy.)

182
 When Eddie returns to the cottage, climbing through
the window, alter the gas massacre and million dollar
robbery, he is changed and tense. The rain is relentless and
the swing which Eddie had said would be ‘a great place for
kids to romp around’ sways slightly in the wind.
Jo cannot understand why, since he is innocent, Eddie
wants to run away:

Eddie - you can’t run. You can’t. You’ll never be able to prove your
innocence then — ...
Eddie, it you love me, you’ll stay and face it.

As a three-time loser, he knows better. He has no alibi; he

was wandering the streets in search of work when the raid
happened.

O.K., kid. I’ll play it your way!

But you’re gambling with my life - and if you’re wrong -

So Eddie is trapped and led off by the State Troopers, who

would have preferred to shoot him while resisting and
‘save the State the expense of a trial’
Later, in the Court House hall, Eddie passes Jo who has
been waiting to talk to him. He looks hatred and contempt
at her, and shakes her off:

Are you satisfied now?

Eddie — please forgive me!
Keep away from me! (and to the cops) Let’s go.

There is characteristic overlapping of dialogue. As

Eddie is driven away from the Court House he shouts at
the mob - hysterical like the crowd in Fury and with two
maddened women demanding his lynching -

Get a big kick out of me! It’s fun to see a man burning!
. . . They’re never . . .
DISSOLVE TO CONDEMNED ROW
. . . going to burn me for something I didn’t do . . .
CUT TO CLOSE-UP OF EDDIE GRIPPING THE BARS OF
THE DEATH CELL, IN FUTILE RAGE:
. . . never, never . . .

So the action is moved forward by ellipsis.

The death cell is seen in its natural abstraction, not in the
decorative manner of Mackie’s death cell in Pabst’s
Dreigroschenoper (to which Brecht’s irony, all the same,
adds a certain ambiguity). Lang had researched the

183
You Only Live Once: the condemned cell
American penal system. He visited San Quentin and
Alcatraz; and the death cell is an exact reconstruction of
the death cell at San Quentin — filmed by Leon Shamroy,
says Lang, ‘brilliantly and imaginatively’. The dark, heavy
bars torm a broad, tan-like pattern of shadows, symbolis¬
ing disaster even more intensely than the black arrow lines
ot the prison in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Fate’s
inescapable trap is made visible. Through the experience of
his German films, Lang manages to create a visual
transposition ot the message in the script, ‘His cage has
vertical wooden bars, about two inches apart, and visible
trom all tour sides’. Once this image has been stamped on
our memory, when we learn that tor five months Eddie
has been waiting in the death cell (‘waiting, - waiting -just
like that’) we understand his behaviour towards Dolan
atter his break-out in the tog. From his use of symbolism in
his German films, Lang has progressed in the States to
discover the only possible expression of a situation whose
symbolic meaning becomes almost painfully real in its
visualisation.
Jo learns her lesson. When Eddie is persuaded (by
Dolan) to talk to her, she still doesn’t quite understand
when Eddie whispers desperately:

Get me a gun — a gun!

I can’t! You’d kill somebody -

To which Eddie viciously retorts:

What do you think they’re going to do to me?

This dialogue is reinforced by a characteristic Lang idea.

As Jo hesitates outside the window of the pawnshop
(whose crowded display recalls M) a newsboy cries out:

Taylor dies to-morrow!

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Jo goes into the shop; and we know she will buy the gun.
Jo has learnt her lesson. When Eddie, bewildered, says
during the escape:

I can still see Father Dolan’s face . . .

she answers

I’m guilty, Eddie . . . not you ... I pulled the trigger on him. I killed
Father Dolan ... If I hadn’t had this silly belief in faith . . . faith . . .

185
and I had let you go when you wanted to, all this wouldn’t have
happened. It was my fault. I tell you - my fault, not yours!

The sequence in which Eddie receives the note telling

him to get into the hospital isolation ward, where he
breaks the coffee pot and where he slashes his wrist, so that
blood starts to drip on the ground, recall the Mabuse films.
The succeeding action emphasises the cruelty of an
ostensibly socially minded society. The bleeding man is
given a transfusion to save his life for the electric chair. The
troubled executioner asks the warden if it will be necessary
to postpone the execution; the doctor, with indifference
replies that he will be strong enough by then. The
warden can announce that ‘The execution will go on as
scheduled —’
When, in a parallel scene, the warden’s smug wife tells
Father Dolan,

I still don’t understand your feeling for the Taylor boy. I think he was
born bad!

Dolan voices the philosophy which could stand as a motto

for all Lang’s American films:

Every man - at his birth - is endowed with the nobility of a king. But
the stam of the world soon makes him forget even his birthright.

Perhaps, he adds, this is the reason for death - just to give

men another chance of remembering who they are before
they are born again. The warden’s insensitive comment is:

Well, father, I hope when Taylor dies tonight he won’t be born again.
He’s caused enough trouble in the world.

At this precise moment the siren starts up shrilly: Eddie

has broken out.
In the prison yard there is dense fog; and in the haze are
two figures: Eddie, and in front of him as a shield, Eddie’s
pistol in his back, Dr Hill, the prison doctor.
Searchlights try to track Eddie. The siren continues to
blast out. The fog is impenetrable. There are shouts among
the guards straining to see down into the yard. The whole
is orchestrated with the precision of The Last Will of Dr
Mabuse.
Like Fury the film is divided into two clear sections, in
which the tragic reversal of fortune is achieved. At the
moment where Eddie Taylor’s innocence is established
(the truck and Monk’s corpse have been found at the
 You Only Live Once: the break-out from the prison

bottom of the gorge), he turns murderer, shooting Father

Dolan as he makes his break. Now their fate is inevitable,
(and this alone distinguishes You Only Live Once from the
casual, unmotivated activities of Bonnie and Clyde with
which the film is frequently compared: there is more of
Lang’s philosophy in Ray’s fine They Live by Night). Eddie
andjo have no choice: everything is final and without alter¬
native. Every act of violence which is now perpetrated in
the country is inevitably blamed on them. When they hold
up a garage, merely for petrol, the garage employees
quickly empty the till and blame the fugitives. A man
speculates:

From all they’ve stolen - they must be millionaires by now.

His friend replies:

Probably hiding in a swell place and having a real time.

In fact we at once see them shivering in the wind and

rain in the car whose windscreen they have had to break

187
You Only Live Once: the end in the woods
You Only Line Once: Joan (Sylvia Sidney) and Eddie (Henry Fonda)

away so that the bullet holes will not give them away.
After the rain, storm and gloom we find them temporarily
installed in the sunshine, in the hobo jungle where their
baby is born. It is a faint echo of the Valley Tavern idyll.
Whitney, the public defender, is a type such as we meet
again and again in Lang films. He loves Jo, and what he
does for Eddie is initially for her sake. Yet when he
recognizes thejudicial mistake, and watches a jury convict
a man of murder only on the strength of his record, he
decides to devote himself entirely to the Taylor case.
When the Inspector reproaches him,

You sound as though you sympathise with that guy -

He answers:
The law condemned him to death. They found out they had made a
mistake - And they thought they could straighten it out just like that.

He maintains his resistance when Bonnie, Jo’s sister, out

of love for Jo, expresses views similar to those of the

189
warden’s wife:

You’re not helping Jo by trying to keep this case alive. You know as
well as I do that Eddie Taylor’s been pounding on the door of the
execution chamber since he was born.

Lang’s sense of justice is clearly expressed when Whitney

tells the Inspector:

What do you want me to do? Go out and find him? Get a gun and
shoot him. That’s your job — and I don’t envy you.

In Fury Joe Wilson becomes more and more embittered,

until Catherine makes him realise he cannot continue to
live in this way. Eddie is more and more purified during
the lovers’ escape into nowhere. Lang has been charged
with sentimentality in having Eddie hear Father Dolan’s
voice as he sinks to the ground, clasping the dead Jo in his
arms: ‘Eddie, you’re free - the gates are open!’ The script
says only: ‘CAMERA PANS HIGEI . . . over the hill top,
over-the-top-of-the-trees. The sun rises higher and higher,
casting golden beams of light.’ In Murnau’s Faust also the
light of the sun meant salvation. If Lang felt that the beams
of sunlight woven among the high trunks of the forest near
the frontier that meant freedom was not by themselves
enough, it was not out of sentimentality or symbolism. In
Goethe’s Faust, after the declaration ‘She has been judged!’
comes a voice from above: ‘She has been savedV In
Germany Lang showed the lovers of Destiny walking
about in the world beyond. Here, in a far more mature
film, Death opens the gates for the two lovers who have
been removed from earthly justice.
 15 You and Me (1938)

You and Me was his least You and Me was a lailure: perhaps because it was an
important (film), although it
attempt at a Brecht Lehrstück without Brecht (Kurt Weill’s
too was a bold attempt to
facility did not compensate lor the merciless precision and
break away from Hollywood
formula and to experiment harsh rhythm of Brecht); perhaps because - as Gavin
with sound . . . the story had Lambert speculates in his Sight and Sound article, 'Fritz
moments of novel Lang’s America’ - in contrast to Lang’s first two American
treatment . . . there were . . . films the problem is no longer a fight against social
many striking camera bits, and
injustice. Certainly there was no darker under-structure
there was the same pungent
against which the comedy and irony could reverberate.
characterisation and moodiness
that was evident in Lang’s The boss of a big department store collects convicts as
first two films. other people collect stamps, in order to give them another
Lewis Jacobs: The Rise of chance. The former gaol-bird has, then, none of the
the American Film, problems of Eddie in You Only Live Once, of finding a
Harcourt, Brace and
decent job to give him the chance to go straight. The
Company, New York,
motives are now private ones: the converted gangster goes
1939
back to his former criminal associations because he is
resentful that his sweetheart kept him in the dark about her
own past prison experience.
The opening song,

You can’t get something for nothing

And only a chump would try

resembles the rhythmical structure of the original German

of Brecht’s:

And as you made your bed

You shall lie there

(It is interesting to note that Weill was accustomed to get

the distinctive rhythm for his songs from Brecht, who
would indicate it on the piano with one finger.) Lang
illustrates the song with a rapid montage ot all the desirable
things to be had for money. It is a very different effect from
M’s visual illustration of the report on the office break-in,
You and Me (1938): studies of the interplay of light and shade

or the police commissioner’s account of his force’s

investigation methods, in its arbitrary assembly of objects.
Again, Lang’s illustration of the business of a sailors’ pub,
as the dance hall singer sings:

They call him good for nothing . . .

But he’s the right guy for me

is soft and blurred (even allowing for the atmospheric

intention) and uncharacteristic of Lang.
The film’s strongest moment is the scene of the
gangsters’ Christmas Eve party. One of them sighs as his
eyes fall on the barred window of the restaurant patronised
equally by gangsters and decent bourgeoisie. The bars
recall days of being inside, looking out; and they all start to
reminisce about their times in prison, and the truly festive
Christmas that the one joint of the year represented. Now
that they can buy as many chickens and turkeys as they
please, it does not mean nearly as much . . . One of them

192
Starts to bang the table with his knife, and all the others
start up the rhythmic hammering of the prison code.
When finally Joe (George Raft) asks to be admitted with
the same coded knocking on the door, they all start up in a
stylised chorus: ‘Stay with the mob. Stay with the mob’.
The rhythmic chant appears quite natural in this context,
and the desired effect is achieved without Weill’s music.
(Weill in fact only worked on the film for a short time and
abandoned it before it was completed.)
Lang explains that for this remarkable scene he wanted
‘something like a song without music, built only on
rhythm and sound effects’; though he dislikes the term
‘sound effects’ and achieved rather a mental association
between the nocturnal passing of the code in prison, and
the sounds produced by the ex-convicts with the glasses,
forks and plates of their banquet.
With his enthusiasm and interest obviously aroused at
this point, Lang achieves a convincing poetic movement.

193
In the soft light we see infinite prison corridors; and
everywhere - on the cells, between the corridors, some of
which are only blobs of light and lattice made of shadows
on the floor. Even the barred restaurant window is
suddenly seen to cast a merciless shadow on the wall beside
one of the reminiscing gangsters. As in Eddie’s death cell,
the bars all seem to spell an inexorable doom, the fate ot an
inescapable incarceration. They all recall the legendary
break-out of Number One, the greatest; and all of them
are once more pressing against the bars of their cells,
vicariously sharing the experience, until the rat-tat of
machine guns and the sudden silence of the siren shows
that Number One did not make it. This is no longer the
case of an arbitrary, accidental, purely decorative illus¬
tration, but a forceful and expressive statement.
The scene of the break-in recalls M, with the watchman
on his rounds, the conspiratorial whistling, the empty
entrance railings and drive; and then the emergence of
shadowy figures, and the rhythm of people walking
upstairs, as if in step . . . Suddenly the light flashes on: the
boss and his gunman are lying in wait, take their arms; and
the boss remarks that his wife was right after all: he should
have collected stamps. Helen (Sylvia Sidney) makes her
speech about the unprofitability of crime, and de¬
monstrates on a blackboard that each of them stands to
gain 133 dollars and 35 cents: not much for a hunted life.
(Brecht’s Polly Peachum also dominated the gang by
means of simple arithmetic; only she taught that the
opening of a bank is more profitable than robbing one:
‘Wholesale robbing is better’.)
The film somewhat abruptly changes its mood to gaiety
and harmlessness, not much affected even by the scenes
which recall M, such as the council of gangsters who
enquire from house to house and bar to bar for Helen.
There is a comic happy ending, as they all sit around 111 the
maternity hospital waiting for the arrival of Helen’s baby,
incongruously dressed in bourgeois Sunday best. When
the nurse calls for the happy father, they all rush forward
together. Lehrstück as parody, a kind of Robber Symphony.
Some ol the comic inventions are nevertheless excel¬
lent: the shop man who intimidates a fat, spoilt child into
choosing the toy she at first rejected, and the unwitting
mother who compliments the man’s understanding of

194
 You and Me: George Raft as Joe Dennis

child psychology; George Raft’s assurance to a sportive

lady customer m the sports department that he knows as
much about rackets as anyone; the helpful safecracker who
deftly shows the boss’s wife how to open a tin can; Joe’s
encounter with an importunate man on the dance floor -
knocking him out when Helen is gone, and then sitting
him up and straightening his cap.
There is a use of symbolism here, too. A stop/go traffic
sign haltsjoe in his tracks and sends him back to Helen. But
the idyllic relationship lacks the intensity of You Only Live
Once, because there are finally no tragic undertones; and
perhaps because George Raft, with a vapid, gigolo face,
cannot believably arouse sufficient interest trom Sylvia
Sidney.
The film was made under difficulties. Lang did not get
on very well with Virginia Van Upp, the screenwriter.
George Raft demanded many rehearsals, while Sylvia

195
Sydney wanted as few as possible in order to keep her
performance spontaneous. Americans were not yet ready
for the Lehrstück film, and to Lang the plot seemed too
superficial to warrant a deeper-reaching social treatment.
A script called Men Without a Country which Lang
wanted to film for Paramount never materialised. It was
the story of three adventurers, a Nazi, a Japanese and
another international spy who try to get hold of a secret
war weapon, a beam which produces blindness. After this
Lang tried his hand at a Western script, dealing with a lost
goldmine, The Dutchman; and there was an offer by
Darryl F. Zanuck, then chief of production at Twentieth
Century Fox, to make a sequel to Fienry King’s Jesse James,
which would have Frank James, brother of the murdered
bandit, as the hero. Lang agreed to make the film.

196
 16 The Return of Frank James (1940)

The fact that, in contrast to so Approaching his first Western, Lang recognized that for
many other films by Fritz the young American nation the only equivalent to sagas or
Lang, The Return of Frank
legends like the Arthurian lore of the English, the Roland
James has a happy ending,
should not be interpreted as a
Legend of the French or the Nibelungen Saga of the
concession to American Germans and Scandinavians was the folklore of the War of
censorship. Leaving behind Secession and the Conquest of the West. History mingles
moral man, Lang finds sinful wishfully with myth and legend in the stories of the
man, which explains his opening of the unknown and mysterious West, the
bitterness. Yet beyond the
conflicts with the Indians, the feuds between the pioneers
sinner there is a study of
regenerated man, which who wanted arable land and the cattle men and cowboys
intrigues the most Germanic who wanted open grazing land and prairie. The outsiders,
of American film makers. the bandits and rebels like Jesse James, were as much
When the fierce individualist romanticised in their own life-times as were the defenders
Frank James finally finds his
of the established order, marshals and sheriffs. Often the
happiness, it is only after
Western gams its vitality from a presentation of the two
having first atoned with his
pain. sorts of folk heroes in conflict.
Jean-luc Godard: Fiche Lang, having already spent some time living with the
U.F.O.L.E.I.S. 1956 Navaho while waiting for MGM to find him work under

I love Westerns. They are

his contract, accepted the challenge of making a Western
based on a very simple and as authentic as any native American director could do. As
essential ethical code. It is a always, he first sought to document every individual
code which is no longer noted, detail. In Tombstone, for instance, he found an old theatre
because critics are too
still standing, with its narrow boxes and hard benches;
sophisticated. All simple
contemporary accounts and pictures supplied missing
morals are important for the
success of a film. Even with details like the showy chandelier and the stage fittings.
Shakespeare the moral is The existing screenplay was good enough to require no
simple. The struggle of good more than the usual careful editing and modifications -
against evil is as old as the ‘personalising’ - which were Lang’s invariable contri¬
world.
butions to any script. He claims that to ensure the
Entretien with Fritz Lang,
continuity between one film and the other he used the last
Cahiers du Cinema,
7 November 1959 shots of the Henry King film (Jesse James, 1939) as an
introduction to his own - the shooting of Jesse James by

197
the Ford brothers after his wedding and just as he is The clear air and the sweeping
landscapes of the West seemed
preparing to retire into respectable life under the name of
to stimulate Lang only as a
Mr Howard, with a number of killings still on his
painter, for it is in their
conscience. However, the scene as it now appears in Lang’s markedly tasteful and
film, in which Jesse is shot in the back while hanging up a exploratory use of Technicolor
wall motto inscribed ‘God Bless Our Home’, is certainly that the main interest of both
not the scene as it occurs in King’s picture, where Jesse is films lies. The landscapes are
soft and luminous, they have a
shot while sitting at a table in a wooden-block cabin.
rich and idyllic glow . . .
Although it was the first time that Lang had used colour,
Gavin Lambert, ‘Fritz
the technique seemed to come naturally to him. He had Lang’s America’, Sight and
always loved to grapple with new problems; and alter all Sound, Autumn 1955
he had been used to a whole spectrum of shades and tonal
His reputation . . . had
gradations in using black and white film. Nor, for a preceded him in Hollywood,
director who had generally worked in the studio, was he and it was not until long after
disturbed by the comparatively unusual problems of his arrival . . . that he had
working out-of-doors in natural exteriors. As he had become one of the industry’s
busiest directors. Later 1
quickly mastered sound in M, so here he learned - helped
remember, Darryl Zanuck
by his talent as a painter - to cope with the problems of gave him a Western movie to
colour, the new techniques of structure, composition and direct, and I asked him how on
cutting; the need to grade the film carefully so that the earth he could allow a middle
spectator’s eye is saved the shock of too sudden contrasts of European to do an American
lighting. Western. ‘Because he’ll see
things we don’t,’ Darryl
The characters have an open-air freshness, and the
replied. And he was right.
adventure aspects of the story avoid conventional Joan Bennett: The Bennett
stylisation, but contribute to the revenge story in which Playbill by Lois Kibbee,
the avenger - unlike other comparable Lang heroes - does 1970
not himself have to kill. Frank James, the more moderate
of the brothers, had already gone back to his former life as
a cattle-breeder and farmer - the life from which the
brothers had been inveigled by the intrigues of the railway
agents - before Jesse’s murder. Thus, the title The Return of
Frank James carries at least a double meaning: ‘return’ in
the sense of ‘revenge’; but more importantly, like Joe
Wilson, Frank is able to return to an open life on his farm
without the necessity of any longer hiding his identity -
‘return’ in the sense of‘redemption’.
The revenge motive must have attracted Lang, quite
apart from the exotic, mythological and adventure aspects
of the story. This is, however, no longer the all-consuming
and self-destructive revenge of Kriemhild or Joe Wilson in
their determination to have an eye for an eye. Frank
decides to act himself only when he sees the court ofjustice
fail him, with the jury, bribed by the railway company,

198
The Return of Frank James (1940): the sweeping landscape of the West
199
acquitting the murderers and even rewarding them with
their Judas money. He can even rob the Yankee Railroad
Company of its money with good conscience and dignity;
they have stolen his and his brother’s farm. Yet Frank is
spared the need to kill the Ford brothers himself. The first
of them falls to his death in a canyon during a chase; the
other shoots himself after he has been injured and is
cornered in a barn by Frank. So, by the laws of American
mythology, Frank may have his happy ending and return
to the simple life of his little farm - perhaps even first
taking a detour by Denver where the amateur girl reporter
lives (‘mighty pretty country round there . . . Yep, there’s
lots about Denver I like.’).
It must be remembered that the film was made in 1940.
The Western genre, with its underlying mythus of the
American dream, had not yet begun to darken. Still, the
laws, for all that, are inexorable. Clem, the ranch hand
who is helping Frank, has accidentally caused the death of
the railroad man whom Frank had intended to spare. He
must pay for his minimal guilt, however accidental. There
is an echo of You Only Live Once in the situation of Frank’s
surrender to the court on the advice of the girl reporter, in
order to save the faithful Pinky, an Uncle Tom figure in
the story. There are important differences, however. The
girl is first interested in the case she has rather romanticised,
and only later in Frank himself. Frank is rightly named,
upright, straightforward, naturally decent, and is more
mature than Eddie. Thus he does not bear any resentment
toward the girl when things seem to go against him in the
court, for her advice coincides with his own conscience.
Only when he is officially acquitted can hejustify his own
deeds to himself and begin a new life. Indeed, it must be
remembered that the real Frank James was also acquitted.
The happy ending is not a concession either to the box
office or the censor, but a meeting of history and Western
ideology.
In regard to such ideology as it works within the genre,
Philip French has made a perceptive observation about
casting in the Western:

When Wayne is cast as a criminal there’s usually a suggestion that

something is wrong with the law in a local, easily resolved way; when
Fonda is cast as an outlaw the implication is that there’s something
basically wrong with society. (Outside the Western, he fulfills this

200
 The Return of Frank James: the court scene

function in, for instance, You Only Live Once, Grapes of Wrath and The
Wrong Man.) The use of Fonda and Wayne proposes fairly immediate
social readings of the genre.
Philip French, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre, Cinema One, 25
(London, 1973)

Certainly it is more possible thus to interpret The Return of

Frank James, whose corrupt courts and commercial
intrigues of railroad and banks are more dishonest and
harmful to society than the outlaw James brothers
themselves. To so read the film, however, would be
fundamentally to misread Lang’s tone here, even it such
undertones echo Lang’s previous American films and
prefigure his use of the genre in Rancho Notorious. Although
Lang is here fully aware of the darker possibilities of the
Western, The Return of Frank James is a film without
pessimism or bitterness. Lang’s ‘Enter the Bear’ humour
always counteracts the tragic elements, and in particular
gives colour and vitality to the court-room scene. All

201
The Return of Frank James: the theatrical re-enactment of Jesse James' death

Lang’s court scenes are notable for their immediacy and

directness, the variations and inventions he is able to bring
to this arena, usually so restricted in the films of other
directors. Henry Hull is permitted to overact extra¬
vagantly his role of newspaper editor and defense lawyer;
the court, composed of Southern-sympathizers, takes
unconcealed delight in for once being able to cross the
Railway Yankees. Such farcical elements override the
more sombre implications of the court-room scenes.
There is a happy and joyful earthiness and simplicity in
the film which reminds one of John Ford’s My Darling
Clementine. Adventure is interwoven with comic situ¬
ation, constantly underscoring the humanity of the
characters. For example, the encounter of the smirky little
detective with Frank and Clem and the hold-up in their
room is given a comic dimension by the discovery of the
little man gagged and bound to the cupboard door. Even
the unpleasantness of the Ford brothers’ re-enactment of

202
The Murder of JesseJames is undercut by the fresh humour
of the little theatre with its precarious benches and
wobbling scenery.
Lang, after years of working in the artifice of the studio,
rejoices here in the exterior work and the breathtaking
chases. The familiar Lang style, however, is particularly
recognisable in the scene in the barn, with its sense of menace
in the isolation of every detail in the impenetrable darkness
in which even the change of colour tones seems to harbour
an undefined threat. Every small sound — creaking timber,
the neigh and stamp of horses, the rustling of the straw -
acquires more resonance in the menacing silence. Here the
ritardando effect, coming in a film of fast-moving action,
is genuinely unnerving.
Courtade, not usually an admirer of Lang, wrote of its
‘chanson de geste naivete which makes for most of the film’s
charm’. Chanson de geste, perhaps; but not naivete. Lang
was never more deliberate than in constructing this film;
thereby establishing himself with authority in a territory
which had until now seemed to be the exclusive preserve
of native American directors.

203
17 Western Union (1941)

The box office success of The Return of Frank James gave ‘To a simple piece of telegraph
Lang an opportunity to do another Western for Fox, with wire’ - this dedication by
Zane Grey, one of the most
the possibility of careful preparation. The writer Robert
brilliant exponents of
Carson, interviewed by Eibel, said that while he was regionalist literature, refers to
deeply impressed by Lang’s personality and career, his rare the peaceful epic of the
encounters with him were not productive from the point ‘Pioneers of the Western
of view of the finished script, and that there was no time to Union’, who laid the first
telegraph wire across the West
make the corrections recommended by Lang for this
from 1861 on. The sober tone
‘stylisation of American folk-lore’. Lang, to the contrary,
of the book is also found in
remembers that he had time enough to work through the Fritz Lang’s film, which
script, making his changes in his accustomed way. The fact manages to recreate the simple
that he was given time and opportunity to scout for and and hard fight of those men,
choose his own locations would seem to lend credence to whose work consisted in
fitting one piece of iron wire
the director’s memory.
on to another piece of iron
At first glance this subject would not seem to offer the
wire’.
same obvious dramatic possibilities as did the James story. J.-L Rieupeyrout and Andre
The real-life subject matter - the progress of the Western Bazin, Le Western (1953)
Union Telegraph Company from Omaha to Salt Lake
City at the time of Lincoln’s presidency - was so
uneventful that, as Lang said later, he needed more time to
make a film about it than the Western Union Company
itself had taken for the efficiently accomplished laying of
the cable. The most momentous historical occurrences
were the knocking down of telegraph poles by buffaloes
scratching their backs against them.
Nonetheless, Lang saw clearly the possibilities offered by
one of the most classic of Western forms, the arrival of an
equivocal ‘civilization’ to the West through ‘technological
progress’ and the linkage of the two American coasts and a
concomitant closing down of one sort of code which is to
be replaced by another. However, as in The Return of Frank
James, Lang is not yet ready to allow the celebratory

204
 Lang shooting Western Union (1941)

aspects of the coming to the West of eastern ‘civilisation’ to

be more than slightly darkened by undertones of moral
and ethical disquiet.*
Hence the need to ornament the theme with classic
Western motifs and issues: encounters with Indians,
reminiscences of the Civil War, the clash of moral codes.
Again there is the characteristic Western motif of the
outlaw who wants to go straight: Vance Shaw, the man
* It is unfortunate that with a past and a golden heart, is caught in a tragic conflict
one can do no more than
(a la Corneille) of loyalties between Western Union,
speculate on what Lang
whose scout he is, and his own brother, whose role as gang
might have made of the
material he had planned to leader he cannot bring himself to betray. Such a character,
use for Winchester ’73 in trapped by fate, in conflict with the equivocal justice
1948, in which meted out by the guardians of public order, was obviously
‘technological progress’ in irresistible to Lang. There was more for him in the story
the form of a rifle obviously
than the simple fascination of the West, its prairies and its
takes on a much darker
moral coloration than does wealth of legend.
the telegraph wire. Again Lang strove for authenticity, informing himself

205
minutely on such technical matters as the methods ol
erecting the poles and tautening the wires, the function of
the insulators and the tools which would have been used at
the time. Even today he is proud of a letter from some old-
timers in Flagstaff, Arizona: ‘We have seen Western Union
and this film is the only one which shows the West as it
really was . . . How is this for a European director ?’ Yet, at
the same time, Lang insisted that the film, in spite of the
authenticity of detail, did not show the West as it really
was: ‘It lived up to certain dreams and illusions of what
these old-timers wanted to remember of the Old West.’ No
doubt, Lang’s ability to discover the spirit and essence of
the action made the film appear authentic and credible to
the people who remembered the reality.*
Certainly part ot the credibility derives not merely from
Lang’s visual and formal effects, but from the smaller
ingenious touches which render each action realistic.
There is, tor example, the scene in which Vance prepares
for his last fight. He tears the bandages from his badly
burned right hand and - adding to the script - Lang makes
him stretch his fingers to test whether they are ready to
pull the trigger of his gun and that ‘he can be quick on the
draw’. A typical enrichment of the script by Lang with a
realistic and characteristically human detail.
In the Western, with its semi-historical, semi-
mythological background, and primitive heroic codes,
Lang found the possibilities of presenting themes im¬
possible in modern subjects. The cowboy of those days, in
all his romantic glorification and his belief in honour and
his word of honour, is worlds apart from his present-day
counterpart - the Midnight Cowboy who walks the New
York pavements without a code to his name. The final
gun-battle - in which honour finally forces Vance to
destroy his own brother and his gang - has much the same
heroic rhythm as the gun battle in High Noon despite the
more matter-of-fact documentary presentation by Lang.
Unlike Frank James, whose robbery of the railroad’s
money is morally justified, Vance Shaw is required to pay *So effective, indeed,
for his bank robber and outlaw past with his life. Too late, was Lang’s recreation of the
he meets the potentially redeeming woman of his life: the legendary West, that some
ot his footage from the fdm
end of this Western is tragic.
was used by William
‘The characters of film Westerns’, writes Jean-Luc Wellman in Buffalo Bill
Godard in his analysis of the film, ‘are certainly among the (1944)-

206
 Western Union: on location

most type-cast characters in the cinema, but that means

that he (Lang) enters an important part of the mythology
by way of their existence.’ The typing is an important part
of the genre. Vance (Randolph Scott) is a simple man of lew
words, weather beaten, reserved, reticent in Ins romantic
love. His rival and counterpart Tenderfoot Blake (Robert
Young) is intelligent, educated, exaggeratedly elegant-in
short, an Easterner to contrast with Vance’s typical
Westerner. Creighton (Dean Jagger) is the professional
pioneer who guesses the truth of Vance’s past but chooses
to trust him nonetheless. He too is a recognisable Western
type, as are all the other characters: Creighton’s daughter
Sue, an idealized and civilizing pioneer woman; the gang
of greedy outlaws, the anxious comic cook, the tough,
realistic Western Union employees, Homer and Pat. Even
if the script at one point speaks ol ‘savages’, the Indians are
presented sympathetically. Their chief. Spotted Horse, has
a calm dignity; the Indian party which raids the camp does

207
so only after they have been made drunk by corrupt white
men.
Again, Lang’s use of colour is notable: Vance’s ride
through the night forest to meet his brother and the attack
by the gang; the climactic scene of the burning camp - the
sparks and flames, wagons hurtling and tumbling, water
splashing up from the puddles, constant movement in
which flashes of light and colour mix with shadow - all
even more brilliantly orchestrated than the barn scene in
The Return of Frank James. Further, there is the virtuoso
treatment of the moment which announces the start of
Indian resistance, an idea which Lang credits to his
cameraman Edward Cronjager. The camera pans down
the wire hanging loose from the last telegraph pole to the
coil still lying on the ground. From the shock of the war
spear with its brilliantly coloured feathers, the camera pans
rapidly up to the greater shock of two hundred Indians
lined up in full war paint. (Lang is particularly proud of the
authenticity of this war pamt, for which, with the
assistance of producer Kenneth MacGowan, he had
consulted authorities on Indian lore.) While Lang is
usually opposed to tricky and complicated camera work,
he used a pan of one hundred and eighty degrees in the shot
because he wanted to shock the spectator and to drive the
action forward more forcefully than would have been
possible with a simple cut.
Lang’s first two Westerns reveal a trend towards a new
development in the Western genre - the ‘psychological’
Western. His own distinctive manner of balancing right
against wrong, of introducing darker undertones to run
just under the surface of typical Western action, introduces
a new element into the mythology of the Western; and
these two Westerns clearly are preludes to the tragic
imponderables of Rancho Notorious.

208
 18 Man Hunt (1941)

Early in 1941, I made my Although Kenneth MacGowan, then a producer with

first film with the
Fox, had Fritz Lang in mind originally as director of
incomparable director Fritz
Dudley Nichol’s script for Man Hunt, it was offered first to
Lang, a circumstance that
would be an important boost John Ford, who turned it down because he did not like the
for me as an actress ... I subject matter. The script was based on Geoffrey
played a Cockney, and for Household’s novel Rogue Male (which was also the original
weeks before the shooting title of the film), and though the dictator who figures in
began, I worked on the accent
the book is unnamed, both Lang and Nichols naturally
with Queenie Leonard, an
saw him as being Hitler. Lang therefore took the
English music hall performer.
It was the only movie I ever opportunity of making his first American anti-Nazi film,
made in which I knew the to help awaken then indolent Americans to Nazi methods
entire script, like a play, and menace, much as he was to do with Hangmen Also Die
beforehand. Conquering the and The Ministry of Fear, although by the time of their
dialect was tricky enough, but
release, after Pearl Harbour, America had entered the war.
the real challenge came in
As a kind of final reckoning, in 1946 he made yet another
working with Fritz Lang . . .
anti-Nazi film in Cloak and Dagger.
Fritz was terribly exacting and
demanding and working with Dudley Nichols’ working methods and conception
him was sometimes abrasive, were very like Lang’s own (he was later hired by Lang’s
but he commanded great own company, Diana Productions, to script Scarlet Street);
respect, and I performed better but it is interesting to follow through his original script
under his direction than at any
and discover the extent to which the director himself
other time in my career.
works over scenarios, revising, improving, testing the
Almost always I did what I
was told, and we developed a credibility of behaviour and dialogue, and finally, in the
great working rapport. shooting, adding his own personality to what is written.
Joan Bennett: The Bennett It must also be noted that there was much more in the
Playbill, by Lois Kibbee, subject that would have interested Lang in addition to the
1970
anti-Nazi aspects. Examining either of the film’s titles,
Rogue Male and Man Hunt, in the light of the film that Lang
made will immediately indicate those areas of the subject
which interested Lang. Applying almost any of the
alternative definitions of‘rogue’ in a standard dictionary to
the hero of the film will lead one to those special

209
ambiguities of character and morality which delight the
director.
Like most Lang heroes Thorndike will learn about
himself, about his own code, and about the code of society
which he must either accept or reject, either of which
alternatives carries a price. The final title, Man Hunt, is not
without its ironies, in which, in typical Lang lashion,
everything is reversed and the hunter becomes the hunted,
is caught in a trap from which he must escape for
redemption.
Nichols opens the script with a dramatic introduction,
ifi media res. Lang was once again working on the studio lot,
in a wood so authentic that it is hard to believe it
was an impressive set built by Wiard Ihnen at Fox. The
camera slowly pans down to discover enormous footprints
in the wet soil. (In Lang’s films close-ups are used only
when they are vital to the action, as they are here and a
little later in the close-ups of a hand adjusting the telescopic
sights of a gun.) Near Hitler’s Berchtesgaden estate, the
British Captain Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) holds his
prey in the telescopic sights of his rifle: the Führer. The
experienced hunter has stalked his prey without having
been discovered by guards or bloodhounds. There is no
bullet in the gun when he pulls the trigger experimentally.
The hunter’s instinct asserts itself; he loads. Is he really
going to shoot? Is it merely a matter of proving to himself
that he could if he wanted to? By the end of the film,
Thorndike will have learned enough about his own
motives to give himself the answer: he wished to free
Europe of the monster. Then a leaf falls, a shaft of sunlight
glints on the gun barrel, and Hitler’s blackshirts are alerted.
He is captured and interrogated by a man addressed by
the others as Quive-Smith (a cynical and worldly role well
suited to George Sanders). A fellow-hunter, Quive-Smith
refuses to believe Thorndike’s explanations that it was only
a sporting stalk for the thrill: there is, after all, a bullet in
the rifle. Thorndike in turn refuses to accept that the end
(his liberty) justifies the means (the signing of a statement
that he was acting on British orders to assassinate Hitler).
(The date is 1939 and the British and the Germans are still
at peace.) The obstinate man is therefore handed over to
the blackshirts. The door slams; there is the ‘sound of
something being knocked about in the inner room. There

210
 is a sickening thud as something falls to the floor’.
Nichols aversion to showing torture coincides with
Lang s comparable aversion to violence; but Lang goes
further than his writer. Nichols describes at length
Thorndike s state after they have tortured and dragged
him back in:
He is only halt conscious. His arms dangle loosely and his chin is sunk
on his breast. His eyes are closed. His fingers look black. His face is
battered and across the right cheek is the livid mark of an ugly burn, as
it a burning sabre had been slapped across his cheek. Much time has
passed, tor a stubble of a beard shows on the bruised face . . .

Lang has deleted all this with red pencil, and noted on the
margin ‘Shadow — don’t show Thorndike throughout the
whole scene’ and ‘play the whole scene on Q.S.’. So in the
finished film we see only part of the man in close-up as he is
dragged in. Lang writes: ‘Close shot of dragging feet . . .
blood drops could be all.’ His legs are limp and his feet
dragging on the ground leave visible tracks. Now the
scene is concentrated on Quive-Smith and the Nazi
doctor. We see only their part of the room, which now
seems enormous; we hear the voice of Thorndike, thick
and inarticulate, from elsewhere in the room. Then we see
the shadow of the armchair, and Thorndike’s shadow as he
tries to raise himself from it. Lang then adds another shot
not in the script: the doctor bends over the tortured man
with his stethoscope, and wipes his hands afterwards -
presumably because they have been bloodied. In this way,
the imagination of the spectator to visualise the effects of
the torture, just as the torture behind the closed door was
left to the imagination. This is a clear example of Lang’s
ability to intensify an apparently finished script.
Thorndike’s high-level connections (his brother is a
Lord, a dim-witted diplomat with faith in Hitler’s
promises) make it difficult to shoot him ‘while escaping’,
so since he adamantly refuses to sign the confession, an
‘accident’ must be staged. Only half recovered from his
wounds, he is pushed into an abyss by the Nazi doctor. But
when an innocent-seeming hunting party sets out to
investigate the accident, his corpse can not be found. Only
a snapped branch indicates how his fall might have been
broken. Lang delights in the tautly cut chase which
ensues, through the evocative landscapes that are again
constructions on the back lot at Fox, with murky swamps;

21 i
Man Hunt (1941): Walter Pidgeon as Thorndike

a dried-out river bed and the cave where Thorndike later

seeks safety at the end of the film are also shot on the lot.
Slipping unnoticed past the harbour police, Thorndike
reaches a row-boat in the black waters of a port at night
(yet another studio set) and is helped by a bright cabin boy
(charmingly and unprecociously played by the young
Roddy Macdowall) to stow away in a little Danish tramp
steamer. But a well-dressed gentleman who resembles a
walking corpse, calling himself Mr Jones (John Carradme)
has inopportunely turned up on the same boat, bearing
Thorndike’s passport which was found in the rowboat.
This is all introduction to the nightmare which starts in
earnest in London. It is typical of Lang that the well-
thought-out documentary detail which creates a sense of
reality at the same time also carries a sinister threat. Danger
lurks everywhere: the man with the cap who follows him
at the port, the little stout man in a bowler, the taxi-driver,

212
the gentleman with an umbrella, all ol whom in turn take
up the pursuit of Thorndike in the maze of Limehouse
night streets. Here Lang brings in screens of mysterious
and heavy fog. Walls loom out of the dense fog, as much
shadowed as illuminated by feeble lamplight; all much
more authentic, more threatening, and less romanticised
than the London of Pabst’s Threepenny Opera. Even
such touches of local colour as the pearly king and his
entourage who skip by to the accompaniment of a con¬
certina emphasize the nightmare qualities of the dark.
Even sound gives volume to the lingering menace as
footsteps echo through the fog.
In the original script Thorndike meets Jerry (Joan
Bennett) the little streetwalker on the sidewalk. Lang
arranges their meeting in a doorway where Thorndike has
fled from his pursuers. While it served slightly to obscure
her profession for the benefit of the Legion of Decency, for
Lang it was only important in providing him with a more
dramatic effect. To prevent her from screaming, Thorn¬
dike has to clasp his hand over her mouth, later explaining
that he is being followed. Slightly to lighten the mounting
tension, there is a humorous scene in which Thorndike
takes Jerry to visit his brother, whose formal wife, Lady
Alice, pleads a headache in the face ofjerry’s frank and easy
behaviour. Thorndike teases:

Remember she thinks you are a lady. Surely you don’t want to
disillusion one so young and trusting . . .

Nichols and Lang make the idyll of Thorndike and Jerry

subtle and touching, and Joan Bennett plays the little
streetwalker with warmth and spontaneity. For Thorn¬
dike the affair is merely an amusing and fraternal interlude
of companionship forced upon him by chance; when the
two have to spend the night in the same room, she in her
bed and he on the couch, the girl cries bitterly, because she
believes she is being rejected as unworthy of the
gentleman. With goodnaturcd insensitivity (he still has
much to learn), Thorndike asks: ‘What the devil are you
sniffling about?’
(In order to satisfy the moral qualms of the Hays Office,
the producers put a sewing machine into the girl’s room in
this scene, in the feeble hope that the streetwalker might
pass for a seamstress. Needless to say, Lang took no

213
notice of the object.)
Lang treats the relationship without sentimentality. For
breakfast Jerry buys fish and chips in a newspaper, and
Thorndike learns how to eat them with his hands. The girl
is touched when he moves up a chair for her to sit on, as a
gentlemanly matter-of-course. She reacts again as she had
done the previous night when he kissed her hands in open
gratitude as she gave him her last ten-shilling note from
her stocking. Lang cuts to one of his rare close-ups to
show her reaction, and to reveal how all the hardness and
obstinacy which she has adopted as armour against the
world have fallen away.
The only present Jerry will accept from him is a new hat
pin for her tam-o’-shanter to replace the one she lost while
running from Thorndike’s pursuers. ‘Every soldier needs a
crest for his cap,’ Thorndike says when she chooses a silver-
plated arrow from the stock of the old junk and jewelry
dealer who turns out to be a German. As he follows the
couple with his eyes, the spectator asks himself, along with
Thorndike, whether he, too, may not be a member of the
Nazi gang.
The story threads are so tightly interwoven that the
tension is maintained even in what seem minor or
unimportant scenes. The formal ‘Mr Jones’ is feeding
pigeons in front of the house where Thorndike calls to
collect money and insure Jerry’s future through his
solicitor; and then releases a homing pigeon to report
Thorndike’s whereabouts.
Here follows a breathtaking hunt in the underground,
with endless corridors and stairways (all built in the studio)
- again demonstrating Lang’s ability to mix reality with
fantasy. (An equally thrilling variation can be found in
While the City Sleeps.) The figures ofjones and Thorndike
are only dimly seen as they stealthily move through the
tunnels; the only noise is the drip of water from the slimy
curved ceilings, as specified in the script. Jones holds a
torch in one hand and an automatic in the other. Before he
has a chance to raise his weapon, Thorndike springs on
him. The flashlight goes out and their struggling bodies are
only vaguely seen in the dark, with the nearby gleam of
the third, live rail. As the ominous roar of the approaching
train is heard, one of the figures throws off the other with a
grunt. There is a scream, and a flash as a falling body

214
Man Hunt: Mr Jones (John Carradine) in the underground
215
Man Hunt: Jerry (Joan Bennett) and Thorndike

touches the live rail. Then the other figure - the spectator
cannot make out who it is - leaps to safety as the train
thunders by.
A newspaper placard cries: ‘Murder in the Under¬
ground’; the dazed Jerry buys the paper to find out what
Thorndike himself will read aloud a bit later:

Captain Thorndike’s body was mangled beyond recognition by the

train, but positive identification was made possible by his passport and
billfold which he carried.

The tearful Jerry comes back to her room, only to find

Thorndike sitting there waiting. She stares as if at a ghost:
‘I thought - you was - dead.’
Forced into hiding from the police now as well as
from his pursuers, and unable to take the girl with him,
he scribbled a poste restante address far from London on
a piece of torn newspaper. Their tender parting takes
place on London Bridge; the scene has all the tenderness
befitting the soft and gentle fog in which it is set. As

216
 . . . the scene on the bridge

Thorndike wants to give Jerry her first kiss, she sees a

policeman. To prevent his recognising Thorndike, the
wanted man with the scar, the suspected ‘underground
murderer' of himself, she must draw attention to herself by
playing the hard-boiled tart soliciting a customer.
Ignoring Thorndike, the policeman leads her away:

No go Miss . . . you can’t be pesterin’ gentlemen this time of night . . .

Sorry, Sir, if I were you I’d step along. Don’t get mixed up with these
’ere girls.

This excellent scene was almost lost. Kenneth MacGowan

had already resigned from the film because of Zanuck’s
interference. Zanuck now opposed the scene: it would, he
argued, be tragic if a ‘decent’ girl had to play the whore in
front of a man she loved: but it was not tragic if a whore
acted as a whore in the same circumstances. No money was
therefore allowed for the scene in the budget.
Lang was nonetheless determined to shoot it all the
same. There were existing set materials - paving stones and

217
sidewalks - left from previous studio street scenes. There
was even one section of a bridge railing among the sets in
storage, but a second one could not be found. Lang
therefore paid forty dollars out of his own pocket to have
another made. The unit manager, Ben Silvi, was unable to
send Lang studio workers. Therefore, Lang and his
cameraman shot the scene by themselves at 4 a.m. in the
deserted studio. Cameraman Arthur Miller set up the
camera, and Lang, instructed by him, hung light bulbs
of varying size and strength to give an impression of a
perspective line of lights stretching away into the useful
London fog, which rendered a backdrop unnecessary. As
with the hanging streets in Metropolis and the living letter
of Destiny, Lang was never averse to engaging in the most
practical aspects of production; I myself observed this at
first hand during the shooting both of Liliom and the later
Hindu Tomb. Zanuck, says Lang, was so impressed with
the look of the finished scene that he ordered the set should
be retained for a subsequent production. There was, of
course, no set.
After the parting, Jerry returns to her room with a
certainty that she will never again see Thorndike. Four
strange figures are waiting for her in the darkness. She
rushes out of the room into the arms of a waiting
policeman whom she knows, only to realise that he, too, is
part of the gang. Again, we do not see anything of violence
or torture. Quive-Smith, who has reappeared, says
suavely:

Sit down, girl. We’re going to have a long conversation . . . Where

have you been so late?

The scene fades out as Jerry gazes at her captors in terror -

not for herself, but in her fear of what they may try to
make her do to Thorndike.
Evidently the address on the newspaper fragment has
been discovered, as Thorndike senses from the hesitation
and evident fear of the post office clerk when he asks for his
poste restante letters. Alarmed, he manages to make his
way back to his cave hide-out, but finds himself barricaded
in by Quive-Smith. When he again refuses to sign the
confession, Jerry’s tam-o’-shanter with the familiar hat¬
pin is pushed down the air-shaft. Thorndike asks what
they have done to her.

218
 Man Hunt: the improvised weapon

She refused to tell us anything . . .

The death of a girl like that can be no loss at all. The police reported
that she had jumped from a window . . .

Now realising in his pain, hatred, and self-discovery

that the affair has gone far beyond a sport, like hunting,
Thorndike agrees to sign the confession in order to gain
time, but asks to read it again first. He has been promised
free passage if he will sign, but outside the cave we can see
Quive-Smith holding his gun at the ready. Thorndike
improvises a crude cross-bow out of a bent tube, his belt, a
shaft, andjerry’s arrow-hatpin, and shoots Quive-Smith as
he comes to retrieve the confession at the air shaft. Before
he dies, Quive-Smith manages to wound Thorndike, who
crawls over to the now dead man, tears the confession
from his hand and destroys it.
The epilogue begins with a series of superimpositions,
scenes of the beginning of the war - R.A.F. attacks, the

219
German invasion ports - juxtaposed with images of
Thorndike in hospital. As we see him recovered and
parachuting from an aeroplane, the matter-of-fact voice of
a commentator states:

And from now on somewhere within Germany is a man with a

precision rifle and the high degree of intelligence and training that is
required to use it. It may be days, months, or even years - but this time
he clearly knows his purpose.

220
 19 Hangmen Also Die (1943)

The most remarkable Lang now managed to get free of his Fox term contract.
commentary on the war
For some time the independent producer Arnold Press-
produced by the American
burger, whom Lang knew from their European days in
cinema . . . Some critics have
seen in this film a melodrama, Berlin and Paris, had been asking Lang to make a film for
forgetting that the melodrama him; but Lang had not liked any of the subjects suggested.
does not refier to the violence it Then one day he read in the newspapers that Heydnch, the
presents but to the intrusion ofi hated ‘Reichsprotektor’ of Czechoslovakia had been
an unmotivated and accidental
assassinated. Lang spoke of this as an idea for a film to
violence into a situation where
an intrinsic conflict does not
Bertolt Brecht, who had managed to reach the United
exist . . . Like the war itself, States thanks to an affidavit by Lang and Lionel
Hangmen Also Die is Feuchtwanger, and was a neighbour and frequent
intrinsically dramatic ... In companion of Lang. The two of them set to work on a
Hangmen Also Die freedom short synopsis which they offered to Pressburger.
and tyranny are concrete forces
Brecht had already tried half-heartedly to sell scripts in
seen in action, and this is
doubtlessly the first film that
FJollywood to keep himself and his family alive; and had
ties up personal, collective and written,
social conflict . . . Lang’s film
starts off an historical realism Every morning, to earn my bread
in place of mystical I go to the market where lies are bought.
idealism . . . Lang’s direction Hopefully
elaborates with superior I queue up among the sellers.
artistry the given script, and
does it so well that the film This at least was a script that was not in need of lies.
seems to be the work of a In one of his infrequent mentions of the film in his
unique and gigantic will. diaries, Brecht speaks of listening to the roar of the sea in
Joe Davidson: Hangmen
Santa Monica, while Lang was negotiating conditions
Also Die - But the People
Live in New Masses, 4 May with the producer. Lang had asked Brecht how much he
1953 expected to get for the finished script, and Brecht asked if
he thought 3,000 dollars too much. Lang said he would try
and get 5,000 dollars for him, but finally asked Press-
burger 3,500 - which the producer thought too much in
any case for an author who had never before written an
American screenplay. Pressburger gave in when Lang said

221
he would work with no other author, because of Brecht’s
unique grasp of the political situations involved; and it was
agreed that Brecht should be assisted by a German
speaking American writer. (Brecht, in his certainty that he
would return to Germany, refused to learn English;
though m 1938 he had published a translation of Shelley’s
The Mask of Anarchy into powerful German verse.) John
Wexley, who had just had a success with a play about
capital punishment, The Last Mile, was selected as a writer
of sympathetic left-wing tendencies who also spoke good
German.
Lang would meet the two writers every three or tour
days to discuss the script as far as it had gone, and after three
months a script of 280 pages (about twice the length of the
conventional script of the period) was completed. Lang
planned to make the necessary cuts in consultation with
Brecht and Wexley. Suddenly, however, Lang was told by
Pressburger that for unforseen financial reasons, shooting
would have to begin three weeks earlier than expected,
and that there were only eight days left to make the cuts.
Lang was thus obliged to make the cuts himself, in
collaboration with a young writer named Gunsburg,
reducing the manuscript to 192 pages. He remembers that
while there were extensive cuts in the hostage scenes, no
really vital scenes were sacrificed.
This then is the origin of the story of an estrangement
between Lang and Brecht over Hangmen Also Die. Lang, 111
fact, never again saw Brecht after the hearing before the
Screen Writers’ Guild, which was called to settle disputes
which had by this time arisen between the two writers.
Wexley had demanded more money for the script - 10,000
dollars - and had asked for sole screen credit. Unjustly, the
Guild decided that Wexley should be credited as sole
author, mainly on the grounds that the credit was more
valuable to Wexley who intended to go on working 111 the
States, than for Brecht, who would eventually return to
Germany. Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler pro¬
tested in vain against the decision. (As an irony of history,
however, it may be recorded that during the McCarthy
witch hunts Wexley was blacklisted in Hollywood
because, unlike Brecht, he was a member of the
Communist Party.)
It is hard to assess from the final shooting script what

222
was Brecht s contribution, but Lang attributes 90 per cent
ot it to him. The ideology expressed in the concentration
camp sequences is characteristic Brecht, and the setting,
too, was familiar enough to him. It seems unlikely that
Wexley would have invented the strangely reticent and
seemingly trivial conversation between Professor No¬
votny and the poet Nezval, or the understatement when
Nezval goes to his execution:

. . . He didn t see why they always have to shoot people at sunrise!

Why not at sunset ? He said - it didn’t make much sense . . .

How typical ol the Brecht of the Kalendergeschickten are the

professor’s words to his daughter when he wants to
prevent her telling him that she has seen the assassin of
Heydrich:

Mascha: I’m sure I saw him . . .

Professor: You have not seen anyone . . . it’s simply that in such matters
one doesn’t talk. Example: you tell it to A - A entrusts it to B - B
confides in C - C deposes the secret to D. It’s not very far from E to F -
F breathes it to G . . . and G stands for Gestapo!

Even in translation the formulation and the sophistry are

characteristically Brecht’s. The introductory scenes, in
which Heydrich appears in all his Nazi arrogance, his
horsewhip elegance and hysterical style of speech, points to
Brecht and Lang (who clearly would have made his usual
considerable contribution to the script). Sentences like
‘This sabotage that stinks to high heaven’, ‘drastic
measures’, ‘1 shall make life hell for these Czech scum and
discipline these dregs of mankind in the Skoda works, that
they will hear bells ringing in their ears’ (Lang marked the
last phrase with brackets and a question mark in the script)
have the tones of Brecht’s metallic voice. The irony of the
toning down of the insults by an interpreter for the benefit
of the Czechs who do not speak German also seems typical
in its manner.
It is much more likely that Brecht and Lang, rather than
Wexley, would have thought of the almost Expressionist
chorus of voices which rises to a crescendo in the darkness
of the cinema where the assassin Swoboda has sought
refuge:

Heydrich . . . shot! The Reichsprotektor!

Heydrich . . . ! HEYDRICH ! !

223
Hangmen Also Die (1943): Swoboda (Brian Donlevy) hiding in a doorway

Applause breaks out on all sides, until the Nazi voice calls
out ‘Lights on! Stop the film!’ (it is typical Kulturfilm, a
sickly romantic travelogue of the ‘Beautiful Rhine Valley’)
and puts an end to the protective darkness.' The response to
the angry query, ‘Who started the applause’ could only
have been written by someone who knew the sardonic
humour of pre-Hitler Berlin: ' The unknown soldier’.
There is no reason why the building up of tension
should not have been worked out by a writer of Wexley’s
political experience. The landlady cannot give a room to
the assassin because she is ‘under orders’. The cafe is closed
down and the curfew is already on as Swoboda seeks
refuge with Mascha and her family, whom he pretends he
has seen at the symphony concert. But the subtle nuances
of the conversations, the almost unnoticeable insistence on
a specific situation - only the professor and Mascha out of
the whole family know what it is about - is the sort of
effect that appears again and again in scripts on which Lang

224
has worked, as does the ingenious interweaving of events:
Mascha discovers that the man who claims to be an
architect must be a doctor because of the professional way
he bandages her little brother when he cuts himself on the
bread-knite, and because he mentions the chimes of a
particular church just beside a hospital. These details, each
almost imperceptible, but closely interlocking, push the
action forward.
Swoboda, the assassin on account of whom 400 hostages
(including Professor Novotny) are to be shot at ever more
rapid intervals until the culprit is found, is not allowed to
give himself up because of a decree by Dedic, the leader of
the resistance. He is still needed and orders are orders: this
is the inexorable logic of Brecht’s Jasager. It is equally
consistent that Mascha, indignant at Swoboda’s behaviour
and out of love for her father, intends to denounce
Swoboda to the Gestapo.
The distancing, the ‘alienation’ of the types whose
individual characters are brought out in a gesture or
remark, without being analysed must be due to the
Brecht-Lang collaboration. ‘We didn’t want’, says Lang,
quoted by Eibel,
Analyses of characters, we simply schematised into those who resist
and those who organise, those who aspire to freedom but have not yet
found or chosen the means of action (cf. Mascha’s fiance Jan - L.H.E.)
and finally the collaborators, the genuine enemy of the people like
Czaka . . .
I don’t think it is possible in such a plot to go far into the psychological
development because the psychology does not change.
For me psychology is not in the talking, it is in the action, in the
movement, the gestures. In Hangmen Also Die there is a great deal of
detail that makes the personalities come alive ... It is the behaviour¬
isms which create the character.
Lang instances the behaviour of Gruber, the Gestapo chief,
when he discovers in the mirror, by comparison, that the
lipstick imprint on Swoboda’s face is too regular to be
genuine, because the mark on his own face is only a smear.
Gruber’s recognition that Swoboda’s rendezvous with
Mascha was a fake, staged to cover up Dedic’s presence, at
once turns to action. Having incapacitated the obstinate
Jan, he hurries to Swoboda’s hospital to pressure him into
giving information. It is the same kind of fast-moving
action based on gestures, images and movement that was
already familiar in Lang’s German thrillers.

225
 How, Lang asks, should the Nazi psychology be
presented? By small touches and understatements - quite
unlike the caricature and low comedy ol Lubitsch’s To Be
Or Not To Be - corresponding to Lang’s mentality and
Brecht’s concern with epic theatre.
Again as in Manhunt Lang is true to his principles ol not
showing violence for its own sake. As he had done with the
sex murder in M he shows only the consequences and
leaves the rest to the spectator’s imagination. He shows
neither the torture in the Gestapo headquarters, nor the
Heydrich assassination. How very effective this can be is
seen in Lang’s use of the old rheumatic green-grocer
woman who is forced to pick up part of the broken chair
again and again. We sense from her haggard face and slow,
tired movements what she has suffered; the consequences
are here more horrifying than the torture itself, and the
action has not been slowed by the inclusion of an unneeded
torture scene.
Because the Gestapo men are not crudely portrayed as
animals, they appear so much more dangerous. They are
civil servants in the traditional Prussian mould, citizens
doing their ’duty’, who have suddenly acquired a power
with which they cannot cope. They are the same people
who were to tell the war crimes tribunals that they acted
only on ‘superior orders’, small wheels in an immensely
complex instrument of destruction. One of the Gestapo
men endlessly and irritatingly cracks his knuckles during
the interrogations, a detail Lang had remembered as a
habit of one of his more hated schoolmasters. The hoarse¬
voiced man’s continual picking of the pus-filled spots on
Ins face is not in the script: it is pure Lang, a hint that he is
probably syphilitic and maybe, with his indifference to
women, homosexual too.
In Brecht’s Mann ist Mann Galy Gay goes out to buy a
fish. Mascha goes to queue for potatoes, but gets nothing
but turnips. Like Galy Gay her mind is altered on the
journey. Caught in the Gestapo web, she realises the
import of her first intention of making a statement about
the assassin. The Nazis for their part have realised that she
can lead them to the man they are seeking.
The search of the Novotny house in Mascha’s absence
is shown m all its brutality, as part of a method. The
interrogation of all the members of the household is shot

226
Hangmen Also Die: Swoboda and Mascha (Anna Lee) caught in the Gestapo
web (above); Gruber and Mascha’s fiance (below) 227
in quick dissolves, with each person answering the
question put to his predecessor. The over-lap technique
already practised in Lang’s German sound films to push the
action forward now has an extra purpose in expressing the
nervous strain and attrition. Mosaic-fashion, the tull
picture of Gestapo methods is built up with strict
economy, each nuance adding to the panorama of terror.
Gestapo Inspector Gruber is played by Alexander
Granach as a kind of inverted Lohmann, a cynical,
intelligent and unscupulous sleuth in his world of Czaka
beer, schnapps and whores. For the character of the
insolent and cowardly brewer, Emil Czaka - a quisling
who infiltrates the resistance group in order to destroy it,
Brecht wanted to cast Oscar Homolka. This, says Lang,
was the source of his only difference with Brecht.
Although he admired Homolka very much, his idea was
that Nazi parts should be played by refugee actors while
the Czechs should all be played by Americans. Thus only
the Germans speak with foreign accents, which gives the
events a properly three-dimensional atmosphere.
In the scenes of the hostages (which Brecht at one time
wanted to expand to use as a separate film for distribution
after the war) Lang’s concern for documentary cor¬
responds with Brecht’s objectivity: we are always aware of
a cool detachment, whether in individual characters or the
people of Prague seen as a whole crowd, with individuals
momentarily picked out. There is no overstatement or
sentimentality in the ‘Never Surrender’ song, even in
English pure Brecht, with its forceful musical accompani¬
ment by Hanns Eisler;

Brother - the time has come!

Brother - work to be done!
Take hold of the invisible torch, and pass it on!

Maybe you will die, maybe you will not,

But never let them take you brother, if you
Shoot or you are shot . . .

The same Brechtian style informs Professor Novotny’s

‘Letter to my Son’ which he asks Mascha to learn by heart
after she has been called by Gruber to visit her father who is
apparently on the point of being shot, in the hostage camp:

Those will be good days to live! It will be a land where all men and
women and children will have enough good food to eat, time to read

228
and to think - and to talk things over with one another, for their own
good. When such great days do come, don’t forget Freedom is not
anything one possesses like — a hat or a piece of candy. Real freedom is
FightingJor Freedom! And you must remember me — not because I’ve
been your father, but because I died in this great fight . . .

It is credit to Lang’s objective direction that the three

pivots on which the plot turns seem plausible and historic
realism, even though they are patently ‘staged’. The first is
where the Nazi’s listen-in on the apparent love talk
between Mascha and Swoboda (an anticipation of the
post-Hitlerian The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse). The
Nazis hear, expectantly, Mascha’s exclamation, ‘You
killed . . but are disappointed when she continues
‘. . . every leeling - I ever had for you’. They do not see
that Swoboda has held up his prescription pad on which he
has scribbled ‘Microphone! Be careful!’
The second pivot is the staged rendezvous between
Mascha and Swoboda in the latter’s flat, to conceal the
presence of the wounded Dedic, hidden only by a curtain
from the Gestapo men. A spilt glass of red wine covers up
the slowly dripping blood. The cunning Gruber has
brought along Mascha’s fiance Jan, hoping that the
apparent infidelity will irritate him into collaboration. In
fact Jan’s feelings throughout remain remarkably cool and
without passion. Equally the authors are at pains not to
allow any love element to enter the relationship of Mascha
and Swoboda. It is their recognition that in times like these
people’s personal lives are secondary, their refusal to allow
it to become a complicated affair of individual emotions,
that lends a directness and authenticity to the film.
The third pivot, at which the film reaches a crescendo,
all the threads of the action join up, is the killing of the
traitor Czaka. The resistance group wants to know if
Czaka is in fact the traitor who betrayed a group in Pilsen
two years ago. Czaka, who claims not to speak German,
gives himself away when he laughs at a Hitler joke told in
German by the waiter, Rudi. Czaka is now finished off by
the false evidence of a few individuals - a waiter, a
cloakroom woman, the landlady, a cab driver who
pretends to have driven Czaka after the murder of
Heydrich, and his own servant. Thus the Gestapo is
convinced that Czaka is a double agent and the assassin of
Heydrich.

229
 The most deadly factor in the case against Czaka is the
absence of Gruber, who could have spoken for him. After
trying to interrogate Jan in a cabaret, he lies snoring in a
pile of beer bottles in Jan’s flat, sleeping it off. Waking, he
dashes to the hospital because, alerted by Jan’s laughter, he
realises that the lipstick stains were faked, and also that the
fact that doctors wear masks when operating invalidates
Swoboda’s claim that at the time of the murder he was
performing surgery.
In the hospital there is a climactic battle. Gruber holds
Swoboda and the doctor who stood-in for him on the day
of the assassination in the operating room in check with his
revolver while trying to ring the Gestapo headquarters.
Suddenly Jan leaps at him from behind. This time Lang
deliberately shows violence. Gruber is suffocated on the
table with sheets. His hands fall; his dangling legs go rigid.
To keep the spectator in the grip of dramatic tension,
aware that Gruber might still destroy ‘the conspiracy of
the people of Prague’, there are constant flashback
cutaways to people giving evidence to Gruber. The
tension is relaxed with the certainty of his death. His round
hat slowly rolls forward on the floor. This touch was not in
the script: Lang remembered the ball of the murdered
child in M.
The cutaways to people giving evidence against Czaka
is shot very differently from the blow by blow affair of the
interrogation of the Novotnys. Here the rhythm is
deliberately slow, in order to interweave a parallel action
and to contrast with the rapidity of the Gruber sequence.
Into these two parallel strands a scene from the hostage
camp is effectively cut in. So the spectator is thrown into
new suspense as to whether the conviction of Czaka will in
fact halt the killing of the hostages. Some copies of the film
circulating in France do not, in fact, show the death of
Novotny and the remaining hostages; but in the original
version of the film the fact of the shooting of the professor
was shown, followed by the flower-decked graves of the
hostages, to indicate that the Nazis in fact broke their
promise after the (apparent) surrender of the assassin. In
the French copies, we see the town of Prague as we hear
Lang’s summing-up, Brecht’s song:

Maybe you will die, maybe you will not,

230
But never let them take you brother, if you shoot
Or you are shot

The end title is prophetic - the war was still on:

NOT
The End

Thus the film does not show the ultimate victory of

resistance, it only promises the continuation of resistance.
There will be new ranks of fighters ‘to take the invisible
torch and pass it along’. The pass-word is ‘Never
Surrender’. It was to remain relevant to Czechoslovakia’s
tragic history.
What really mattered to Lang in this film was the force
of facts. Inevitably there are characteristic pictorial images
- the precise instinct for composition; Mascha’s reflection
in a puddle during the getaway, or again when she has
been arrested and the railings cast parallel stripes of
shadow, as if inexorably crushing her; the giant shadows
which overcast Novotny’s interrogation. Yet for the most
part Lang is not interested in effects of mood and
atmosphere and chiaroscuro as in Man Hunt or The
Ministry of Fear; he concentrated clearly and precisely on
the facts; the political events are shown in all their variety,
without decorative effect. However, beyond the political
facts, one must not lose sight of certain moral ironies and
ambiguities which mark every Lang film. While Lang’s
sympathies are fully with the people of Prague, he shows
them turning into something akin to the mob in Fury
when they discover Mascha is asking directions to Gestapo
headquarters. The ironies of a conviction through false and
circumstantial evidence against Czaka are not lost on the
director who had already made Fury and would later make
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

APPENDIX: BRECHT ON HANGMEN ALSO DIE

Brecht’s recently published work diaries (Suhrkamp
Verlag, Frankfurt u. Mam, 1973) throw some light on his
collaboration with Lang and with Wexley on Hangmen
Also Die during 1942-3. The diaries are almost daily notes,
written in his characteristic handwriting, without any
capitals, and perhaps not intended for publication. (Lang
and Marta Feuchtwanger, widow of Lionel Feuchtwan-
ger, both believe that they have been polished up by some
other hand for publication). If Brecht seems particularly
hard on Lang, we must take into account his natural
irritability due to external circumstances. The notes reveal
that he lived a very precarious existence in a narrow, petit
bourgeois room (the sickly pink doors got on his nerves
especially), supported by other people. Wexley — whose
role in the entire affair seems ambiguous - told Wolfgang
Garsch (recorded in ‘Der Fall Hangmen Also Die’, in Kino
und Fernseh-Almanack, Berlin 1972) that Brecht could not
get used to the ideological methods for which this moment
in history called, nor to the general commercial outlook
on life which he found in America.
Whilst not by any means a conservative and though full
of sympathy for the Left, Lang’s position could not be
regarded as very left-wing, according to the view of the
Communist Wexley. There were heated discussions
between Brecht and Lang in which he, Wexley, tried to
mediate: otherwise the film might never have passed
beyond the preliminary stages. Brecht, for his part, knew
little about films.
Wexley says that the work was conducted with a daily
three- of four-hour conference, sometimes at Brecht’s
house, in Santa Monica, sometimes at Lang’s but mostly in
the studio. Then Brecht would go away and Wexley
would write down the agreed text as a draft. Many such
conferences were held without Brecht, who was more
interested in the design of the plot than in the film to be
shown on the screen.
Brecht’s irritation that - for the very practical reasons
already explained - Lang could not accept his suggestion
that Oscar Homolka should play Czaka, was aggravated
when (for the same reasons) Lang would not give Brecht’s
wife Helene Weigel the part of the green-grocer which
Brecht had designed for her. On 24 November 1942
Brecht complains that he has expressly made it a part
without words, while Wexley (and this is the first time we
sense resentment against Wexley’s behaviour) had ‘scrib¬
bled’ superfluous dialogue into the role. Lang had held a
superficial sound audition with Weigel, but the proper

232
screen test that Weigel had expected and prepared for
never took place, and another, American actress was
chosen for the part.
At hrst everything had seemed to go well. On 8 May
1942 Brecht notes that he had discussed with Lang on the
beach a hostage story in connection with Heydrich’s
murder in Prague. On 5 July he writes that during lunch at
Lang s they discussed a film version of his theatre sketches
Fear and Misery oj the 1 lurd Reich. He also attempted a story
with Lang about Prague, the Gestapo and the hostages,
Silent City; 'but all this is Monte Carlo’ (i.e. a gamble). On
27 June however it seemed that the story looked more
promising: Lang had even talked about it to a producer.
Brecht added a touching personal note: ‘How I hate these
small heat waves which get hold of one when there is the
prospect of money: secure working time, a better Hat,
music lessons tor Steff (his son) and no more accepting of
charity. ’
On 29 June he writes interestingly about his work with
Lang. At this time he was working with Lang on the
hostage story from nine in the morning till seven at night.
An interesting term recurs when they came to the
discussion of the logic of an incident: Lang’s test was ‘The
audience will accept that’. It emerges at this point that the
incident of the wounded resistance leader hiding behind
the curtain was Lang’s, worked out by the test of audience
acceptance.
Brecht remarks that Lang was ‘buying gags’ such as
corpses of criminal inspectors falling out of wardrobes, or
secret gatherings of people under the Nazi terror. ‘It is
interesting, too, how he is much more interested in
surprises than in tension.’ Evidently the scene in which
Czaka makes himself suspicious in the eyes of the resistance
group was not in Brecht’s plan.
In an entry for 5 July Brecht writes that while he dictates
the story to his secretary, Lang has to negotiate with
financiers. Astronomical figures and agonising cries can be
heard above as if from a propaganda film: ‘30,000 dollars
minus 8 per cent’ - ‘I can’t do it!’ Brecht moves with the
secretary into the garden . . . ‘Gunshots from across the
sea!’
By 27 July Brecht is complaining that the hostage film is
a ‘sad confabulation’ with its phantoms, intrigues and

233
falsities. It belonged strictly to the context of a bourgeois
and middle-class rebellion. It was now a question ol
casting, and he had been looking at a book ol actors’
photographs - faces from the company of the Ulm
municipal theatre.
Wexley is mentioned for the first time on 5 August.
Brecht is now working in a hot United Artists olhce in Las
Palmas Street, Hollywood, together with secretaries and
this American writer who was considered very left and
very decent and was being paid 1,500 dollars a week. Their
method was for Brecht to go over a scene with Wexley
who then dictated to a secretary. The first incident arises
when Brecht asks for one of the four copies that have been
made, and Wexley only hands it over alter some childish
excuses. The copy is headed with John Wexley’s name.
When Brecht retained the copy with his own hand¬
written corrections and additions, there was frantic
telephoning that Wexley could not continue working
unless he had it back. ‘It appears’, remarks Brecht wryly,
‘that such tricks are well paid.’
By 14 September, however, relations seemed to have
improved. Work was progressing better. Brecht was
discussing the transpositions of the outlines into a finished
script with Wexley rather than with Lang, and writes that
this enables him to correct Wexley’s work at the same
time. Above all he had persuaded Wexley to cooperate in
the writing of an ‘Ideal Script’ in his own house, which
would be shown to Lang on completion. Inevitably
Brecht put most of the emphasis on the crowd scenes, and
indeed would have liked to call the film Trust the People.
(The first title given to the film was No Surrender or Never
Surrender, but before shooting was concluded a book of a
similar title appeared. Hence Lang and Pressburger
organised a competition in the studio to find a new title,
and a secretary won the prize of 100 dollars for Hangmen
Also Die.)
On 5 October, Brecht notes, he hears that Wexley has
asked for and received a bonus for evening and Sunday
work. Lang has advised him to ask for the same bonus,
which he also receives after a lot of trouble. Wexley seems
to have remained fairly conciliatory, but Lang with his
technical experience and knowledge of script writing, as
well as his awareness of the behaviour of producers when

234
trying to get them to accept a script, takes a different
position. Lang now wants them to write the outline
treatment in the evenings and keep the revising (Brecht
calls it ‘polishing’) for later. In fact Wexley is no longer
cooperating on the ‘Ideal Script’, of which only 70 pages
have been completed.
On 16 October 1942 Brecht writes that he and Wexley
are still working to the best of their knowledge on the
script of Trust the People, but that Wexley has told him that
Lang dragged him into his office, locked the doors and
yelled at him that he was shooting a Hollywood picture,
and to hell with crowd scenes (one gets the feeling that
Wexley understood how to keep the quarrel alive).
Brecht, who a few months earlier had talked about the
'heat waves’ which the mention of money produces in
people and wrote ‘only he who lives in riches . . .’ now
speaks bitterly about Lang, mentions ‘70,000 dollars or
thereabouts,’talks of dictatorial attitudes behind the boss’s
desk, of keeping an eye on the box office and so on.
On 12 October Brecht notes down that he would
publish some scenes from the screenplay of Trust the
People, if he could continue with his ‘experiments’ - for
instance the first scene just before the assassination, in
which Heydrich shows a Czech industrialist some leaflets
found in munitions factories, using the symbol of a
tortoise, and urging Czech workers to slow down. Thus a
modern tyrant was shown intelligently; the German
terror was an impersonal thing in response to the sabotage
of production, just as the assassination is an impersonal
riposte to terror. Brecht also refers to a few hostage scenes,
which showed the class differences still surviving in the
camp. Minutes before being taken for execution, the
hostages were still throwing anti-semitic insults at each
other and so on. The construction he intended for the film
was epic, with three interwoven stories: of an assassin, of a
girl whose father is taken as a hostage; and the story of a
quisling who is brought to summaryjustice by the town as
a whole. From this we can assess to what extent the bite of
the script was due to Brecht, and understand that Lang could
not accept the too abstract epic elements, nor, perhaps, the
anti-semitic incidents, at least if the hostage scenes were to
have a positive effect for his audience.
Other entries for 19 and 22 October indicate Brecht’s
dissatisfaction with what he saw as commercial compro¬
mises: he left it to others ‘to find slick lines for the
transition from nothing to nothing’, states that he does not
like the surprises and tensions which make the impossible
happen and keep the audience in the dark, characters that
are distorted into stereotypes.
On 2 November Brecht records that Eisler brought
Wexley along - ‘a living picture of a guilty conscience’.
Having heard nothing for two weeks he had been
telephoned by a secretary who informed him that shooting
had begun and that he was ‘invited, more than invited!’
In the studio, the first scene Lang shot was one that
Brecht and Wexley had cut, in which the heroine - played
by an anodyne British actress - is quarrelling with her aunt
about the decollete of her bridal nightgown. Lang he says,
had waved to him with affected naturalness; tomorrow he
would get the manuscript.
On 4 November 1942 Brecht writes that Wexley, for
two weekly cheques of 30,000 dollars, had demolished
everything he had built up in ten weeks; and everything
that he, Brecht, had thrown out was now back in again. In
the studio Brecht watches the shooting of a scene in which
the assassin, having walked about aimlessly for hours,
comes to seek refuge in the flat of the historian. (Since he
does not criticise the scene he probably wrote it.) The
studio hairdressers rush at the assassin to prepare him for
the shot, and in this commonplace production procedure,
Brecht detects the same ‘Hollywood glamorisation’ hap¬
pening to everyone and everything.
On 15 November he writes that he occasionally goes to
the studio. When Lang directs a fight between a Gestapo
commissar and Jan, the result is almost art, he notes. The
work has the dignity and respectability of a craft. He
would rather have seen the fight, however, in a scene
where the kitchen staff of a restaurant prevent the Gestapo
from arresting members of a resistance cell.
On 13 December Brecht writes down the words of a
song which Eisler’s music made the theme song of the film
Trust the People.
On 17 December Brecht complains that Lang had used a
highly-paid hit parade writer to translate the song, and had
paid 500 dollars for a travesty. Lang is now combining this
version with some lines by Wexley, and the flag which was

236
handed on has become an invisible torch. Brecht’s remarks
that invisible bulbs were not particularly clear were
ignored. The song is now supposed to have been written
by a worker in the hostage camp, and who reads it to a
famous poet, who ponders for a moment whether he
should correct an expression like ‘invisible torch’, but then
leaves it as an adequate and noble document. Brecht
remarks that instead of casting the poet as a fat drunkard in
the type of Diktomus (a writer whom Brecht had met in
Finland), Lang had chosen a man in the mould of
Ganghofer (a third-rate Bavarian popular writer, pop¬
ularly known as Hotgänger on account of his notorious
loyalty to the Emperor), genial and vain and delighted
with the phrase ‘invisible torch’. So the worker is
expressing himself in the cliche images the bourgeoisie had
outgrown; and the bourgeoisie accepted them back from
him with emotion.
By 20 January Brecht is declaring that the sight of the
intellectual deformation makes him physically sick. He has
had to telephone the Screen Writers’ Guild because Lang
and Pressburger do not want to credit him for his work on
the screenplay (compare Lang’s assertion that this was
Wexley’s doing, not his and that it was on his advice that
Brecht sought the help of the Guild). Wexley himself was
now sitting in the conference room of the Screen Writers’
Guild, armed with half a hundredweight of manuscripts,
and maintaining that he had hardly ever spoken to Brecht.
There is no doubt that the screen credit on this film
would have helped Brecht to find work in films at a time
when he was desperately hard-up.
Brecht’s last reference to the film comes on 24 June
1943. There are always compensations: Lang’s film - now
called Hangmen Also Die - had helped him write three
plays: Die Gesischte der Simone Machard, Die Herzogin von
Malfi and Schweyk.

LANG’S COUNTER STATEMENTS

A journalist who had had the opportunity to see Brecht’s
working diaries before publication, asked Lang for his
comments on the foregoing. The gist of his reply was:
(a) To reiterate his emphatic reasons for using American
actors for Czech characters and European actors for the
Nazi roles, in order to demonstrate more vividly to

237
American audiences what an occupation was like.
(b) He felt no need to make a screen test with Helene
Weigel since he had used her in small parts in films (e.g.
Metropolis) even before her marriage to Brecht.
(c) Lang speaks of Brecht’s plan for the elaboration of the
hostage scenes into a ‘documentary’ film to be used after
the war, and says that he approved the idea.
(d) He reiterates that the reason for an estrangement was
that he, Lang was obliged to cut the script at short notice,
when Pressburger announced that for unforeseen financial
reasons the shooting would have to be brought forward by
three weeks. It was no longer possible to do the work with
Wexley and Brecht as planned within the time available,
eight days; and Lang had been obliged to cut the script
with difficulty from 280 pages to a manageable 192, with
the help of a young writer called Gunsburg. The cuts had
involved the hostage scenes, so that the mam action could
be left intact.
(e) According to Lang there was never any differences of
opinion over the content of the film, since he and Brecht
had drawn up the main outlines together.
(f) At the time Lang had not foreseen any likelihood of
differences between Brecht and Wexley, or that Wexley
would claim sole authorship for himself. This was patently
absurd because of the typically Brechtian quality of many
of the scenes. So it was natural for Lang to defend Brecht’s
claim before the arbitration court of the Screen Writers’
Guild, as did Hanns Eisler who had advised Lang on the
resistance scenes, as well as providing the music for the
‘Never Surrender’ song. Lang in fact yielded his own
rights as author of the idea and original story in order to
allow the credit to go to Brecht after the irreversible
verdict in favour of Wexley.
(g) The reason why the film could not be called Never
Surrender was that a book of this title had been published
during the period of shooting.

238
 20 Ministry of Fear (1943)

The Lang structure has never This is a film tor which Lang says he had not much feeling,
been so elaborate, particularly
though he liked Graham Greene’s original novel, and
in The Ministry of Fear, the
eagerly accepted when his agent called him in New York
world of which is built up
with hardly any help from to tell him of Paramount’s offer of the film. Normally
lighting or decor effects, just Lang himself negotiated with the producers, but in this
like the world of Kafka . . . case his agent drew up the contract, and neglected Lang’s
The spectator identifies habitual clause retaining his right to make such changes in
completely with the principal
the script as he considered necessary. The producer and
character, and undergoes with
writer, Seton I. Miller, a former saxophonist and
him all the evil surprises, all
the traps that are set. bandsman, was resistant to the changes proposed by the
Luc Moullet: Fritz Lang director.
(1963) Despite this, and his lack of enthusiasm for the cast (he
Lang seems rejuvenated. In had suggested Tonio Selwart, who had been admirable as a
fact he is merely true to Gestapo official in Hangmen Also Die for the role of Willy
himself: more than twenty Hilfe), Lang managed to make the film his own, full of
years later, The Thousand menace and mystery. It is, of course, a thriller, a definite
Eyes of Dr Mabuse will be
part of the film noir tradition, full of typical Langian
in much the same style, the
concerns: the ambiguity of guilt, a breaking through a
style of The Spiders ... we
are full speed ahead for moral trap towards redemption and redefinition ot
action. This is the cinema identity, a realistic nightmare where seemingly secure
conceived from the image, certainties give way suddenly. It is also something more
detailed, nervous. than this: Lang wanted to make another anti-Nazi
Francis Courtade: Fritz
statement; and his realist fantasy is used to good effect. The
Lang (1963)
film has the ring of truth: even such a character as Dr
Forrester, who has published a book on Nazi psychology
was m no way fantastic, as later events and the discovery
that certain prominent persons had been spies during the
war, were to prove.
The film starts on a dark evening in England some¬
where about 6 p.m. The film opens with no other sound
but the ticking of a clock in the silence. The image
fades in: all that is seen in the shadow is the old carved

239
Ministry of Fear (1943): the waiting

black clock case with a pendulum that seems to swing

backwards and forwards too slowly. Then the camera
draws back to reveal a room sombre in twilight, and a
young man sitting staring silently 111 a chair, as if waiting.
The door opens and a shaft of light from the brilliantly
lit hall outside cuts across the dimness of the room. The
person who enters tells the young man that he is now free,
and leads him to a gate that is heavily barred. A remark
that the young man should keep away from the police
now, and his reply that he will lead a quiet life at first
suggests that this is a prison; but as he passes along the
gloomy walls a large sign tells us that this is LEMBRIDGE
ASYLUM. Everything is uncertain: in the dark night we
are prepared tor the nightmare to begin in an atmosphere
made even more tense by our ignorance of what the young
man has done. Nor will that particular part of the mystery
be cleared up until much later in the film, thus keeping the
moral equilibration of events to come always a bit askew.

240
 At the deserted war-time station the young man,
Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is told that the train will be
another hour late. Hence he is drawn by the distant sound
ol fairground music to where a group of charitable
middle-class ladies in print dresses and silly hats are
struggling to make a success of their ‘Mothers of Free
Nations’ charity bazaar. Neale guesses the weight of a
prize cake (‘made with real eggs’ - a rarity in those days of
rationing) and is drawn into the clairvoyante’s booth. In
the dark tent the clairvoyante, Mrs Bellane, absurd in her
turban and jewels, reads his palm with her flashlight.
When she tells him that he has made a woman very happy,
he sharply draws his hand away and says that they should
leave the past to itself. Mrs Bellane explains that it is illegal
to talk about the future, but reveals to him one thing: the
weight of the cake.
Urged by Mrs Bellane, Neale wins the cake, among the
congratulations and laughter of the apparently harmless
charitable ladies, though a few of the bystanders seem
unaccountably startled. As Neale sets off with his cake for
the station, a well-dressed man (Dan Duryea) gets out of a
taxi. Suddenly everyone pursues Neale, telling him that it
was a mistake: the newcomer, who hasjust come from the
clairvoyante’s tent, has guessed the weight of the cake
more correctly. Neale however stubbornly insists on his
prize.
As Neale waits in his darkened train compartment, a
strange, staccato tapping noise is heard in the mist of
smoke billowing from the engine. It is revealed to be the
stick of a blind man, who enters the compartment. Neale
kindly offers him a piece of cake for the journey, but as he
is bending over to cut it, the spectator realises with shock
that the blind man is looking with eager curiosity at the
cake. Neale, too, is startled when the man instead of eating
his cake crumbles it as if looking for something. The train
stops on account of an air raid; the blind man hits Neale
over the head with his stick and rushes off into the darkness
with the cake. Recovering, Neale starts off in pursuit. In
the fog the blind man shoots aimlessly at him, until the
sudden explosion of a bomb leaves nothing of the
mysterious man but a fragment of his revolver. All this is
done with the utmost economy; using his effects of light
and fog, Lang only gives us the bare facts we need.

241
Ministry of Fear: the clairvoyant

On a murky London evening Neale visits the seedy

office of a private detective - one of Lang’s comic
characters. Surprised taking a swig from his brandy bottle,
he indignantly reproaches that an appointment is ne¬
cessary, but anxiously drags Neale back when money is
mentioned. Together the two of them go to the offices of
the ‘Mothers of Free Nations’, where everything seems
innocent and normal, and they meet two Austrian
refugees, brother and sister, Willy and Carla.
They follow the trail to the address of Mrs Bellane, who
turns out to be a handsome, elegant woman not in the least
resembling the stout and overdressed clairvoyante at
Lembridge Fair. Now Neale is involved in a seance as
effectively orchestrated as a scene from the Mabuse films.
The circle of people around the table is mysteriously
illuminated by a central light as the camera pans from one
to the other. Among them is the elegant Mr Costa - the
man in the taxi at the fair. A whispering sound grows
clearer: the medium’s spirit guide speaks to Stephen about
poison, and about the clock with its loud ticking. His
nerves give way, he pulls his hands from the circle and
leaps up just as a shot rings out. Mr Costa lies on the
ground. Another ol the guests, Dr Forrester, says that no
doctor is needed now; only the police; and a hysterical old
lady points accusingly at Neale as the killer.
The atmosphere has been built up with masterly use of
image, sound, lighting, accumulation of detail - all logical,
laconic and nerve-racking.
Aided by the kindly Willy, Neale makes his escape and
returns to the office of the detective, Renmt, The door
creaks ominously as he enters the dark room. The place has
been ransacked, and Rennit is nowhere to be seen. In the
street outside a sinister dark figure stands calmly cleaning
his nails with a file.
Now on the run, Neale meets the young Austrian
refugee, Carla (Marjorie Reynolds) who is to take him to a
safe place of concealment. The meeting takes place in an
air-raid which Lang documents with care - pyjama-clad
people dragging their bedding and needless belongings to
the tube station shelters. Here Neale reveals to Carla what
preys upon his mind. His incurably ill wife asked him to
get her poison to end her sufferings. He bought the poison,
and though he would not give it to her, she found the
hiding place and took it. For a whole night he held her
hand, watching the clock and its slowly swinging
pendulum, until her torment ended and a happy smile
crossed her face . . .
The mysterious man with the nail file appears, but,
seeming not to notice Neale who covers his face with his
hat - takes the first morning train. As it passes through the
station, its lights flicker over the hunched figures lying on
the station.
Hidden by a German bookseller, Neale discovers
Forrester’s book on Nazi psychology, and realises that this
was the man at the seance. The bookseller asks Carla and
Neale to deliver a suitcase of books to the same Dr
Forrester, emphasising that they should bring back the case
(‘leather is so rare these days’). Arriving at the address
given they discover only a deserted flat occupied, says the
porter by a Mr Travers. Mystified, Neale opens the case
cautiously; smoke fills the room, and Neale is only just in

243
Ministry of Fear: Travers (Dan Duryea) and Neale (Ray Milland)

time to pull Carla to safety before the bomb inside

explodes.
When he comes round he is in bed, watched over by the
man with the nail file. He is not, as the spectator fears along
with Neale, a Nazi, but a Scotland Yard detective, who
accuses Neale of the murder not of Costa, but of Rennit the
detective, who has been found with his head smashed.
Neale’s whole story is met with disbelief until the site of
the munitions factory where the ‘blind’ man died is
searched. The fragments of cake scattered around reveal
nothing, until two quarrelling birds lead Neale to a wall
onto which a piece of cake containing a reel of microfilm
has been thrown.
The trail of the vanished Dr Forrester leads them to his
tailor, Travers, who turns out to be none other than Mr
Costa, still very much alive and brandishing a huge pair of
scissors, menacingly. The scene reveals Lang at his most
virtuoso. Travers uses his scissors to dial one number after

244
 . . . the discovery of the body

another on the phone, in order to inform an unknown

customer that his suit is going to be delivered and that
while the shoulders seem to be fitting well they should be
carefully checked all the time gesticulating threateningly
with the scissors - leading both Neale and the spectator to
believe he is about to attack. Then he suddenly dashes
away, bolting himself in his private otfice. When the
inspector and Neale break down the glass door, he has
killed himself with the scissors. Neale dials the telephone
number which Travers had called, and the voice that
answers is Carla’s. Once again a certainty dissolves, and the
spectator, like Neale, begins to suspect Carla.
A delivery man arrives and reveals the address of
Travers’ customer. Neale rushes there by taxi, observed, as
the spectator realises, by Dr Forrester who has been
waiting m his car. The door is opened by Carla’s brother
Willy who, Carla reveals she has just learned, belongs to
the Nazi gang and intends to shoot both her and Neale. In

245
the fight that ensues, Neale tries to snatch Willy’s revolver,
but Carla gets it and threatens her brother. Neale forces
Willy to remove his jacket and starts to examine the
shoulder padding. Willy snatches it back and dashes off
shouting to Carla, ‘You won’t shoot your own brother!’.
Carla shoots through the door, and then opens it to find
Willy dead on the ground. This shot was particularly
difficult. Lang had to make the hole cut by the bullet
visible at exactly the right angle. It took ij hours to set
up. Then, because of union rules, Lang was not allowed to
drill the hole himself, nor let any of the crew do it. The
entire door had to be sent to the studio joinery, while the
entire cast and crew waited for the hole to be drilled and
the door returned to its position.
Neale now finds in the shoulder padding of the dead
man’s jacket a further piece of microfilm which should
correspond to that portion from the cake. Carla and Neale
rush for the lift,just as someone else is ascending in it. Foot¬
steps are mounting the stairs also. Desperately the couple,
shot from above, escape onto the roof. The police arrive
just as Dr Forrester emerges menacingly . . .
The epilogue shows Neale and Carla on their honey¬
moon, driving through clear sunshine; the darkness and
nightmare have been dispelled. And yet, Carla mentions
their wedding without wedding cake, and Neale says with
a shudder: ‘Cake? No, no cake!’
I have described the content of the film at length to
show how in a film reckoned as one of Lang’s minor
works, taken from a Graham Greene novel and scripted by
a different author, an adventure story has become a typical
Lang film - directly in the line of Mabuse and Spies with its
seamless functioning action, its strict logic, an atmosphere
which combines fantasy and documentary realism, its
ability to control a multiplicity of incident - in short the
work of a perfectionist who makes each film he works on
his own.
 21 The Woman in the Window (1944)

Within the apparent structure ‘When I made Woman in the Window,' wrote Lang in his
of a police film, overlaying an article ‘Happily Ever After’ (Penguin Film Review, No. 5,
insupportable anxiety, Fritz
1948):
Lang allows himself an
inquisitive walk into the I was chided by critics for ending it as a dream. I was not always
subconscious of a professor who objective about my own work, but in this case my choice was
is convinced of the infallibility conscious. It I had continued the story to its logical conclusion, a man
of his theories. He believes would have been caught and executed for committing a murder
that all the confused images, because he was one moment off guard. Even were he not convicted of
symbols and mad dreams can the crime, his life would have been ruined. I rejected this logical
be made lucid, thinks he has ending because it seemed to me a defeatist ending, a tragedy for
the key to all our mysteries, nothing, brought about by an implacable Fate - a negative ending to a
and finds himself one day problem which is not universal, a futile dreariness which an audience
unwittingly trapped by the would reject. Woman in the Window enjoyed a considerable success,
fascination exerted over him by and while it may be hindsight on my part, I think that with another
the portrait of a beautiful ending its success would have been less.
woman. This face, which
This statement characterises the development Lang had
works with the help of
phantom images, is the starting undergone in the United States. He is no longer working
point of an infernal adventure, strictly within the formula of‘man trapped by fate’ ol his
which is lived as intensely as if early scripts and German films.
it had really happened. And The origin of the script, I. H. Wallis’s novel Once Off
this revelation, which was so
Guard has a tragic ending. Lang’s decision to give it a
much criticized at the time the
film appeared, makes us
happy ending was not a concession to the box office (both
understand that the whole the producer and the writer, Nunnally Johnson, at first
thing was only a dream, opposed the idea), but in accordance with his own feelings.
suddenly elucidates two The professor, after all, is not Chris Cross of Scarlet Street
meanings with equal passion:
or the similar figure in the Georg Kaiser play Von Morgen
the knowledge that nothing is
bis Mitternacht. Those critics who have insisted that Scarlet
protection against the internal
demons, and that so-called Street is some sort of remake of Woman in the Window with
human wisdom, ripening with a tragic ending have failed to see the very real differences
age, is only deception, a kind between the two in terms of character, motivation, and
of social convention. action; perhaps they have simply been deceived by
Henry Chapier, Combat,
similarities of casting and theme. From the very start
22 April 1972
Woman in the Window was intended as a nightmare, based

247
on the notion of‘assuming that . . Why should a good . . . the adventure has been
family man have to end his life in suicide because of a wish- described with an assiduous
deliberation that gives it an
dream ? He does not even visit a night club, his only excess
almost dreamlike quality:
being an extra drink or two at his club.
everything seems real yet
At the very beginning, Lang provides the clues to all surely it cannot be. But the
that will follow (or, in truth, not follow). The professor sleeper is not to waken and
remarks with a smile to his friends, the doctor and the nightmarish sequels . . . arrive
district attorney, in their club that he would not visit a with the same, inexorable,
ominously charged momentum.
burlesque show, although
It is only with the entrance of
If one of the young ladies wishes to come over here and perform I’ll be the blackmailer that his
only too happy to watch . . . But if it means leaving this chair . . . (He momentum begins to slacken;
shakes his head). the sense oj accumulating
fatality is not matched by a
So the professor of psychology and expert on criminology
gathering intensity of rhythm,
will have been shaken out of the smug certainty of his the inevitable begins to hover
his arm chair. The temptations of the subconscious are on the edge of the obvious.
chimaeras ironically dreamed up by a man who considers Yet this was perhaps Lang’s
himself an expert on matters of the mind. By the end he intention, for knowing the
trap is bound to close, one is
will have been shaken out of the snug certainty of his
still fascinated to learn
theories, about which we have seen him lecturing to
exactly how and when.
his students at the beginning of the film. And afterwards, Gavm Lambert, ‘Fritz
back in the lap of his respectable family, he may well Lang’s America’, Sight and
occasionally experience a longing for, or a fear of, those Sound, Autumn 1953
dangerous forces within him which were the source of his The next significant film I
dream. Thus, while the ending is a happy one in a certain made was again directed by
sense, it is ultimately an ambiguous one. Fritz Lang: Woman in the
The adventure begins when the professor (Edward G. Window with Edward G.
Robinson. Its success equalled
Robinson, clearly responding to the chance to play an
that oj Man Hunt, and ours
intellectual as a change from gangster roles) pauses to look
seemed a most fortuitous
at a picture ot a beautiful woman in the window of an art working relationship.
gallery. The two friends who are accompanying him to Joan Bennett; The Bennett
the club tease him for his faraway thoughts; she is their Playbill, by Lois Kibbee,
‘dream girl’ too. In the club the three ageing men discuss 1970

the proposition that ‘Life ends at forty’ - which surely is a

bit early. Nonetheless, the professor insists that:

That sort of shenanigan is out for us. To me it is the end of the

brightness of life, the end of the spirit of adventure.

The District Attorney answers that there is still the demon

de midi which can ruin ageing men. Thus, the premises
have been stated.
Two drinks more than usual and a few moments spent
reading Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’ - the quintessential
love poem - and the professor is asleep. Woken, a bit

248
 Woman in the Window (1944): the meeting

dazed, by the club waiter, the professor stumbles into the

dark street. Gazing once more at the portrait, he sees
reflected in the glass window - almost like a momentary
hallucination - the real-life original, the double, of the face
in the picture. They talk; she explains that when she is
feeling lonely she goes to the window to watch the
reactions of passers-by. In a bar, the woman (Joan Bennett)
asks if he would care to see the sketches for the portrait
back at her apartment. ‘I'm not married. I have no designs
on you,’ she reassures him. The elegantly dressed and
obviously sophisticated woman is no cheap call-girl. In her
refined speech and her glittering dress she is difficult to
place socially, and Lang thus introduces an unresolved
ambiguity.
The professor’s demurrance is token (‘I don’t think I
should. I was warned against the siren call of adventure.’).
Characteristically, Lang moves the action ahead by ellipsis.
A dissolve, and the professor is helping the woman from a

249
taxi and entering her apartment. Another dissolve, and the
portfolio of sketches has been moved from the coffee table
where the professor studied it; he is about to open a bottle
of champagne. The cork breaks and the woman brings a
pair of scissors to get it out. The conditions and the tools
lor the coming action are now established.
For the initial street scene Lang made a note in the script:
‘No Rain’. As a new taxi drives up outside the apartment
building, rain is pouring down. It is the kind of rain that
produces an unnerving insecurity and hints at potential
catastrophe. Horror and brutality are about to invade the
cool, civilized interior of the luxury apartment. We are
also about to learn more about the rather detached woman
who lives there among her countless reflections in the
many mirrors lining the walls. (Lang’s characterisation of
the woman is expertly done; later when she phones the
professor, for example, there is a mirror placed over her
bed, so that decor, as Lang has always insisted, leads the
spectator to discoveries about the people who inhabit
them.)
The man who gets out of the taxi enters the apartment
with his own key. Rushing into the room he slaps the
woman and throws himself upon the professor. Nearly
strangled, the professor reaches out and grabs at the scissors
offered by the woman and blindly plunges them again and
again into the back of his assailant.
The man is dead. The professor’s first reaction is to
phone the police; a homicide in self-defence is, after all,
justifiable. His reasons for replacing the phone after the
operator’s repeated ‘Hello’ is clear enough without the
sequence in the script which Lang quite rightly cut:

Montage of transparent figures, his wife’s face looking at him in

anguish, begging him: ‘you didn’t, Richard, you didn’t’

followed by superimpositions of the entreating faces of his

two children.
The woman is anxious. She begins to reveal more of
herself. The man’s name was Howard, a rich man she met
on a train. While he kept her, she learned little about him;
they never went out anywhere together; she only saw him
when he turned up as he did that night, unexpectedly. The
professor conceives a plan. If he takes the corpse away in
his car and dumps it, no one will connect either of them

250
with the killing. At this decision, the line of self-defence is
invalidated and the strict logic of fate and its ramifications
begins to operate. Yet, the woman is uneasy; she has no
reason to trust anyone:

But it you get out of here like that why should you ever come back?
... I don t think there s a man in the world who wouldn’t get out of a
mess like this if he could.

Her experience with men has evidently not been

uniformly a happy one. Before he leaves to get his car from
the garage, she persuades him to leave his waistcoat. While
one senses that she would not inform on the professor, her
character is still somewhat ambiguous; she removes the
professor’s initialled pencil from his pocket and hides it,
carefully wrapped, in a drawer. She also ignores the
professor’s advice to throw away the dead man’s watch;
she places that as well in the drawer. Later, she will
attempt to keep back some of the blackmail money for
herself. Clearly, she has a somewhat firmer grip on reality
than has the theoretician professor. Whatever their
differences, however, each has his destiny marked out in
common.
Driving along dark, rain-drenched glistening streets,
the professor is stopped by a police car: ‘Don’t you ever
turn your lights on at night?’ The spectator’s nerves are
strained along with the professor’s, and the tension is kept
up by a ritardando characteristic of Lang. Returning to the
house, the professor is just about to carry out the body
when the tenant from the floor above drives up and catches
a glimpse of the woman who has opened the door to see
that the coast is clear. Her appearance does not surprise him
so much as her sudden retreat, which makes him hesitate
on the stairs to look back. Even with such a false track, so
beloved of Lang, we are made aware of the possibilities of
sudden discovery of the crime.
Nor is Lang shy in heightening his moments of drama:
there is a thunder-clap just as the professor leaves the house
with his ominous burden wrapped in a dark cover. Two
stunning images stand out of the precipitation of incidents.
As always with Lang, they are an organic part of the
situation. The woman watches the body being placed in
the car by the professor who then brings back the cover to
her and returns to sit in the driver’s seat. At first we see her

251
Woman in the Window: hiding the corpse
252
face reflected (once again) in the glass of the front door,
then at a reverse angle behind the glass, with raindrops
slithering down the pane, and the light from a street lamp
weaving glittering reflections. In this liquid, distorted
imagery she looks even more beautiful and seductive than
in her portrait. This is at once the climax of fascination and
an underscoring of the strangely ambiguous atmosphere of
dream. Yet, it must be remembered, all of this is created
without a single erotic incident between the two.
Having already acted suspiciously when stopped earlier
by the police, the professor again reveals his nervousness
when the toll-gate collecter misses the hastily thrown dime
and the professor is obliged to back-up to fumble for
another coin. The danger involved is emphasised by a
quick shot of the pale and bloated face ol the dead man on
the car floor.
Nor does Lang allow either the spectator or the
professor a respite from the tension. There are constantly
new sources of unease and obstacles: a stop sign which the
professor almost misses, and near it a motorcycle
policeman flashing his light. Everything glitters and glints
in the rain-sodden darkness. The glistening wet foliage of
the bushes — concealing the barbed wire which catches
some tell-tale threads from the professor’s jacket when it
cuts his arm - recall the bushes of The Last Will of Dr
Mabuse in their taking on a life of their own. And, again,
we are given two shots of the awful face of the corpse that
looks out of sightless eyes.
The evidence piles up. There are the footprints and tyre
marks in the wet clay soil. Rashly the professor mentions
murder to the distinct attorney when the other man has no
more than commented that a financier has disappeared.
When the professor is invited along, socially, to watch the
police investigation he makes the mistake ot moving
directly towards the spot where the body was found
before he is told where it was. He cannot keep his
explanations simple: he claims his arm was cut when he
was opening a tin, and then as it becomes inflamed from
the sumak poison of the bush, he must talk about a search
for a lost golf ball. While he can burn his jacket, he cannot
remove the already discovered imprints in the earth. Lang
obviously enjoys playing the game of circumstantial
evidence. He is also fond of red herrings: a woman arrested

253
m a cheap hotel whom he tried to avoid turns out not to be
the professor’s ’dream girl’ at all; another toll-gate
attendant has replaced the one who might have identified
him.
If, however, the professor is more or less managing to
deal with the police, these are only delaying tactics. The
trap springs from an entirely different direction. The
dubious bodyguard, ironically hired by the dead man’s
business partners to protect him against his own hot
temper, suddenly appears with a blackmail demand. The
demand follows a characteristic moment of relief: the
professor is at first terrified when the woman telephones
him, but she only wishes to congratulate him on an
academic promotion which had been announced in the
newspaper. He has time only to put down the receiver,
reassured, when the blackmailer (Dan Duryea, an actor
Lang liked a good deal and used whenever he could) rings
her door-bell. The first demand for 5,000 dollars goes up
when the official reward is placed at twice that sum. The
blackmailer finds the professor’s pencil, although the
woman has managed to keep the newspaper article from
him by agreeing at once to his demands.
The professor has gotten a prescription from his friend
the doctor for a heavy tranquilizer - with the warning that
too many will cause a sudden heart attack without leaving
a trace. So now the two, once having killed by accident,
are ready to murder in earnest. The blackmailer is too
clever, however, to drink the drugged glass offered by the
woman. His demands grow heavier when he discovers the
dead man’s watch.
The woman desperately calls the professor, but he has
run out of cash and valuables. He hangs up and takes the
rest of the tranquilizer himself. Hearing shots, the woman
runs into the street. In a disquieting tilt-shot, the hunched-
up body of the blackmailer is discovered, outside a
basement entrance, with the incriminating watch and
5,000 dollars; when the police had approached he had
panicked and shot first. Oddly enough, Police Inspector
Jackson, who has observed the professor during the
investigations, comments:

'. . . that’s very funny, I was beginning to get an entirely different idea
about it . . .’

254
When the woman tries to telephone the good news to the
professor there is no answer.
Lang employs virtuoso camerawork for the transition
from catharsis to the reality which succeeds the dream.
The camera angle carefully calculated, we see the professor
in an armchair in his bedroom beside the photographs of
his family. The camera pans close to the unconscious man
who vaguely reacts to the ringing of the telephone, then
draws back. The professor is now asleep in his chair in the
club, and the hand touching his shoulder is that of a club
servant, waking him: ‘It is halt past ten. Professor
Wanley.’
In a letter, put at my disposal by Pierre Rissient,
Nunnally Johnson writes, on 23 January 1969, about how
the initially resistant producer-writer came to accept
Lang’s intentions:

Our association couldn’t have been pleasanter. The script was

completed when it was offered to him and when we went over it
together I can remember only one conflict of opinions. But conflict is
not exactly the word. It might better be described as a different
opinion about the treatment of the story within the story. I did not
want this inner story to be a dream ... I wanted it to be a story told by
someone, though I can’t remember how I worked out such a
presentation. But Fritz preferred the dream, and it would have been
presumptuous of me to disagree with him on such a small point in
view of his experience and eminence. He was more likely to be more
right than I was.
The picture provided Fritz with one of the most ingenious shots,
possibly the most ingenious that I have seen. It is when Edward G.
Robinson must be brought out of his dream back into reality.
Robinson has taken some kind of poison that is putting him to sleep
when the telephone rings. If he can summon the strength to reach out
and pick up the ’phone the audience knows the mystery has been
solved and that he can in all possibility take some antidote to the
poison. This is where the dream must end.
As the ’phone continues to ring and Robinson begins to expire, Fritz
moved the camera closer and closer until it was almost a head shot.
Robinson is now presumably dead. Then a hand is pressed urgently on
his shoulder and he opens his eyes, awakening from his dream. Fritz
then pulled the camera back and a steward is reminding him that he
wanted to be called at 11 o’clock.
This shot which involved a complete change of wardrobe and set
was done without a cut. It was so perfectly done it had to be explained
to me. Robinson was wearing a break-away suit of clothes and in the
few seconds of the head shot an assistant crept up under the camera and
snapped it off, leaving him in the suit he was wearing when he tell
asleep, and in the same few seconds the crew had substituted the club

255
set for the room in which he had taken the poison. It was that sort of
ingenuity that helped to make Fritz the great director he was.

When he is awakened, the professor rises and goes

out. We now see the irascible financier and the cunning
blackmailer in their everyday shapes. They had evidently
lingered in the professor’s subconscious from previous
encounters. The ‘financier’ is the obsequious cloakroom
attendant; the ‘blackmailer’ is the club doorman, his face
now, like the other man’s, without anything sinister about
it. Outside, a streetwalker asks for a light in the traditional
first gesture of a solicitation, while just in the background
is the mysterious and ambiguous portrait of the ‘dream
girl’ with her smile of a thousand possibilities. He flees,
shouting ‘No . . . not for a million dollars!’ It is the satyr
play after the tragedy; it is the release from the nightmare,
not an arbitrary or imposed happy ending.

256
 22 Scarlet Street (1945)

Scarlet Street is Lang’s most So far as he recalls, Lang held 55 per cent of the stock of
European American film . . .
Diana productions, while Joan Bennett had ten per cent
its surface is very similar to that
and Walter Wanger none, being hired as the firm’s vice-
oj Woman in the Window,
with the same cameraman chairman with a 40,000 dollar fee for every film, since he
(Milton Krasner) creating had arranged Lang’s financial backing.
some dark texture impressions Looking about for a subject for their first production,
of an anonymous, melancholy Lang heard that Paramount had acquired the rights of the
urban world. A long-held shot
Renoir film La Chienne (1931) which had been based on
introduces Scarlet Street itself
the novel by Georges de la Fouchardiere. Lubitsch,
— nocturnal, rainy, vaguely
raffish with a barrel-organ however, had dropped the idea of a remake because he
playing while a few couples couldn’t find a way of making the subject palatable to
stroll past. American audiences. Lang, on the other hand, saw the
Gavin Lambert, ‘Fritz possibility of transposing the film to a Greenwich Village
Lang’s America’, Sight and
setting and still retaining the atmosphere. Dudley Nichols,
Sound, Autumn 1955
who knew Renoir’s film, liked the idea, and Lang recalls:
I did a couple of films after The two of us were agreed to make a new film and not just a copy ol
that, neither of which pleased the Renoir film which we had seen in the Thirties. We wanted to use
me very much, and it was then the idea in a new way with reference to the Greenwich Village
Walter, Fritz and IJormed an atmosphere and the American characters — ‘Lazy Legs’ (Joan Bennett)
independent producing and Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson).
company and arranged to
distribute through
. (The name ‘Lazy Legs’ rather indicates a prostitute who is
Universal . . . We called the almost too lazy to follow her trade, while ‘Chris Cross’ is a
company Diana Productions man who criss-crosses his way through life.)
and our first film as an Before Nichols started to work on the script, he, Lang,
organisation was Scarlet Wanger and Joan Bennett met to find a suitable title; a
Street, with a cast headed by
literal translation of La Chienne would clearly not be
Edward G. Robinson and me.
It was another hit and a good acceptable. ‘We talked and talked and could not find what
omen for the newly formed we wanted until I suddenly had a brainwave and said
company. ‘Scarlet Street?’ and everyone was enthusiastic.’ Lang says
Joan Bennett: The Bennett he did not know exactly what the title meant, but that
Playbill, by Lois Kibbee,
afterwards he remembered the passage in the Apocalypse
1970
of St. John where the whore of Babylon is described as ‘the

257
woman arrayed in purple and scarlet’ and thinks that
perhaps that image might have been in the back of his
mind.
In Renoir’s film the girl is clearly a putain from the
lowest ranks. When Michel Simon tries to rescue her and
strike her pimp who has thrown her to the sidewalk, she
goes for him angrily and screams at him in vulgar French.
When she allows him to take her home, there is no doubt
what she is: she tells him openly that she lives with her
pimp, Dede. Thus Simon has no illusions; he accepts their
fate as something natural.
Joan Bennett’s Kitty is a better-class girl, but not because
of the Hays Office. Lang intends to make something else
from the material, and the romantic illusions of Chris arc a
necessary part of that plan. The script says that ‘she lives
with her friend Milly who designs belts for a boutique
where Kitty herself worked before she met Johnny’. While
Lang has kept references to this in the film, we come into
the story after she has become Johnny’s adoring slave; he
allows her to keep him. The scene in which he beats her up
because (Lazy Legs that she is) she has earned only fifteen
dollars in an evening is self-explanatory. Still, except with
Johnny, she has some pride and ambition. She is more than
happy to have Chris believe her story that she is an actress
who has been attacked by a purse-snatcher. Later, when
she begins to have professional success as a ‘painter’, she
will even be able to parrot back Chris’s second-hand
opinion about the ‘Work of art that grows organically’
when she talks to an art critic.
Lang’s Chris is very different from Simon in the Renoir
film. Simon is half-primitive, yet cunning enough not to
be completely defenceless - almost a bourgeois mutation
of Boudu sauve des eaux. His Sunday painting is more a
hobby than a passion, and unlike the timid and ‘con¬
siderate’ Chris he has a real, sexual affair with the
prostitute. At the end, after killing her in a fit of rage, he
becomes a tramp, but it is less tragic downfall than release,
an anarchist freed at last from all bourgeois restraints. The
cynicism of this ending was only possible in the liberal
French atmosphere which still preserved a good deal of the
scepticism of Anatole France. In the United States of 1945, £
Lang had to at least make a gesture toward the de¬
monstration that ‘crime does not pay’. Nonetheless, Lang

258
Scarlet Street (1945): Lang with Dan Duryea and Joan Bennett (right)

had a somewhat different conception of what that might

mean from that of the Hays Office. He declares that Chris
suffers neither from the death of Lazy Legs nor from
having sent an innocent man to the electric chair. He suffers
only from ajealousy which cannot be assuaged even by the
death of the two people involved. He still hears their love
talk, is tortured by it, and this is what turns him into a bum.
Lang further points out that this was the first Hollywood
film in which an innocent man is executed, yet no single
review commented on the fact; nor, evidently, did the
Hays Office object, although that Office had earlier found
the intrigue against Czaka in Hangmen Also Die ‘immoral’.
Was this because Chris’s downfall seems ambivalent, and
because Lang shows it with such intensity and atmospheric
anxiety? Did no one object to Johnny’s execution because
he was so unpleasant? If the film itself is sometimes
ambiguous in the Lang fashion, the reactions to the film on
the part of critics and censor were ambiguous in quite
another way.

259
 Renoir’s film is in parts almost vaudeville, drastic
naturalism with occasional tragic overtones. Lang’s film
with its chiaroscuro compositions reveals the deep tragedy
of a man hurt by life. Chris has a heart; something unique
in the film. He trusts Kitty deeply and forgives her
everything. He destroys Kitty, and himself, because she has
f destroyed his love, his trust, his illusions. It is a long way
from Montmartre to Greenwich Village.
The film opens on a rain-sodden night in which the
headlights of cars are reflected in puddles, in which the
lights from restaurants barely penetrate the dark, in which
the pavement seems to slide away under one’s feet and
temptation (and doom?) is waiting at every street corner.
Thin music from a barrel organ is wafted away in the thin
breeze. An elegant car containing a beautiful woman
draws up outside a restaurant; a discreet chauffeur
murmurs something to the head waiter who, in turn,
passes the message along to the boss, who then speeds up to
conclude the presentations to celebrate the cashier’s
twenty-five years with the firm. The lady can’t be kept
waiting.
The office staff, a little tipsy, crowd to the window to
wonder at the boss’s companion - not, certainly, his wife.
The timid, little cashier, slipping away from the party with
his friend and fellow-worker confides:

I feel kind of lonely tonight ... I wonder what it is like ... to be -

well, loved by a girl like that?
. . . No one ever looked at me like that, not even when I was young.

When he was young this gentle, helpless man dreamed of

being a painter. Now, after twenty-five monotonous years
as a bank cashier (his only reward, tonight’s gold watch and
a hurried presentation), he is married to a shrew who never
misses a chance to compare him unfavourably to his
predecessor whose picture (with a genuine life-saver’s
medal pinned to its chest) glares at him in the sitting room.
Chris in a woman’s apron, afraid to invite his friend home,
washes the dishes and listens to her threats to give his
paintings to thejunk man because she can’t bear the smell
of turpentine and oil. Detail is piled upon detail to create a
picture of his domestic life in all its stuffiness, all kept by
Lang in chiaroscuro. The one bright spot in Chris’s life is
his painting - done on Sundays locked in the bathroom -

260
 Scarlet Street: Chris (Edward G. Robinson) and wife

paintings which are strangely primitive, without per¬

spective as his whole existence is without perspective.
The encounter with Kitty is the fulfilment of un-
defmable longings. With her, the Sunday painter who
thinks she is an actress, becomes a real painter. The flower
she gives him acquires a magic: he paints it, but his wile
throws it into the garbage. Yet, even early in their
relationship there is a stirring of suspicion. As Chris and
Kitty part, he asks her who is the Johnny for whom she
asked the barman, but seems satisfied with her explanation
that he is the boyfriend of Milly. In fact it is at Johnny’s
instigation that Kitty begins to soak the apparently rich
painter.
Chris becomes entangled in easy stages. First a loan tor a
few clothes so she can be presentable when she visits
‘agents and producers’. Then a bright, modern flat, which
Kitty will live in but where Chris can come to paint in
peace away trom his wife, Adele. To get the necessary

261
Scarlet Street: discovering the pictures

money, Chris first steals bonds which his wife had

inherited from her first husband. Soon, he is robbing his
employer too. He is so besotted that he is not even angry
when he discovers that Kitty is signing his paintings (‘It’s
almost like we were married.’) and selling them to a
gallery. This leads to a comic passage. Chris’s wife sees the
pictures in the window of the art gallery and assumes her
husband had copied the work of this ‘Katherine Marsh’.
She dashes home to demand ‘How long have you known
Katherine Marsh?’ Hard at work cutting meat, Chris not
realising she knows nothing of his relationship with Kitty,
brandishes the knife in Adele’s face - obviously remember¬
ing all the newspaper stories he has read with relish about
wives being murdered.
For the scene before the gallery, Lang had an ingenious
technical idea. To give the impression of an intense street
life reflected in the window of the gallery, he made a back
projection with moving traffic and passers-by which he

262
 then reflected in the window which, being dimly lit from
the other side, provided a partial mirror.
Chris finds that he will not have to murder Adele to be
rid ot her. The supposedly lost husband returns to demand
blackmail money to leave Chris in happy possession of
Adele. Instead, Chris delightedly tricks him back into the
marriage trap. Now free to marry Kitty, he rushes to the
apartment with his suitcase.
In the Renoir film, Simon found the girl in bed with her
lover. In Lang’s film, Chris sees the two through a glass
door rushing into each other’s arms and kiss, and hears
Oh Johnny! Oh Johnny!

Lazy Legs! (half in mockery)

Jeepers I love you Johnny!

The gramophone needle has stuck in a groove of the

refrain of Kitty’s favourite ‘Melancholy Baby’: ‘I love . . .
love . . . love . . . love’.
Johnny hears the front door as Chris runs away. Angry
with Kitty’s negligence, which may have lost them the
source of their income, Johnny stalks out. Having got a bit
drunk in a saloon, Chris returns to tell Kitty he is free, that
he forgives her and understands that Johnny forced himself
on her. She buries her head in her pillow, her shoulders
shaking. ‘Don’t cry, darling. Please don’t cry.’ At which
point she turns on him, laughing:
- How can a man be so dumb . . . I’ve been wanting to laugh in your
face ever since I met you. You’re old and ugly and I’m sick of you —
sick, sick, sick!

He retreats, horrified. The ice-pick Johnny had borrowed

from the ice-man downstairs for a champagne celebration
of his purchase of a new car falls to the floor. Chris
mechanically picks it up to replace it. As Kitty buries her
face in the blankets, he hacks like an enraged machine at
her body.
The stairwell is lit in a tragic chiaroscuro. Johnny,
drunk, drives up in his new car so recklessly that he almost
runs down the ice-man:
Just look out, Johnny, you will kill somebody.

Chris comes down the stairs like a sleepwalker. When

Johnny’s shadow appears on the frosted glass of the front
door, silhouetted by the lamp outside, Chris hides at the

263
 side of the stairwell. Impatiently, Johnny rattles the bolted
door, then smashes the glass to get in. As Johnny runs up
the stairs, Chris slips out unnoticed.
The circumstantial evidence against Johnny the pimp
piles up: he stole the dead girl’s jewelry; just before her
death Kitty rang Milly who warned her Johnny was drunk
and threatening Kitty with violence;Johnny hardly makes
a good impression when he insists that Chris (‘He ain’t as
dumb as he looks.’) did the ‘Katherine Marsh’ paintings
while both Adele and Chris claim that Chris was only
capable of making bad copies - so bad they had been
destroyed.
Nichols’ screenplay already provides for the stylisation
of the scene of cross-examination:

In this succession of quick wipes we see only the witness chair and part
of the judge’s bench. But at intervals we hear the audience and the
judge’s gavel. The prosecutor who asks the questions we do not hear,
becomes the CAMERA. We, the audience of the film are the audience
of the court-room.

It is interesting to compare this with other Lang court¬

room scenes, and the solutions he finds elsewhere to the
problems of showing multiple interrogations.
The script contained a further scene of hallucination: in
the night, as Johnny goes to the electric chair, Chris drives
to Sing Sing. He climbs up on an insulation tower from
which he can watch how the voltage drops when the
switch is pulled. Lang rightly felt that this might have an
unintentional comic effect on the audience and eliminated
it. The scene must have been shot, however, as there is a
surviving still photograph showing Robinson overlook¬
ing the death house from the vantage of the pole.
"f As the film now exists, there is only the sequence of his
return journey by train. He is politely addressed by the
journalists who recognise him from the trial as ‘Mr Cross’,
though he has already begun to look shabby and unshaven.
He hears one of the passengers remark ‘Nobody gets away
with murder’ - there is always the conscience - ‘No one
escapes punishment’.
Yet, when Chris collapses in the miserable Bowery
hotel room, without even a curtain, it is not because of
guilty conscience. Lang’s suggestive powers transcend the
script. A neon sign outside flashes on and off, lighting in

264
sequence cut from film (left); Chris in the dreary hotel room (right)

uncannily regular intervals the gloomy room through the

curtainless window, torturing his already sore nerves. He
finds himself unable to stop involuntarily whistling Kitty’s
favourite ‘Melancholy Baby’, and then another sound
comes in as if from another dimension: the words he heard
the lovers speak:

Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny!

Lazy Legs!

Jeepers I love you, Johnny!

The words are repeated again and again with the flashing
light, more terrifying than the footsteps heard in the mind
of Joe Wilson in Fury. Everything suddenly stops and
Chris screams out ‘Kitty!’
There is a cut to the door of Chris’s room; the grubby
porter and another client push open the door from behind
which there has just been the noise of a falling chair.
Through the open doorway we see the outlines of a

265
hanging man, or rather the dark shapes of his legs in the
twilight. The failed suicide is shown as starkly as a
newsreel.
The final act, the slow decline of an obsessed man who
has lost everything is shown by means of an ellipsis. On a
snowy night the police find the tramp asleep on a park
bench. One tells the other that the tramp is a bit crazy. He
wants to be arrested:

he has the crazy idea he killed a couple of people. Always trym’ to give
himself up, wants to be tried and executed. You know these nuts.

As they make him move along, they conclude that

probably he just wants a warm place for the night.
Through the wintry night Christmas carols and Jingle
bells can be heard in the distance. The tramp is shuffling
past the art gallery when the door opens and Kitty’s
alleged self-portrait is carefully carried into a waiting car.
The gallery owner discusses it with a fat woman:

Well, there goes her masterpiece. I really hate to part with it . . .

For twenty-five thousand dollars you shouldn’t mind, Mr Delarow.

It is almost as if Chris has not heard. He shuffles on towards

the Bowery, picks up a cigarette stub, shuffles on again.
The original script continued, eerily:

A gust of wind whines in the street, making a swirl of snow around

him like ghost figures and we hear Kitty’s voice whispering: ‘Johnny,
I love you Johnny’.

Lang goes even further. As the jingle bell music continues

merrily, and as the voices of the lovers again haunt Chris,
there is a dissolve. All of the other people on the street have
disappeared, and Chris’s profound loneliness is made
concrete in the image of him slowly, listlessly, shuffling
off, becoming smaller and smaller in the distance.

266
 23 Cloak and Dagger (1946)

Peace? There’s no peace! It’s

Cloak and Dagger is a less romantic title than at first
year one of the Atomic Age
appears; it was the actual name for the intelligence work
and God have mercy on us
all! ... if we think we can and wartime secret service activities of the Office of
wage other wars without Strategic Services — OSS — in Washington. Man Hunt,
destroying ourselves. Hangmen Also Die, and Ministry of Fear are all, in addition
Script by Albert Maltz and to their other aspects, anti-Nazi films made during the
Ring Lardner, Jr.
Second World War. Cloak and Dagger was made in 1946,
when the Nazi regime had, in principle, been destroyed; it
was thus meant as a kind of concluding commentary on
the terror of the Reich. There is, however, more to it than
simply that: the sentiments from the script quoted above,
for example, were central to the film and put into the
mouth of the film’s hero Alvah Jasper, played with human
simplicity by Gary Cooper. This ending, a warning
against the new-born terror of the spread of the destructive
capabilities of atomic power, was Lang’s central purpose in
making the film. While it was filmed, it was removed,
with the entire last reel of the film, by the production
company, and was destroyed before the film’s release. No
complete copy of the film as intended has survived.
In Lang’s previous anti-Nazi films, the enemy are
sharply characterised. In Cloak and Dagger the Nazis and
Fascists are treated more summarily and vaguely. Like the
bomb itself they remain a dim, hard to grasp, menace; 111
the original film and script, the menace is no longer
localized, but has spread to international proportions.
The Gestapo kidnap Dr Katerin Loder, a famous
FJungarian physicist, who has fled to Switzerland rather
than work for the Nazi atomic weapon. Before Jasper can
save her, she is shot by a Nazi nurse. Before dying, she is
able to reveal that an Italian physicist, Dr Polda, is working
for the Nazis. The rather unworldly Jasper, recruited to

267
OSS to establish contact with Dr Loder, realises he now
has a larger task: he must go to Italy to discover why the
once liberal Polda is working with the Nazis. Likejan and
Mascha in Hangmen Also Die, he is to be transformed into a
committed fighter.
Although the script is ascribed to Albert Maltz and Ring
Lardner, Jr. (both to become victims of the McCarthy
witchhunts in Hollywood), Lang’s influence and logic are
evident in the mosaic structure. In a Basque restaurant a
switchman and his colleague are sending messages to
England about loads of pitchblend being shipped from
Czechoslovakia to Germany. In the middle of their
radioing, the Gestapo surprise and kill them. Meanwhile,
in Washington, the interrupted message has been mon¬
itored.
Jasper explains to his cloak-and-dagger friend the
significance of the shipments of pitchblend and momcite -
uranium and thorium: the Nazis, like the Americans, are
working on an atomic bomb.

. . . this is the first time I am sorry I am a scientist. Society is not ready

for atomic energy. I’m scared stiff.

Whatever his ultimate feelings about the bomb, however,

one thing is immediately clear: the Nazis must not
develop the bomb.
Disguised as a German scientist, Jasper reaches Polda
(after an adventurous landing by submarine in Italy) to
find that he is being forced to work with the Nazis. His
daughter is in their hands and his house is heavily guarded
by Fascists. When Jasper reveals his real identity, the
terrified Polda rings for his guards; but reminded by Jasper
of his former statements about science and humanity,
merely mumbles a request for matches when the Fascist
Fuigi appears. Luigi will later become suspicious when he
finds a box of matches already on Polda’s desk.
Here, as well as in other incidents like the ‘accidental’
encounter in Switzerland of Jasper with an American
adventuress who is actually a Nazi agent, the sudden tying
together of seemingly trivial or unconnected details in their
causal connections is sometimes reminiscent of The Spy.
Polda will make his escape with Jasper only if his
daughter is first saved, so that Jasper must stay in Italy
instead of leaving within twenty-four hours as ordered. He

268
Cloak and Dagger (1946): the subtle menace of the Nazis
269
is put under the protection of the lovely resistance fighter
Gina, played by Lili Palmer with the actress’s usual
deliberate coolness which is here not inappropriate to the
role. At first, the two are to stay together in the same room
until they receive the signal — a newspaper obituary
notice for a lieutenant Rinaldi — that Polda’s daughter is
safe.
Here, Lang’s instinct for suspense and his economy of
means comes into play. Jasper can’t stand the meowing of a
hungry cat outside the door. Gina coldly replies that
‘When people are hungry, it’s natural cats should be too.’
When it stops, she remarks ‘here even cats learn it’s no use
to cry’. Yet when the meows begin again, she softens and
allows the cat to come inside the room. Thus we are given
the situation which has made Gina’s assumed hardness
necessary and shown that there is another, softer, side to
her character. But the cat serves yet another purpose: in
the morning the janitor comes looking for his cat and
discoversjasper. While the introduction ofjasper as Gina’s
new husband works for the moment, Jasper obviously
cannot register with the police, and they are forced to flee.
They move from one precarious refuge to the next, with
Jasper learning more and more about Gina’s anxieties and
fears brought about by her hard and dangerous life. She
begins to relax and to trust Jasper’s basic decency and
sympathy:

Don’t make love to me! Don't be someone 1 like ... In my work, I kiss
without feeling . . . When you fight scum you become scum.

Nothing is what it appears; danger is everywhere. Two

nuns knock at the door of their hiding place collecting
money for war orphans. Trusting no one, Gina watches
them when they leave and sees them stop at a car parked
down the street. They were agents, and Gina urges Jasper
that they must again move on. While he is not convinced
of the danger, he recognises her terror and tries to calm her
by taking her into his arms. She clings to him:

I want you to like me - I want you to think I am nineteen, with a white

dress, a girl who has never been kissed before.

This, however, is no sentimental boy-meets-girl situation.

Lang very carefully directs the scene so that it is perfectly
natural, two human beings clinging to one another for

270
Support and warmth in a nightmare world which has
devalued human emotions and the heart.
Their next refuge is a bombed house. Then Jasper must
hide under a bridge, d he nightmare is increasing in
intensity and the alternatives tor survival are diminishing.
Finally the obituary notice is in the newspaper, and Jasper
and Gina set otf to fetch Polda from his appointment with
his anti-Fascist dentist. The danger has not passed
however. A typical Lang set piece follows. Luigi,
suspicious, has followed Polda’s car and must be got out of
the way.
Gina passes him with swaying hips, apparently not even
noticing him, then stops in a doorway to fix her stocking.
While Luigi’s attention is thus elsewhere, Jasper is able to
get near enough to force him at gun-point into the
doorway. From outside we can hear street music. Luigi
resists, jumps at Jasper and claws at his face. The wild
struggle is all the more frightening for taking place in total
silence, save for the strains of music from the street. Jasper
kills his enemy with a well-aimed karate blow. At that
moment a ball rolls down the stairs, step by step,
heralding the arrival of someone unseen. Jasper, who has
already tried unsuccessfully to hide the body behind some
boxes in the hall, only to find that the feet and legs stick out
too much, seats Luigi on one of the boxes, and sits behind
him, opening up a newspaper in front of the two of them
as if they are reading together. The owner of the ball, a
small boy, and his mother come down the stairs and out
the door.
Gina has meanwhile found Polda. Jasper leaps into the
car with them just as Luigi’s body, no longer supported,
slowly slides down from his box, exciting the curiosity of
passers-by. (Lang recalls that Gary Cooper insisted on
playing the entire scene himself - including the fight -
although he had a sprained hip at the time.)
Jasper, Gina, and Polda reach the lonely farmhouse
where the resistance fighters await them, only to find that
the girl whom they have ‘saved’ is not Polda’s daughter
Maria, but a Nazi agent who has taken her place. She
reveals with malicious pleasure that Maria has been dead
for six months; it was easy to lake the childish writing ol
the letters to Polda.
It is a trap. The Germans who have followed her now

271
attack. The cloak-and-dagger Pinkie who brought Jasper
to Italy shows him a secret exit from the house through
which he can take Gina and Polda. When Jasper asks why
they cannot all escape this way, Pinkie declares ‘sometimes
a guy carries the ball, sometimes another’ in a speech
reminiscent of the ‘take the torch’ speech in Hangmen Also
Die, and:

Because the only way you can make it is if we do enough shooting to

convince them we’re still here.
My orders were to get you into this country and get you out again.

Dragging the dazed Polda with them, Gina accom-

paniesjasper to the plane which is waiting to take them to
the United States. Gina has already explained she must stay
in Italy where she is needed:
Alter the war - I’m coming back for you.
Things change, people too . . .
(icalling after him:) Come back for me!

The film as it now exists ends here on this equivocally

happy ending. In the original version as filmed, Polda dies
in the plane just as he is about to reveal to Jasper the
locations of the tour main plants where the Nazi atomic
bomb is being tested. Unable to finish, he takes a
photograph from his pocket just as he dies. It shows him
and his daughter in a lake landscape with wooded hill and
unusual mountain formation in the background. From this
the OSS are able to identify the fourth plant, the only one
Polda had not named, as Grünbach in Bavaria.
An operation is mounted. Mysteriously, RAF recon¬
naissance planes sent in advance encounter no resistance.
When Jasper and the task force arrive, they find the secret
factory is deserted. Where is the work on the bomb being
continued? In Spam? The Argentine.?
It was at this point that Jasper made the speech which
was for Lang the raison d’etre of the film:

God have mercy on us if we ever thought we could really keep science

a secret - or even wanted to. God have mercy on us if we think we can
wage other wars without destroying ourselves . . . And God have
mercy on us if we haven’t the sense to keep the world in peace.

Emerging from the cave that leads to the underground

factory, Jasper takes a deep breath, then sees a paratrooper
tossing pebbles and gazing at the sky. The paratrooper
remarks:

2 72
 K l&r k\rjPRjjj
.i

Cloak and Dagger: Lang with Vladimir SokolofF (Polda) and Gary Cooper
(Jasper) and (below) the set 273
Nice sky.

Sure is.

Looks like the sky over my part of Ohio. 1 want to go back there, take
off my suit and never climb into it again.

That’s a good want. I hope you make it.

Blue sky and birds singing. Guess I’ll see my girl soon.

Yeah. Guess I will too.

Does Jasper’s sudden smile on this line anticipate a better

end; or does this evocation of the normal life actually
underscore the fears he had expressed moments earlier; is
it, as in Hangmen Also Die, NOT THE END?
As usual Lang surrounded himself with experts for the
preparation of this film. Two former OSS men gave him
advice based on their own cloak-and-dagger experiences
during the war-Milton Sperling, the producer, and Mike
Burke who had actually had the task of smuggling out of
Italy an Italian admiral who had invented an electronic
torpedo device which the Allies wanted to prevent the
Fascists from having. Jasper’s views in his ‘God help us’
speech were based directly on the anxieties expressed by
the famous physicist Oppenheimer, who had anticipated
the disastrous consequences of the development of the
atom bomb.
Thus, even in its present truncated form, the film
represents Lang’s consistent careful balance of documen¬
tary foundation with necessary adventurous narrative
elements.

274
 24 Secret Beyond the Door (1948)

When I mention On i February 1947, Lang wrote to me on notepaper

psychoanalysis in connection
with the heading of Diana Productions:
with Fritz Lang, I mean to
say that he is better than I started shooting Secret Beyond the Door this week ... I am
anyone else in discovering its experimenting with using superimposed sound for the ‘thought
poetry and dreamlike power. voices’ ot the leading characters, and I find the idea intriguing to work
Anyway, the film starts like a out.
dream from which one
awakens . . . Later he explained that his first idea had been to let the
What is superb is Lang’s thought voice of Celia (Joan Bennett) be spoken by a
personal style, the treatment he different actress, but in the end Joan Bennett insisted on
gives to this story, the plastic doing it herself. Lang was endeavouring with his
beauty of his structures, his
superimpositions of thought voices to do something
flight into an imaginary world.
which O’Neill’s Strange Interlude had failed to achieve on
The reconstruction of rooms
which were the theatre of stage. The words of the subconscious are not like asides in a
famous murders is the shock play but are somehow placed on a different plane, belong
sequence of this film. There is to a different dimension. Because of this, and their
a baroque profusion which intensity, they tightly integrate the whole structure of the
reminds us of the aesthetics of
action and, importantly, prepare us for the latent Freudian
fosef von Sternberg, but Fritz
undertones. At the same time, paradoxically, they free the
Lang imbues it with that
Germanic coldness of the action from its improbabilities, reinforcing Lang’s ‘fantas¬
delirium which has the purity tic realism’. Emotional reactions are revealed, and what we
of a diamond . . . hear enables us to explore the furthest ramifications of
Henri Chapier: Secret inner thought. Along with this, the camera acquires an
Beyond the Door, in Combat,
astonishing degree of subjectivity: we follow the action
20 February 1968
through the heroine’s own eyes. When at the decisive
moment of the reversal of fortunes, at the climax of the
drama, her partner’s thought voice tells us almost
unspeakable things, the atmosphere of dream reaches a
density that is still completely natural.
I have tried to approach the The film starts with a waking-up from a kind of dream
murderer imaginatively to pool. The script says:
show him as a human being
possessed of some demon that FADE IN - pool, clear sunlit water sending out widening ripples. A

275
Secret Beyond the Door (1948): shadow play: Joan Bennett as Celia

girl’s voice is heard warm and vibrant . . . When a girl dreams of a has driven him beyond the
ship, she will reach a safe harbour, when she dreams of daffodils, she is ordinary borderline of human
in great danger. And then: ‘This is my wedding-day. When behaviour . . .
somebody drowns he sees his whole life floating’. Fritz Lang: Why I am
Interested in Murder
So when Celia enters the church, fragments of her life rush
(Newspaper clipping, 1947,
before her imagination; and the thought voice makes these quoted in Eibel: Fritz Lang)
flashbacks seem possible, natural, organic in their con¬
I remember he wouldn’t use
nections.
doubles for Michael Redgrave
The rich heiress who has turned down many suitors is and me for a sequence in a
now suddenly marrying, in the little baroque Mexican burning house. We fled
church, a stranger of whom she knows nothing except that terrified, through scorching
he is an architect and edits a magazine. They had met at a flames time and again and it
wasn’t a fire for toasting
Mexican fair, where the spoilt Celia gazed spellbound at
marshmallows.
two gypsies fighting a knife duel over a woman. Her
Joan Bennett: The Bennett
thought voice tells us she was also transfixed by the sense of Playbill, by Lois Kibbee,
eyes gazing at her. The stranger speaks to her: 1970

I heard his voice and then I didn’t hear any more because the beating of
my blood was louder.

276
Lang, intent on achieving subtle shades of tonality, shows
us the stranger’s lips moving, but we do not hear his
words, only the thought voice takes us into the unknown
and vague, deep waters unbounded by shores seem to
carry us along. A wishing well, surrounded by candles,
into which people throw coins merges into the stream ot
awareness. We share with the young woman the
tempting, seductively dangerous experience of making
decisions against her own will.
‘Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave’, continues the
1947 letter, ‘are starred, and I think it will be an interesting
picture.’ Redgrave, with his ambiguous charm and
equivocal sexuality, the rather sulky, protruding lower lip,
his occasionally almost childlike, hesitant tenderness, is an
ideal partner for the austere Joan Bennett, who turns into
an adoring sleepwalker; but then regains her old active
self, which makes plausible the psychoanalytic cure of the
unstable man.

277
 The patio of the Mexican villa recalls the idyll of the
Valley Tavern in You Only Live Once, though here
everything is more sensuous and sultry. Celia intends only
a joke when she says ‘Mark, darling, you are inhibited.
You are touched in the head’. In the next scene she has
locked herself in the room, to tease her husband. A close-
up shows the handle turn once, then twice. The dark
corridor-seen with a subjective camera from Celia’s point
of view - is empty. When Celia subsequently asks Mark it
he came upstairs while she was dressing, he denies it, not
looking at her (or at the camera). His glass shatters in his
hand (‘his kiss was cold’). Still looking away he says he
must go at once to Mexico City; a telegram has brought a
good offer to buy his magazine.
‘And then I was alone.’ Lang expresses forcefully the
restless walking up and down, the thoughts in the dim,
candle-lit room, the tension when Paquita, the servant
says, ‘There was no telegram. Telegrams do not come to
this loneliness.’ Celia throws herself on the bed; the music
echoes the thought voice: ‘Why did he go away ? Why did
he lie to me?’
At Mark Lamphere’s estate, Lavender Falls, his sister
Carrie tells Celia he has not yet arrived. Standing by the
entrance to the house, she sees a curtain move briefly.
Perhaps it is the strange child, David, who Celia learns is
Mark’s child by a previous marriage. She goes upstairs,
past the eerie South Sea and Indian masks on the wall.
Everything about the house is sinister. None of Celia’s
doors has a key, and seeking Carrie to ask her about
this, Celia encounters the mysterious Miss Robey in
Mark’s studio. Miss Robey wears a shade to hide the scar
received in rescuing little David from a fire in the
summerhouse. This adds to the sinister atmosphere; she is
not unlike creatures from the American horror films of
Paul Lem.
It seems to be the old Mark who runs to meet her next
morning when he arrives at the railway station; yet when
he sees the lilac twig she has in her lapel, he freezes and
makes an excuse to get away from her.
The house-warming party is suddenly interrupted by a
thunderstorm; and Carrie suggests that Mark should
entertain the chattering guests by showing his collection of
‘felicitous rooms’. Celia’s lawyer, Bob, takes the oppor-

278
tunity to reproach Celia for having given Mark power of
attorney over her fortune. ‘Look, Bob, 1 know Mark
would never do anything unfair.’ At the very moment
Celia is thus reassuring Bob there is a shrill burst of
laughter - typical Langian irony - followed by a remark of
a passing society woman:

Mark s a lucky lellow. First wife’s money runs out . . . She dies.
Second wife with plenty of cash . . .

The ‘felicitous rooms’, which Mark is showing his

guests with sadistic joy, all turn out to have been
distinguished by the violent deaths ol women: a Huguenot
countess stabbed by her husband on Bartholomew’s night;
an old mother tied to a chair to drown in a flood for the
sake ol her life insurance; several Hacienda wives strangled
with the suave Don Ignazio’s flowered scarf: murder a la
De Quincey as a fine art! As in the trial scene in Fury, Lang
shows only a selection of cases. Mark stops before the last
door, upon which the hat of a garrulous guest casts an
ominous shadow; but this one is locked. ‘A man must have
at least one secret’, he smiles.
Later alone with Celia, he explains that ‘felicitous’ is
only another word for ‘appropriate’, to indicate the unholy
emanations of a room. When Celia charges him with
morbidity, he grows cool; and when she asks what is in the
seventh room he shows irritation: ‘I won’t be badgered,
Celia. I never lived my own life.’ There have always been
women - his mother, Carrie, then Eleanor his first wife.
Next day she learns from Carrie and the gardener that
Mark’s mother loved lilac and had bushes everywhere in
the garden. After her death Mark had them all torn out. He
had been a sensitive child, almost like David. Once he was
beside himself with rage when Carrie locked him in his
room for fun. Told by little David, ‘He killed my mother’,
Celia’s thought voice demands again and again ‘How did
Eleanor die?’. A characteristic Lang series of dialogue
overlaps takes up the question. ‘She was tired ot living’,
declares Carrie. ‘Mr Mark is the soul of kindness’, says the
chambermaid; and the next shot shows Mark, through the
window, caring for a run-over dog. The chambermaid
adds the sinister information that Mark always gave
Eleanor her medicine himself. Celia’s thought voice adds,
‘He keeps his mind locked like his door’.

279
Secret Beyond the Door: door no 7

Breaking some wax off a candle, she sneaks into Mark’s

dressing room to make an impression of the only key in the
house. The shorter candle disturbs Mark’s pathological
sense of symmetry; and Celia has to lie when he asks if she
has just been to his room.
Late at night,

The door opens ... a shaft of light breaks the darkness. Celia comes
out, turns down the corridor towards the stairs. At the top of the stairs,
she stops, looks down into the blackness and directs the beam of her
flashlight into the pitch-black stairwell. Moving shot of the
CAMERA PASSES in the dim indirect light . . .

The eerie native masks and grim family portraits recall The
Last Will of Dr Mabuse. The script continues with an
almost Expressionist touch:

. . . in the weird light the furniture of the library looks immense and
threatening.

Objects seem to assume a life of their own, and Celia

becomes a tiny distant figure. Far-off church chimes are

280
heard. Stills show that the library scene was shot in this
way, though the copies of the film existing in France pass
at once to Celia standing in front of the iron grilled door
which sighs as it is opened. In the dark corridor the beam of
the flashlight moves along the walls until it stops at the
locked door. ‘Close-up of No 7, then of the lock.’
When she finds the room behind the curtained
doorway, her thought voice at first tells her it is Eleanor’s
room - poor Mark feels such guilt at not having loved her
that he thinks he actually killed her. Only then does she
realise: the room is a duplicate of her own and is waiting
tor her, Celia. Terrified, she flees past Don Ignazio’s room
and passes with difficulty through the iron door which has
shut itself. Then we see a shot of Mark’s legs, and Don
Ignazio’s scart trailing behind him. As Celia reaches the
stairs, Miss Robey’s door opens. No longer hostile, Miss
Robey gives her a coat and the keys of the car when the
terrified girl cries: ‘I want to go away.’ On the bottom
stair, she sees Don Ignazio’s scarf.
In the dark garden, tree trunks menace through the
haze. Just as she reaches the end, a dark figure appears.
There is just a scream, and then a fade-out.
The sequence which follows, with its complexity and
abstractions, could only have been brought off by a
director of Lang’s assurance, the experience of his German
days, his grasp of ‘fantastic realism’ - and above all by a
director working for his own production company. It is
the following morning. Mark is coolly shaving, and
holding Don Ignazio’s scarf. Now Mark’s thought voice is
used for the first time, while his schizophrenia and
anxieties are given visual form. Grey-on-grey we see a
ghostly court-room, with the distant dark shadow of the
judge and the equally faceless silhouettes of the jury.

I tried not to kill her . . .

I love her but I still have to kill her

The superimposed thought voice of Celia comments on

and interprets events objectively. Mark’s is much more
direct and subjective. His assumption of the role of both
prosecutor and defence echoes his schizoid state.
The faint music is at once disembodied and insistent,
with themes suggestive of grief and torment. The faceless
judge gives a hollow knock with his gavel to announce the

282
Secret Beyond the Door: the dark shadow ofjustice: Michael Redgrave as Mark

death sentence . . . and the knocking merges into Sarah’s

knock on the door: Miss Carrie asks if he is coming down
to breakfast. There he finds that Celia has not gone away:

I thought you left last night?

I did. I ran into Bob (the dark figure in the garden).
Why did you come back?

Because I love you.

Mark dismisses Miss Robey for having tried to come

between him and Celia, and the woman supposes that
Celia has broken her promise not to reveal to him that the
supposed scar behind her veil had been in fact removed by
surgery long ago. ‘So she told you’, is her only, resentful,
response.
Later Celia and Mark are left alone in the house, in a
thunderstorm and Mark’s thought voice declares: ‘I can’t
be alone with her.’ He says he must go to New York and
insists she move to a hotel so as not to be alone. At the
station however - atmospheric with the smoke, lights, and

283
raging storm - Mark suddenly turns back.
At the house the telephone rings. It is Miss Robey, and
Celia tells her Mark has gone to New York. Then she goes
to Eleanor’s room with a large bouquet of lilacs. She leaves
the key in the lock and waits. Mark appears, Don Ignazio’s
scarf in his hand. Celia, to stay alive, must talk to him.
This ‘lesson in psychoanalysis’ has been criticised; and
Lang himself would today agree that the whole story is too
simplified, and Mark’s cure improbably abrupt. Still the
situation had been prepared. When Mark was showing his
rooms, a woman psychoanalyst explained the murders and
their motivation. Mark immediately afterwards tells
Celia, ‘Murder comes from a strong emotion, more direct
than love’. On the Mexican patio, Celia has told Mark,
jokingly, that he is ‘inhibited’.
As Henri Chapier has written, Lang’s achievement here
is not simply to exteriorise psychoanalysis but to steep it in a
poetic-dreamlike fluidum which gives credibility and
logic to events which would otherwise be only melo¬
drama. We must remember too the period in which the film
was made: psychoanalysis was just becoming popular,
both on and off the screen, in America. Lang admits to a
certain influence by Rebecca, and we are also reminded of
Spellbound. In the atmosphere of subconscious suspension
which Lang has created, it becomes believable that Celia
prises Mark’s long-suppressed secret out of him - the
associations of lilac and locked doors - just as he is about to
strangle her; that he now realises what is buried deep inside
him and drives him to murder the people he most loves;
that he is freed of his murderous desires when he saves
Celia from the burning house, fired by the incendiary Miss
Robey. With the burning of the ominous rooms, his
obsessions are laid and he is free.
A degree of improbability is allowed for in the epilogue,
when Mark and Celia are again together on the Mexican
patio; and Mark very deliberately is made to state that he
has still some way to go before he is again completely well.
Celia answers: ‘We have to go this way together.’

284
 25 The House by the River (1949)

Made after Secret Beyond the Lang recalls very little about this film, and its subject
Door and following
matter seems unfamiliar to him, though he finds it
immediately after, The House
interesting. It is easy to see the attractions of the story for
by the River takes up the
same themes in a manner that Lang: the transition from good to evil ‘with the speed of
is perhaps even stricter and thought’, as the Devil in Lessing’s Faust remarks; the ‘once
more precise. A film of fear in olf guard’ theme, the how and why of a man’s becoming
which desire leads to guilty, here presented even more mercilessly than in the
strangulation, a film of the
nightmare of Woman in the Window; his favourite idea that
night in which the scream
in certain situations very little distinguishes a peaceful
augments in relation to the
image, Lang’s main erotic citizen from a law-breaker; the half-tones, the doom¬
obsession is here displayed laden and dream-like atmospheres, hinted in the script and
more clearly than in any other strengthened in the realisation.
of his films. Secret and The opening of the script already establishes the
House together form a
atmosphere - perhaps too markedly, for Lang generally
singular enclave in his
does not like beginnings which too clearly evoke and
oeuvre, the perfectly achieved
climax of a way of directing anticipate later events:
partly abandoned in favour oj
the search for greater nakedness A row of old and dignified houses of early Victorian architecture is
which was not a regression, seen from the opposite bank of a river. As CAMERA MOVES IN
but an evolution towards a CLOSER and PANS DOWN the river we are aware of a peculiar lack
different goal. of activity; no tugs go by, no one is in sight.
Michel Mourlet: ‘Billet
CAMERA concentrates on the rushing water of the river; hinting at
Londonien’ in Cahiers du
dark things, passion and death and furtive cruelties, and all that sense ot
Cinema, No 102, December
secrecy and crime which clings to the riverside of cities. Somehow
1959
there is a feeling of expectancy and disaster - as if horrible things might
House by the River easily be accomplished beside these dark waters, then hidden and
constitutes, in the oeuvre of condoned by the river, carried away to oblivion in the sea. CAMERA
Fritz Lang, one of those HOLDS: a few twigs and scum and masses of seaweed float by.
moments oj pause like Suddenly a sodden, heavy mass of something floats into shot, halt
Moonfleet or Rancho submerged in the water. CAMERA FOLLOWS as it hits a brighter
Notorious, in which, with patch of water and we see that it is a dead cow. With dingy light-
the help of a story based on coloured hide and bloated belly, it flows down drowned and
fear, the author of The Big forgotten on the water. As it begins to float down out ot shot, a
Heat gives free rein to a woman’s VOICE IS HEARD O.S.

285
House by the River: Stephen tries to strangle his wife
286
profound romanticism. Yet Mrs Ambroise s Voice (O.S.): ‘I hate this river!’
through this romanticism
which gives us wonderful
Louis Hayward plays the novelist, Stephen Byrne,
structures and vibrant nature
studies, Lang keeps his lucid good-looking, but weak and glib in his charm. He is not a
critical eye ... In The House very successful writer: the post laid on his desk by the maid
by the River he deals with Emily includes a rejected manuscript.
the notion of guilt, one of his Emily asks it she may use the upstairs bathroom, since
main obsessions . . . House
the plumber has not been to repair her own in the
differs from Beyond . . on
basement, and Mrs Byrne is away with friends in the
account of the dream-like
quality of its atmosphere. country. Stephen agrees, and continues to battle with his
Afterwards one wants to go writing in the garden. A blot falls on the sheet; he
back, as to those dreams whose crumples it, then makes more blots on a fresh page, folding
endings one can foresee, back the sheet to create patterns. From time to time he glances
to that astonishing peace which
up at the bathroom window with light shining through its
reigns in the first scenes of the
curtains. A beetle crawls over the paper, and Byrne
film, on a summer’s evening,
near the stream. Anxiety carefully replaces it in safety on the grass. This detail is
grows rather from tenderness characteristic of Lang (he recalls he had personally to
than from cruelty. search for a beetle for the scene) in serving at least a dual
Bertrand Tavernier: ‘Lettre purpose: to illuminate Stephen Byrne’s character at the
de Bruxelles’, Cahiers du
moment and to provide an ironic comment on his
Cinema, No. 132, June 1962
morality: the man who cannot hurt an insect will five
minutes later kill a human being.
Stephen has entered the house. We hear the bathroom
door open, and see a streak of light fall on the wall
opposite. Emily, in her bathrobe descends the stairs - at
first the upper part of her remains in the shadows, and
starts at the sound of a glass clinking on a tray. ‘Oh, Mr
Byrne! You’ve frightened me.’ Stephen stops her,
playfully taxes her with using his wife’s scent, then
passionately kisses the astonished girl on the mouth. When
he starts to embrace her, she struggles, then begins to
scream hysterically.
Afraid that his gossipy neighbour Mrs Ambroise will
hear, Stephen presses his hand to her mouth, and as she
continues to scream, grasps her neck, and peers anxiously
out of the window to see if Mrs Ambroise has heard.
When the screaming stops, and he lets go, Emily’s body
falls limp. The Hays Office modified Stephen’s ‘Merciful
God!’ to ‘Good Heavens!’, as he realises he has killed her.
Stephen’s brother John appears, seen through the panels
of the front door. When the frightened Stephen does not
answer, John comes in the back way. Quite undeceived by
Stephen’s attempts to he, John wants to call the police; but

287
House by the River (1949): lowering the sack into the river

for the sake of Stephen’s wife, Marjorie, who Stephen

claims is expecting a baby, reluctantly agrees to help his
brother out of one more scrape.
Stephen’s search for a sack in the dark cellar, with a
candle throwing grotesque shadows on the wall, gives
Lang opportunity for an atmospheric scene. As the two
brothers are about to carry their sacked burden to the
river, Mrs Ambroise engages Stephen in conversation
while John is forced to stand in the shadows with the sack:
Is Marjorie home yet? What should she wear for the party
to which they are all invited . . .
Finally they are able to take out their little rowing boat
in the rain, with clouds hiding the moon. As they are
lowering the sack, a fish jumps - its white belly flashes in
the moonlight - and startles Stephen, who is almost pulled
into the water by the weight. He is startled again when he
returns to the eerily silent house: just as he is contemplat¬
ing his tormented face in the mirror, a naked foot descends

288
the stairs. His first thought is ‘Emily!’ But it is Marjorie
who has come back unexpectedly soon, and wants Emily
to help lace up her corset (it is the Victorian age). The flash
ot the silver hairbrush reminds him of the flashing belly of
the fish jumping in the moonlight; and he has to plead a
headache to explain his agitation. Nevertheless he goes to
the party: while Stephen is unaccountably gay and noisy,
John is depressed.
Emily’s disappearance remains mysterious: Marjorie is
encouraged by Stephen to blame the apparent runaway for
the disappearance of her opal earrings; and Stephen does
not defend her even though the publicity surrounding her
disappearance begins to benefit his career. He does not, as is
his habit, read to his wife and John the new novel, The
River, on which he is assiduously working (‘Eve had
enough of your criticisms!’) Stephen flourishes; John
becomes increasingly forlorn, and Marjorie complains of
her husband:

There is such a peculiar look that comes on his face when he talks about
Emily . . . It’s almost as if he were actually enjoying it . . . He fancies
this whole affair as a great big melodrama - with himself in the leading
role.

One day as Stephen is working in the garden he hears

Mrs Ambroise’s off-screen voice again: T hate this river!
. . . That horrid thing floated by again! Realising it is the
sack which has surfaced, Stephen takes out the boat. His
boathook tears the sack, now back on the river bed; and a
woman’s long fair hair tumbles out. Stephen confides to
his brother what has happened. John has meanwhile
realised that his own name is stencilled on the sack, which
he had himself lent to Stephen. He has also learned from
Marjorie that Stephen’s story that she is pregnant, by
which he had won John’s sympathy and help, is false.
Again Stephen is writing in the garden when a
policeman arrives with the empty sack. Stephen admits
that he borrowed it from his brother, but says he had been
unable to find it; and pretends shock on learning that it had
contained the body of Emily Gaunt. At the subseqent
inquest, Stephen is suave, undisturbed, self-righteous;
while John’s former housekeeper tries to incriminate the
employer who has dismissed her.
After the inquest (treated, like other Lang court-room

289
scenes, with concentrated economy) Stephen begins to
hint to Marjorie suspicions of John — a cripple who could
hope for nothing more than a servant girl. Marjorie is
contemptuous of her husband, and goes to John whom she
finds on the point of leaving as a result of the persecution
he is suffering. She persuades him to remain.
Her fears that John may commit suicide evidently give
Stephen an idea. While Marjorie is out of the house, he
takes the missing earrings from a secret drawer in his desk.
Surreptitiously he moves about the darkened house,
hiding in the bathroom when Marjorie returns, until she
disappears into her room. We first see the curtain stirring
with the draught of the door’s movement. We see
Stephen’s silhouette against the window of John’s room,
then the brief flash as he drops the earrings into the
grandfather clock.
At night, with no sound but a faint, distant foghorn,
John is standing by an abandoned pier, staring into the
water, when Stephen - sent by Marjorie who is worrying
about John — comes up behind him. John reassures him that
he would not commit suicide, which would only convince
people of his guilt. Stephen confides:

In spite of everything that has happened and everything that’s going to

happen ... I want you to know that I’ve gained something . . .

All his life, he explains, he has been afraid of people and of

people’s opinion. This has been the trouble with his
writing:
But now I’m not afraid any more, and I’ve written something good,
because it’s real.
JOHN: It took a murder to do that . . .
STEPHEN: Doesn’t this justify the end?
JOHN: You must be very, very, ill, Stephen . . .
STEPHEN: Ill?

JOHN: Yes, sick. Otherwise you wouldn’t think as you do . . .

STEPHEN: I can’t understand my own brother sharing my wife with
me . . .

Whereupon John hits him on the jaw and makes to leave.

Stephen grabs an iron chain lying on the pier, moves after
the limping John and brings it down on the back of his
head. John crumbles, and Stephen rolls him, still ap¬
parently alive, off the pier edge. We hear a heavy splash.

290
 Stephen enters Marjorie’s room, sees her reading his
manuscript now entitled Death on the River, and calmly
asks how she likes it.

MARJORIE: (almost inaudibly) How can you ask me that?

STEPHEN: (with a half smile) Can’t you appreciate its quality .

quite apart from its content?

MARJORIE: (in the same low voice) Not when it says that my husband
is a murderer . . .

STEPHEN: John must love you very much . . . letting everybody

believe he did it. (smiling) No, he loved you very much ... he was old-
fashioned ... he believed in chivalry.

Marjorie makes to rush for the door, but Stephen holds her
back:

STEPHEN: Don’t you see, Marjorie . . . your reading the script has
solved everything . . .
She had used your perfume ... she looked rather pretty and I wanted
to kiss her. I didn’t mean to kill her ... I hardly touched her.
(His hands go up to Marjorie’s neck)
But I didn’t realise that it would be so easy . . .
(His hands go round her throat)
... so very easy.

Marjorie struggles helplessly. Suddenly there is a sound,

of a heavy, limping tread. The back door is open; a
gaslight burns in the hallway. The tread becomes clearer:

CAMERA PANS to wet muddy footprints; it is the long shadow of

John as he slips up the stairs. CAMERA PANS UP - the staircase is
deserted - only the curtains at the top of the stairs flutter in the
draught . . .
Marjorie is fighting for her life, Stephen’s thoughts are elsewhere,
he listens, it appears as if the strangling has become of secondary
importance to him. The background is lost in shadows, lit only by the
reflection of the one dim gaslight through the open door to the
corridor.
Stephen seems to witness an - apparition. John appears dripping
wet and matted with blood on one side of his head, he is haggard,
muddy to his knees.
Stephen’s grip slackens - full of horror he believes to see his
brother’s ghost. He lets Marjorie drop, dashes into the corridor, runs
towards the staircase. The bathroom door opens slowly and the
draught blows the long white curtains out. Viewed by the dim single
gaslight, it is ghostly and weird.
With an expression of extreme horror he stares in the direction of
the bathroom door. The billowing curtains stream out with the
draught, Stephen thinks he can see a white body - Emily with floating
hair.

291
House by the River: the re-appearance of John
 . . . the avenging curtains

With this second apparition his brain cracks completely, he rushes

towards the staircase, but now the heavy curtains from the balcony are
blown out towards him, they appear to entangle him.
In a panic he struggles frantically to disentangle himself, in his effort
to free himself Stephen goes backwards over the banister. There is an
agonised scream.
John and Marjorie are standing down below. CAMERA PANS
AWAY from them - one sees the title page of Stephen’s manuscript,
Death on the River, while the other pages are scattered on the floor.

The late Victorian period, with its heavy draperies,

plush sofas, gaslights, antiquated telephones, tight-lacing
and the claustrophobic atmosphere in which erring
husbands went secretly to prostitutes, is an appropriate
setting for an action in which it is the shame and fear ot
discovery of a minor olfence, and the secrecy demanded
by petty bourgeois morality, that leads a man to crime.
Lang emphasises all the baroque elements of the Victorian
age; and the camerawork of his excellent director of

293
photography Cronjäger relishes the shadow and chiaros¬
curo, the monochrome shades of grey and white, the
bright flash of the jumping fish or the glitter ot a silver
hairbrush. This black and white film seems to anticipate
the colour work of Moonfleet, a later essay in period
recreation.
The melodrama is transformed into a work ot art; not
only in the formal shape and composition, but in the
themes and their treatment. Lang’s treatment of guilt, for
example, is characteristically ambiguous. The ‘once off
guard’ motif, the drama of a man trapped by circum¬
stance or fate (which is partially character, alter all; if the
plumber had come in time, would Stephen have still
become a murderer?) is given more depth, and acquires
more point from being set in this milieu and the most
bourgeois of all ages. Lang seems this time less than
sympathetic to his ‘once off guard’ character; Stephen
becomes entangled in more and more acts of cowardice as
he continues to scheme and turn everything to his own
advantage. Yet with Lang there are always imponder¬
ables; shortly before his psychopath brother tries to
murder him, John suggests mitigating circumstances,
when he says: ‘You must be very sick’. Are there also
such mitigating circumstances for John? To what degree
is John also guilty as he aids and abets his murdering
brother? Wanting to help one’s brother, not wanting to
upset his supposedly pregnant sister-in-law, calmly
accepting blame which is not his: all these are virtues,
doubtless, until they are offered as reasons for dumping a
dead girl in the river and saying nothing. If the ‘nice’
people in the film must accept partial responsibility for the
murder in their bourgeois morality, Lang also suggests
that their system ofjustice leaves much to be desired. A girl
disappears at the same time as a pair of earrings; it is
assumed (with Stephen’s help admittedly) that she has
stolen them. The most circumstantial evidence makes John
guilty of the murder in the eyes of his fellow citizens.
We have, then, returned to the beginning with the river
of dark things, furtive cruelties, secrecy and crime running
alongside the dignified houses of respectable society. The
melodrama has turned into a moral nightmare.

294
 26 American Guerrilla in the Philippines
(1950)

The many scenes, actually When Lang was asked about American Guerrilla in the
photographed in the islands, of
Philippines, he answered: ‘It was also offered to me - and
tattered hordes of fleeing
refugees strung across strange
even a director has to make a living! Honestly, I needed
and rugged landscapes, of some money. Directors are often blamed: “Why did you
marauding Oriental troops, of do this ? And why did you do that ?” But nobody ever says,
bearded, unkempt American “Even a director has to eat.’” Admittedly the film is not
fighters inhabiting alien hovels
among his best and most personal projects. Yet, given
in alien land and dauntlessly
Lang’s drive for perfection and his authority over every
improvising devices and
designs as they go - all have a aspect of his medium, it would seem impossible for him to
timely appearance in this film. make a film which was totally without interest or which
The New York Times, 8 did not reflect in some way his personal vision.
November 1950 Che Guevara’s diaries reveal how war is more often a
Background and native matter of daily incidents in the struggle for survival, than
customs caught in confrontation with an enemy; and Stendhal’s description
Technicolor give this of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Panne illustrates how tiny a
attraction an interesting and sector the spectator placed in the centre of a battle can see.
different flavour.
Lang’s American Guerrilla in the Philippines, based on the
Motion Picture Herald, 18
November 1950 book by Ira Wolfert with a script by producer Lamar
Trotti, is, equally, made up of countless small interwoven
episodes.
Lang seems without hesitation to have chosen to shoot
on location in Subic Bay, Bataan Peninsula, Barras and
Manila; while critics constantly speak of his liking for the
studio, it would never have occurred to him to build a
studio on a Japanese island, as did Sternberg for The Saga
of Anatahan. This, with Lang’s passion for documentary
detail, and the sporadic character of the plot structure,
gives the film an admirable directness.
It is interesting to see how typical Lang themes and
concerns work outside the studio. The basic situation is
like those in Man Hunt, Hangmen Also Die, Ministry of Fear,
and Cloak and Dagger. The hero is suddenly in a situation

295
where the enemy is everywhere. All activity is forced
underground; all ‘normal’ activity becomes impossible.
Slowly each character moves from passive action (escape,
survival) to the more active and positive movement
towards fighting back in the hope of the final restoration ot
complete freedom of activity in a ‘normal’ way. While the
situation remains the same, the setting tends to alter the
coloration of the situation. Man Hunt, for example, takes
on the quality of a nightmare partially because the city, the
fog, and the urban night act as part of an ever-shifting and
sinister trap. In the open, island locations, however, the
very presence of the sky, the sea, the jungle and the open
fields tends to offer more alternatives for escape and
survival. While the strangeness of the island for the main
characters tends to limit these alternatives, it is still not
surprising that their movement towards positive action
comes sooner than it does for their urban colleagues.
The film opens with the bombing of a motorboat by
Japanese aeroplanes; eight survivors reach the shore. The
unpretentious, precise, understated commentary con¬
stantly cuts into the action and drives it on;

For sixty-five days we took it - and gave back the best we had . . . And
then - we got it!

This was the Philippines in the spring of 1942, and this was the last of
Motor Torpedo Squadron X, which broke through the Japanese lines
to clear the way for General MacArthur . . .

But now she was done, and we were out of business - here in a strange
island, with wounded to be cared for and dead to be laid to rest in
lonely graves, eight thousand miles from home . . .

Jim Mitchell (Tom Ewell) one of the survivors tries in

vain to start his battered radio. Only when he kicks it does
it give out first a blare of dance music, then the news that
Bataan has fallen to the Japanese. The survivors decide to
split up so as not to be conspicuous, and to make for Del
Monte Airfield, from which they can get a priority lift to
Australia.
Mitchell goes with Chuck Palmer (Tyrone Power);

There was a lot of walking for us after that - over mountains - through
jungles - in equatorial heat and rain - sometimes waist-deep in
water . . .

among refugees, threatened by Japanese soldiers.

296
An American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950): Chuck Palmer (Tyrone Power)
An American Guerrilla in the Philippines: (Micheline Presle)

For two weeks and ten days we were on the jump until at last we came
towards a town.

At the mission school of Tacloban on the island ol Leyte,

Chuck learns that the Japanese have taken Del Monte
Airport. Advised to stay and surrender according to
orders, Chuck determines to press on for Australia. He
borrows money from the sceptical Colonel whom he also
persuades to give a permit for a woman to enter the over¬
crowded hospital for a cesarean operation.
Despite further dissuasion from Jeanne (Micheline
Presle), the cousin of the pregnant woman, Chuck and
eight other men provision a small rowing boat. Notwith¬
standing inexperience and the mutiny of a piglet - part of
the provisions — they get under way.
Wrecked in a storm, they swim for hours, but are
picked up by a Filipino fishing boat, and nursed back to
health by the Filipinos of Leyte. Despite trouble with the
traitorous Politico, they make their getaway with the aid of

298
a Filipino, Miguel, when the Japanese arrive. Arriving in
Tacloban they again encounter Jeanne, with her husband
Martinez who persuades Colonel Grenada to get them a
boat il Chuck will first lead his men on a perilous mission
to contact the guerrilla leader Colonel Philip.
Hijacking a Japanese motor launch, they cross the Gulf
ol Leyte and the difficult, insect-infested Djuta mountains
to reach Philip. Philip sends Chuck and his men back to
Leyte (‘We don’t want men in Australia, we want them
here) to take charge of radio operations. When they
return, the Free Leyte Provisional Government has been
set up:

We were starting from scratch, but the people of Leyte were quick to
respond, offering what they had freely . . . We printed our own
money.

So finally Chuck is following Jeanne’s original advice to

stay and fight. Her husband Martinez assists with the radio
station, and pays with his life when he refuses to betray its
whereabouts to the Japanese. Again Lang does not show
the torture directly. Martinez is dragged back, off camera.
We hear blows; and a Japanese officer tells Jeanne ‘This is
the way we treat guerrillas’, as she turns her head away.
The next scene is Martinez’s funeral.
Back in the jungle, it is by now Christmas. Jeanne
improvises a Christmas tree out of a tropical plant, sings a
French carol for Chuck; and they exchange their first kiss.
Not unlike Jasper and Gina in Cloak and Dagger, their
emotion is partially born from the situation ol being
thrown together into the dangers of war. At this moment
Miguel is brought in gravely wounded. Chuck’s primitive
surgery is unable to save him.

That Christmas somehow, marked the beginning of a change on

Leyte. For one thing, our subs were coming in regularly now,
bringing with them guns and all manner of supplies. For another, our
guerrilla armies were going on the offensive everywhere.

Chuck accomplishes a near suicidal mission to establish a

radio observation post behind enemy lines. Later, when
thejapanese return to the village, the population barricade
themselves in the church, from the windows of which
Chuck and a choirboy keep up a valiant defence with one
tommy gun and a pistol. The siege is becoming desperate

299
when suddenly there is the noise ot aircraft, and the
Japanese hastily withdraw. General MacArthur has kept
his word: the reason for the siege on the church was a
Japanese officer’s picking up of a chocolate bar dropped by
a frightened Filipino boy. On it was inscribed ‘I shall return
- MacArthur’. In a final scene we see Chuck and Jeanne
driving in a jeep through a jubilant crowd as the American
and Filipino flags flutter side by side in the wind.
Ira Wolfert’s book was based on the real experiences of
an American guerrilla leader in Leyte, David Richardson.
Lang turns the loose recital of often apparently unrelated
episodes into a chanson degeste, reminiscent of Brecht’s epic
theatre. Like the song in Rancho Notorious, the com¬
mentary is used to concentrate and comment on the
situation, in a tone of cool but sympathetic understate¬
ment.
The Lang of American Guerrilla is unfamiliar. His passion
for precise research and documentation have paid off,
despite the speed with which the film was made, in
working on location instead of in the studio and in
depicting an unfamiliar country and its people. Lang does
not, however, aim for a picture-book exoticism: the
exotic details emerge organically from the action - for
instance the Filipino dance between poles which occurs
during a relaxed moment in the film. The Filipino struggle
for liberty must have appealed to the director of Hangmen
Also Die; but the creation of a free country is shown
without sentimentality, demonstrated in a thousand small
details of guerrilla warfare, or the printing techniques
involved in establishing a paper currency.

300
 27 Rancho Notorious (1951)

We love Westerns in Rancho Notorious is unique among Westerns, going

proportion to whether they
beyond even the school of the ‘psychological Western’.
offer us just enough surprises to
The subject matter is clothed in half tones, the course of the
make us experience the
pleasure of seeing images we action is kept in a minor and at the same time ironic key. It
have seen a hundred times is seen in depth, new aspects are opened up by imponder¬
before. Fritz Lang respects ables; the ‘once upon a time’ of a melancholy fairy tale is
here the rules of the game mingled with a crude reality in which values have lost their
which he has insidiously
meaning. Moral certainties and a peaceful life are torn apart
complicated by introducing an
at the beginning of the film, an average ‘normal’ man is
unusual reality into the
cinematic medium: time . . . corrupted by hate, but nothing is restored to its former
by accepting the age of his state by the end. The dark undertones of The Return of
interpreter he shows the two Frank James and Western Union have here come to the
myths it illustrates: that of the foreground; there will be no possibility of a return to a
Western and his own. This is
pastoral existence, no happy ending. Whatever redemp¬
why there is an unknown
tion is possible for the characters is here only partial and
emotion, a sort oj derisory and
tragic complicity with the film carries the taste of ‘bitter and evil fruit’. At once
women - who suddenly unsentimental yet full of gentle nostalgic longing for the
resemble the women in life and past, it is the saga of an aging but still very desirable dance
ourselves. hall girl and an old gun hand who is no longer as quick on
Claude Mauriac: L’Amour
the draw as he once was. It is still the myth of Marlene, yet
du Cinema, Albin Michel,
with the goddess facing maturity: resignation tempers
Paris 1954
the triumphant pose of the femme fatale. A similar type ot
woman would have ruined men in earlier Lang films: here
she throws herself into the path ot the bullet intended tor
her old lover.
Howard Hughes, who financed the film, changed the
admirable title The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck (trom the name
of the vertical roulette wheel of Western bar-rooms)
because he believed Europeans would not understand it.
The title Rancho Notorious means even less to a non-
American audience. The film was moreover heavily cut,
and the writer Daniel Taradish maintains (ct. Eibel:

301
Textes, page 68) that the producer boasted of having cut
out all the ‘ambience’. Fortunately he was unsuccessful:
even though he was compelled to use backdrops, painted
skies and the Western street of the Republic lot, Lang’s
experience in working in interiors, together with his
excellent production designer, Wiard Ihnen, served him
well; and the film is rich in authentic Lang atmospheres. It
might even be argued that Rancho Notorious would not
have worked half so well had it been shot on locations. The
world of the film is a closed one, in which moral
alternatives are limited, in which literally there is nowhere
to go. The painted backdrops, beautiful in themselves,
serve to emphasise the moral situation.*
The theme song - ‘the old story of hate, murder and
revenge’ - powerfully reinforces the impact of the film.
The ‘theme song’ used as a continuing and integral
commentary was at this time new (Lang invented its use
in film a year before High Noon was released); and from it
Rancho Notorious derives the feeling of a ballad, a legend, a
saga appropriate to a Western which is a celebration of the
pioneer past.
The prologue to the film achieves its impact from its
abrupt juxtaposition of moods of tender lyricism and
horrifying violence. The little Wyoming town is deserted
(everyone has gone to visit the mother of newly born
triplets), except for Beth left alone in the general store, and
a little boy, Tommy, when Vern rides in to give his fiancee
Beth a brooch. After Vern leaves, Kinch and the aged,
white-haired Whitey, two outlaws, ride into town. Kinch
enters the store, forces Beth to open the safe, and his gaze
lingers on the brooch on her seductive shoulder . . .
Outside little Tommy hears a scream and a shot. Kinch
rushes out of the store and the two outlaws ride off. With
this violation of the peaceful normality of the town, the
values upon which it was founded are also violated. The
* Further illustration of
values are turned into something suspect, as we will see in
how such sets can work
the town of Gunsight a bit later in the film. wonderfully to underscore
As in M we are shown nothing of the rape. When Vern such moral and ideological
arrives back, Beth is lying dead on the couch, her brooch concerns can be found in
off, with a piece of her dress, blood staining her shoulder two later Westerns: The
Man Who Shot Liberty
and breast, a limp hand dangling to the floor. The doctor
Valence (John Ford, 1961)
tells him:
and El Dorado (Howard
Hawks, 1967).

302
Vern, I don t know how to tell you this — She — wasn’t spared
anything.

While the sherifl leads a posse to the borders of Sioux

country, the vengeful Vern rides on alone. He comes upon
the dying Whitey, who had wanted to dissociate himself
trom the rape-murder by taking his cut and riding on
alone and was therefore shot in the back by Kinch, and
who tells him as he dies that the murderer has gone ‘To
Chuck-a-Luck’:

Now where and what is Chuck-a-Luck?

Nobody knows and the dead won’t tell
So on and on relentlessly this man pursues his quest
Through fall - and winter - searching the great Southwest
This thing that drives him like a whip will never let him rest
Night and day, early and late
He looks for a place,
Or a town, or a face
And deep within him grows the beast of HATE
MURDER
And REVENGE . . .

Thus Vern has quickly changed from the innocent lover

carrying a brooch to a gun-carrying version of Knemhild
or Joe Wilson; soon he will be so poisoned by his hate
that he will be unable to see good anywhere. For him,
everyone will be guilty or suspect. During the ballad there
is a montage of mute shots of Vern questioning strangers
on his way. All shake their heads or shrug. None knows,
until, the song ended, he asks in a barber shop and is told by
another customer:

I wouldn’t talk about Chuck-a-Luck so tree if I were you . . . Altar

Keane wouldn’t like it.

The customer defensively draws his gun - he turns out to

be a wanted bandit - and Vern overpowers him to set out
on the quest for the mysterious Altar Keane.
Suddenly we see her for the first time, in flashback, as
the middle-aged deputy recalls the day in his youth when
he was her mount in a ribald steeplechase in which the
jockeys were dance-hall girls and the horses their
customers. The laugh of the deputy suddenly mingles with
the gay hearty laughter of Altar riding the younger
deputy. She is blonde, rouged, bejewelled, leggy and
handsome. In short, it is Marlene in all her glory, vic-

303
Rancho Notorious (1951): the ribald steeplechase
305
Rancho Notorious: Altar (Marlene Dietrich) with Frenchy (Mel Ferrer) and
Vern (Arthur Kennedy) - a publicity photograph
 . . . gambling

torious as she and her miner ‘horse’ take all the obstacles
in the chase - a stepladder, a rope held by two men, tables
and chairs. Unscrupulous, she kicks a rival with her long,
beautiful legs, stops another with her arm. The whole
sequence is without dialogue; the shouts and laughs
mingle with the music, for there is no need of dialogue: the
focus of the scene is Marlene, as supremely the apogee of
womanhood as when sitting on the barrel in The Blue
Angel. The whole passage glitters, its visual impact as
powerful as a blow. Lang knew exactly how to use the
presence and the myth of Marlene; Vern will now try
everything to find this Altar Keane.
Vern encounters other recollections ot Altar. In Dodge
City her former friend Dolly recalls how Altar would
have shut the door on a cattle baron if she had a fancy for a
cowpuncher. In Baldy Guilder’s shabby saloon in Tascosa
he learns she was fired after she kicked a man in thejaw for
fondling her knee while she was singing and because ‘you

307
don’t smile enough!’. Almost cheated out of her winnings
by Baldy on his own fixed roulette wheel. Frenchy
Fairmont (Mel Ferrer) - the fastest draw in the West who
once rode with General Lee - protected her that night,
taking her home without asking himself for ‘payment’.
Since then, Altar and Frenchy had met again. Baldy takes
malicious delight in revealing that Altar’s cosy liaison with
Frenchy has come to an end, and that the gunman is
waiting to be hanged:

Now the trail that goes to Chuck-a-Luck, Chuck-a-Luck

Leads to a jail down Gunsight way.

The theme song and the flashbacks which Lang structures

so organically and rhythmically, have thus created a
mosaic impression of the myth of the youthful, glamorous
Altar Keane, to prepare us for the woman of later years.
As Vern arrives in Gunsight, an election is in progress,
with the slogan ‘Throw the grafters out of town! Vote
Law and Order!’ prominently plastered in the centre of
the little town. The small town election, however, is an
ironic inversion of the values of the earlier small town in
Wyoming. Like the citizens in Fury, the ‘Law and Order’
party plans to rid its town of evil (the grafters) by doing
evil (lynching the ousted politicians). In seeing moral
corruption everywhere, Vern is here, at least, accurate.
Vern manages to get himself thrown into jail by shooting
up the bar (gone ‘dry’ lor the election period), and is put in
Frenchy’s cell. Together they break jail, using the horses
prepared for their fellow-prisoners, three corrupt local
politicians. As Vern has planned, Frenchy takes him to
Altar Keane’s Chuck-a-luck ranch.
Altar is wearing faded denims and a simple shirt. When
Frenchy tells her about the jail-break, and how Vern ‘used
his head and used his guts’, she comments sardonically,
‘Uses his eyes, too, doesn’t he?’. She allows him to stay at
the ranch:

Once you agree to the rules -

We don’t have any fighting here
We don’t ask any questions.

Vern spends his time learning sharp-shooting from

Frenchy, and studying the outlaws who surround Altar.

308
Ironically, while he shoots at a silver dollar obligingly spun
by Kinch, whom he does not suspect, he comes to the
conclusion that the lady-killer, Wilson, may have been
Beth’s murderer.
He is attracted to Altar, and not merely because he hopes
to use her to find the murderer. He is attracted both by
what he had learned about her (the romantic myth) and by
her honesty and more mature beauty. His courting her
casts a shadow on his relationship with Frenchy. Talking
about his days with General Lee, Frenchy says ‘I just don’t
like to lose anything . . . even a war’. His significant glance
indicates he is speaking of Altar. Vern is warned by
Frenchy:

‘Lately I see you trying everything I do.’

‘If I keep on I might be able to outdraw you some day.’
‘Don’t ever try it.’

The rivalry for Altar is intensified during her birthday

309
party (‘and don’t ask me how old I’ll be tomorrow . . .
Every year is a threat to a woman.’) when she sings a song
with a special significance:

A young man is reckless and ready

A young man is handsome and vain.
He’s young and intense, but he hasn’t the sense
To come in out of the rain.
Get away — get away
Get away, young man, get away
A young man is full of adventure
And eager to do what he can.
He may be a joy, but don’t send a boy
To do the work of a man . . .

Before she sings the third verse, she pulls off her scar! to
throw it to Frenchy, revealing Beth’s brooch on her
dress.*
The look-out reports riders approaching the ranch, and
the men all ride out. Vern however returns, and is in time
to save the situation when the marshal’s men notice that
horses are missing from the corral. Vern’s calloused
cowboy hands convince the marshal that he is not a
gunman. When Frenchy returns and finds Vern and Altar
together, his suspicions are aggravated: now the song
moves from illustration to commentary, and the im¬
mediacy with which it grows out of the situation serves to
demonstrate Brecht’s ‘epic’ theory:

Oh, there’s trouble in the air at Chuck-a-Luck! Chuck-a-Luck!

And death is waiting at every turn
There’s jealousy and fear, and suspicion here
And a woman with love to burn.
And he somehow feels that in this place
He’ll meet the killer face to face
Which one . . . which one will die for
HATE
MURDER
And REVENGE?
* It is interesting to
The resentful Frenchy takes Vern along on a bank compare Lang’s use of the
robbery. Kinch, who has now realised who Vern is from motif of the brooch and
the way he mounts his horse, tries to shoot him during the revenge with that of John
Ford (My Darling
raid, and sets off a gun battle from which the robbers
Clemantine, 1946) and of
retreat with their lives and their money. Frenchy however
Henry Hathaway (Nevada
is missing. Vern rides back to the ranch with Altar’s share Smith, 1966).

310
of the loot. He asks her to put on her dress; and tells her the
significance ol the brooch. As he flings his share of the loot
at her feet, in exchange for the brooch, the last words of the
song are heard -

HATE
MURDER
And REVENGE

Vern confronts Kinch with the brooch in the saloon,

and tells him he will kill him. Kinch is too cowardly to
fight however and Vern hands him over to the sheriff:

Eve tracked you for a year and a half. . . All I wanted of life was to kill
you . . . But something has happened to me . . . Maybe Em just not a
killer

Frenchy returns to the ranch wounded and exhausted,

to find Altar leaving. She explains that she wants to go
away and be a dance hall girl again; and denies that she is
going with Vern: ‘He wouldn’t have me’. Meanwhile the
outlaws, having freed Kinch on his way to jail, return to
settle scores with Altar whom they suspect of betraying
them. Vern comes back in time to assist Altar and Frenchy.
In the gun battle which ensues, Frenchy kills Kmch before
he can shoot Vern. Altar sees the outlaw Wilson draw on
Frenchy, and throws herself in front of Frenchy to protect
him. Vern shoots Wilson but too late to prevent his bullet
hitting Altar. The gun-battle over, Altar is dying.
The two men whom she loved in different ways ride off
tired and aimlessly:

Now revenge is a bitter and evil fruit

And death hangs beside it on the bough
These men that lived by the code of hate
Have nothing to live for now . . .
And the legends tell that when Custer fell
They died with him in the fight.

So Frenchy, who once rode with Lee for a lost cause, and
Vern who has lost everything that made his life worth
living, go off together to the hoplessness of a lost battle.
There is much more to this beautiful film than the
familiar Lang themes of violence, revenge, wrong and
right, justice, the femme fatale, the efficiently functioning
outlaw organisation and its guiding boss. The organic
fusion of psychological motivation and adventure spring¬
ing from them, produces a sense of harmony and tragedy
which is instinct, never exteriorised.
Fury already revealed a profound and mature under¬
standing of the vanity of violence. Here it is even more
evident, emphasised by the use of the theme song to
summarise and to anticipate events, to supply the film’s
structure as a ballad of the old frontier. Its rhythm merges
with the rhythm of the action and the vibrant reactions of
the characters. The new role of the femme fatale - saving the
life of her lover, rather than ruining him - suggests that
Lang’s pessimism has matured and changed: he under¬
stands better the complexity of existence and the
impossibility of reducing it to formulas of implacable fate.

312
 28 Clash By Night (1951)

Lang finds himself forced to Clash by Night was based on a Clifford Odets success of
comply with the modern New
the early forties, and both Lang and Jerry Wald, the film’s
York theatre which indulges in
unofficial producer, were very fond of the play. Neverthe¬
the display of human misery.
Yet here, where the New less the focus is considerably altered in the screen vision. In
Yorkers blame the misery on the original the action centred on the social background of
some kind of undefined the thirties, unemployment and the relation of these
ananke, somehow linked with conditions to the cuckolded husband’s final murder of the
the social constitution of the
wife’s lover. The film is concerned essentially with the
United States . . . Lang insists
more personal aspects of the plot: the adulterous
on the concept of
responsibility. Destiny again relationship of a married woman; and its denouement is
represented by the movement both more dramatic and less conventional. At the end the
of the waves, is fused with the woman returns to her husband.
realistic document. Wald wanted to change the scene of the action from a
Luc Moullet: Fritz Lang,
small mid-American town to a fishing village. To establish
Editions Seghers, 1963
that Lang, the European, could grasp such a milieu, the
director took his cameraman Nicholas Musaraca to
Monterey (which he knew well and which had already
been the setting of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row). Some
remnants of the once flourishing sardine fishing industry
still survived there. Lang and Musaraca came without
actors, and watched the fishing boats return, and the way
the catch was thrown from underwater pipes on to a
moving conveyor belt and thus straight into the canning
factory.
They shot enthusiastically and discovered that in three
days they had used some 10,000 feet of film. Anxiously
they sent the voluminous material to Wald, and instead of
the rebuke they expected they received a congratulatory
telegram from the producer. The material they shot
provided the introductory sequence of the film. Swarms of
seagulls fly in the sun on a clear sky, waves break on the
shore, a big fishing boat glides along, the masses ot

313
glittering fish are pumped by pipeline into the holding
tanks. Inside the cannery women briskly process them into
canned food. The atmosphere is so airy and sunny, the
impressions all so glittering that it is hard to realise it is not
in colour. In some copies of the film in circulation today,
this splendid opening is incomplete.
The open-air atmosphere, the density of natural
exteriors established here contributes to the film’s escape
from the theatricality of the stage original; and in this
respect too the change of plot in the script by Alfred Hayes
(and Lang, naturally) is effective. It is not the imposition of
a happy ending by the producer that has resulted in the
happy ending, but Lang’s desire for verisimilitude, as well
as his natural abhorrence of violence. The only result of
having the husband kill her lover would be to make the
wife hate him. Instead of an unnecessary act of revenge we
have only the fierce quarrel in the projection room. Lang
would not find it true for the simple and kindly husband,
Jerry D’Amato, who knowingly married a woman with a
past, to strangle his rival and suffer the punishment for it. It
is enough that the friend he worshipped - an equally
complicated character who in his own way also loved the
woman - steals her from him. There is no reason to blow a
simple tragedy up to unnecessary dimensions.
Jerry (Paul Douglas), the owner of a sardine fishing
boat, conducts the trade of his Sicilian forbears in a
patriarchal way, projecting his personality on a bigger
scale in the new country. Mae Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck),
always hopeful, always disappointed, perhaps a cut above
Jerry socially, and who says that ‘home’s where you come
to when you run out of places’ is at first reluctant to accept
his proposal (‘You don’t know anything about me. What
kind of animal am I? What kind of jungle am I from?’).
Only after a final scene at the dance hall with Earl Pfeiffer,
the film projectionist (played with a somewhat mephis-
tophelean cast by Robert Ryan) does she accept Jerry’s
offer. She has meanwhile confided to Earl that the only
man who ever gave her what she needed had died -

a man who didn’t tear a woman down. He made her feel confident -
sure of herself.

She marries Jerry with the best of intentions, perhaps

because he might give her something like this. She rightly

3H
Clash By Night (1951): the fight
315
senses that Earl is as unstable as herself and so is dangerous
for her. Jerry is indeed sad that she behaves harshly to his
friend. Accident nevertheless throws them together. Earl
having been divorced from his fickle wife collapses dead
drunk at Jerry’s house, and stays the night. The next
morning, after Jerry has gone to work, the inevitable
happens despite Mae’s resistance. Succumbing to Earl’s
passion, she determines to leave Jerry, taking their child
with her. It is when Earl tries to persuade her to leave the
child behind with Jerry that she realises how selfish his
passion is:

You’ll come home - I’ll be tired - the kids’ll cry - there’ll be dishes in
the sink . . .
And I’ll have to be pretty all the time. I want to be loved ugly, tired,
dull . . .
EARL Like Jerry loved you? (laughs cynically)
MAE Yes. Like Jerry loved me (slowly).

Her return to Jerry - who has meanwhile taken the child

to the safety of his boat - is treated tactfully and without
sentimentality. At first Jerry is unwilling to believe her:

JERRY You never loved me. Bein’ safe - bein’ taken care of- that’s
all you wanted. And my fault was savin’ you - all right - if that’s the
way she loves me I’ll take it that way.
MAE People change. You find out what’s important and what isn’t.
What you really want.

When Jerry still does not believe her, she calls out:

MAE Am I the only woman in the world who thought she was in
love with a man and then found out she wasn’t? Maybe certain things
are unforgiveable.

Reluctantly Jerry relents.

JERRY You’ve got to trust somebody. There ain’t no other way. Go

take your child home.

The script concludes:

Mae turns slowly towards the bunks.

Here Lang has added, significantly:

She turns and smiles at him.

People who question whether Mae would go back to

Jerry when she realises how selfish is Earl’s love should
recall that twenty years later, another film Bergman’s The
Touch shows an unfaithful wife returning to her husband

316
 Clash By Night: Lang directing the young Marilyn Monroe

for similar reasons. Neither director can be suspected of

choosing this ending simply for box-office considerations.
The two directors interpret the situation differently. In
both cases the decision is made not from a desire to get
back to bourgeois security, but from an understanding that
everyone should behave responsibly to others, and that it is
not possible simply to run away from moral obligations.
Bergman takes an easier way out, in not showing how the
adulterous wife returns to her husband: we merely see her
back in the home. Lang with his sense of logic and matter
of fact shows all the consequences of the action.
The Odets play provides a parallel and counterpoint
action in the story of Mae’s brother Joe (Keith Andea) and
his bride, who was played by the young Marilyn Monroe.
Lang recalls that it required a lot of patience to deal with
her. Shy and unsure ol herself, she would arrive late for
work - either out of stagefright or because unconsciously
she was nervous of her more experienced colleagues. At

317
the same time she was clearly aware of her sexual appeal.
While Paul Douglas clearly resented this comparatively
inexperienced starlet being made to act the star, Barbara
Stanwyck was exceptionally kind to her, and patient even
when Marilyn’s fluffs and errors meant frequent retakes.
Lang remembers one particular example: a difficult
scene in which Stanwyck had to deliver important
dialogue and take washing from a line at the same time.
Monroe was particularly bad, so the scene was retaken
innumerable times to everyone’s frustration except the
professional Stanwyck who took it all in sympathetic
stride.
Marilyn was ambitious and keen too, and asked Lang if
she could have her personal coach Natasha Lytess with her.
He agreed as long as Miss Lytess did not coach her at home,
but when he realised that she was trying to make
suggestions about how Monroe should act in front of the
camera, he withdrew his permission. The result of Lang’s
patience and Stanwyck’s unselfish and comradely help was
a performance that seemed free and spontaneous and
earned Monroe some excellent reviews. In contrast to the
near-tragedy of Jerry and Mae, Joe and Peggy provide a
tender comedy of the taming of a shrew. The high-
minded Joe also adds a complication to the main plot.
Subsidiary characters are real and vivid: Jerry’s father,
upright and eager to work but wandering the bars with his
concertina and getting drunk, since he cannot get a job;
Jerry’s drunken and cadging uncle, a burden upon Jerry
and less harmless than the father with his hostility to the
intrusion of Mae and the child, and his attempt to incite
Jerry to murder his rival.
An exceptional complexity and variety in the editing
corresponds to the psychological subtlety of the film, and
the final shooting script reveals vividly the careful logic of
Lang’s direction and the precision with which every detail
is planned and worked out in advance. Lang received
proper praise for this even from the usually undiscerning
Paul M. Jensen who declares that:

the director gets close to his characters both physically and

psychologically . . .

and mentions:

the mobility of his camera as it pans and tracks, unobtrusively pulling

318
 Clash By Night: Lang’s drawing

in towards the actors and then backing off again . . .

and notices:

the tendency to cut to different angles at dramatic moments instead of

allowing a scene to unfold from a single point of view.*
*The book by Jensen was
written under such unusual The drawing reproduced here, by Lang himself, shows
circumstances, and has in how he worked in one scene, using two back projection
Lang’s opinion so distorted screens to the right and to the left of a big rock on the
his work and personality, beach. Thus he could make a panning shot without a cut
that it must be commented
by first showing the young lovers Joe and Peggy playing
on. Apparently Jensen sent
on the beach, then let them disappear behind the rock and
Lang a manuscript copy ot
his university thesis. Lang then re-emerge to climb the steps to the restaurant. All this
was immediately more happens under the eyes of Earl who sits on the terrace,
offended by the huge following their movements with a cynical expression on
number of errors of simple his face. He subsequently flirts with Peggy while Joe has
fact than he was by the
gone to get her sweater, but is distracted because Mae is
accompanying letter
trying to dance with the clumsy Jerry. Such shots, where
demanding that the director
correct the thesis, in spite of the geography is dictated by the psychology, reveal the

319
precision and economy of Lang’s mind and method. the author’s praising Lang’s
The symbolic use of the high waves to reflect emotions films. Some time after
Lang’s refusal to have
and underline the passions are unobtrusive, and never
anything to do with the
merely decorative, but necessary and meaningful in a
project, the thesis was
drama which is orchestrated by images of air and storm. It published. While most of
is no longer the symbolism of an independent, auto¬ the factual errors had been
nomous fate as in the early German films. Tragedy can be corrected, the author had
averted by an act of free will on the part of the assumed a whole new
attitude towards Lang and
protagonists. Jerry knows what he wants. Mae has learned
his films. To this day, Lang
how empty and meaningless adventures can be. Now the
who has never minded
two of them have to put their joint efforts into making a honest criticism of, even
good marriage for the sake of their child. Everyone is attacks on, his work, refuses
responsible for his own destiny. The ‘happy’ ending to allow anyone to bring
summarises the problems of existence, and reflects that the book into his presence.

maturity and experience which we shall find echoed in

Godard’s Le Mepris.

320
 29 The Blue Gardenia (1953)

I would like to say - not to While Lang was shooting Clash by Night Howard
diminish the film’s merit - that
Hughes - who still owned RKO and had financed Rancho
in this scenario Lang perhaps
Notorious — told him through his associates that ‘the future
saw no more than a pretext,
and tried harder to work out held great things in store for him’. Clash By Night was
the characters than to justifiy finished on 3 November 1951. After that months went by,
the facts. Yet what richness of but Lang received no offers from anywhere. Eventually
observed detail, what a Lang’s solicitor heard what the trouble was. Lang had been
delightful representation of the
placed on the Hollywood black-list, not as a communist,
life of three young American
but as a potential communist.
employees . . . What a modern
conception oj cutting in the flat Even before the end of the war there had been signs that
sequences . . . Fritz Lang certain Americans would have preferred to fight the
fights neo-realism on its own Soviet Union on the German side; and after the death of
ground . . . Roosevelt the cold war against the Soviet Union began in
‘Maurice Scherer’ (Eric
the United States. When Joseph McCarthy became
Rohmer): Un realisme
mechant in Cahiers du
senator for Wisconsin in 1948, he quickly recognised the
Cinema, June 1954 House Committee on Un-American Activities, founded
the year before, as a valuable political stepping-stone.
Hollywood was his finest showplace. The so-called Black
List contained the names of liberals as well as out and out
communists, which is why Fritz Lang, Walter Wanger
and even Thomas Mann found themselves on it. Lang of
course had been a friend of such known left-wingers as
Brecht and Toller, had worked with Hanns Eisler, and
used the scriptwriters Ring Lardner Jr. and Albert Maltz -
both included in the Hollywood Ten - on Cloak and
Dagger. So he was informed that there was no longer any
work for him.
Only after eighteen months of enforced idleness was
Lang offered work, by a producer named Adolf Gottlieb.
Gottlieb wanted to use the title The Blue Gardenia which
had been suggested to him by the nom de guerre of a
prostitute who had recently been brutally murdered.

321
‘Black Dahlia’. The script had no prostitute, but it had a
murder; and Gottlieb hoped to cash in on the title as
quickly as possible before the sensational murder was
forgotten. The Blue Gardenia served its purpose ol getting
Lang back into work. In 1953 Harry Cohn ol Columbia
gave him a year’s contract, and testified before the House on
Un-American Activities Committee that Lang had never
been a member of the Communist party.
Apart from this Lang has no particular affection tor The
Blue Gardenia. It had to be shot in twenty days which left
little time for the preparation and revision of the script,
though he was able to modify the dialogue and, in one
important particular, the action. Nor did it have the kind
of social message which he preferred. For all that the film is
remarkably vivid and substantial, with the world of the
telephone exchange - a busy harem of girls with their
individual preoccupations and troubles, all ready to
pounce on the first man that enters — and the world of the
tiny apartment in which the three girls live a cheerfully
irritable spinster life. The cramped space (in which the
opening of the bathroom door leads immediately to
bumping somebody’s bottom) and subtle angles seem to
focus the characters: the worldy-wise Crystal just starting
to flirt again with her divorced husband Homer; the
childlike Sally, engrossed in the world of paperback
thrillers and dating the drugstore librarian; the gentle,
romantic Norah.
It is Norah who is caught ‘once off guard' and drawn
into the whirlpool. Alone in the apartment on her
birthday, she sits down to a prettily laid table facing a
photograph of her fiance who is a lieutenant in faraway
Korea. As she drinks her champagne, she opens and reads
his latest letter. He has suddenly broken the engagement;
he has met a nurse and is going to marry her. Norah is
distraught and vulnerable when the phone rings. It is the
famous fashion designer, Harry Prebble, who has met the
girls while sketching in the telephone exchange. While
hoping to date the lively (and ‘easy’) Crystal, when he
learns she is dining with her ex-husband, he settles for
Norah instead: to him it is all the same.
Lang instantly evokes the sultry and intoxicating
ambience and cheap exoticism of the Blue Gardenia
restaurant where there is always too much rum 111 the

322
 The Blue Gardenia (1953): the birthday table scene

Polynesian Pearl Diver cocktails. In a characteristic and

ingenious shot, a tilted mirror behind Nat King Cole, who
is singing in the background, reflects his piano keyboard
and behind the whole restaurant. Prebble persuades the
now tipsy Norah to go to his flat on the pretext that he has
invited some friends. There - with the concealed lighting
casting strange shadows of the tropical plants, and the
gramophone playing ‘The Blue Gardenia’ - he slips her
more rum in the coffee she drinks to sober her up. She falls
asleep on the couch, and when she awakes to find Prebble
making advances to her, she at first thinks in her contusion
it is her boy-friend; then starts to struggle. Prebble has
pushed her to the fireplace; there is the glint of the fire
irons; she awkwardly seizes the poker, which crashes into
the mirror.
At this point the script as written looks temptingly
effective for any director:
Norah swings the poker downwards to Harry in front of the broken

323
mirror. We SEE the distorted vision of the piece of mirror. The piece
of mirror falls and we HEAR Harry’s hoarse yell. Flash of Harry with
his arm trying to protect his face, he stumbles over a table or low chair
and falls to the floor.

Sound of falling poker. On soundtrack, crash ot the mirror, the music

of the record and Harry’s yell melt into the distant ringing sound as
though a doorbell is ringing in Norah’s mind. Tbe ringing ot the door
bell repeats and changes into knocking. Norah slowly collapses in a
faint on the floor, around her inert body (CAMERA MOVES
DOWN with her) trick black waves wash in and out from various
angles, sometimes blackening her out, sometimes leaving her tace free.
When they cover her face all SOUND comes to a complete silence. But
when they leave her again the SOUND TRACK contains a medley of
distortion, blurred voices, knocking and the rain outside.

Finally the black waves retreat. Norah looks vacantly up to see: in the
remaining piece of glass we see the reflection of two vague and
indefinite figures moving . . .

Lang’s cinematic instinct told him that to show the

audience the clever distortions, the ringing, knocking,
entering of another person and so on would have killed
every bit of suspense and revealed the solution. He
therefore simplifies all this: Norah falls to the floor alter
the breaking of the mirror. Whirlpools of waves envelop
her, and neither Norah nor the spectator know what has
happened. Norah wakes up as if from a fever dream, and
without looking round runs out into the thunderstorm,
leaving her shoes behind.
Next morning she wakes with a leaden head. Her only
recollection is a flash of her own distorted face in the
mirror, which recalls the evening before. At the telephone
exchange the girls who had been sketched by Prebble the
day before are interviewed one by one by police
investigating his murder. A pair of shattered sunglasses
startle her; and in a characteristic ellipsis, the shot leads
Lang to Prebble’s apartment and the investigation there,
treated in cool documentary style: the police, cameramen,
a journalist called Casey Mayo, the inspector who is
exasperated by the conscientious charlady who has
polished away all fingerprints (‘that’s what I’m paid for’);
the discovery of the incriminating size court shoes and a
lace handkerchief.
The spectator shares Norah’s fears that she is guilty, and
experiences all the shocks of her shattered nerves. Leaving

324
The Blue Gardenia: the smashing of the mirror
 ■

The Blue Gardenia: Lang directing Anne Baxter

the apartment she bumps into a policeman - but he is only
looking lor the janitor. About to burn what she takes to be
the incriminating taffeta dress she had worn that evening (a
characteristic Lang touch: it is wrapped in a newspaper
with Prebble Murder headlines), she is stopped by another
cop - ‘Lady, don't you know it’s against the law to burn an
incinerator at night?’. On the point of telephoning Casey
Mayo who has offered his help to the unknown suspect, in
his newspaper, she sees the car of a deputy sheriff outside
the telephone kiosk, and flees.
Reminiscent of the blind street hawker in M, the blind
flower woman from the Blue Gardenia tells the police
about the taffeta dress: ‘Taffeta has a voice of its own. It
rustles like no other material’. Yet just when Norah has
succeeded in burning her new dress, Inspector Haynes tells
Mayo:

The taffeta dress isn’t much of a clue, Casey. My wife tells me they’re
all the rage this year . . . Shoes are different . . .

Casey Mayo, who has pinned his ambitions on to

solving this case, decides to base his investigations on the
shoes. His open letter to The Girl of the Blue Gardenia is
written to keep alive the sensation. In a Lang montage that
again recalls M we watch all sorts of people read the letter
in the newspaper. As Norah reads the letter, we hear
Mayo’s own voice on the sound track:

I hope you will read this letter . . .

I want to help you . . .
But I do care . . .
You can trust me

Alone in his office, Mayo sits answering endless phone

calls from hysterical women (including one who confesses,
a humorous touch typical of Lang, to the murder because
of a ‘big passion’, but is dismissed because her feet are
equally big, size 8^). Norah, the only one to give the right
shoe size, makes an appointment to come to see him. On
her arrival Lang uses a characteristic shock lighting effect,
when Casey suddenly turns on the bright light in the dark
office. Norah unconvincingly relates the incidents that
happened ‘to a friend’. Mayo drops some ash on her dress
so that he can see her handkerchief: it is not a lace one, like
the handkerchiefs dropped in Prebble’s flat and in the
telephone box from which Norah unsuccessfully tried to

327
call Mayo.
Still unaware that Norah is the Blue Gardenia, since his
preconception of the mysterious girl is of someone no
better than she ought to be, he arranges with her to meet
her ‘friend’ the next afternoon. It is not Mayo, however,
who betrays her to the police, but the unpleasant barman,
Bill, who overhears the conversation at their rendezvous,
when Norah reveals the truth.
Unhappily, Mayo sets off from the airport to his next
assignment. Suddenly hearing a record on the coffee-shop
juke box, he realises it is the one that was on Prebble’s
phonograph when the cleaning woman discovered the
body, and not ‘The Blue Gardenia’, which Norah
remembered playing as she blacked out. Investigation in
record shops to discover where the disc was bought leads
to an aging woman, Rose, with whom Prebble had had a
brief (and at the time apparently insignificant) telephone
conversation early in the film. Just as Haynes is trying to
dissuade Mayo from his wild goose chase, Rose is found in
the ladies’ room with her wrists slashed. (The apparently
harmless telephone conversation will find an echo in a
similar call in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.)
Rose’s hospital-bed confession is shown as a series of
flashbacks, which only now reveal the events hinted in the
elaborate sequence prescribed much earlier by the script:
she had burst in on Prebble while Norah lay unconscious,
and despite his efforts to calm her by putting on her
favourite phonograph record, had killed him in the fury of
being scorned. The epiloque is light-hearted. When Norah
is released from prison she is cool with Mayo, not because
she still thinks he betrayed her, but because Crystal has
given him her (their) telephone number. Mayo however
demonstates his intention of fidelity by handing over his
‘little black book’ of telephone numbers of call-girls and
Crystal-types to the delighted Haynes.

328
 30 The Big Heat (1953)

With The Big Heat . . . Every film, says Lang, has to have its own rhythm. The
Lang found a subject - a small
rhythm ol The Big Heat is a relentless action, spurred by
town dominated by a racketeer
hate, murder and revenge (there is a parallel to Rancho
and a young detective’s
determination to break his Notorious in that the detective is more keenly motivated to
tyranny — in which he could his investigation following the murder of his wife). Here
combine American ‘realism’ Lang had an excellent script, by the crime reporter, Sidney
and the more abstract, symbolic Boehm, and one which he could regard as serious in
menace of his most
theme: a real accusation against crime and the criminal.
characteristic melodrama . . .
The script must also have appealed to him in its treatment
From the opening shot, the
of the spread of corruption throughout society on both
close-up of the revolver . . .
lying on the table, there is a
sides of the law.
morose intentness on violence. A letter to Lang from his producer Robert Arthur,
The killings and outrages . . . dated 10 April 1953 suggests that the Breen Office may be
are not presented with great thanked for the extreme effectiveness of the opening scene:
physical emphasis or detail - the censors thought it too gruesome to show the suicide
several of them occur off-screen
directly, so stimulated Lang into a scene of suggestive
- but they determine,
menacingly, the course of the intensity. We see a close-up of a pistol on a desk. A hand
action. comes into the picture, then an arm. The hand takes up the
pistol and the camera moves back to reveal the back of the
In its great variety of human
comment, and its more man’s head and the raised weapon. A shot; and the man’s
intimate observation of head and arms slump to the desk. The camera pans to a
character, The Big Heat bulky envelope addressed to the District Attorney, and
marks a development in beside it a police sergeant’s badge.
Lang’s work . . . these are
Wakened by the shot, the wife of the suicide comes
unusually rounded portraits
presented more acutely and
downstairs. She shows no emotion, simply opens the
vividly for themselves than is letter, glances through the pages and picks up the
usual with Lang . . . The telephone:
texture of the film is richer and
Mr Logana!
more concentrated than in any
I know it’s late - wake him up!
of his works since the jos.
Tell him it’s Tom Duncan’s widow.
Gavin Lambert: Fritz
Yes, I said, widow.
Lang’s America, in Sight and
Sound, Autumn 1955 Woken by his secretary and bodyguard, the millionaire
racketeer Logana, thanks Bertha Duncan for the news, and The Big Heat distinguishes
says they should meet. It is clear that she intends to use the itself by the simplicity of its
style, in the image of its
letter, which she puts into a safe place, against Logana.
heroes, by its rejection of
Logana tells his secretary to call up Vincent Stone (Lee artificiality and by the violence
Marvin), and we see some of Logana’s gang. Vince, gruff, of its action.
rugged and apparently self-assured, is goaded by his girl Luc Moullet: Fritz Lang,
friend Debbie (Gloria Grahame) about his subservience to Editions Seghers, 1963

Logana:

I always like to tell Vince you’re calling - I always like to watch him
jump.

she tells Logana. Later on she tells one of the gangsters:

Ever go to the circus, Larry ? You should — and take Vince. The man in
the big hat holds up the hoop, cracks the whip! - Come Vince! Up!
Over! Come Larry! Up - over!

This not only tells us about the inter-gang relationships,

but also reveals a good deal about Debbie: outspoken,
clear-sighted, and honest, even about herself. In return
Vince charges this frivolous yet worldly-wise mistress:

Six days a week she shops . . .

On the seventh she rests — all tired out!

The clues to future relationships are laid. With characteris¬

tic economy, Lang has sketched in present relationships
and laid clues for the future.
Police Sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) suspects
nothing as he interviews Bertha Duncan, who claims that
Tom killed himself because he was suffering from an
illness. Ffere Lang adds to the script, in his own large
handwriting:

Bertha stands at mirror, fixes her face . . . Knock at door - she assumes
tragic pose: ‘Please come in’
Dave enters in mirror.

Thus before the interview begins, the audience is

prepared: Bertha is going to lie.
Lucy Chapman, a bar hostess, arouses Bannion’s
suspicions that it is not a case of simple suicide when she
tells him about Tom Duncan’s excellent health, his house
in Lakeside, his impending divorce and affair with herself.
When she accuses him of:

covering up for a cop’s widow! You don’t want to find out anything
that’ll change her story

330
he retorts brutally, ‘I want facts’. He returns of his own
accord to question Bertha further. She acknowledges her
husband’s infidelity, but rejects all other implications,
especially those having to do with the source of the money
which paid for the big Lakeside home and the Duncan’s
luxurious life style.
Returning to his office, he learns that Lucy Chapman
has been murdered; while his cautious lieutenant has been
given orders that Bannion is to leave Mrs Duncan alone.
Logana’s payroll is clearly a big one; and when Bannion
receives a threatening telephone call he knows who he has
to see. He goes to Logana in the luxurious house of which
the gangster is so proud:

This is my home.
I don’t like dirt tracked to it.

When Bannion talks to him about Lucy Chapman’s death,

he is turned out of the house, after first knocking down the
bodyguard who touches him.
One of the surprises of this film is the warmth of the
domestic scenes. Contrasting with the Logana house, Lang
shows the home of Bannion and his cheerful wife Katie
(later described by Bannion as a ‘real Irish blow-top, a
sampler, she’d take sips of my drinks - taste my food and
take puffs of my cigarette’) and their little girl Joyce who
insistently demands that Bannion tells her the story of the
three kittens.
The poignancy of the end of the sequence is thus under¬
scored, and we are made to feel something of the same
rage and emotional shock as Dave Bannion himself. Katie
leaves to fetch the babysitter in the car while Bannion
tucks in littlejoyce. There is an explosion. Bannion rushes
out; the car - blown up by the Logana mob - is already on
fire. When Bannion smashes the car window in order to
open the buckled door, the lifeless body of Katie falls into
his arms. We are now ready to join Bannion in his
implacable determination to destroy Logana, his gang, and
its corrupt supporters. He knows now that he will have to
work outside the corrupt police system, and that if Bertha
Duncan is killed, the letter she is using to control Logana
will reveal everything;

With you dead the big heat follows!

The big heat for Logana, for Stone - for the rest of the lice.

331
The Big Heat (1953): the scarred Debbie (Gloria Grahame) with Vince (Lee
Marvin)
(‘The big heat’ is a slang term for concentrated police
activity against criminals; it is a powerful title which
carries the implication of a settling of accounts, from
which derives the French Reglement de Compte; the
German title Heisses Eisen - Hot Iron - means nothing.
Bannion challenges the Chief of Police, Higgins, with
being on Logana’s payroll, and throws in his police badge
- refusing to hand over his pistol, which is his own
property. Higgins has remorse enough to put a police
guard on the house of his brother-in-law who is keeping
the child.
Lang (and Boehm) fill the world of the film with people
who make that world come alive. Bannion’s trail of the
killer of his wife leads him far from the ‘respectable’ homes
of the Duncans and Loganas, to the underworld of‘scared
rabbits who never see a thing’. The denizens of the car
graveyard are perfect examples of Lang’s ability to surprise
us with characterisation. The fat, scared owner is indeed a
‘rabbit’ (‘When it comes to my bread and butter I stay
careful.’), but the elderly, limping Selma - who might so
easily be just a sinister type - turns out to be sympathetic
and helpful, courageously so. Such honest characters turn
up again and again in the film when we least expect them;
the whole world has not been corrupted. Selma sends him
to the same bar where he had met Lucy Chapman
(ironically called The Retreat). Vincent Stone is playing
dice with a girl, and in his pathological rage at losing, he
burns her hand with his cigar. Bannion challenges the
startled Stone:
Maybe you’re the one that worked over Lucy Chapman!
Get out!
Now! While you can still walk!

When Stone leaves, Debbie offers Bannion a drink. In spite

ofhis refusal (‘with Vince Stone’s money. I’d choke on it!’)
she follows him out. When they get into his car, they are
followed by a Logana man. Debbie is clearly not prepared
to reveal anything about the gang. Her only intention is to
make Stone angry and jealous; and the weary Bannion
tells her:
I’ll put you in a cab.

Again Lang shows a lying woman through a mirror:

Debbie is primping her pretty face while she denies where

333
she has been to Stone, who is playing cards with Higgins,
Larry and another municipal official. She gives herself
away, however, when she reveals that she is aware oi
Bannion’s hatred for Stone. Stone twists her arm, and
throws an urn of scalding coffee in her face. Higgins is
made to take her to a doctor, but Debbie runs away to
Banmon, knowing that Lucy Chapman’s fate awaits her
otherwise.
Now Debbie is prepared to tell all and to give Bannion
the lead to a man he has been seeking, Larry Gordon. Larry
confirms Bannion’s suspicions of Logana and Stone. A
little later we learn that he is dead. Next Bannion goes to
Bertha, but her warning call to Logana brings two
protecting patrolmen sent by Higgins. Bannion is obliged
to leave.
He returns to Debbie in the hotel hideaway where he
has put her; and Lang provides an unsentimentally
touching scene between the disfigured girl and the lonely
cop who paternally makes her eat and take her pills.
Debbie tells him:

. . . Guess a scar isn’t so bad not if it’s only on one side. I can go through
life sideways . . .
Just sitting here and thinking is pretty rough when you’ve spent most
of your life not thinking.

When she asks him about his wife, and he answers only:

She was twenty-seven years old, light hair — grey eyes . . .

Debbie replies that this is a police description. But she

understands, she says, that he doesn’t want to talk about his
wife with someone like her. Bannion answers, for
Debbie’s honesty and plight have touched him as they
have us, ‘Not with anyone’.
Bannion confides to Debbie that with Bertha Duncan
he has run into a brick wall. She is the only thing that
stands in the way of the conviction of the gang, since she
holds Duncan’s confession, which she is using to blackmail
Logana. ‘I almost killed her an hour ago’, he says. Then
Debbie replies, with her usual clarity of vision:

I don’t believe you could. If you had, there wouldn’t be much

difference between you and Vincent Stone.

Bannion’s brother-in-law calls him to tell him that

334
Higgins has removed the police guard from the apartment
where Bannion’s little daughter Joyce is staying: Higgins
intends to leave the way clear for Logana to get at the child
to threaten Bannion. Bannion throws a revolver on
Debbie’s bed for her protection, rushes out, but is
overpowered by an unidentified man on the first floor
landing in his brother-in-law’s house. The spectator
believes with Bannion that it is a member of the gang: in
fact it is the brother-in-law’s wartime buddies whom he
has brought in to protect them. Bannion is able to tell little
Joyce the story of the three kittens again before going
down to the street more calmly, to find that two of his
own former colleagues have mounted their own guard of
the house; not all human beings are scared rabbits.
Meanwhile Debbie has gone to Bertha’s apartment
(‘We’re sisters under the mink, Bertha’) and shot her dead.
When Vince Stone returns to his apartment, she is already
waiting for him, too, and throws boiling coffee in his face,
before telling him,

Bertha Duncan’s dead!

No more insurance for you and Logana.
The lid is off the garbage can.
And I did it.

Stone whips out his Luger and shoots Debbie, just as

Bannion breaks in the door. Shots are fired; but when
Stone’s gun is empty Bannion disdains to kill him and
hands him over to his police friends:

Guess I was a cop too long. I almost said, You’re under arrest, to him.

His action here parallels that of Vern when he captures the

murderer Kinch in Rancho Notorious save that Dave is not
so poisoned by hatred. He kneels beside the dying Debbie,
and gently tells her about his wife (‘I like her - I like her a
lot.’), which he has hitherto refused to do.
Sergeant Bannion is back in the Homicide Department.
When he is called out on a hit-and-run case, he is just about
to drink his coffee. ‘Keep it hot, will you, Hugo’, he grins.
Sidney Boehm’s excellent script is masterly constructed
by Lang, and is recounted here in some detail because it is
so typical of Lang’s method and approach. As we have seen
the characters in the film are not merely gangsters and
cops, but real people, and this gives the film its remarkable
density.

335
The Big Heat: disdaining to kill

According to Lang, Bannion’s story is a personal affair

between himself and crime. Bannion becomes the
audience, and Lang constantly uses the camera from the
viewpoint of the protagonist, until the audience in¬
voluntarily follows him and identifies with him. Even
more than Joe Wilson in Fury, Bannion is Joe Doe. As a
loner like Wilson or Vern in Rancho Notorious, he takes the
law into his own hands and pursues his private revenge.
But when the big heat starts, he understands that it is not
for him in the final resort to exercise justice, but that he
must hand the criminals over to the official organs of
justice, which he has been instrumental in awakening.
Earlier he has been warned by his colleague Detective
Burke:

You’ve decided people are all scared rabbits and you spit on them,
you’re on a hate binge.

This is an attitude which Lang examines again and again.

33b
 . . . the dying Debbie

He shows the results of violence rather than the violence

itself, activating in this way an absolutely legitimate
dramatic element. The way leads from M to Fury, to
Rancho Notorious and The Big Heat, as Lang heroes move
towards a maturity and wisdom which no longer contains
bitterness or contempt for their fellow men.

337
31 Human Desire (1954)

Lang and his scenarist Alfred Hayes chose the same La Bete Humaine (Renoir)
quotation trom Zola as Renoir had done to preface their is made up of long sequences
and short scenes while Human l
film:
Desire (Lang) is all in short
sequences and long scenes and
There dwells in each of us a beast, caged only by what we have been
thus has a completely different
taught to believe is right or wrong. When we lorget these teachings,
rhythm . . . Human Desire,
the beast in us is unleashed in all its fury.
coming after Woman in the
Window and Scarlet Street
In Zola’s naturalistic view all the characters of La Bete
possesses the same qualities
Humaine act according to natural instincts and a realistic
which are characteristic of
theory of genetics; and Renoir, facing no prior restrictions, Fritz Lang ... It is a solid
was able to follow the novel closely in his film version. and strong film, a beautiful
Lang - having already remade one Renoir film. La block whose sharp edges follow 1
Chienne, as Scarlet Street - was eager to arrive at a the classical rules of cutting,
the images are frank, brutal,
completely personal conception, and accordingly asked
each of them has its own
the Cinematheque Fran^aise for a copy of Renoir's original
beauty . . . The confrontation
film. The creator of M would certainly have found an of these two works is
interesting solution of the ambivalences of the story in a extremely rewarding since it
mentally sick character, as he had done a few years earlier reveals how two of the greatest t
in Secret Beyond the Door, working for his own production men of the cinema treated the
same subject diverging in their
company, and was to do later in While The City Sleeps,
conception of content and of
where the murderer is again a psychopath like the hero ot
form while each of them
M. In While the City Sleeps however, the psychopath is not succeeded in making one of the 1
the mam character, but a minor figure who is run to best films of their careers.
ground by the hero. In Human Desire Lang transfers that Francois Truffaut: Desir
tragedy to a different plane. He emphasises the tragic Humain, in Arts, July 1955

existence of the aging husband, who, as in Zola, sinks Whereas Renoir’s The
deeper and deeper, since every crime brings its own Human Beast is the tragedy
of a doomed man caught up in
revenge.
the flow of life, Lang’s remake 1
Lang and his writer inevitably encountered difficulties
Human Desire is the
in making this subject in Holywood. The Hays Office nightmare of an innocent man
frowned on sex maniacs or epileptics in main roles. The enmeshed in the tangled
American hero had to be sympathetic and normal, as a strands of fate. What we

338
 remember in Renoir are the prerequisite ot the American dream. Glenn Ford, follow¬
faces of Gabin, Simon and ing his performance in The Big Heat was chosen for the
Ledoux. What we remember
main role, in which Columbia, carefully guarding their
in Lang are the geometrical
patterns of trains, tracks and star s ‘image’ insisted he present a completely normal and
fateful camera angles. As hard-working person. For the producer Jerry Wald - who
Renoir is humanism, Lang is detected sexual symbolism in everything, not least in trains
determinism. As Renoir is entering tunnels - a married woman who is determined on
concerned with the plight of
seducing a man was purely and simply the human beast.
his characters, Lang is obsessed
Rita Hayworth was originally intended for this role,
with the structure of the trap.
Andrew Sarris: ‘Films’, The of the ambivalent Vicky (possibly to reunite the
Village Voice, 7 December Ford-Hay worth team again). When the location shooting
1967 was rescheduled for Canada, however, Hayworth bowed
out (legal difficulties and a divorce and child custody
proscribed her leaving the States). Gloria Grahame (fresh
from her teaming with Ford in The Big Heat) took the role
and was no doubt a better choice. She conveys all the
character’s sexual instincts, and exactly fits the script
description:

on the surface she seems contained, easygoing and affectionate

natured. It is only in the sudden changes of expression in her eyes and
in certain unfinished gestures that one can sense the complexity that
exists under the surface.

Vicky’s husband, Carl Buckley, is dismissed from the

railway company because of a quarrel. He persuades his
wife to go and plead with the powerful Owens. Suspicious
at her long absence, he forces out of her a confession about
her former connection with Owens. The jealous husband
forces Vicky to write a letter to Owens saying that she will
join him in his sleeper to Chicago, since her husband will
be away in Edmonton.
As in Zola, the husband murders Owens on the train, in
Vicky’s presence, and takes his watch and wallet to suggest
the murderer was a simple thief. In Zola, however, the
incriminating letter from Vicky to Owens remains in the
papers of the murdered man, to incriminate the murderer-
even though the judge will hush up the matter, so corrupt
were the times. In Lang’s film the use of the letter is more
logical: Carl finds it and keeps it as a permanent hold over
Vicky.
As Carl and Vicky are returning to their compartment
after the murder, they see the relieved engine driver, Jeff
Warren, travelling back as a passenger and waiting for a

339
Human Desire (1954): scenes of violence: Broderick Crawford and Gloria
Grahame
tree compartment. Carl sends Vicky, who is unknown to
Jeff, to lure him from the place he is standing in the
corridor, so that Carl can safely regain his compartment
while the two are having a drink in the dining car. Later, in
the court-room where the passengers from the train are
assembled tor investigation, he catches Vicky’s imploring
eyes, and denies that he saw anyone coming from the
murder compartment; now he is implicated, and has made
the first step towards their guilt. All the major characters
are now caught in a trap of their own making (fate is
character).
The usually jealous Carl deliberately throws Vicky and
this new friend together. At first she insists to Jeff that she
found Owens dead in the compartment; then, as they
become more intimate later she tells the truth about the
murder, but claims that she had been seduced by Owens
when a sixteen-year-old virgin. Jeff realises how deeply he
is involved when Vicki tries to persuade him to kill Carl.
He finds the incriminating letter in Carl’s pocket when he
picks him up, drunk, from the railway tracks. He gives it
to Vicki who thus feels herself free of Carl, but is desperate
when Jeff tells her their affair is over. In despair at not being
able to hold Jeff, Vicky takes a train to leave Carl and when
he breaks into her compartment she tells him another
version of the Owens seduction:
Owens seduced me - yes, because I wanted him to! I wanted that big
house he lived in. I wanted him to get rid of that wife. He knew what I
was after. And you know what? I admired him for it.

When she tells him that he will never be sure of her because
new men would always desire her, Carl strangles Vicki.
Jeff returns to the loyal girl who tried to tell him in the
beginning that he should find the right girl.

Lang and Hayes transplanted Zola’s story into an

American milieu and the present time. Jeff has just come
back from the war in Korea; but the lesson of how to kill
has not stuck with him enough for Vicki to be able to
seduce him into killing Carl. The day of the steam train,
moreover, is finished: Jeff drives an electrical-powered
diesel engine; and his assistant - father of the girl he will
eventually return to - is no longer a stoker.
Lang had difficulty in persuading a railway company to
cooperate in the shooting. The Santa Fe Company refused

341
Human Desire: the lovers

when they learned that the original novel had a murder in

a sleeping car; and the company appears to have passed on
its warning to all the other American railroad companies.
In the end Lang found a small company in Canada - where
the weather at the beginning of December was distinctly
un-California-hke - to agree. Despite the problems Lang
gave a characteristic authenticity to his railway milieu -
endless travellings along the rails, top shots of the carriages,
rolling wheels that translate speed into visual terms. His
images are never gratuitous or simply decorative; always
they are logical and functional. Touches of detail and
mood give the background life an authenticity; the
metallic shimmer from the tracks in the darkness of the
railway yard lend a distinctive lyricism to the love story of
Jeff and Vicki. The purely documentary introduction to
the film has almost the same power as the sardine fishing
shots in Clash By Night.
Lang captures Zola’s own feeling of the speed of the

342
trains as a symbol of unbridled passions. Characteristically
Lang again leaves the details of the murder of Owens to the
imagination of the spectator: Carl enters the compartment
after Owens has let in Vicki; we see only the speeding
train, the locked door, and then, after the murder, just a
glimpse of part of the body. On the other hand Carl’s
strangling of Vicki can be shown directly - partly because
it is not actually bloody, but also because it is important we
are aware that Carl’s fate is sealed, that he will meet the
consequences of murder, and the murder of Owens, too,
will be atoned for.
Renoir followed Zola’s ending: the engine-driver and
stoker fight in their hatred and are thrown from the train
and killed. The driverless tram crashes, and all in it perish.
Lang’s film, subtly understated, abandons this ending for
the possibility of a happy one. In Hayes’ eighth draft of the
script, Jeff sits in his engine as the tracks stretch into the
darkness. Lang noted in his characteristic large hand¬
writing: ‘Day or night?’. Ultimately he chose broad
daylight, as for the beginning of the film: the nightmare
has passed with the morning: Jeff smiles at Alec and looks
at the tickets for the railwayman’s ball which Alec’s
daughter has given him. The dark, after all, had grown
naturally from the subject: the murder, the illicit meetings
of the lovers. Thus Lang’s delight in chiaroscuro comes
into play. The moral twilight calls for atmospheric night.
Occasionally even the story of the good girl, Ellen, Alec’s
daughter, is taken into twilight. Jeff lies on his bed, with
streaks of light from the half-closed shutters throwing dark
stripes across the room. Ellen comes in to tell him that Mrs
Carl Buckley is on the telephone. She goes on to remind
him how he had talked to her about the simple life he
wanted when he came back from the war — a little fishing;
a night at the movies. She tells him he forgot one thing: the
right girl to take to the movies. How, he asks, ‘do you tell a
girl who’s right for you from the one who’s not’. Thus in
this room in which darkness struggles with light, he has
doubts for the first time.

343
Moonfleet (1954)
 32 Moonfleet (1954)

The sets are themselves a It was gratifying to Lang to be approached by MGM to

means of creating the horror
do Moonfleet, since the company had not used him since his
which makes them reflect the
mental world oj the characters
original contract expired, despite the success of Fury. He
. . . Even the most glowing was presented with a finished script, but was able to follow
colours of Dorset, the splendid his usual habit of careful preparation and modification. In
tonalities of the deserted places the outcome MGM did not retain the montage he had
make one feel uneasy because planned; and it is only recently that Lang has come to have
of their density. The sea, with
a higher opinion of the film.
its waves, presents a concrete
image of the inaccessibility oj Moonfleet opens with a highly Langian scene, which was
fate. But this frightening in fact in the original script. Eleven-year-oldjohn Mohune
universe is not without the has strayed into the overgrown graveyard of Moonfleet.
natural charm which is Overhead the sky is heavy and stormy, painted in deep
revealed in the novel as in all
purples and brilliant yellows, with menacing clouds. The
adventure stories. The critical
boy is alarmed by a crudely carved wooden angel which
mind takes away the romantic
aura from the facts of the past, looms between the crooked gravestones, looking more
and reveals their base like an evil demon, and appearing to grow more and more
motivations, identical to those gigantic. Suddenly a shadow rises out of a grave. The
of our own times . . . On the terrified boy, who has just taken off his boot to ease his sore
other hand Lang always
feet, tumbles into a hole and loses consciousness. This
remains sensitive to the
romantic elements which
sequence, as well as many other aspects of the story,
characterise his early films. remind one of Dickens’ (if not Lean’s) Great Expectations,
Like all of Lang’s in both atmosphere and theme; this resemblance is all the
masterworks, Moonfleet owes more striking when one recalls the problems of Dickens
its success to a very strong with the two endings of the novel.
expression of the two
When he wakes, we see from his viewpoint a frog’s eye
components of his dialectics
. . . The film achieves in this view of a half circle of smugglers, with grimacing faces,
way a great subtlety of tone who surround him like a pallisade. From now on the
and rhythm. action will be seen very much through the eyes of the
Luc Moullet: Fritz Lang, brave little boy who, innocent and unsuspecting, is drawn
Editions Seghers, 1963
into a world of dark intrigues, the murderous desires of the
smugglers and the vices of a depraved aristocracy. At the
same time it has the tone of a ballad, with the theme oi the

345
Moonfleet (1954): Lang and his cinemascope format

strong, loyal friend to whom the dying mother has

entrusted her child, the romantic fantasies and adventures,
and the melancholy charm of a lost age.
In his treatment of period, the director of Destiny and
Liliom is again recognisable. The painted sky produces
effects half surrealist, half baroque, which serve to make
the characters more real to us. Composing in groups and
colour contrasts, Lang admirably copes with the Cinema¬
scope format which was forced on him, and which he
regards as only suited to ‘snakes and funerals’. The settings
(particularly the tavern inspired by a Hogarth picture)
built in the studio and on the lot are created dynamically in
the Cinemascope proportions. Lang’s careful preplanning
and innate sense of composition are present even in the
antipathetic ratio.
Typically, Lang’s success in making the characters real is
due to his refusal to romanticise them simply because they
appear in a romantic context. These figures from a Liaisons

346
Dangereuses world are at the same time realistic, and
portrayed in critical, contemporary terms: the rake
Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger), unscrupulous and grown
cynical yet still courageous and somehow a gentleman; the
corrupted Lord Ashwood (George Sanders), more cynical
than Fox and totally villainous; Lady Ashwood (Joan
Greenwood) simply greedy for money and pleasure.
When John Mohune meets his prospective but very
unwilling guardian, Jeremy, for the first time, he says with
innocent trust: ‘It’s nice to have a friend’. Next morning
he thinks he has been kidnapped when he is driven off to a
far-off school, and escapes, to burst inopportunely into a
dinner party at Jeremy’s house. Nevertheless he pleases
Jeremy by attacking Lord Ashwood when he supposes he
is insulting his new friend Jeremy (‘If the boy’s heart is set
on a career of rascality, there’s no man in England can set
him a better example’).
Left alone the next day, he begins to learn some of the
secrets of the past: how the arrogant Mohunes had set
the dogs on Jeremy for his interest in John’s mother;
the legend of the Mohune diamond; the eerie secret of
‘Redbeard’ Mohune’s coffin in the churchyard, which
spills out its macabre and intriguing contents. Investigat¬
ing the tomb of his ancestors, John finds, among the
scattered bones, a locket. Hearing footsteps coming near,
he hides in a corner; this is the smugglers’ hide-out.
From their conversation John learns that Jeremy is the
leader of the organisation. Trying to escape from the
tomb, John finds that the smugglers have blocked the
entrance with a huge rock. His cries for help only bring the
smugglers. Aware he has heard their secrets and knows
their identities, they plan to drown him in the sea.
Realising that John can be trusted to keep the secret,
Jeremy rescues him. The incident, however, provokes a
showdown between Jeremy and his villainous men; and
the Fairbanks-like swashbuckling battle which follows,
with everything in the inn being brought in as improvised
weapons, is a tribute both to Stewart Granger’s aptitude,
and, much more, to Lang’s virtuosity in mise en scene.
Jeremy plans to send John off to the colonies in the
charge of Mrs Minton, his mistress; but the jealous Mrs
Minton, realising that it is the memory of John’s dead
mother that stands between her and Jeremy (his affairs

347
with Lady Ashwood and the gypsy girl are of no
consequence next to that lost love), denounces him to the
military. Jeremy, wounded, nevertheless escapes from the
soldiers after a cliff-top fight. John accompanies him, but
Jeremy realises that they must separate tor the boy’s safety.
Meanwhile they succeed in deciphering the message
involving verses from the Bible with deliberately wrong
reference numbers written on an old parchment concealed
in a locket which John retrieved from the coffin of
‘Redbeard’ Mohune, and recaptured from the smugglers.
It reveals that the Mohune diamond was hidden in the well
of the fortifications which Redbeard used to command.
With the help of the servant girl from an inn and a stolen
Colonel’s uniform. Jeremy and John find the well-head,
and John is lowered down to find the diamond in the
locket. Jeremy risks his life to save the boy when the true
owner of the uniform suddenly turns up and they are
almost captured by the troops in the fortification; a
sequence which is at once excitingly swashbuckling and
comic.
The boy plans to start a new life in the colonies with
Jeremy, thanks to the diamond, but while he is safe and
sound asleep in a fishing hut by the sea, Jeremy leaves him,
taking the diamond, and leaving behind a note written on
the back of his own arrest warrant:

Go back to your mother’s house - for her sake. She was wrong to put
her trust in T c

Making off with his friends Lord and Lady Ashwood,

Jeremy is saved when the carriage is stopped by the soldiers
looking for him, thanks to Lady Ashwood who embraces
him thus hiding his face. Ashwood explains that it is his
daughter and her new husband. The Ashwood coat-of-
arms on the coach are enough to cow the military.
The conversation turns to John. (‘What did you do with
him? Kill him to be rid of him?’ ‘Yes, you approve?’)
Suddenly Jeremy demands that the carriage is turned back.
When Ashwood and his coachman resist Jeremy knocks
out the coachman and shoots Ashwood, but not before he
has himself received a mortal wound from Ashwood’s
sword-stick. Nevertheless he makes it to the hut where
John is still asleep. He tears the note he had left, so that only
the first sentence remains; and slips the locket with the

348
 Moonfleet: Jeremy (Stewart Granger) and Ashwood (George Sanders)

diamond into the boy’s pocket. The boy wakes:

JOHN: Time to go sir?

JEREMY: Our plans are changed.
JOHN: Shall we be able to go home?
JEREMY: Would you like that? (with difficulty)
JOHN: Yes, if you think it’s best.
JEREMY: It’s best.

He quietly closes the door behind him, and through the

window we see him in a boat with a red sail (dragged into
the water with what must have been great difficulty). He
lies down in the boat, his hand still holding on to the sail.
As the boat sails out of shot, the hand drops down.
This was the ending which Lang intended, having shot
and omitted a happy ending provided by the script. In this
we seejohn and his little playmate Grace walking with the
honest parson. When the parson comments that it is the
first time he has seen the great gates of the manor house
open, the young owner declares:

349
They must be open! There’s no telling - when he’ll come home . . .
PARSON: Jeremy Fox? You’re sure that you’ll hear from him -
some day?
JOHN : He’s my friend.
Lang was initially angry that this ending was added to
the film after the preview against his will. Today, as ever
scrupulously fair, he is prepared to revise his opinion:

I think now that I was completely wrong, because I can see that the
script motivated the return (Jeremy’s note; the last dialogue between
Jeremy and John) strongly.

The current ending, as Lang must be aware, is ambiguous

in its ‘happiness’ anyway. John is happy, but he does not
know what the audience knows; for the spectator the
ending then, is bitter-sweet.
It is the Rake’s Progress towards the better; but the
ending is not conventional or cliche; Fox’s change of heart
is motivated; the man who was once the lover of John’s
mother still retains the remnant of a conscience despite the
years’ accumulated cynicism; and it is the boy’s trusting
nature that has succeeded in reactivating it. It is achieved
without conformism or sentimentality. As in Clash By
Night and Human Desire Lang’s logic perceives that
resolutions which tend towards a happy ending are the
only possible solutions.

350
 33 While the City Sleeps (1955)

Lang . . . is as sharp as the It is myopic to see this film - as at least one German critic
edge oj a razor. His icy
did - as no more than a ‘thriller’. Lang was not concerned
detachment is that of the
with a ‘who-dunnif mystery. As in M he reveals the
naturalist or the ethnologist.
He describes a flock of crows identity of the murderer from the start; even before the
which devour a corpse, and credits we see him in action (though true to his usual
from his description grows a principle, Lang refrains from showing the murder itself).
judgment without appeal . . . The concern of the film is rather the effect of the
Lang draws a limited case oj
murder upon the other characters. It exposes the world
social pathology, he constructs,
of American newspapers and the sensational press, the
if you will, the ‘ideal type’ oj
a current phenomenon of social treachery and disloyalty that can divide friendly colleagues
corruption by money ... It is caught up in the rat-race for position, the advantages to be
a question of analysis which won by being the one to discover the murderer. The
only retains certain essential scheming is developed in a series of chessboard moves; the
details and whose object is to
tension comes not from external incident or conventional
destroy the myth oj the
journalist as a defender of
mystery suspense, but from the internal motives that drive
widows and orphans. on the action. This time the question is not ‘what makes
Jean Domarchi: ‘Lang le the murderer tick?’: Lang composes his film so that we
Constructeur’, Cahiers du understand this from the start. Again as in M Lang’s
Cinema, October 1956
sympathy or empathy for the murderer’s disturbed
mentality admits that this murderer, too, cannot help it.
The other people involved could behave in a different
way from what they do, yet they are more incurably ill
than the murderer, driven on and on against one another
by ‘the bloody spur of ambition’ and senseless competitive
rivalries.
A French critic has complained that the murderer is
‘misunderstood Freud’; yet Lang’s ‘lipstick killer , based
on real events, is very much more convincingly motivated
than, say, Losey’s neurotic murderer in his weak remake of
M. If the character from time to time seems conventional,
despite his tics and manias, it must be blamed less on the
director than on John Barrymore Jr, an incorrigibly

351
 mediocre actor whom Lang found he could teach nothing.

There were certain modifications of Charles Einstein’s

original book The Bloody Spur. Einstein’s killer writes on
the bathroom walls with his victim’s lipstick: ‘Help me for
God’s sake’ (which, in turn, was based on a real killer who
wrote ‘stop me before I kill more’). The Hays Office would
no doubt have resented the request to the Lord; and Lang’s
killer, a student who delivers drugstore parcels in the
evening, knows enough about psychoanalysis to write,
‘Ask mother’. One of the four journalists in the novel is a
notably colourless character, and Lang has reduced them
to three (‘decent men corrupted by the bloody spur of
ambition’, says the original paperback blurb).
Lang and his writer Casey Robinson make other
changes. Perhaps to avoid similarity with M, the
murderer’s victims no longer include a child; nor is his
third assault against an elderly woman who resembles his
mother. Recalling the ‘Letter to the Blue Gardenia’ the
crack reporter unscrupulously uses his own fiancee as bait,
and through television challenges the murderer, appealing
to his vanity and inciting him to give himself up.
This reporter, Mobley (Dana Andrews) is thus made a
more substantial character. At first he seems more decent
than the others because he declares himself to be without
ambition. Eventually however he proves as unscrupulous
as his colleague Casey Mayo. Not only is he prepared to
risk his own fiancee s life in this way, but he yields quite
readily to a nymphomaniac when it proves opportune.
Lang brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of the news¬
room where everyone is crowded and a glass wall is the
greatest privacy the privileged can claim; the buzz of
noise, work and intrigue is worked out with characteristic
instinct for rhythm and tension. We are really aware of
people and of a great news empire-on the line of Hearst’s
- at work. In spite of echoes of M, this is, after The Big
Heat, Lang s most American film, with its concern with
cynicism and self-assertion, the women who are never
unaware of the irony of their easy favours. In an amusing
incidental scene (based on a real experience of Lang’s)
Mildred (Ida Lupino) the gossip columnist sets out to
seduce Mobley, with her own lover’s connivance. At the
bar, she makes coquettish play with a stereoscope which

352
While the City Sleeps (1955): the lipstick killer
we are led to suppose contains pornographic pictures.
When she drops the gadget, we see, with the inquisitive
barman, that it is only a picture of herself as a baby lying
naked on her tummy. This ironic little scene was almost
cut by the producer, who could see neither point nor
humour in it, in spite of positive reactions from preview
audiences.
Lang’s critics have affected to see in the film both
misogyny (odd since the male characters are less sym¬
pathetic than the female) and an aversion to journalists.
But Lang sees only the truth: journalism is a hard
profession, and people must be tough to survive in it. Lang
is realistic about his heroes. They are no longer like the
ideally noble human Freder in Metropolis. Lang’s heroes are
no longer immaculate, but seen in all their weaknesses,
great and small.
When the old newspaper tycoon Walter Kyne dies,
there is no sentimentality: the long-ready obituary is got
out for the next edition, and a new power struggle is on.
His heir, the spoilt son Walter Kyne Jr (Vincent Price)
finds his only means of domination is to stimulate
competition and hatred. Only the picture editor Harry
Kritzer (James Craig) thinks that his affair with Kyne’s
wife Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming) saves him the necessity of
effort. Neither Kritzer nor Dorothy are deceived by the
nature of their relationship.

‘I’ll play it my own way as Walter’s best friend,’ he tells Dorothy.

‘With Walter’s best wife.’
‘I don’t want to involve you, darling,’ he replies.
‘My hero!’ is her ironic and rather cynical answer.

The only apparently neutral man is Mobley, and the slick

and cynical Mark Loving of Kyne News Service (George
Sanders) thinks he can win his support by getting his girl
friend Mildred to seduce him. At once pleased by the
opportunity and irked by his disregard for their affair,
Mildred cheerfully obliges. Of all of them perhaps Jon
Griffith (Thomas Mitchell) a hard drinking, hard working
Irishman is perhaps the most honest in his motives: he
needs the money.
Even Mobley s fiancee, Nancy (Sally Forrest) is neither
innocent nor free of the cynicism of the other two women,
though in deference to the League of Decency she is at least

354
 While the City Sleeps: the newsroom

less sophisticated than in the original novel, in which she

declares ‘I like my men experienced’. This very seeming
lack of sophistication, however, serves to make her even
less sympathetic in the film. She is constantly making sly
remarks full of sexual innuendo, and is something ot a
sexual tease. A certain coquetry finally serves to save her.
When the murderer tries to gain entry to her room by
pretending to be Mobley, she will not let him in because
she is jealous over the affair with Mildred.
The intrigue of the film is frequently better planned
than in the book - for instance the incident in which Mrs
Kyne, on her way to a date with Harry Kritzer, is almost
killed because Nancy has refused to let the murderer into
her room, which happens to be in the same house as
Kritzer. This replaces the scene in the original where the
murderer almost kills the woman who resembles his
mother.
The incident of the murderer’s flight into an under-

3 55
ground tunnel is so typical of Lang, that it is tempting to
think that Einstein, writing The Bloody Spur in 1953,
might have been inspired by Man Hunt, released twelve
years before. ‘Manners bolts into the blackness’, says the
script; \ . . the light hits a distant figure - Manners.’ We
hear ‘the roar and clattering of the oncoming train . . .
(which) blocks from cameraview’ the two men wrestling
with each other. Then, ‘the lights of the southbound train
are flickering over them’. Finally, ‘the sound of the north¬
bound train is heard, it comes closer and closer’. We see the
headlights; Mobley is ‘propelled across the express tracks’.
Manners, having broken free, runs up the spiral stairs to
the emergency exit, into the hands of the police.
Lang orchestrates light and sound easily, heightening
the tension to breathtaking intensity; yet where the action
itself contains suspense enough, and is driven on by the
dialogue, he makes little use of idiosyncratic virtuosity.
Only the pre-credit sequence, of the first murder, and the
scene in which the murderer listens to Mobley’s television
speech are shot in Lang’s typical chiaroscuro. Lang is
seeking a real environment instead of revealing ‘mys¬
terious’ atmosphere. The French word ambiance - un¬
translatable though it is, with its implication of a social
component-best expresses his intentions, in showing how
the violence of other people is triggered off by one man’s
violent actions. The starting point could well be some¬
thing else besides a murder story. Rather than showing
him as misogynist or hater of pressmen. While the City
Sleeps shows more forcefully than any other of Lang’s
films the loneliness of an individual.
While the City Sleeps: Mobley (Dana Andrews) in the underground
 34 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt presents an ever more difficult Lang, as is well known,
dramatic problem than Liliom - in which the hero dies always searches for the truth
beyond appearances, and here
haltway through the film. Here a hero who throughout
he searches for it beyond
the film has seemed altogether sympathetic and against improbabilities. It is perhaps a
whom we have seen false evidence deliberately fabricated, vain task to contrast this last
is at the last moment revealed as the murderer. Lang’s last film oj Lang’s with some of
film in the United States, it is very characteristic, even his earlier ones like Fury or
You Only Live Once . . .
though it was somewhat cut by the producers. It has often
Here innocence with the
been taken as a tract against capital punishment, but Lang
appearance oj culpability,
was seeking in it something more universal. In the summer there culpability with all the
ot 1969 he explained his intentions to me. At the time he appearance of innocence . . .
had read a lot of scripts during the period he was editing Beyond appearances what is
While the City Sleeps. Gradually it dawned on him why culpability or innocence? Is
one in reality ever innocent or
they all seemed so devoid of interest:
guilty?
‘Social’ themes, such as the exposure of corruption and similar subjects Jacques Rivette: ‘La Mam
seemed passes to me. (Beyond a Resonable Doubt)’,
How many more films on that subject? Cahiers du Cinema,
November 1957
People enjoyed these films, having become indifferent to VIOLENCE
(not by watching films or by daily life around them!) - a ‘social’ film
serves no other purpose but that of killing time. It was an unconscious
escape from monotonous daily routine of work and life into the
unreality of daydreaming.

More and more over the past lew years I pondered the question : what
or who is the cause or the reason of people’s increasing alienation?
Is it the double standards of our society - of the establishment - which
accepts for instance that a man may do certain things for which a
woman would be condemned?
These double standards which campaign against the immorality of
street prostitution by laws and prison sentences allow the better-paid
call girls to follow their trade, and even formally tax them on their
‘wages of sin’.

Laws against homosexuality, against abortion - discussions on the

‘morals’ of judges or politicians . . . and so on, ad infinitum!

358
It is the personal selfishness of the contented ‘respectable citizen’, his
lack of concern for the suffering of others, the lack of understanding,
the cold indifference unless one is involved oneself.
It is not merely the arrogant self-righteousness of bourgeois ‘morality’
and its prejudices, it is the intolerance of the mistakes or offences
committed by other people, the unwillingness to understand the
worries, feelings and sufferings of their fellow human beings!
AS LONG AS IT ISN’T A QUESTION OF ONE’S OWN SKIN

Lang cites instances of epileptics or accidents on the New

York sidewalks when passers-by walk on rather than get
involved, or the case in which a woman was assaulted and
killed in the street while people looked on without
troubling to telephone the police: ‘They might have had
to be witnesses in court - what a waste of time’. He
continued:

In fact people do not want to know who or how they really are, and
they are certainly not interested in knowing their fellow human
beings.
The basis of their actions is the deeply rooted personal dishonesty of
which the younger generation quite rightly accuses the older
generation.
As Brecht said: ‘Man is not good. Man is evil’.
I was pondering all this in Autumn 1955 when I was offered Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt; and when I asked myself whether the public would
accept the fact of the sympathetic ‘hero’ of the film, Dana Andrews,
turning out to be an unsympathetic murderer at the last moment, I
began to wonder who was the worse human being - the murderer or
the unscrupulous blackmailer who is after his money with egotistical
singlemindedness and without a moment’s thought for the possibility
that she is ruining his whole career and his future life?

This is no excuse; yet it may be an explanation. Or is it the woman

with whom the murderer is in love ? Does she really love him ? Did she
ever love him? To leave a man who has committed a murder is
perhaps understandable, but to betray him, to hand him over so that he
ends up in the electric chair is a completely different matter. Which of
the two is the worse character? Or which out of all three of them?

Or out of all four, if we include the journalist who is in love with

Susan, since he removes a rival for her affections simply by
telephoning the warden? Who then is the worse human being? The
man who is driven by his nature to murder, the blackmailer who is
only interested in money and is indifferent to the ruin she may effect to
his life; or the two philistines who do not even make the effort to
understand what might have driven the man to the murder; first,
because one does not do things like that', and secondly because by handing
over to the executioner ‘as he deserves , they smooth the way to their
own respectable marriage bed.

359
WHICH IS THE MOST DESPICABLE CHARACTER OUT OF
THE FOUR?

This was the problem which Lang set himself to

investigate, and he now asks himself whether he wholly or
partially succeeded, when the audience condemns the
murderer who agrees to play the role of a fictitious
murderer in order to help the newspaper tycoon Austin
Spencer in his campaign against the death penalty, and
incidentally to rid himself of the blackmailer without risk,
since he knows that when he is put on trial he will be
acquitted, and thereafter safe from further trial for the
offence. Partly Lang’s interest was the same as in While the
City Sleeps — the comparable guilt of the murderer and of
those who are prepared to profit financially or pro¬
fessionally from the hunt after the murderer.
The approach indicates less misanthropy in Lang than a
sympathy with the sufferings of unstable personalities that
goes back to M. Nor is his decision to open the film with an
execution in the electric chair a mark of sadism:

I was very keen on this first scene, because I wanted to impress Dana
Andrews (and of course the audience, too) with the heartlessness and
illogicality of a process which forces other people - by switching on
the fatal electric current - to commit the very same action as the person
who is condemned to death - that is, to kill a human being.

When Lang explained this to the producer, he

remarked, ‘Fine, Fritz; make it very realistic’. Lang asked
if there might not be trouble with the front office and
distributors, and was assured, ‘Don’t worry, that’s my
business’. During the shooting of the sequence, one of the
usual innumerable studio spies informed the front office,
and the producer was summoned. When he returned to
the stage where Lang was shooting the scene of the
convicted man waiting in the death cell, adjacent to the
execution room, the producer was enraged: ‘Why did you
shoot the electric chair scene so explicitly. You’re not at
UFA now. Here in America we don’t like these sadistic
scenes’.
Lang did not reply: it was not the first promise the
producer had broken. When the shooting was finished the
producer exercised all his charm in order to ensure Lang
would excise all the so-called cruel scenes. Lang, however,
left the cutting in the charge of his reliable cutter and friend

360
 Gene Fowler, Jr. who would save what he could. ‘But
Fritz, we are friends’, wailed the producer; ‘You can’t do
that to me; you can’t leave me now!’
The camera pans along the cells of the Condemned
Row, affording glimpses of the inmates. Two condemned
men in separate cells play chess on a board placed outside,
beside the bars of their two cells (this was based on an
incident Lang had seen in a real prison during his research).
This small touch - authentic or ‘cruel’ according to the
point of view of the spectator - is much more effective
than the original script which refers to a prisoner bent over
his bunk in silent prayer, another in an adjoining cell
pacing helplessly up and down, a third in the farthest cell
crouched like a wild animal.
For Beyond a Reasonable Doubt there exists an early
version of the script, which reveals the extent to which
Lang worked over his scenarios before starting to shoot.
Apropos of a scene in which Stephen Garrett (Dana
Andrews) listens to a conversation between Austin
Spencer, his prospective father-in-law and the pig-headed
District Attorney, Thompson, he notes that Stephen
should not listen in such an indifferent way:

I don’t think that Dana Andrews can sit through the whole scene
without taking sides, or say something important; not just a weak line
‘What’s wrong with that?’

Moreover he wants the scene between the two rivals to be

less amicable; one must feel that Austin is a genuine
opponent of capital punishment and the District Attorney
supports it:

There should be some fireworks, accusations by Beall* who’s

emotionally involved! It’s an old feud! . . . Garrett as a writer must have
some opinions about the whole question. He is too indifferent... a
writer always wants to meet interesting characters . . .

Lang also demands:

more about Beall’s point of view! The audience must be intrigued by

what Beall is standing for

Lang in other words wants to give this scene better

motivation from the start - an indication of his constant
insistence on the deeper psychological implications of
* The name of the Austin
every scene, of his objective approach to the characteri¬
Spencer character in the
early versions of the script. sation of people and events. Lang himself dictated the

36i
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956): establishing an alibi

entire immensely important introductory sequence in

which Stephen is taken along by his prospective father-in-
law to watch the execution. The writer Douglas Morrow
had simply a scene in which the jury condemns a man on
circumstantial evidence. (This scene was actually filmed
for use in countries like England where the censor would
have banned the showing of an execution.) Lang has
Spencer say:

He’s trying to reach the governor’s chair over the bodies of executed
men. I’m fighting against capital punishment. That’s why I wanted
you to see that execution this morning . . .

Apart from Eddie in You Only Live Once, none of

Lang’s heroes is very young. Garrett is in his middle or late
thirties, ruggedly handsome, casually but conservatively
dressed. His fiancee Susan is conventional, ambitious, with
expensive tastes. Not very sexual, she does not allow pre¬
marital intimacy, which is not accepted in her circles.
Between the two of them there is always a certain distance,
a noticeable restraint. Susan, too, is apparently the more
active partner in the engagement. From the start Lang and
the scenarist make clear her character: such a girl will not
stick to her fiance, but will betray him without qualms
rather than risk a scandal.
The very cool engagement scene is interrupted by a
telephone call. It is left unexplained, but makes Stephen
nervous (we know later it is from the blackmailing Patty-
Emma). With his hobby horse of capital punishment, even
Spencer is surprised at the newly engaged man’s eagerness
to talk about the subject. Garrett readily agrees to
Spencer’s proposition that he shall allow himself to be
framed for an as yet unsolved murder of a dancer in a cheap
amusement club (while Garrett postpones the marriage
date for unknown reasons), in order to demonstrate the
dangers of circumstantial evidence and of capital punish¬
ment.
Lang goes on methodically to show the fabrication ot
the evidence against Garrett, and at the same time the
progress of the police investigation as they question
associates of the murdered girl. Characteristically, Lang
makes each authentic in accent, posture, type. One, still
innocent, lived with the murdered girl, and is contrasted
sharply with a flamboyant type with dyed blonde hair.
This second girl, brassy and confident, has nothing good to
say about Patty Gay: ‘she was a real creep’. Only the third
girl, a bit more intelligent, has a description of the
murderer: ‘He had a grey tweed coat and a brown hat on
. . . and he was smoking a pipe.’ On the basis of such vague
evidence, Spencer has little difficulty in manufacturing a
suspect. Arrested and convicted Garrett waits in prison for
the photographs which Spencer had made of each item of
fabricated evidence. Then comes a ntardando so typical of
Lang. As Spencer drives out of his garage to take the
photos to court, a lorry hits it. Spencer is killed and the
films entirely destroyed.
The proof of Garrett’s innocence thus gone, Susan
dutifully sets out to fight for her fiance, aided by a
journalist who is in love with her. Their enquiries reveal
the surprising news that the murdered girl, Patty Gray was
really called Emma Bloker.
Just when everything seems hopeless, Austin Spencer s

363
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: the car crash

partner returns from a European trip, and an envelope is

found in which Spencer had made a written record of the
whole plot, for use in the event of some such accident as has
occurred. At this last moment of reprieve, however,
Garrett, worn out by worry, is caught off guard. He tells
Susan:

He should have found out who really killed Emma instead of putting
me through all this . . .

Susan is startled to learn that he knows the murdered girl’s

real name; and recognises that he is the killer. He confesses :
he had been made to marry Emma when he was only a boy
(she had cynically pretended to be pregnant), had lost sight
of her, but had recently been blackmailed by her after the
success of his writing and the announcement of his
engagement.
Garrett attempts to regain Susan’s shaken loyalty to
him:

364
 ate

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Susan (Joan Fontaine) with the journalist

‘And you proved your love by fighting tor me.’ 'I thought you were
innocent.’ ‘You’d have fought for me anyway ... if you had known
why I did it.’

She breaks away from his embrace and seeks advice trom
the journalist:

If ... I were accused of a crime ... and if you thought I might be

guilty . . . would you still help me?

His answer does not please her:

How could I love you and not do anything I could?

But when she explains the situation, his nobility suddenly

dissolves. He sees a way to have Susan: it is her duty to
inform the authorities, for if Garrett were acquitted he
could never again be convicted. She is still undecided, she
picks up the phone, puts it back. Lang introduces a touch
of irony: Garrett tells a reporter who asks it he will resume
his writing:

365
 I guess so. That’s the way I make my living . . .

On the word ’living’ the telephone call of Susan’s

journalist friend reaches the Governor who is just about to
sign Garrett’s pardon. The Governor puts down his pen:

Warden . . . have Mr Garrett taken back to his cell. There will be no

pardon.

Why is this hero so unsympathetic while the hero who

kills or wants to kill for the sake of ambition in Sternberg’s
and George Stevens’ adaptations of Dreiser’s An American
Tragedy does not strike the spectator as at all un¬
sympathetic? Perhaps it is because Garrett calculates the
whole alfair so coolly; or because the audience has become
so certain about his innocence. Perhaps he should have told
Susan more about his reasons and about the way he
suffered to keep her and our sympathies. Perhaps we are
not sufficiently taken into his confidence about the
suffering which brought him to his action.
Lang says he was interested not in the characters but in
the subject. He was again fascinated by questions of guilt
and innocence, by the vague ambiguities and ambivalences
of the subject. Throughout his films he again and again
asks the same question: What is guilt, and what is
innocence?
The ending was perhaps inevitable. The conclusion of
While the City Sleeps had still the possibility of not being
tragic; Woman in the Window was only a nightmare from
which the hero could wake; the equivocal ending of
Scarlet Street permitted the real murderer - the dupe - to
throw all the blame on the pimp, the worse human being.
In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt the conformist Susan and her
journalist will live on happy ever after. The father who
crusaded against capital punishment will be forgotten. For
Lang is in accord with Brecht: man is not good at all.

366
35 Working Methods and Style: The
American Period, 1934—1956

Other Countries - Other Methods

Lubitsch came to Hollywood in 1923, at the height of

twenties’ optimism and movie prosperity. Despite initial
troubles with Mary Pickford and occasional hostility, in
the aftermath of the War, this adroit and highly
commercial director triumphantly made his way. Mur-
nau, too, lured to Hollywood late in the twenties, was
given comparative freedom on his first film Sunrise,
though later commercial compromises and pressures were
to prove too much for him and he was to give up the
struggle against money interests to escape to the South
Seas.
1929 was the year of the stock market crash. The
carefree twenties with their prosperity were succeeded by
a period of social crisis and mental anguish, the turmoil ot
the troubled thirties.
Fritz Lang arrived in Hollywood from a Germany
which was ostensibly stabilised, which was eager to forget
the anguish of the early twenties, and which looked
forward (despite the rising numbers ot unemployed) to
Hitler’s promised economic miracle; a Germany equally
willing to overlook certain rather sinister ‘problems’ in the
hope of material improvements. He found an industry
technologically far in advance of the German studios, but
in which the director’s position was very different: here lie
was not a twentieth century prince, but just another
employee of the big film companies, no longer command-
h'ngTmTirmted money and manpower.
In Germany Lang had been used to writing his own
films, in collaboration with Thea von Harbou. In
Hollywood a script was often the confection of a whole

367
 number of writers, working simultaneously or in suc¬
cession. Lang had been used to cutting his own films; in
Hollywood the rushes were entrusted to an editor. He had
been accustomed to shoot on at the end of the day, to go on
making retakes until he was content. In Hollywood he
found regular working hours and strict control of breaks
tor the crews. Yet, even in the departmented studios, Lang
was often, rather surprisingly, able to manage a good deal
ot control over his scripts, editing, sets, and other aspects of
the films he made. He also attempted as much as possible to
follow his practice in Germany of maintaining something
of a repertory company of technicians and actors.
Although stars were often forced on him, it is enlightening
to examine the credits in his filmography; one finds again
and again the same names among both the technical and
casting credits.
Lang shared the unhappy experiences of other European
film people at MGM. At first the company found him no
work; they thought his shyness ‘Germanic’; and when his
first film was a surprise success, they were rather more
uncomfortable than pleased. Lang found himself struggl¬
ing all the time. He discovered Zanuck, a writer himself,
possessed understanding of art, though easily influenced by
sycophants. Other, lesser producers often believed Lang
too idiosyncratic or too perfectionist; hence his constant
moves from one studio to another, apart from three
successive films for Twentieth Century-Fox.
He found himself dragged into the muddy waters of the
witchhunts and blacklists. To avoid unemployment he
was forced to take whatever work he could get. Even
working for his own company did not make things easy.
When finally, after major films like The Big Heat and
While the City Sleeps, he at last turned his back on
Hollywood in order to realise an old cherished dream in a
new Germany, a remake of The Indian Tomb, he faced
disappointment. Lang’s outlook on life has been called
pessimistic; perhaps a more fitting word would be
‘disillusioned’.
V,__

YeF'tlTe'Un 1 ted States have given Lang a lot; and he

returned much to the country of his choice. It is not
without reason that he is known as ‘a director’s director’.
The director of M never deviated from the path along
which his character and his talent led him.

368

/
 Subject Matter
Lang wrote to me, in relation to The Spy:

There are two kinds of detective novels or better, to use the English
expression, ‘Whodunnits’. There is the type I never liked in which the
reader is made to solve riddles and where in the end after long and
boring chapters the action is finally explained and the identity of the
culprit revealed.

Or the second kind: showing both sides, that of the criminal as well as
that of the people who oppose him. I always found it much more
interesting to show, as in a game of chess, the moves of both partners, how
in an interlocking logic one move necessitates the next while
occasionally one side seems to prefer the short cut of violence.
Whether this - in its original sense - mental struggle between the two
minds has to be developed in psychological terms seems to me more
than doubtful . . .
* Francois Truffaut,
although speaking
specifically about one film, Though these statements are directly applicable to The Spy
sees quite clearly Lang’s and the Mabuse films, in the States Lang also retained this
constant method and principle of showing both sides.
theme: Lang is often described as ambiguous; and he points out
One sees that this film is at that he is by birth a Sagittarian, a discordant nature.
once both subversive and Already in M he raises his favourite problem of guilt. It is
daring, constructed as it is on
explored more deeply in his American films: in Fury the
the principle that ‘respectable’
people can be morally
innocent victim of a lynching almost becomes guilty in the
repugnant. In fact, it is the end. Films like Secret Beyond the Door, Beyond a Reasonable
duty of the artist to show us Doubt, While the City Sleeps are further variations of the
beauty where we had thought
question A
only ugliness existed. Fritz
Lang, throughout You Only The subjects of Lang’s films are very varied - often he
Live Once, underscores the accepted subjects that were offered him** (though always
contrast between the servility
there had to be something in the story to appeal to him, to
of people within ‘society’ and
the nobility of the ‘anti-social’
offer ‘possibilities’). Yet there are always inner con¬
couple. nections: whether in the preliminary preparation or the
‘Fritz Lang en Amerique’, Les studio work, they were turned into Lang subjects.
Films de Ma Vie Flammarion,
One means by which this was achieved was his
Paris 1975
characteristic stress 011 detail. The accumulation of detail,
** Alternatively he could
the power of the camera to isolate it at once gives him his
refuse: after Fury he turned
down a script about a
spontaneity and his realism: ‘detail produces authenticity
Jewish school teacher who said Stendhal. In his American films detail is no longer
was lynched after being symbol as in his German period. In Fury symbols may still
accused of raping a pupil. be important (the gossiping women paralleled with the
He did not want to be images of ducks; the number ‘22’ which pursues Spencer
typed as a director
Tracy in the dark street) and even in You Only Live Once
specialising in lynching
there is the frog image; yet their significance is deeper.
films.

369
 Lang once wrote to the present writer that his first three
American films formed a trilogy, but that the later ones,
Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Big Heat and
While the City Sleeps were directly connected with this
trilogy. These films of social problems are all the inevitable
followers of earlier work like M.

The Finished Script and other matters

The Bogdanovich interview occasionally gives the
impression that Lang at times had to take over ‘finished’
scripts in America. People who know and have worked
with Lang insist that there was never a case when he did
not meticulously work overjyscript, even “when he had to
shoot quickly. Lven m his so-called ‘final’ scripts, there are
always dialogue changes to make characters more
consistent, and reorganisation of whole passages of action
for the sake of logic. He writes in a letter:
What is a finished manuscript? It is not, as might be assumed, a
manuscript ready for shooting. It is a manuscript of a story which is far
from being a manuscript ready for shooting.

Never in my life have I been given a manuscript I could have filmed

straightaway. This applies to House by the River as much as to
Moonfleet.
It is a long way from a ‘finished’ manuscript to a final screenplay and
almost always did I have to work hard — sometimes not so hard - to
turn it into a final screenplay.

In a later letter Lang adds that the fine writer Dudley

Nichols who wrote Man Hunt and Scarlet Street always said
‘A script is only the blueprint for a future film’. Many
years before, too, an article signed by Lang, ‘Wir über uns
selbst’, in Film-Künstler (1928) speaks of Thea von Harbou
as:

an invaluable collaborator who out of a profound understanding of

my intentions creates the manuscripts which are the basis of my work.

Lang has often described how he worked with a

scriptwriter. If he liked a story offered him he would ask to
meet the scriptwriter at an early stage. He reckoned
himself a pretty good script doctor. He is rarely credited
by name for the script: it was more important to him to
arrive at the best scenario ready for shooting and which
would enable him to maintain, as required, the studio
shooting schedule.

370
 Each script, of course, was a different case. On Fury he is
credited; and passages like the pursuing ‘22’ are unmis-
takeably his. Sometimes - as on Hangmen also Die - the
original idea was his own. For While the City Sleeps he took
a screenplay in which he saw possibilities, though he felt
certain passages lacked the necessary logic. He introduced
the author to M and showed him a newspaper clipping
about a real-life sex murderer who had left a message on a
mirror: ‘Please catch me before I kill more’.
Lang saw the relationship with the scriptwriter as
essentially a collaboration. When it worked well, Lang
might conceive one scene, the writer another. Moreover
he encouraged the writers to include suggestions for
camera angles and positions if they wished. ‘I could always
change it if I wanted to.’

Camera Angles
I always proceeded as follows: on one or two evenings before I went
into the studio to shoot the sequence in question, in the mornings I sat
at home at my desk, after having seen the rushes, going over the floor
plan of the scenes to be filmed in the morning and decided every single
camera angle.*
I chose not only the angles, but also the kind of lens - whether 28, 30 or
40 - that was to be used.
This method of not working out the angles in the studio just before
shooting had two big advantages:
1) When we had rehearsed the sequence and the actors knew it inside
out, we could shoot the sequence out of the chronological order which
the audience sees later on. Then everything that had to be filmed in one
direction was shot first and then the shots in the opposite direction. This
meant that the lighting had to be changed only once and saved us a lot ot
time.
2) When I sat every evening say about two hours only working out the
various angles 1 had to shoot the next day I saved those two hours in
the studio. For a film with 40 days of shooting I thus saved 80 hours ot
shooting time spent in preparing angles. With an 8-hour working day
* Lang was a sufficiently
I thus saved 10 days of studio work (80 divided by 8) and the result was
well-trained architect to be
naturally a considerable reduction in the cost of a film.
able to make up the floor
plans for himself from the Everything in other words is planned and fixed before
set drawings, if he did not work m the studio begins. There are no longer experi¬
have the designers’ own ments and improvisations as in the early German period
floor plans; and he was
when everything had still to be invented. Only rarely
enough of a painter to be
able in turn to visualise the would a camera angle be changed in the studio, it Lang
composition from the plans suddenly perceived something that made for a better

371
Lang at the camera
atmosphere or was more suitable to the lighting.

The Rational Camera

Lang constantly emphasises that every movement of the
camera has to have a reason. He told Bogdanovich that he
tried to get his cameramen to use the camera where
possible to make the audience see the action as if from the
viewpoint of the protagonist. In this way the spectator can
identify directly, think with him and - we should also say,
in terms of Lang’s philosophy, suffer with him.
Despite the subtlety of lighting, the mastery of
atmosphere learned in Germany, Lang dislikes virtuoso
camera work (hence, for example, his rejection of the
zoom lens as ‘not natural’). Striving for authenticity, for
‘spontaneity’ and documentary verisimilitude, he de¬
manded from his cameramen the ‘newsreel’ method
already often mentioned.
Every tilt shot has its reason. In The Blue Gardenia, for
instance, the use of the crab dolly subtly emphasises the
cramped space of the girls’ bedroom. His most extensive
use of a variety of camera angles is in the psychologically
complex Clash by Night. Lang does not permit himself to
be seduced into camera tricks by the script. Fascinating as
they are on paper, Lang rejects the elaborate scenes
prescribed by the script of The Blue Gardenia (p. 370).
Josef von Sternberg was accustomed to claim that he
had operated the camera on all his films, and that the
cameramen credited were merely assistants. Lang, in
contrast, constantly stresses in his letters the excellence of
his cameramen. Only once, when I praised the angles and
camerawork of Secret Beyond the Door during Joan
Bennett’s nocturnal wanderings through rooms and
corridors did he reveal how much preparatory work he
had himself put into achieving these effects.

Working With Actors

There are, said Lang in a letter, apropos his silent films,
‘actors and actors. Some are serious about their work,
others are overconscientious, others have no idea what it’s
all about and others again are only interested in sillyjokes!’.
Generally the most intelligent and the most modest
actors understood Lang’s intentions, his perfectionism, the
fact that he demanded as much from himself as he did from

373
them. Edward G. Robinson has praised Lang’s under¬
standing of dramatic action, his rare energy and en¬
thusiasm. He admits it was not always easy to work with
him and his high demands, precision over detail, contempt
for the mediocre, occasional tyranny to those who did not
measure up to his level. Shortly before his death, the actor
told David Overbey in an interview that Lang was to him
one of the great ones, a true innovator. It he was hard to
work with, it was because he was so different from what
actors had been accustomed to in the United States. Yet tor
Ins great skill he was highly respected, so that actors and
technicians alike were prepared to accept his domineering
methods. He was part of everything, not only the director
of actors. He would even sweep the floor ot the set (Scarlet
Street) if he was dissatisfied with the way it was done. ‘He
could be extra precise, meticulous with externals,
dominating, autocratic for the sake of the work we were
doing. He knew what he was about.’
Dan Duryea gives a similar impression (cf. Eibel, p.
121). It could be a difficult test for an actor, yet it opened
up a bigger dimension. He worked with an actor, he
acknowledges, but he also worked tor the actor.
Other actors have recorded less complimentary views.
Marlene Dietrich, who may have been influenced in her
comments by the souring of a personal relationship with
Lang, says (cf. Eibel, p. 121) that she did not like working
with him because everything was already fixed and
constructed in his mind before the actor came along, and
would make no concessions. Even though he was rarely as
excellent as in the two films he made with Lang, Henry
Fonda (cf. Cinema 66) seemed not to comprehend the
working methods of Lang, whom he found incomprehen¬
sibly unyielding. More recently (Sight and Sound, Spring
1973) he has said that working with Lang was a bad
experience compared to the way in which John Ford
allowed the actor his head. He was not prepared like Boyer
to be told when to open or shut his eyes, as in Liliom; ‘but I
must admit it is effective on the screen’.
Fonda also mentions endless retakes of the scene in Y on
Only Live Once showing the dirty plates of the newly¬
weds’ meal:

He would dolly back and shoot, then he would stop and take the spoon

375
 from my dessert, move the ice cream a little bit and dirty the dish etc.
etc. He would do it fifty-five times . . .

Amusingly, Lang in writing about another film confirms

this in his article ‘The Frog and f:
If I was once criticised for spending an hour in arranging a pile of dirty
plates and left-overs in an apartment sink, yet one brief look which the
camera took at that sink explained to the audience much more about the
woman who owned that apartment than lines of dialogue.

(As he has said elsewhere: ‘Out of detail is created

atmosphere’.) Despite his reservations Fonda admits, ‘Fie is
a great director’.
In a letter to David Overbey, Joan Bennett, who has
elsewhere stated that she was never better than when
working with Lang, goes into detail about Lang’s
relationship with actors:

An ordinary day with Fritz Lang as director was ordinary m just one
respect, it was invariably handled as he alone could. For me, this was
extraordinary. He was thoroughly meticulous, with a complete grasp
of where he was going, exactly what he wanted and precisely how he
wanted his actors to perform. My confidence in him was absolute and
unquestioning. There were no demonstrations, discussions or analyses
of character. Fritz told his cast what he wanted - and that was it. He
was fanatical about realism. Just as he demanded that Michael
Redgrave and I do the actual shot of running through the burning
house in Secret, the one fearful moment I had in Scarlet Street was the
stabbing scene. I would have welcomed a double except for Fritz’s
insistence on the real thing and my confidence in him and his integrity.
Fritz was a demanding director, but working with him was well
worth the experience. As you well know, his camera techniques were
distinctive, original and revolutionary in the motion picture industry.
He had one - I suppose you might call it a trick - that he seemed to use
with me alone. He habitually stood behind the camera during
shooting and would motion to me with his hands for small
movements which would improve camera angles. He’s the only
director I ever worked for who did this, and while it seemed to be a
source of annoyance to others I’ve worked with, I accepted it Trilby¬
like because of the consummate confidence in his ability.

Rhonda Fleming (cf. Eibel, p.122) perhaps sums up

most succintly:

He was strict, occasionally almost severe — he is never gentle in his

attempts at getting results yet with him work gets done and it gets
done well.

A Perfectionist
When Lang was shooting American Guerrilla in the
Philippines a Naval Commander said to him, ambiguously:

376
‘They say you are a . . . perfectionist!’ Eibel quotes a
number of his associates who all confirm the stories of long
preparation, meticulous work on the script, pre-planning
of camera work, discussions with designers, architects and
cameramen; above all his immense knowledge of
technical means and possibilities, his indefatigable energy
and stamina. Even when it led to conflicts, his best
associates respected the need to be as he was.
Joseph Ruttenberg, cameraman of Fury praises the help
to the operator of Lang’s precise and subtle knowledge of
the camera and his preparatory work: improvisation
would take up too much time in the studio. Arthur Miller,
cameraman of Man Hunt also talks about Lang’s technical
knowledge and says that every scene he shot was given the
profile which alone gave it strong dramatic emphasis.
Nicholas Musuraca, camerman of Clash by Night and The
Blue Gardenia praises Lang’s enormous professional ability,
and Ernest Laszlo, the cameraman of While The City
Sleeps, also praises his professionalism, and ability to know
and get what he wants.
Most significant are the statements of Gene Fowler Jr.
He had been warned that Lang had the reputation for
‘devouring cutters alive’. Rather, he demanded:

ot everybody who worked with him a willingness to contribute to his

search for perfection - and in most American studios the word
perfection is looked at askance.

Fowler says that Lang taught him three things: that he had
still a lot to learn himself; that it was easy to work with
Lang once one admitted this; and finally how many things
could be expressed in film if it were cut correctly. He
mentions Lang’s interest in realism, his care for detail, his
expertise concerning the lens to be used for every shot, the
way his sets are always adapted to the size ot the lens (a
particularly interesting comment: with Lang the angle and
the respective lens size are always dependent on the
composition); his unrivalled knowledge of the crane and
its uses m specific situations. Fowler speaks as a cutter, who
has particular opportunity to appreciate the procedures
which precede the editing.

Atmosphere and Style: Shooting on location

Lang relates in a letter how the magic forest of Siegfried
was built:

377
 I remember how Thea von Harbou and myself tried, at first near
Dresden, then in the Harz mountains, to find a forest that seemed to fit
the intended stylisation of the Nibelungen. We could not find a ‘heroic’
forest. Somehow I was thinking of Boeckhn’s Schweigen im Walde,
and after discussions with my working crew Vollbrecht, Hunte and
Kettelhut, we decided to build the forest. And all the other external
shots were built, apart from the sand dunes down which the Huns rush
on horseback. (Somewhere around Berlin there was a suitable sand
dune in those days, though it was eventually swallowed up by
building sites.) I also shot the Tower of Babel scenes for Metropolis
there.
As far as I can remember I never filmed on location in Germany except
in the grounds of Woltersdorf.

(Woltersdorf was used in The Spiders and perhaps Harakiri.)

On another occasion Lang told me that if he had known
the great American Redwoods he would probably have
used them tor Siegfried’s forest. Yet ultimately he preferred
building his sets in the studio or the studio grounds,
because it gave him greater control of atmosphere and
mood by means of lighting.
In the United States Lang mostly stuck to this practice-
usually out of necessity. The prison in Fury was built
against the studio walls; and Lang explains in a letter that
the highway and the forest scenery were built:

perspectively by the very gifted art director Alexander Taluhoff i.e.

they were designed from the point of view of the camera. And this was
done in a way that they could be livened up by cars and people, yet
from a certain point onwards - looked at from the camera as focal
point — the life-size street was built in a constantly diminishing scale,
i.e. finishing off perspectively.

The same procedure was used for the exterior shots of You
Only Live Once which was filmed in and around the
studios. Because of the perspective building, there was
always a point beyond which actors could not move into
the set without appearing in altered scale. Lang confirms
also that:
For Man Hunt the port and all the other exterior shots (the forest in the
dried-out river bed in front of the cave into which Thorndyke has
escaped) were shot on the Fox Studio grounds.

The architect here was Wiard Ilmen, who also created the
backdrops and painted skies for Rancho Notorious which
unlike Lang’s earlier two Westerns, was not shot in natural
exteriors. For Moorfleet, too, only the scenes by the sea and
on the shore were shot outside the studio, on location
south of Marineland.

378
 —1
II
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11
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Lang selecting models for You Only Live Once

French critics often talk of a ‘vase clos’ in reference to

Lang’s German films; and Gavin Lambert sees in the
American films Lang’s love tor abstraction and con¬
struction. I would feel tempted to replace the word
‘abstract’ by ‘absolute’: Lang’s films have the perfection of
an ‘absolute composition’ in the architectural and logical
sense.
Surprisingly few critics have mentioned Lang’s genuine
exterior shots however. Gavin Lambert says that the
landscapes of The Return oj Fratik James are sott and
luminous, with a rich idyllic glow; and praises the rarely
equalled subtle shading of Western Union; yet he believes
that Lang, the painter, was mostly interested in the ex¬
ploratory use of Technicolor. Even Lang’s least perceptive
critic, Jensen, notes that ‘the proximity to such raw natural
forces - the pounding waves, moulds the characters and
their reactions’, that the intervention of nature is necessary,
and that the fine documentary introduction of the sardine

379
 fishery in Clash by Night was more than simply a virtuoso
exercise.
Yet in general Lang’s critics are still captivated by his
earlier formula of‘Man trapped by Fate’ (although even in
the earlier films ‘Fate’ is based on character), seeing the
heavy nocturnal chiaroscuro of the streets of Woman in the
Window, Scarlet Street and even Fury, and the night-time
assignations of Human Desire. Yet his remarks in the article
Flappily Ever After’ (Penguin Film Review, no 5) reveal
that he is not only interested in tragedy, the nocturnal
menace, the huis clos atmospheres created in the studios.
Tragedy has become for him the Greek idea, of‘character
is the daimon of man’, rather than the earlier ‘Man trapped
by fate’.
In one of his most recent letters he cites a quotation he
had found in Democrates:

A Everywhere man blames nature and fate, Yet his fate is mostly but the
echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.

Outlook: Germany or America ?

It is an academic question - and as trivial as the favourite
German dispute between the relative greatness of Goethe
or Schiller — whether Lang’s German films or his
American period are to be valued more highly. Gavin
Lambert regards the peak as being the German films, with
the American period - apart from Fury and You Only Live
Once - as a decline. American reviewers (who rarely know
the German films adequately) tend to consider his
American works as an evolution in his oeuvre.
The discussion leaves out essential elements of the
matter: the American films were made in a different time
and a different environment. There is doubtless, a
profound difference in perspective, but there is also a firm
continuity of vision. Lang, of course, matured as a natural
process of aging common to all men, and the change in
environment of course played a part in this maturation.
The first films, then, are not exactly the same as the later
films, but the same man made them all; both periods are
always related in essentials (Big Heat, for example, can be
taken to correspond to M in many ways).
French critics always pride themselves upon their
eccentricity: for them the apogee of his career is the second
German period, and particularly the Indian diptych.

380
 Meditating

APPENDIX

In a copy of the screenplay ot Rancho Notorious may be

discovered a short note to Daniel Taradash, the writer,
which illustrates much about Lang’s working method.
Generally his comments are brief and written in his large,
energetic writing. In this longer note, he is notably tactful,
beginning (using his own modification ot Taradash’s
nickname, ‘Dash’ or ‘Dachs’ as Lang called him):

‘Ach, Herr Dachs,* I think it is pure insolence to criticise the script.’

Lor all that, his criticisms are to the point:

i) My main impression is that from the birthday party onwards the

story leads away from its proper subject because the scenes are too long
and elaborate and divert from the story.
The shooting practice. We know from earlier scenes that Vern cannot
* The note is in German; shoot. The scene with Vern and Frenchy should end on p. 72 with
‘Dachs’ is the word for Frenchy’s words to Altar: ‘That’s right. I will be’, and merge into the
‘badger’, the animal. silver dollar scene on page 74, where Vern is the good shot.

381
 2) Vern should never suspect Frenchy, because we know Frenchy as a
gentleman-outlaw and consider him incapable of a brutal murder of a
woman (p. 70). The tension between Frenchy and Vern should only
arise out of Frenchy’s jealousy because of Altar (page 75).
3) I think Vern is quite logical in his search for the murderer. He
knows that three men* were in on the act. He knows from Tommy
that the wounded man has long, blond hair. He should look for the
friendly pairs among the outlaws. Kinch and Geary are often seen
together. The Wilson brothers too are together. He doesn’t even
notice that Kinch is suspicious of him, though Kinch attacks him
(p- 74)- Even during the bank raid he is not aware of Kinch’s shooting
him.
4) The preparations for the bank raid (at the ranch) and the raid itself
are very long.
5) Further to point 2: Vern says to Frenchy in jail that he is from
Wyoming and asks him if he has ever been there. Frenchy says, no.
Even if Vern thinks that Frenchy is lying, his acts of friendship must
convince him that Frenchy is not the murderer.

* At first there were to

have been three men; but
m later versions of the
script there were only two
one ot whom rapes and
murders Vern’s fiancee.

382
Part III: The Second German Period:
1959-1960

The circle is closed.

Fritz Lang in conversation with the author

383
 36 Der Tiger von Eschnapur; Das Indische
Grabmal (1959-60)

On a visit to India Lang had made some notes and done The great director Fritz Lang
some research for a film about the Taj Mahal, a monument made these films ten years ago
in Germany. They were then
to eternal love. The plan came to nothing and he returned
considered disturbing, even
to the United States. The subjects he was offered did not
ridiculous. Later on one
interest him, and a film on the tapping of private realised that Godard likes
telephones by the FBI and local police stations — a them. . . . Looking at them
fascinating foreshadowing of Watergate - ran into studiously as if they were
surprising (or not surprising) difficulties. difficult avantgardist works,
leads to the discovery of
In 1958 he eagerly accepted an offer from Arthur
something over and above their
Brauner in Germany to film The Tiger of Eschnapur and ideological content and the
its sequel The Indian Tomb, with the promise of a non-existent psychology of an
completely free hand. Perhaps it still rankled that thirty- exotic and romantic story: the
seven years before this subject, written by Lang and von classical lucidity of
construction , the stylisation of
Harbou, had been taken over by Joe May on the pretext
figures and situations, the
that Lang was too young to direct this subject.* This
meaningful glances, the
fulfilment of so old an ambition had an almost mystical continuity of space, the
significance. He felt the circle had closed. nostalgia, a kind of paralysis,
He was attracted by the adventure, the romanticism, the an almost uncanny abstraction.
exoticism, above all by the recherche du temps perdu of H.F. Südeutsche Zeitung, 13
November, 1968
Indian legend. He recognised too that he had to make a big
popular success, by creating fairytale splendour for a
Germany that was still not rich. In this he succeeded: the * It is one of the ironies
films were an instant popular success, though the reviews of film history that, just as
were negative. German critics at that time certainly the May film had been
edited into one incomplete
seemed to have a barely conscious resentment of the
feature in 1922 when it was
emigres of the thirties, like Lang and Dietrich. More
released outside of
recently, there is evidence of a new understanding of Lang, Germany, the Lang films
but in 1958 he was wryly amused to find ‘Yankee Go were released in America
Home’ chalked on walls both of the studio and locations. and England 111 a mutilated
single feature version called
The quotation at the head of this chapter is perhaps a
Journey to the Lost City
partial explanation of the strongly contrasted enthusiasm
(USA) or Tiger of Bengal
for the films in France, where there is a delight in elements (UK). See filmography.

384
 Der Tiger von Eschnapur (1958): Debra Paget in the dance sequence

essentially related to the noble classicism of Corneille, or

the rationalist lucidity of Descartes. The work has a
crystal-clear composition which is not the creation ol an
old man, but the crowning of maturity. When I
complained to Chabrol about the vagueness of the praise
showered on the film by the French critics, he pointed out
the mastery with which Lang presented the young
architect’s search for the dancer from chamber to chamber,
with gathering intensity and the balancing of colours and
structures. It is the formal perfection, the masterly use ot
decor and spatial structuring, on which the extreme
admiration of the Indian films is based.
Occasionally the stylisation and deliberate abstraction
recall the Nibelungen. Here too situations and sequences are
often set pieces of courtly splendour; sometimes the
subject demands a static treatment. At the same time there
is rich visual variety, as for instance in the subtle variations
introduced into the two separate temple dance scenes

385
 performed by Debra Paget - the first in the temple grotto,
and the second in which she is threatened, and apparently
even hypnotised by a snake. Again Lang’s mise en scene
achieves mastery in the sequence to which Chabrol made
reference - the young architect’s search through state¬
rooms, terraces and halls for the dancer Seetha. The
camera is very mobile, and we follow him almost
breathlessly through heavy gates which mysteriously close
one after the other behind him. Again Lang produces a
symphony of colours, a feeling for space and dimension, a
fusion of spatial units. Again the sequence is paralleled in
the second part, where the dancer walks similarly from
room to room with Chandra’s hostile brother, in order to
reach the dungeon where her beloved lies. There is yet a
different aspect of the situation when the architect’s sister is
also seeking Seetha, to help her in her quest for her brother.
Individual images are memorable for their formal
perfection: the palace surrounded by water and seen
against a vast expanse of sky; a hall with avenues of stone
elephants jutting like a pier into the water; the panorama
of an Indian town overlooking a bay; water, stone,
reflections, opalescent shimmer. Reflections in the water
are shattered by a pebble or a jumping fish; the sandstorm;
the mesmeric rhythm of galloping horses (which Lang had
already used in his Westerns); vultures in a burning sky;
the fugitive’s desperate gesture of shooting at the merciless
disc of the sun which appears in his sand-blinded eyes as
yellow and brown haloes; inevitably the grottoes, heavy
with mystery, with their strangely mingled colours; the
silent army of lepers which noiselessly menace from their
depths; the deep circular shaft in which the chained
architect is imprisoned.
The silent moments in this film have a resonance that
produces new spatial dimensions. The phosphorescent
colours melt together in the temple grotto, as the misty
haze and billowing smoke rise slowly up to veil the
gigantic limbs of the goddess, then clearing to reveal them
again so that she seems to come alive. Although the spatial
and atmospheric effects are so strongly characteristic of
Lang, they were produced in spite of a rather intractable
camera. One regrets that the director was not able to use
the cameraman of his choice, Fritz Arno Wagner, who had
so memorably shot Destiny, TheSpy,M^d The Last Will of

386
 Der Tiger von Eschnapur: the grotto passage

Dr Mabuse. Instead he was given Richard Angst, celebrated

for his memorable scenic photography for the ‘mountain’
films of Arnold Fanck and Lem Riefenstahl. Disappointed
in not being allowed to work with Lang, Wagner accepted
a job on an indifferent film that was being shot in
Geiselgasteig near Munich, and fell to his death in the
course of shooting.
In this admirable spectacle, Lang remained true to his
principles of what should constitute an adventure film:
sustained suspense, without psychological treatment of
character, or analysis of emotional reactions. He endeav¬
oured to modernise the subject, working over it with a
German writer (Werner Jörg Lüddecke), and entirely
reforming the original Lang—Harbou scenario. Now the
ending has Chandra discovering in the face of his defeated
enemy that hatred and revenge are hollow. While the
architect departs in a caravan, with Seetha, his sister and his
brother-in-law, we see the once-powerful maharaja

387
The Hindu Tomb: the strangling: Lang demonstrates (above)
388
transformed into the humble servant of a Buddhist priest.
Lang had to deal with a not very understanding
producer, Arthur Brauner, whose own film Morituri te
salutant - based on his experiences in a concentration
camp, and of which only the intentions were good - had
failed commercially. His eye was therefore obsessively on
the box office. Nonetheless, while Lang took great joy in
delivering exciting adventures which would be popular,
he never failed to make such adventures an organic part of
the story as seen from his own personal viewpoint. The
astonishing use of the rope trick in the film is an example.
Exciting in itself, it leads logically to the basket trick. A
court magician shoves sharp knives into a basket contain¬
ing a servant woman. After the trick - at first seemingly a
success - blood begins to ooze from the basket. While the
scene is exciting and popularly exotic, it also allows Lang
to make a serious point about both the character of the
maharaja (who is punishing Seetha’s faithful servant) and
the age of absolutism.

389
37 Die Tausend Augen des Dr Mabuse (The
Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, 1960)

After the popular success of the Indian films Arthur He makes films with ideas
rather than films of ideas. As
Brauner proposed a remake of the Nibelungen, an idea
he remarked recently ‘I live
which Lang, now back in the States, rejected as absurd.*
through my eyes’, and in the
Already, just after the war he had refused Eric Pommer’s end it is his power to embody
proposal of a remake of Destiny: he did not like to repeat his ideas visually which
himself. When Brauner came back with a suggestion for a accounts for the lasting effects
remake of The Last Will of Dr Mabuse, Lang agreed instead of his films. The main con flict
in them is not primarily on the
to film a new variation on the Mabuse theme, almost
intellectual level, between good
thirty years after The Last Will. He was attracted by the and bad, order and disorder,
idea of using a realistic modern style, new technological but on the intuitive between
notions, and an idea he had picked up from documents darkness and light. Light is
about a hotel microphone system the Nazis had planned to never in Lang used merely
use after the war to spy on foreign diplomats. decoratively, atmospherically,
but always psychologically to
As a thriller Lang’s last film is masterly: elated by his
convey emotional states.
love of whirlwind adventure, Lang produced a film which John Russell Taylor: ‘The
stands up well against the work of his preceding American Nine Lives of Dr Mabuse,
period. Yet it is more than a thriller: Lang was concerned Sight ind Sound Winter
with sounding a warning on dependence upon tech¬ 1961-2

nology, the benefits of science that can turn into a menace

in an age when one maniac might press a button and set off
a nuclear holocaust.
Lively, spontaneous, thrilling, the film has nowhere the
appearance of an old man’s work. Lang himself feared that
the opening was too long-winded; but his fears seem
groundless: the present-day spectator, to whom Mabuse is
quite unknown, requires certain background information. * He did not see how the
Echoing the famous scene of the murder of Dr Kramm problem of proper dialogue
in The Last Will, a man sits in his car as another car glides for the characters could be
up beside him. In the back seat is No. 12 (Howard solved. Were they to speak
the same dialogue that
Vernon), the executor of the new gang, his fingers tapping
appeared in the silent titles,
nervously on a violin-shaped box. There is a cutaway to he thought they would
the police station where the inspector sceptically listens to a sound ridiculous.

3 90
 Die Tausend Augen des Dr Mabuse (i960): the blind clairvoyant

From its audience, The telephone call in which the clairvoyant Cornelius predicts
Thousand Eyes asks both a car murder. On the word ‘murder’ there is a quick cut
greater innocence and infinitely back to the cars, and the executioner who pulls an unusual
greater sophistication than
rifle from his case and aims. When the traffic lights turn to
most of us bring to the movies
green, all the cars move on — except one. The main
nowadays.
Roger Greenspun: ‘Film difference between this scene and the murder of Dr
Favourites: The Thousand Kramm is that in The Last Will the noise of the shot was
Eyes of Dr MabuseFilm smothered by the concert of motor horns playfully tooted
Comment, March-April,
by the impatient drivers; we only find out later why Lang
1973
did not use this detail again.
In The Last Will we were already aware of who Dr
Kramm was and exactly what was happening. In The
Thousand Eyes, however, Lang maintains suspense by
keeping us ignorant at several points. Thus we learn after
the murder who the victim was, but not yet why he was
killed. A tearful woman announcer appears on television
to announce that the popular reporter Peter Barter, who
had promised a sensational scoop, died of a heart attack

391
Dr Mabuse: the executioner (Howard Vernon)

while driving his car. A quick cut takes us back to the

murder car where the chauffeur expresses curiosity about
what ‘the doctor’ looks like. The executor tells him that
similar curiosity was the reason why an American was
found with his throat cut. Soon the police and Interpol
discover that Barter was shot with a weapon that fires a
steel needle without sound, an American Army secret
weapon which was stolen by a soldier who was later found
with his throat cut. Thus we begin to get at least the
outlines of a conspiracy as details begin to dovetail
together. A search of Barter’s apartment reveals that every
scrap of tape or paper that might give a clue has been
removed. All that remains is a photograph of a girl friend.
The film is constantly kept on the move by Lang’s
characteristic overlapping, ellipsis, rapid cutting. If
someone mentions a person, an object or an event, the next
shot will show us something about this person, object or
event. A question is taken up and unexpectedly answered

392
 Dr Mabuse: the dead husband

in the succeeding shot. The device produces a breathtaking

pace and immediacy, which never sacrifices precision or
clarity.
Now the name of Mabuse begins to be mentioned. The
technique of the car murder reminds someone of the
mastermind of crime who died before the Hitler regime.
We see his overgrown grave; then in quick cuts, a room
with the police file ‘Dr Mabuse’; but then immediately
afterward are taken into the gangster headquarters where a
man - of whom we only see a close-up of a clubfooted leg
- is giving orders to the gang, using the name of Dr
Mabuse.
In a monitor van two gangsters are told to watch the
American millionaire Henry B. Travers (Peter van Eyck).
Henry Travers is seen carrying on discussions about taking
over the Arar Atomic Works, in his hotel - the Luxor. At
police headquarters there is talk of the mysterious crimes
and accidents that have all centred on the Luxor Hotel.

393
Then immediately we see the facade of the hotel with its
clearly lettered sign. The camera pans back: a young girl is
on a ledge, threatening to jump, watched by a thrilled
crowd. She ignores the hotel manager and detective who
are trying to help, but from an adjacent window Travers
manages to grab her hand and pull her to safety. This
dramatic ‘accidental’ meeting recalls the scene in Spies
where Sonja bursts into the hero’s hotel room, having
apparently just shot a man.
After this the story becomes an intricate mosaic of
interlocking incidents. Soon after ‘saving' Marion (Dawn
Adams), Travers meets Cornelius (‘Lupo Prezzo’*) a blind
clairvoyant who ‘foresees’ an automobile accident and a
problem with a business transaction in Travers’ future.
Soon both come true: an ‘accident’ with Travers’ car and a
truck; and explosion at the Arar Atomic Works which
Travers was negotiating for. Intrigued by Cornelius,
Travers accepts an invitation to a seance, which is also
attended by the odd Mistelzweig (Werner Peters), and by
the inspector with his ‘wife’ who turns out to be Barter’s
friend. During the seance, accompanied effectively by a
thunderstorm, Cornelius changes places with the inspector,
warning him of danger. A shot comes through the window
and hits the chair where the inspector was sitting. Cornelius
insists it was meant for himself.
Travers is shown, by a greedy hotel detective, an empty
suite where it is possible to watch what is happening in the
next room through a two-way mirror. By this time
Travers and Marion have begun to fall in love. She
receives a message from Professor Jordan (Wolfgang
* The same actor played
Preiss*) that the husband she hates and fears is on his way to Cornelius and Jordan;
find her. She flees from Travers’ suite. Travers watches the Wolfgang Preiss used the
meeting of the two; her clubfooted husband threatens her, Italian translation of his
and he is about to cut her face, Travers crashes through the own name for his second
role. The make-up is so
mirror which he has been watching, grabs the husband’s
good that even Roger
revolver and shoots him.
Greenspun in his otherwise
Jordan arrives with mysterious rapidity; he will take the perceptive article did not
body away with the help of the hotel detective, and they notice the single actor in
will claim that the husband died of a heart attack. Marion is both roles. Although Lang
free to marry Travers. Mistelzweig, however, suspects rarely played the
‘whodunnit’ game, in this
Marion. Cornelius’ dog was friendly with Marion, but
case he simply did not want
refused his own overtures of friendship.
the opening credits of the
Mistelzweig, still in the guise of an insurance agent, film to give the plot away.

394
Dr Mabuse: the wounded Marion with Travers
tricks Cornelius into revealing that he can actually see.
Meanwhile, in the ambulance carrying away the ‘dead’
husband, the clubfoot begins to move under the sheet. The
spectator suddenly realises the whole scene had been
staged. Yet the executor raises his gun; Marion must
remain free.
The lovers are about to go away together. Yet Travers
still has doubts. Marion finally breaks down and confesses:
she had been forced to take part in the plot. Mabuse wants
her to marry Travers; then back in the States, he would be
killed and Mabuse would hold all the power of his
economic empire. But now they must flee the hotel where
every room has eyes and ears, where in every ornament
there is hidden a television camera.
They get into the lift. In the lobby Mistelzweig notices
that the lift continues to descend past the ground floor. The
lift door opens on a lower level and the two lovers are
trapped in the giant spy center with television screens for
monitoring everything that happens in the hotel. In the
centre is Professor Jordan, who explains that the entire
system was built by the Nazis, but that it is now his realm
as the rightful heir of Dr Mabuse.** Locking them in the
hidden dungeon with a revolver to kill themselves before
they die of hunger, Jordan takes olbhis disguise. Walking
calmly through the lobby unnoticed, he is betrayed by the
joyful recognition of his own (Cornelius’) dog. He escapes
with his faithful executor. There is a wild chase, and then-
car suddenly goes out of control and breaks through the
railings to drop into the swirling water of the river below.
The television centre has been discovered and the lovers
are released. In the hospital where the wounded Marion is
being treated, Travers takes her hand; the scene is
purposely silent.

** For publicity reasons

Brauner wanted to make
Mabuse’s spiritual heir his
real son. ‘Son ot Mabuse’
seemed, rightly, ridiculous
to Lang and he refused.
Brauner later made the
claim in the original
programme anyway.

396
38 Lang's Statements About Himself: Le
Mepris

There are innumerable published ‘interviews’ with Lang;

but as has been pointed out these have to be approached
with caution - particularly those from the earlier periods.
Lang is conscious how often his remarks have been
misunderstood and misinterpreted. Even alleged tape-
recorded interviews are not always above suspicion: for
instance the interview which Cahiers du Cinema published
with the claim that it was taped by Gretchen Berg (Cahiers
Nos 169 and 179, August 1965 and June 1966) turned out
to be a skilful confection of statements from Lang’s article
‘Happily Ever After’ and other interviews, articles and
remarks made by Lang to Gretchen Berg and her father
Hermann G. Weinberg in informal meetings.
The best clues to Lang’s complex personality are his
own articles - though he has always insisted a film director
should express himself through his films and not through
writing or talking. Of the articles, ‘Happily Ever After’,
which has already been quoted earlier, is the longest and
most revealing. Of the audience Lang says:

I respect the audience, which I believe to be moving towards better

standards and higher truths on the screen as well as in life.

Nobody except the producer believes 111 the gullibility of a

public prepared to accept anything:

I am always suspicious of assumptions which discredit the audience,

because they are used for lazy, unintelligent or mept productions.

The article explains Lang’s appeal to contemporary young

people, who still find him entirely modern:

I believe in artistic rebellion. I think new approaches, new forms are

needed to reflect the changed world we are in . . .
. . . But I don’t think the only alternative to sugar is poison

397
(and this explains also why he is against unnecessary
violence).
For Lang, ‘the film creators are responsible to our own
time’. Contrary to the view of many critics - including
Lambert, Bogdanovich and Moullet - who stress Lang’s
pessimism, in this article he takes a stand against
negativism and despair:

Open City and Hangmen Also Die show man . . . in his own sense of
dignity. Both ot them . . . proclaim the solution through man’s
courage and sacrifice for those who live after him. This is not man as
the victim of fate or man dying for nothing.

Later, in Mepris, he expresses a similar view: ‘Death is no

solution’. Such a statement reveals the American films in a
new light, showing his own transformation, the philo¬
sophy of a man who insists, in the same article, ‘The
highest responsibility of the film creator is to reflect his
time’.
The 1946 article ‘The Frog and F, which relates the frog
incident from the shooting of You Only Live Once (1936)
contains two significant statements on style:

. . . a director must pay attention to detail because out of detail is

created atmosphere and atmosphere sets the mood and tempo which
condition the whole action of the film.

Spontaneity is what every director tries to achieve, perhaps it is

because I learned film making in a country where detail was always
thought important . . . that I say spontaneity comes from minute
attention to detail and constant practice. That careless jerk of the
thumb that halts the passing motorist, that flick of the wrist that
empties the glass and sends the barman back for another . . . these are
the fruits oflong endeavour. And in film making, too, spontaneity like
atmosphere can only be created by piling detail on detail.*

Some of Lang’s views on censorship appeared in an

article in the Los Angeles Daily News of 15 August, 1946,
headed ‘Director presents his case against censorship of
films’. The statement was stimulated by the cutting by the
* The importance of
Oregon censors of the scene in Woman in the Window in detail and decor to
which Joan Bennett tries to poison the blackmailer Dan character in film is
Duryea, on the grounds that there had been a recent real- emphasised as well by Lang

life murder by poison. Lang quotes Voltaire’s ‘I disapprove m his essay 'Ameublement
et Caractere’, written in
of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right
1968 for the book by
to say it’. His arguments are characteristic: aside from the Barsacq. (See
fact that censorship, in denying freedom of speech, is Bibliography).

398
 Fritz Lang (lytiy) (photo by Axel Madsen)

clearly unconstitutional, does it solve any problem? (cf:

‘Death is no solution’).

Censorship is an attempt to gloss over the sources of social ills, which,

if they could be wiped out, would make censorship unnecessary.
Failing to eradicate the real roots of crime — poverty, disease, unequal
opportunity, inadequate education (including sex education) — we
attempt with censorship to ignore and deny results of this failure.

Truth is always constructive; and where the young are

concerned, ‘should youth actually be kept trom facing
life?’

I am not opposed to censorship because I wish to make sensational or

sordid pictures. I hate bad taste and dirty jokes. But if stronger
language or more outspoken description appear necessary to me in
order to give a true characterisation of a particular man or woman, 1
want to be in a position to use what is necessary, irrespective of rules
designed to appease political censors.

Lang expresses similar views in the longish article ‘The

Freedom of the Screen’. He quotes a phrase trom a novel

399
by Michael Blanklort: ‘Reform is always the dream of the
young and the nightmare of the old’.

The way of real security and progress lies neither in the blind
acceptance or rejection of new ideas; they should be scrutinised, tested
and, it found of value, adopted. The censors would deny us the very
rights to examine what is new.

To limit or prevent the spread of ideas or suggestions which might

evoke a dangerous or unhealthy response among the immature,
illiterate or irresponsible or pretend they do not exist and to deny them
an honest treatment on the screen is to treat people like children and
prevent them from reaching maturity.

As to education in sex:

the danger, as always, does not lie in telling the truth, but in telling
half-truths.

Film must draw strength from life, for only by modelling themselves
on the ever-shifting patterns and conflict of society can they continue
to interest, to stimulate, and by dramatizing society’s problems,
indicate the solutions.

In an article in the Los Angeles Herald Express of 12

August, 1947 Lang published an article which appeared
under the heading: ‘Director Tells of Blood Letting and
Violence - Vicarious guilt complex amuses and tortures
“M” Man’ (Lang was not responsible for the title). He
develops the views on censoring expressed earlier, and
writes about the fascination of murder, already discussed
on page 113.

Why has the crime of murder such a patent clutch on the imagination
of all humans ? Why does a juicy murder shave even war events off the
front page ? And why is Shakespeare who wrote hardly a play without
a murder in it the greatest dramatist.

(The article was written at the same time that Secret Beyond
the Door was made ‘to show how a compulsion to murder
can be averted’.)
Lang also discusses the cinema in more general terms:

Drama begins with emotion, strong emotion and with conflicts of

desire and temperament. Given a group of human beings, hemmed in
by circumstances, driven by urges conscious or unconscious, their
actions must march to a climax and from that climax to a resolution.

In Shakespeare’s plays death always speaks the last line. In

his own films, writes Lang, he always:

tried to approach the murderer imaginatively, to show him as a

human being possessed of some demon that has driven him beyond the

400
 ordinary borderline ot human behaviour, and not the least part of
whose tragedy is that by murder he never solves his conflicts.
When a disappointed lover shoots his mistress — what does he gain ? He
has removed the last chance of possessing her body. And when he
shoots his rival, he only earns the girl’s unending hate.

For such reasons Lang found a new solution to tragedy in

Clash By Night', and in Scarlet Street so effectively exposed
the punishment of the murderer that neither the Hays
Office nor any other censorship body could find fault.
Another Lang Article, ’A Person from Porlock’ is a
wryly ironic treatment of interventions and objections he
suffered during the shooting of his films; while in his
‘Preface to Famous Films’ Lang paraphrases Lincoln: ‘The
cinema is the art of the people, by the people, for the
people’. The cinema after all had started in the nicke¬
lodeons, and was a collective art. It represented a new
language. Inevitably it had its cliches, but so far people had
barely touched the surface of the medium’s expressive
potential.
Finally, Lang has discovered among his papers some
previously unpublished notes concerning, he writes, ‘the
mental processes during the making of a film’:

One has an idea . . .

a notion of something . . .
an inspiration . . .
One of these inspirations (or notions or ideas) is somehow dream-like,
situated between reality and unreality and it is a very long process of
developing and revealing the visionary idea which we have seen with
our inner eye and to ultimately put it into ‘life-giving’ words.
Yet words have become impoverished in our time . . . they are like
worn-out coins, it would probably have been impossible to describe a
visionary beauty like Botticelli’s Venus in her shell, before it was created
on the canvas.
III am honest I have to confess that I never quite succeeded in turning
the wealth of visions I intended to film into actual films.
In Paris I was once asked in an interview where a creative idea (what is
called a directorial touch in English) comes from . . . and suddenly I
had the idea that I did not really know myself and I said: ‘I do things
intuitively without much thinking, because they seem right at the
moment’, and added, ‘Maybe a film maker should be psychoanalysed
when he has just finished a film, if he wants to find out, why he had one
particular idea and not another, and used it.
Perhaps I should describe in more detail how my films originate and
how I make them.

401
Almost as if I were sleepwalking.
This is the only expression 1 can find for this process, because 1 have had
no models, no masters whose style I tried to imitate.
Yet from the first moment of my cinematic career I consider filming
the art of our time and it is therefore only logical that the cinema
should be an expression of its time, in other words, ‘reflect its time’.
When, in 1922, 1 made my first Mabuse film I called it Dr Mabuse - the
Gambler, a picture of our time . . . and I believe that all my films are
somehow a picture of their time’.

Lang and 'Le Mepris’

How does the self-portrait presented by these views accord
with the image of Lang - a sort of ‘archive picture’ - in
Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris? When he set out to film
Moravia’s book, Godard confided to Mary Meerson of the
Cinematheque Frantpaise, that his dearest wish was to get
Lang to act the role of the film director. Lang was at first
hesitant because the film director was a fascist; and only
agreed because Godard assured him the part would be
tailored to suit him, and because ever since Truffaut’s Les
Quatre Cents Coups Lang had been keenly interested in the
nouvelle vague, and had closely followed Godard’s career.
Because Godard is accustomed to work without a script
and because of Lang’s ease in the role, I at first assumed that
Lang’s statements in the film were his own, improvised by
himself. Later Lang assured me that the quotations from
Dante, Corneille, Brecht, and even Hölderlin, however
appropriate they seem to him, were part of a real script
(not merely an outline) which Godard sent to Lang when
he arrived in Italy.
It is fascinating to observe this confrontation of two
directors of diametrically opposed approaches. Lang says
that he never thought of himself as a director in this film,
merely as an actor. He seems in the film, more of an
observer; indeed his function is similar to a Greek chorus.
He rarely added anything to the text even when Godard
asked him to. One of his contributions was the sentence
‘Death is no solution’ which is a remark he makes to
Michel Piccoli, who does most of the talking, as they walk
together in a wood, and which becomes a summing-up of
the Bardot character’s fatal car accident. The final
sentence, also, ‘One has to finish what one has started’ is, of
course, also Lang’s.

402
 Nevertheless the Hölderlin quotation which Godard
puts into Lang s mouth when the director is attacked by
the unpleasant producer (unpleasantly played by Jack
Palance) who says, ‘When I hear the word culture I reach
tor my cheque book’ is totally appropriate:
Fearless remains the man whenever he can. Alone with God, his simple
mind protects him. He needs no arms and no cunning. As long as
God’s help is near . . .

Such behaviour by a producer cannot have been an

unfamiliar experience for Lang; and his imperturbability
seems as natural here as when Godard has him quote
Brecht s lines (with reference to the scenarist who has
compromised himself to please the producer) to the effect
that every morning he goes to market and hopefully joins
the queue of people waiting to sell their lies.
The few shots - gigantic marble heads or a statue - of the
Ulysses film the director is supposed to be shooting do not
look at all like Lang; they might come rather from a
Cocteau film. (Godard was prevented by lack of money
and bad weather from showing more of the film.)
More important for us is his television interview with
Godard, after the filming of Le Mepris and his subsequent
remarks to me, which make it clear that he considers the
essential difference between himself and the Godard of
that period to be that Godard improvises while he
meticulously prepares everything in advance. He was
astonished that Godard does not show the car accident as
action — as he himself had done, for instance in Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt - but only as result, that is, he simply
shows the dead bodies in the car, revealed in flashes cut into
the reading of Bardot’s farewell letter. This single point
vividly illustrates the difference between the two creators.
Lang, a grand seigneur, wise as one of the seven Greek
sages, modestly followed Godard’s ‘Intentions’. As a final
gesture of his career he was content to play the role ol an
imperturbable observer of life.
This led to the television interview between Lang and
Godard, with no third person to intermediate or meddle:
an interview between a dinosaur and a baby, between an
Indian chief retiring to meditate and the younger son who
will take over the warpath.
Both admitted romantics, despite their passionate quest
for truth, they met in their love of the cinema. Both regard

403
themselves as workmen who know their trade. Both fight
against censorship, and admit that they cannot say why
they make films, only that they have to. Godard remarks
on Lang’s astonishing youthlulness, and Lang replies that
what matters is youth and its progress. Lang declares again
that a film has to have a theme, that it must offer food for
thought and discussion. To which Godard, in near Maoist
terms already, adds - for action and intervention.
In the final resort, it is necessary to finish what one has started.

404
Bibliography

Beilour, Raymond : ‘Sur Fritz Lang’, Critique, 226 (March 1966).

Berg, Gretchen : ‘La Nuit Viennoise’, Cahiers du Cinema, 160 (August
1965), 179 (June 1966).
Bogdanovich, Peter: Fritz Lang in America, Studio Vista (London,
1967).
Bunuel, Luis: ‘Textes (Metropolis)', Cahiers du Cinema, 223
(August/September 1971).
Courtade, Francis: Fritz Lang, Eric Losfeld/Terrain Vague (Paris,
1963).
Eibel, Alfred and Michel Mourlet: Fritz Lang: Choix de Textes,
Presence du Cinema (Paris, 1964).
Eisner, Lotte FT : ‘Notes sur le Style de Fritz Lang’, La Revue du Cinema,
2nd series, 5 (February 1947).
‘The German Films of Fritz Lang’, The Penguin Film Review, 6 (April 1948).
‘Le Style de M le Maudit’, L’Avant Scene, 39 (July 15-August 16, 1964).
Ferguson, Otis : ‘Fritz Lang and Company’ (23 June 1941).
‘Behind the Camera: Lang’ (30June 1941).
‘Fritz Lang, Continued’ (7july 1941), reprinted in The Film Criticism of Otis
Ferguson, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, 1971).
Franju, Georges: ‘Le Style de Fritz Lang’, Cinematographe, 2 (March
1937)-
Gandert, Gero : ‘Ein Interview’, Kinemathek, 3, Ausgewählte Filmtexte,
Marion von Schröder Verlag (Hamburg, 1963).
Guilleminault, Gilbert, and Phillipe Bernert: Les Princes des
Annees Falles, Pion (Paris, 1970).
Hymson, Joseph: ‘Fritz Lang’s M', UCLA Daily Bruin (7 November,
1969).
Jensen, Paul M.: The Cinema of Fritz Lang, Zwemmer (London, 1969).
Kracauer, Siegfried: From Caligari to Flitter: A Psychological History of
the German Film, Princeton University Press (Princeton, 1947).
Lambert, Gavin : ‘Fritz Lang’s America’, Sight and Sound (Summer, 1955;
Autumn, 1955).
Lang, Fritz : ‘Happily Ever After’, Penguin Film Review, 5 (January 1948).
‘Ameublement et Caractere’, in Leon Barsacq, Le Decor de Film, Seghers
(Paris, 1970).
Mamber, Stephen: ‘The American Films of Fritz Lang’, UCLA Daily
Bruin (15 October, 1969).
Ministro, Maurizio del: ‘Introduzione a Lang Expressionista’,
Letteratura, no. 85-87, Gennaio-Giugno/De Luce (Rome, 1967).
Moullet, Luc : Fritz Lang, Seghers (Paris, 1963).
Overbey, David L. : ‘Fritz Lang’s Death of a Career Girl’, Sight and Sound
(Autumn, 1975).

405
Phillips, Gene D. : ‘Fritz Lang Remembers’, Focus on Film, no. 20 (Spring

1975).
Rhode, Eric : Tower of Babel, Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London, 1966).
Rivette, Jacques, and Jean Domarchi : ‘Entrevue avec Fritz Lang’,
Cahiers du Cinema, no. 99.
Schröder, Peter: ‘Ornament und Ideologie: Zu Einer Fritz Lang
Retrospektive in Bad Ems’, Film, no. 8 (June/July 1964).
Schütte, Wolfram: ‘Kolportage, Stilisierung, Realismus, Anmerkun¬
gen zum Werk von Fritz Lang’, Film Studio, no. 44 (September 1964).
Taylor, John Russell: ‘The Nine Lives of Dr Mabuse’, Sight and
Sound (Winter 1961/62).
Truffaut, Franqois : ‘Fritz Lang en Amerique’, in Les Films de Ma Vie
Flammarion (Paris, 1975).
Verband der Deutschen Filmklubs: Retrospektive Fritz Lang:
Dokumentation (Bad Ems, 1964).
Weinberg, Herman G. : An Index to the Creative Workof Fritz Lang, Index
Series No. 5, Special Supplement to Sight and Sound (February, 1946).

406
 Filmography

The following filmography was based on a number ot published (see bibliography) and unpublished sources.
The most important of the latter was, of course, Lang himself and his personally corrected and updated copy
of the Weinberg ‘Creative Index’.
In the early period (1916 to 1917 or 18)> Lang wrote a number ot scenarios (\ .. in those days I wrote a script
in tour or five days—don t torget no dialogue and shorter films. . .’) some ot which were doubtless lost and
have since been forgotten even by Lang himself. According to Erich Pommer, the first script Lang ever
wrote was Peitsche (1916), but no one now knows it it was ever made into a film nor what it was about.

Die Hochzeit im Exzentrick Klub Totentanz (Dance of Death) Cast: Paul Biensfeldt (Daimyo
(Wedding in the Eccentric Club) Helios Film, 1919 Tokuyawa), Lil Dagover (O-Take-San),
1917 Director: Otto Rippert. Writer: Fritz Georg John (Buddhist Monk), Meinhard
Director: Joe May. Writer: Fritz Lang. Lang. Photographer: Willy Hameister. Art Maur (Prince Matahari), Rudolph
Photographer: Carl Hoffmann. Director: Hermann Warm. Lettinger (Karan), Erner Hübsch (Kin-Be-
Cast: Sascha Gura, Werner Krauss, Joseph Araki), Kaetcjüster (Hanake), Nils Prien
Rohmer. (OlafJ. Anderson), Herta Heden (Eva),
Joe Debbs (Series)
Loni Nest.
Decla-Bioscop, 1917
Die Frau mit den Orchideen (The Original length: 2525 metres. Released:
Director: Joe May. Writer : Fritz Lang.
Woman with the Orchid) Late December, Marmorhaus, Berlin.
Cast: Max Lande, Harry Liedtke.
Decla-Bioscop, 1919 1919. Atter Hara-Kiri, Hermann Warm,
Director: Otto Rippert. Writer: Fritz Walter Reimann and Walter Roehng
Hilde Warren und der Tod (Hilde Lang. Photographer: Carl Hoffmann. submitted a story to Lang and Erich
Warren and Death) Cast: Werner Krauss, Carl de Vogt, Gilda Pommer: Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari.
Decla-Bioscop, 1917 Langer. The popularity of the first part of Die
Director: Joe May. Writer: Fritz Lang. Spinnen was so great, however, that
Cast: Mia May (Hilde Warren), Fritz Der Herr der Liebe (The Master Pommer decided Lang had to begin the
Lang (Death, an old priest, a young of Love) second part at once. Lang’s idea that the
messenger, and a fourth role Lang no Decla-Bioscop/Helios Film, 1919 expressionistic story be framed by a
longer can recall). Director: Fritz Lang. Writer: Oscar normal prologue and epilogue was
Koffler. Photographer: Emil Schünemann. retained by the writers of the script (Karl
Cast: Carl de Vogt (Disescu), Gilda Mayer and Hans Janowitz), and Caligari
Halb-Blut (Half-Caste) Langer (Yvette), Erika Unruh, Fritz Lang. was then directed by Robert Wiene and
Decla-Bioscop, 1919
Released: Mid-September, 1919. Richard released by Decla in February 1920.
Director/ Writer: Fritz Lang. Photographer:
Oswald Lichtspiele, Berlin.
Carl Hoffmann. Die Spinnen. Part Two: Das
Cast: Ressel Orla, Carl de Vogt, Gilda Brillanten Schiff (The Diamond
Die Spinnen (The Spiders). Part
Langer, Carl-Gerrard Schröder, Paul Ship)
One Der Goldene See (The
Morgan.
Golden Lake) Decla-Bioscop, 1919
Premiere: Early April 1919. Marmorhaus, Director/Writer: Fritz Lang. Photographer:
Decla-Bioscop, 1919
Berlin Karl Freund. Art Directors: Otto Hunte,
Director/ Writer: Fritz Lang. Photographer:
Emil Schünemann. Art Directors: Otto Karl Ludwig Kirmse, Hermann Warm,
Pest in Florence (Plague in Hunte, Carl Ludwig Kirmse, Hermann Heinrich Unlauff.
Florence) Warm, Heinrich Umlauff. Cast: Carl de Vogt, Ressel Orla, Lil
Decla-Bioscop, 1919 Cast: Carl de Vogt (Kai Hoog), Ressel Dagover, Paul Morgan, Friedrich
Director: Otto Rippert. Writer: Fritz Orla (Lio Sha), Lil Dagover (Priestess of Kuehnc, Georg John, Meinhardt Maur,
Lang. Photographer: Willy Hamcister. Art the Sun King), Paul Morgan (Expert), Gilda Langer, Paul Biensfeldt.
Directors: Franz Jaffe (exteriors and Georg John (Dr. Telphas), Bruno Shooting: October/November 1919-
Florentine constructions), Hermann Lettinger (Terry Landon), Edgar Pauly Original length: 2219 metres. Released

Warm (interiors), Walter Reimann, (Four-finger John), Paul Biensfeldt. 1920. Early February 1920. Theater am

Walter Röhrig (murals and backgrounds). Original length: 1900 metres. Released: Moritzblatz, Berlin. This section of Die

Music: Bruno Geliert. 3.10.1919, Richard Oswald Lichtspiele, Spinnen was originally called Das Sklaven

Cast: Otto Mannstaedt (Cesare), Anders Berlin. Lang later made a novel from the Schiff (The Slave Ship) in Lang’s original

Wikman (Lorenzo, his son), Karl material of Der Goldene See which was four-part cycle; Parts Three (Das

Bernhard (his confidant), Franz Knaak first serialized in the Berlin Film-Kurier and Geheimnis der Sphinx—The Secret of the

(Cardinal), Erncr Hübsch (Monk), then published in book form. Sphinx) and Four (Um Asiens
Kaiserkrone—For Asia’s Imperial Crown)
Theodor Becker (Franziskus), Marga
Hara-kiri were written by Lang but never filmed.
Kierska (Julia), August Prasch-
Grevenberg (Servant), Hans Walter Decla-Bioscop, 1919
(Friend to Julia), Julietta Brandt (The Director: Fritz Lang. Writer: Max Jungk Das Wandernde Bild (The
Pest). (from the play, Madam Butterfly, by John Wandering Image)
The script for this film, as for Totentanz Luther Long and David Belasco). Joe May Company, 1919
and Die Frau mit den Orchideen, were Photographer: Max Fassbaender. Art Director: Fritz Lang. Writers: Fritz Lang,
evidently written before the making of Director: Heinrich Umlauff (with the Thea von Harbou.
Halb-Blut but were themselves filmed assistance ot the I.F.G. Umlauff Museum Cast: Mia May, Hans Marr.
afterwards. Released October 23, 1919. of Hamburg). Shooting: July 1919. Released 1920.

407
 Working title: Madonna im Schnee second time under Hitler’s government as Schön (Kriemhild), Rudolph Klein-
(Madonna of the Snow). 25.12.1920, The Indian Tomb (1938) by Richard Rogge (Etzel, King of the Huns), Georg
Tauentzienpalast, Berlin. Eichberg. Lang finally directed the August Koch (Hildebrand), Theodor Loos
1920. Lang wrote a four-part serial Der material himself in 1958/9 (see below). (Gunther), Bernhard Goetzke (Volker
Silberkoenig (The Silver King) for the Joe von Alzey), Hans Adalbert von Schlettow
May Company. Some of the material was Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. (Hagen Tronje), Georg John (Mime
subsequently filmed by Lothar Mendes. Mabuse, the Gambler) (Part one: Alberich, I; Blaodel, II), Gertrude Arnold
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler—Ein (Queen Ute), Hanna Ralph (Brunhild),
Vier um die Frau (Four Around a Rudolph Rittner (Rüdiger), Fritz Albert
Bild der Zeit—Dr. Mabuse, the
Woman) (Dietrich), Hans Carl Müller (Gerenot),
Gambler—A Picture of the
Decla-Bioscop, 1920 Edwin Biswanger (Giselher), Hardy von
Time; Part Two:
Director: Fritz Lang. Writers: Fritz Lang, Francois (Dankwart), Frieda Richard
Inferno—Menschen der
Thea von Harbou, (Lecturer), Georg Jurowski (Priest), Iris
Zeit—Inferno—Men of the
Cast: Carola Trolle (Madame Yquem), Roberts (Page), Grete Berger (Hun), Fritz
Time)
Ludwig Hartau (Mr. Yquem), Anton Alberti, Rose Lichtenstein.
Ullstein-Uco Film-Decla-Bioscop-Ufa.
Edthofer (The Swindler), Rudolph Klein- Shooting: (I) 15 weeks; (II) 16 weeks.
Director: Fritz Lang. Writers: Fritz Lang,
Rogge.
Thea von Harbou, from a novel by Original length: (I) 3216 metres; (II) 3576
Working title: Kaempfende Herzen metres. Released (with subtitle Ein
Norbert Jacques. Photographer: Carl
(Fighting Hearts). Released: Early
Hoffmann. Art Directors: Otto Hunte, Deutshes Heldenlied and shown on
February. Marmorhaus, Berlin.
Stahl-Urach. consecutive evenings): January, 1924.
Cast: Rudolph Klein-Rogge (Mabuse), During the production, Decla-Bioscop
Der Müde Tod (The Weary
Alfred Abel (Count Told), Aud Egede merged with Ufa. In 1925, Ufa released
Death)
Nissen (Cara Carozza), Gertrude Welcker outside of Germany a shortened version
American/British title Destiny.
(Countess Told), Bernhard Goetzke (Von (9000 foot) of Siegfried with music from
French title: Les Trois Lumieres
Wenck), Forster Larrinaga (Spörri), Paul Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen
Decla-Bioscop, 1921
Richter (Edgar Hull), Hans Adalbert von arranged by Hugo Reisenfeld, and in
Director: Fritz Lang. Writers: Fritz Lang,
Schlettow (Chauffeur), Georg John 1928 a shortened version (9000 foot) of
Thea von Harbou. Photographers: Erich
(Pesch), Grete Berger (Fine), Julius Kriemhilds Rache followed. In 1933, Ufa
Nietzschmann, Fritz Arno Wagner,
Falkenstein (Karsten), Lydia Potechina released an even shorter version (2258
Hermann Saalfrank. Lighting: Robert
(Russian Woman), Anita Berber metres) of Siegfried with sound effects and
Hegerwald. Art Directors: Hermann
(Dancer), Paul Biensfeldt (Man with the Wagner music. Needless to say, these
Warm, Robert Herlth, Walter Röhrig.
Gun), Karl Platen (Told’s Servant), Karl short versions, particularly with Wagner’s
Cast: Bernhard Goetzke (Death), Lil
Huszar (Hawasch), Edgar Pauly (Fat music which Lang dislikes, were not
Dagover (Young Woman), Walter
Man), Julius Hermann (Schramm), Lil authorized by the director.
Janssen (Young Man), Rudolph Klein-
Dagover, Adele Sandroch, Max Adalbert, (Siegfried) 14.2.1924, Ufa Palast am Zoo,
Rogge (Girolamo), Georg John
Hans J. Junkermann, Auguste Prasch- Berlin, (Kriemhild's Rache) 26.4.1924, Ufa
(Magician), Eduard von Winterstein
Grevenberg, Julie Brandt, Gustave Botz, Palast am Zoo, Berlin.
(Calife), Max Adalbert, Paul Biensfeldt,
Leonhard Haskel, Erner Hübsch,
Karl Huszar, Hermann Vallentin, Erika
Unruh, Wilhelm Diegclmann, Lothar Gottfried Huppertz, Alfred Klein, Erich Metropolis
Pabst, Hans Sternberg, Olf Storm, Erich Ufa, 1926
Müthel, Hermann Picha, Hans Sternberg.
Welter, Heinrich Gotho, Willy Schmidt- Director: Fritz Lang. Writers: Fritz Lang,
Shooting: 9 weeks. Original length: 2306
Gentner. Thea von Harbou. Photographers: Karl
metres. Released: October 1921. The film
was given a very brief American release in Shooting: (Mabuse) 8 weeks, (Inferno) 9 Freund, Günther Rittau. Special effects
weeks. Original length: (Mabuse) 95 photographer: Eugene Schüfftan. Art
July 1923 as Between Two Worlds by
minutes, (Inferno) 100 minutes. Released Directors : Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut,
Artclass. Released: 7.10.1921. Mozartsaal
(with tinted night sequences and shown Carl Vollbrecht. Sculptures: Walter
and U.T. Kurfürste Kürfurstendamm,
on consecutive evenings): April Schultze-Middendorff. Music: Gottfried
Berlin.
1922. (Mabuse) 27.4.1922, Ufa Palast am Huppertz.
Das Indische Grabmal (Part I: Die Zoo, Berlin, (Inferno) 26.5.1922, Ufa Cast: Brigitte Helm (Maria), Alfred Abel
Sendung des Yoghi; Part II Das Palast am Zoo, Berlin. (John Frederson), Gustave Fröhlich
Indische Grabmal) (The Hindu (Freder Frederson), Rudolph Klein-Rogge
Tomb) Die Nibelungen (Part One: (Rothwang), Heinrich Georg (Foreman),
Joe May Company, 1921 Siegfrieds Tod (Death of Fritz Rasp (Grot), Theodor Loos, Erwin
Director: Joe May. Writers: Fritz Lang, Siegfried); Part Two Kriemhilds Biswanger, Olaf Storm, Hans Leo Reich,
Thea von Harbou. Art Director: Martin Rache—Kriemhild s Revenge) Heinrich Gotho, Margarete Lanner, Max
Jacoby-Boy. Dccla-Bioscop-Ufa, 1923-24 Dietze, Georg John, Walter Kuhle,
Cast: Mia May, Conrad Veidt, Lya de Director: Fritz Lang. Writers: Fritz Lang Arthur Reinhard, Erwin Vater, Grete
Putti, Olaf Fonss, Erna Morena, Berhard and Thea von Harbou, based on Die Berger, Oily Böhcim, Ellen Frey, Lisa
Goetzke. Nibelungen and Norse Sagas. Gray, Rose Lichtenstein, Helene Weigel,
Lang and von Harbou had written this Photographers: Carl Hoffmann, Günther Beatrice Garga, Anny Hintze, Helen von
screenplay in 1920 with the idea that Lang Rittau, and Walter Ruttmann (for the Miinchhoten, Hilda Woitscheff, Fritz
would direct the film. At the last animated ‘Dream of the Falcon’ Alberti, 750 secondary actors and over
moment, May decided to direct it sequence). Art Directors: Otto Hunte, 30,000 extras.
himself. While in Germany the two parts Erich Kettelhut, Carl Vollbrecht. Shooting: 310 days, 60 nights—1925-26.
were shown on consecutive evenings, for Costumes: Paul Gerd Guderian, Anne 10.1.1927, Ufa Palast am Zoo, Berlin.
foreign distribution it was edited into a Willkomm. Armour and weapons of the The novel Metropolis by Thea von
single eight-reel feature and called Huns: Heinrich Umlauff. Make-up: Otto Harbou would seem to have been written
Mysteries of India (later changed to Above Genath. Music: Gottfried Huppertz. (as it was published) alter the film, rather
All Law). The scenario was filmed a Cast: Paul Richter (Siegfried), Margarete than the film having been ‘based on a

408
 novel by von Harbou’. When originally G.M.B.H., 1931 Nero Film-Constantin-Deutsche
shown, Metropolis ran for two hours (4189 Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Seymour Universal, 1932-33
metres). After its initial release (January Nebenzal. Writers: Fritz Lang, Thea von Director/Producer: Frita Lang. Writers:
1947), the film was considerably cut Harbou. Photographers: Fritz Arno Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou, based on
(10,400 teet). both abroad and in Wagner, Gustav Rathje. Camera Operator: characters from a novel by Norbert
Germany; no complete copy is now Karl Vash. Art Directors: Carl Vollbrecht, Jacques. Photographers: Fritz Arno
known to exist. Emil Hasler. Backdrop Photographs: Horst Wagner, Karl Vash. Art Directors: Carl
von Harbou. Music: excerpts from Peer Vollbrccht, Emil Hasler. Music: Dr. Hans
Spione (The Spy) Gynt by Edvard Grieg (‘murderer’s Erdmann.
Fritz Lang-Film-G.M.B.FF (released by theme’ whistled by Fritz Lang). Sound: Cast: Rudolph Klein-Rogge (Mabuse),
Ufa), 1927-28 Adolf Jansen. Sound Editor: Paul Oskar Beregi (Dr. Baum), Karl Mcixner
Director/Producer: Fritz Lang. Writers: Falkenberg. (Landlord), Theodor Loos (Dr. Kramm),
Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou. Cast: Peter Lorre (Franz Becker), Otto Otto Wernicke (Karl Lohmann), Klaus
Photographer: Fritz Arno Wagner. Art Wernicke (Karl Lohmann), Gustav Pohl (Müller), Wera Liessem (Lilli),
Directors: Otto Hunte, Carl Vollbrecht. Gründgens (Schraenker), Theo Lingen Gustav Diessl (Kent), Camilla Spira
Music: Werner R. Heymann. (Baurenfaenger), Theodor Loos (Juwelen-Anna), Rudolph Schündler
Cast: Rudolph Klein-Rogge (Haighi), (Commissioner Groeber), Georg John (Hardy), Theo Lingen (Hardy’s friend),
Gerda Maurus (Sonja), Willy Fritsch (Peddler), Ellen Widmann (Madame Paul Oskar Höcker (Bredow), Paul
(Detective), Lupu Pick (Masimoto), Fritz Becker), Inge Landgut (Elsie), Ernst Henckels (Lithographer), Georg John
Rasp (Ivan Stepanov), Lien Deyers Stahl-Nachbaur (Police Chief), Paul (Servant), Ludwig Stössel, Hadrian M.
(Kitty), Craighall Sherry (Burton Jason), Kemp (Pickpocket), Franz Stein Netto, Paul Bernd, Henry Pless,
Julius Falkenstein (Hotel Manager), Georg (Minister), Rudolf Bliimner (Attorney), A. E. Licho, Gerhard Bienert, Josef
John (Train Conductor), Paul Rehkopf Karl Platen (Watchman), Gerhard Bienert Damen, Karl Platen, Paul Rehkopf, Franz
(Strolch), Paul Hörbiger (Valet), Louis (Police Secretary), Rosa Veletti (Servant), Stein, Eduard Wesener, Bruno Ziener,
Ralph (Hans Morriera), Hermann Hertha von Walther (Prostitute), Fritz Heinrich Gotho, Michael von Newlinski,
Vallentm, Grete Berger, Hertha von Odemar (The Cheater), Fritz Gnass (A Anna Goltz, Heinrich Gretler.
Walther. Burglar), Heinrich Gretler, Lotte A French version was shot simultaneously
Shooting: 15 weeks at Neubabelsberg Löbinger, Isenta, Leonard Steckel, with the same technical crew. The
Studios, Berlin. Original length: 4364 Karchow, Edgar Pauly, Kepich Günther scenario was adapted into French by
metres. 22.3.1928, Ufa Palast am Zoo, Neumann, Krehan, Almas, Kurth, A. Rene-Sti.
Berlin. Balthaus, Leeser, Behai, Rosa Cast: Rudolph Klein-Rogge, Oskar
Lichtenstein, Carell, Lohde, Döblin, Beregi, Karl Mcixner, Jim Gerald
Frau im Mond (Woman in the Loretto, Maja Norden, Josef Damen, (Lohmann), Thorny Bourdelle, Maurice
Moon) Wulf, Bruno Ziener, Walth, Wanka, Maillot, Monique Rolland, Rene Ferte,
Fritz-Lang-Film-G.M.B.H. (released by Wannemann, Otto Waldis, Eckhof, Daniel Mendaillc, Raymond Cordy,
Ufa), 1928 Mascheck, Else Ehser, Matthis, Elzer, Ginette Gaubert, Sylvie de Pedrillo,
Director/Producer: Fritz Lang. Writers: Mederow, Trutz, Stroux, Swinborne, Merminod, Georges Tourreil, George
Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou. Faber, Margarete Melzer, Use Paulais, Jacques Ehrem, Lily Rezillot.
Photographers: Curt Courant, Oskar Fürstenberg, Trude Moos, Gelingk, Shooting: 10 weeks. Forbidden in
Fischinger, Otto Kanturek. Special effects: Hadrian M. Netto, Goldstein, Nied, Anna Germany, censorship card dated
Konstantin Tschetwerikoff. Art Directors: Goltz, Klaus Pohl, Heinrich Gotho, 29-3-I933- When the Nazis banned the
Otto Hunte, Emil Hasler, Carl Polland, Hadank, Rebane, Hartberg, film, unassembled footage of the French
Vollbrecht. Backdrop photographs: Horst Rehkopf, Hempel, Rcihsig, Höcker, version was smuggled out of Germany
von Harbou. Music: Willy Schimdt- Rhaden, Hoermann, Ritter, Sablotski, and edited in France by Lothar Wolff into
Gentner. Technical Advisors: Hermann Sascha, Agnes Schultz-Lichterfeld. a less complete version than Lang’s own
Oberth, Willy Ley. Shooting: 6 weeks. 11.5.1931, Ufa Palast German version. It was the French
Cast: Gerda Maurus (Frieda Venten), am Zoo, Berlin. Upon its original release version which was released in the United
Willy Fritsch (Professor Helius), Fritz (May 11, 1931) M ran for two hours. States in 1943 for which Lang wrote a
Rasp (Walt Turner), Gustav von Since then the film has often been special foreword.
Wangenheim (Hans Windegger), Klaus shortened; it is now most commonly
Pohl (Professor Georg Manfeldt), Gustl shown in a version of 89 minutes, Liliom
Stark-Gstettenbaur (Gustav), Margarete although rare, complete prints do exist. S.A.F-Fox Europa, 1933
Kupfer (Madame Hippolt), Tilla Durieux, A 1933 dubbed version was released in the Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Erich
Hermann Vallentm, Max Zilzer, United States with only Lorre speaking Pommer. Writers: Fritz Lang, Robert
Mahmud Terja Bey, Borwin Walth his own lines. In 1951, Superior Pictures- Licbmann, Bernard Zimmer, based on the
(Financiers), Max Maximilian (Grotjan), Columbia released a version of M play by Ferenc Molnar. Photographers:
Alexa von Porembsky (Flower Vendor), produced by Seymour Nebenzal, directed Rudolph Mate, Louis Nee. Art Directors:
Gerhard Dammann (Foreman), Heinrich by Joseph Losey, with a screenplay by Paul Colin, Rene Renoux. Music: Jean
Gotho, Karl Platen, Alfred Loretto, Edgar Norman Reilly Raine, Leo Katcher and Lenoir, Franz Waxman. Assistant Director:
Pauly, and Jesephine the Mouse. Waldo Salt. Although obviously based on Jacques P. Feydeau.
Shooting: 13 weeks. Original length: the original screenplay and film, neither Cast: Charles Boyer (Liliom), Madeleine
4356 metres. 15.10.1929, Ufa Palast am Lang nor von Harbou are credited, which Ozeray (Julie), Florelle (Madame
Zoo, Berlin. Frau im Mond has also been given the dubious quality of the film may Muskat), Robert Arnoux (Strong Arm),
known in the United States and England be just as well. Roland Toutain (Sailor), Alexandre
under the titles By Rocket to the Moon and Rignault (Hollinger), Henri Richaud
The Girl in the Moon. Das Testament von Dr. (Commisionary), Richard Darencet
Mabuse/La Testament du Dr. (Purgatory Police), Antonin Artaud
M Mabuse (The Last Will of Dr. (Knife Grinder), Raoul Marco
Nero Film A.G.-Ver. Star Film- Mabuse) (Detective), Alcover (Alfred), Leon Arnel

409
 (Clerk), Rene Stern (Cashier), Upp, based on a story by Norman Photographers (Technicolour): Edward
Maximilienne, Minimi Funcs, Viviane Krasna. Photographer: Charles Lang, Jr. Cronjager, Allen M. Davey. Art Directors:
Romance, Mila Parely, Rosa Valetti, Lily Art Directors: Hans Dreier, Ernest Fegte. Richard Day, Wiard B. Ihnen. Set
Latte. Set Decorator: A. E. Freudeman. Music: Decorator: Thomas Little. Costumes:
Shooting: 57 days, starting December Kurt Weill, Boris Morros. Songs: ‘The Travis Banton. Music: David Buttolph.
1933 at St. Maurice Studios, Paris. Right Guy For Me’ by Weill, Sam Editor: Robert Bischoff.
Original length: 2 hours. Released: May Coslow: ‘You and Me’ by Ralph Freed, Cast: Robert Young (Richard Blake),
15 1934, Paris. Frederick Hollander. Musical Advisor: Phil Randolph Scott (Vance Shaw), Dean
Boutclie. Editor: Paul Weathcrwax. Jagger (Edward Creighton), Virginia
Fury Cast: Sylvia Sidney (Helen Roberts), Gilmore (Sue Creighton), John Carradine
Metro-Gold wyn-Mayer, 1936 George Raft (Joe Dennis), Robert (Don Murdoch), Slim Summerville
Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Joseph L. Cummings (Jim), Barton MacLane (Herman), Chill Wills (Homer), Barton
Mankiewicz. Writers: Fritz Lang and (Mickey), Roscoe Karns (Cuffy), Harry McLanc (Jack Slade), Russell Hicks
Bartlett Cormack, based on the story Carey (Mr. Morris), Warren Hymcr (Governor), Victor Kiligan (Charlie),
‘Mob Rule’ by Norman Krasna. (Gimpy), George E. Stone (Patsy), Guinn Minor Watson (Pat Grogan), George
Photographer: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art Williams (Cab Driver), Vera Gordon Chandler (Herb), Chief Big Tree (Chief
Director: Cedric Gibbons (assisted by (Mrs. Levine), Carol Paige (Torch Spotted Horse), Chief Thundercloud
William A. Horning, Edwin B. Willis). Singer), Bernadene Hayes (Nellie), Egon (Indian Leader), Dick Rich (Porky),
Costumes: Dolly Tree. Music: Franz Breecher (Mr. Levine), Joyce Compton Harry Strong (Henchman), Charles
Waxman. Editor: Frank Sullivan. Assistant (Blonde), Cecil Cunningham (Mrs. Middleton (Stagecoach Rider), Addison
Director: Horace Hough. Morris), Willard Robertson (Dayton), Richards (Captain Harlow), J. Edward
Cast: Spencer Tracy (Joe Wheeler), Sylvia Roger Grey (Attendant), Adrian Morris Bromberg, Irving Bacon.
Sidney (Katherine Grant), Walter Abel (Knucks),Joe Gray, Jack Pennick, Kit Shooting: 56 days. Original length: 93
(District Attorney), Bruce Cabot (Kirby Guard, Fern Emmet, Max Barwyn, James minutes. Released: February 21.
Dawson), Edward Ellis (Sheriff), Walter McNamara, Paul Newlan, Harlan Briggs,
Brennan (Bugs Mayers), Frank Albertson
Man Hunt
Blanca Vischer, Hetra Lynd, Jimmie
Twentieth Century-Fox, 1941
(Charlie), George Walcott (Tom), Arthur Dundee, Teryy Raye. Sheila Darcy,
Director: Fritz Lang. Associate Producer:
Stone (Durkin), Morgan Wallace (Fred Margaret Randall, Jack Mulhall, Sam
Kenneth Macgowan. Writer: Dudley
Garrett), George Chandler (Milton Ash, Ruth Rogers, Julia Faye, Arthur
Nichols, based on the novel Rogue Male
Jackson), Roger Grey (Stranger), Edwin Hoyt.
Maxwell (Vickery), Howard Hickman by Geoffrey Household. Photographer:
Shooting: 45 days. Original length: 90
Arthur Miller. Art Directors: Richard
(Governor), Jonathan Hale (Defense minutes. Released June 3.
Day, Wiard B. Ihnen. Set Decorator:
Attorney), Leila Bennett (Edna Hooper),
Thomas Little. Costumes: Travis Banton.
Esther Dale (Mrs. Whipple), Helene Flint The Return of Frank James
(Franchette), Frank Sully (Dynamiter). Music: Altred Newman. Editor: Allen
Twentieth-Ccntury-Fox, 1940
McNeil.
Original length: 94 minutes. Released Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Darryl F.
June 5, 1936. Cast: Walter Pidgeon (Captain
Zanuck. Associate Producer: Kenneth
Thorndike), Joan Bennett (Jenny), George
Macgowan. Writer: Sam Heilman.
Sanders (Quive-Smith), John Carradine
You Only Live Once Photographers (Technicolour): George
(Mr. Jones), Roddy McDowall (Vaner),
Wanger-United Artists, 1937 Barnes, William V. Skall. Art Directors:
Richard Day, Wiard B. Ihnen. Set Ludwig Stössel (Doctor), Heather
Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Walter
Decorator: Thomas Little. Costumes: Thatcher (Lady Risborough), Frederick
Wanger. Writers: Gene Townc, Graham
Travis Banton. Music: David Buttolph. Walcock (Lord Risborough), Roger
Baker, based on a story by Towne.
Editor: Walter Thompson. Imhof (Captain Jensen), Egon Brecher
Photographer: Leon Shamroy. Art Director:
Cast: Henry Fonda (Frank James), Gene (Whiskers), Lester Matthews (Major),
Alexander Toluboff. Music: Alfred
Tierney (Eleanor), Jackie Cooper (Clem), Holmes Herbert (Farnsworthy), Eily
Newman. Song ‘A Thousand Dreams of
Henry Hull (Major Rufus Todd), Malyon (Postmistress), Arno Frey (Police
You’ by Louis Alter, Paul Francis
J. Edward Bromberg (George Rynyan), Lieutenant), Fredrik Vogedink
Webster. Editor: Daniel Mandcll. Assistant
Director: Robert Lee. Donald Meek (McCoy), Eddie Collins (Ambassador), Lucien Pnval (Man with

Cast: Sylvia Sidney (Joan Graham), (Station Agent), John Carradine (Bob Umbrella), Herbert Evans (Reeves),
Ford), George Barbier (Judge), Ernest Keith Hitchcock (Bobby).
Henry Fonda (Eddie Taylor), Barton
MacLane (Stephen Whitney), Jean Dixon Whitman (Pinky), Charles Tannen Original length : 105 minutes (longest

(Bonnie Graham), William Gargan (Charlie Ford), Lloyd Corrigan existing version 102 minutes). Released:

(Randolph Stone), Russell Hicks (Agent), June 20.

(Father Dolan), Warren Hymcr (Mugsy),
Charles ‘Chick’ Sale (Ethan), Margaret Victor Kilian (Preacher), Edward Confirm or Deny
Hamilton (Hester), Guinn Williams Me Wade (Colonel Jackson), George Twentieth Century-Fox, 1941
(Rogers), Jerome Cowan (Dr. Hill), John Chandler (Roy), Irving Bacon
Director: Archie Mayo (and uncreditcd
Wray (Warden), Jonathan Hale (District (Bystander), Frank Shannon (Sheriff),
Fritz Lang). Producer : Len Hammond.
Attorney), Ward Bond (Guard), Wade Barbara Papper (Nellie Blane), Louis
Writer: Joe Swering, based on a story by
Boteler (Policeman), Henry Taylor Mason (Mose), William Pawley, Frank Samuel Fuller, Henry Wales.
(Kozderonas), Jean Stoddard Sully, Davidson Clark.
Photographer: Leon Shamroy.
(Stenographer), Ben Hall (Messenger), Shooting: 46 days. Original length: 92
Cast Don Amechc, Joan Bennett, Roddy
Walter De Palma. minutes. Released: August 16.
McDowall, John Loder.
Shooting: 46 days. Original length: 86
Mayo took over when Lang suffered a
minutes. Released January 29. Western Union not unfortunate illness (he never liked the
Twentieth-Century-Fox, 1941 film and was merely fulfilling his
You and Me Director: Fritz Lang. Associate Producer: contract). Lang: ‘I directed practically
Paramount, 1938 Harry Joe Brown. Writer: Robert nothing.’ Length: 73 minutes. Released:
Director: Fritz Lang. Writer: Virginia Van Carson, based on a novel ofZane Grey. December 12.

410
 Moontide Bellaire), Rita Johnson (‘Real’ Mrs. Cloak and Dagger
Twentieth Century-Fox, 1942 Bellaire), Mary Field (Miss Penteel), United States Pictures, Inc. (released by
Director: Archie Mayo (and uncreditcd Byron Foulger (Newby), Lester Warner Bros.), 1946
Fritz Lang). Producer: Mark Hellinger. Matthews (Dr. Morton), Eustace Wyatt Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Milton
Writer : John O’Hara, based on the novel (Blind Man). Sperling. Writers: Albert Maltz, Ring
by Willard Robertson. Photographer: Shooting: 7 weeks. Original length: 84 Lardner, Jr., based on a story by Boris
Charles Clarke. minutes. Produced before, but released Ingster, John Larkin, suggested by a book
Cast: Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino, Claude (16 October) after The Woman in the by Corey Ford, Alastair MacBain.
Rains, Jerome Cowan, Thomas Mitchell. Window (11 October). Photographer: Sol Polita. Art Director:
Mayo replaced Lang after only four days Max Parker. Set Decorator: Walter
shooting. Length: 94 minutes. Released:
Hilford. Special Effects: Harry Barndollar,
May 29. The Woman in the Window Edwin DuPar. Music: Max Steiner.
Christie Corporation-International Editor: Christian Nyby. Assistant Director:
Hangmen Also Die Pictures (released by R.K.O.), 1944 Russ Saunders. Technical Advisor: Michael
Arnold Productions-Umted Artists, 1943 Director: Fritz Lang. Producer/ Writer: Burke.
Director: Fritz Lang. Executive Producer: Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel Cast: Gary Cooper (Alvah Jasper), Lilli
Arnold Pressburger. Associate Producer: T. Once Off Guard by J. H. Wallis. Palmer (Gina), Robert Alda (Pinky),
W. Baumfield. Writers: Fritz Lang, Photographer: Milton Krasner. Special Vladimir Sokoloff (Dr. Polda), J. Edward
Bertolt Brecht, John Wexley, based on a Effects: Vernon Walker. Art Director: Bromberg (Trcnk), Marjorie Hoshelle
story by Lang and Brecht. Photographer: Duncan Cramer. Set Decorator: Julia (Ann Dawson), Ludwig Stössel (German),
James Wong Howe. Art Director William Heron. Costumes: Muriel King. Music: Helene Thimig (Katherine Loder), Dan
Darling. Costumes: Julie Heron. Music: Arthur Lang. Editor: Marjorie Johnson. Seymour (Marsoli), Marc Lawrence
Hanns Eisler. Song: ‘No Surrender’ by Assistant Director: Richard Harlan. (Luigi), James Flavin (Walsh), Pat
Eisler, Sam Coslow. Editor: Gene Fowler, Cast: Edward G. Robinson (Richard O’Moore (Englishman), Charles Marsh
Jr. Production Manager: Carl Harriman. Wanley),Joan Bennett (Alice), Raymond (Enrich), Rosalind Lyons, Connie
Assistant Directors: Archie Mayo, Fred Massey (District Attorney), Dan Duryea Gilchrist.
Pressburger. (Blackmailer), Edmond Breon (Dr. Original release length: 106 minutes.
Cast: Brian Donlevy (Franz Svoboda), Barkstone), Thomas E. Jackson (Inspector Released: September 28.
Walter Brennan (Professor Novotny), Jackson), Arthur Loft (Mazard), Dorothy
Anna Lee (Mascha Novotny), Gene Peterson (Mrs. Wanley), Frank Dawson, Secret Beyond the Door
Lockhart (Emil Czaka), DennL O’Keefe Carol Cameron, Bobby Blake. Diana Productions (released by Universal-
(Jan Horek), Alexander Granach (Alois Original length: 99 minutes. Released: International), 1948
Gruber), Margaret Wycherly (Ludmilla October 11. Director/Producer: Fritz Lang. Executive
Novotny), Nana Bryant (Mrs. Novotny), Producer: Walter Wanger. Writer: Silvia
Billy Roy (Boda Novotny), Hans von Richards, based on the story ‘Museum
Twardowski (Richard Heydnch), Tomo Scarlet Street Piece No. 13’ by Rufus King.
Stawart (Gestapo Chief), Jonathan Hale Diana Productions (released by Photographer: Stanley Cortez. Production
(Debege), Lionel Stander (Cabby), Byron Universal), 1945 Designer: Max Parker. Set Decorators:
Foulger (Bartos), Virginia Farmer Director/Producer: Fritz Lang. Executive Russell A. Gausman, John Austin. Music:
(Landlady), Louis Donath (Shumer), Producer: Walter Wanger. Writer: Dudley Miklos Rosza. Editor: Arthur Hilton.
Sarah Padden (Miss Dvorak), Edmund Nichols, based on the novel and play La Assistant Director: William Holland.
MacDonald (Dr. Pilar), George Irving Chienne by Georges de la Fouchardiere Cast: Joan Bennett (Celia Lamphere),
(Nezval), James Bush (Worker), Arno (with Mouezy-Eon). Photographer: Milton Michael Redgrave (Mark Lamphere),
Frey (Itnut), Lester Sharpe (Rudy), Krasner. Special Photographic Effects: John Anne Revere (Caroline Lamphere),
Arthur Loft (General Bertruba), William P. Fulton. Art Director: Alexander Barbara O’Neil (Miss Robey), Natalie
Famum (Viktonn), Reinhold Schiienzel Golitzen. Set Decorators: Schaefer (Edith Potter), Paul Cavanagh
(Inspector Ritter), Philip Merivale. Russell A. Gausman, Carl Lawrence. (Rick Barrett), Anabel Shaw (Society
Shooting: 52 days. Original length: 140 Costumes: Travis Benton. Paintings: John Guest), Rosa Rey (Paquita), James Seay
minutes. Released: March 26. Decker. Music: HansJ. Salter. Editor: (Bob Dwight), Mark Dennis (David),
Arthur Hilton. Assistant Director: Melville Donna Di Mario (Gypsy), David Cota,
Ministry of Fear Shyer. Celia Moore.
Paramount, 1944 Cast: Edward G. Robinson (Chris Cross), Shooting: 61 days. Original length: 98J
Director: Fritz Lang. Producer/Writer: Joan Bennett (Kitty Marsh), Dan Duryea minutes. Released: February.
Seton I. Miller, based on the novel by (Johnny), Margaret Lindsay (Millie),
Graham Greene. Photographer: Henry Rosalind Ivan (Adele), Samuel S. Hinds House by the River
Sharp. Art Directors: Hans T. Dreier, Hal (Charlie Pringle), Jess Barker (Janeway), Fidelity Pictures (released by Republic),
Pereira. Set Decorator: Bert Granger. Arthur Loft (Dellarowe), Vladimir 1949
Music: Victor Young. Editor: Archie Sokoloff (Pop Legon), Charles Kemper Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Howard
Marshek. Assistant Director: George (Adele’s First Husband), Russell Hicks Welsch. Associate Producer: Robert Peters.
Templeton. (Hogarth), Anita Bolster (Mrs. Michaels), Writer: Mel Dinclli, based on a novel by
Cast: Ray Milland (Stephen Neale), Cyrus W. Kendcll (Nick), Fred Essler A. P. Herbert. Photographer: Edward
Marjorie Reynolds (Carla Hilfe), Carl (Marchetti), Edgar Dearing, Tom Dillon Cronjager. Art Director: Bert Leven. Set
Esmond (Willi Hilfe), Dan Duryea (Policemen), Chuck Hamilton Decorators: Charles Thompson, John
(Costa/Travers), Hilliary Brooke (Mrs. (Chauffeur), Guss Glassmire, Howard McCarthy, Jr. Special Effects: Howard and
Bellane), Percy Waram (Inspector Mitchell, Ralph Littlefield, Sherry Hall, Theodore Lydecker. Costumes: Adele
Prentice), Erskine Sanford (Mr. Rennit), Jack Statham, Rodney Bell, Byron Palmer. Music: George Antheil. Editor:
Thomas Louden (Mr. Newland), Alan Foulger, Will Wright. Arthur D. Hilton. Production Manager:
Napier (Dr. Forrester), Helene Grant Shooting: 56 days. Original length: 102 Joseph Dillpc. Assistant Director. John
(Mrs. Merrick), Aminta Dyne (False Mrs. minutes. Released: December 28. Grubbs.
 Cast: Louis Hayward (Stephen Byrne), (Wilson), Rodric Redwing (Rio), Frank William P. McGiven. Photographer:
Lee Bowman (John Byrne), Jane Wyatt Ferguson (Preacher), Charles Gonzales Charles Lang, Jr. Art Director: Robert
(Marjorie Byrne), Dorothy Patrick (Hevia), Francis MacDonald (Harbin), Peterson. Set Decorator: William Kiernan.
(Emily Gaunt), Ann Shoemaker (Mrs. Jose Dominguez (Gonzales), John Kellog Music: Amfitheatrof. Editor: Charles
Ambrose), Jody Gilbert (Flora Bantam), (Salesman), Stan Jolley (Warren), John Nelson. Assistant Director: Milton
Peter Brocco (Attorney General), Doucette (Whitney), Stuart Randall Feldman.
Hoawland Chamberlain (District (Starr), Frank Graham (Ace Maquire), Cast: Glenn Ford (Dave Bannion), Gloria
Attorney), Margaret Seddon (Mrs. Fuzzy Knight (Barber), Roger Anderson Grahame (Debby Marsh), Jocelyn Brando
Whittaker), Sarah Padden (Mrs. Beach), (Red), Felipe Turich (Sanchez), Lloyd (Katie Bannion), Alexander Scourby
Kathleen Freeman (Effie Ferguson), Will Gough (Kinch), Russell Johnson (Dealer). (Mike Lagana), Lee Marvin (Vince
Wright (Inspector Parten), Leslie Kimmell Original length : 86 minutes. Released : Stone), Jeanette Nolan (Bertha Duncan),
(Mr. Gaunt), Effie Laird (Mrs. Gaunt). March 1952. Peter Whitney (Tierney), Willia Bouchey
Shooting: 32 days. Original length: 88 (Lt. Wilkes), Robert Burton (Gus Burke),
minutes. Released: March 25, 1950. Clash By Night Adam Williams (Larry Gordon), Howard
Wald-Krasna Productions-RKO Radio Wendell (Commissioner Higgens), Cris
An American Guerrilla in the Pictures, 1951 Alcaide (George Rose), Michael Granger
Philippines Director: Fritz Lang. Executive Producer: (Hugo), Dorothy Green (Lucy
Twentieth Century-Fox, 1950 Jerry Wald. Producer: Harriet Parsons. Chapman), Carolyn Jones (Doris), Ric
Director: Fritz Lang. Producer/ Writer: Writer: Alfred Hayes, based on the play Roman (Baldy), Dan Semour (Atkins),
Lamar Trotti, based on the novel ol the of the same title by Clifford Odets. Edith Evanson (Selma Parker), Linda
same title by Ira Wolfert. Photographer Photographer: Nicholas Musuraca. Special Bennett, Kathryn Eames, Rex Reason.
(Technicolour): Harry Jackson. Special Photographic Effects: Harold Wellman. Art Shooting: 29 days. Original length: 90
Photographic Effects: Fred Sersen. Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Carroll minutes. Released: October.
Directors: Lyle Wheeler, J. Russell Clark. Set Decorators: Darrell Silvera, Jack
Spencer. Set Decorators: Thomas Little, Mills. Music: Roy Webb. Song: ‘I Hear a Human Desire
Stuart Reiss. Costumes: Travilla. Music: Rhapsody’ by Dick Gasparre, Jack Baker, Columbia, 1954
Cyril Mockridge. Editor: Robert George Fragos (sung by Tony Martin). Director: Fritz Lang. Producer:
Simpson. Production Manager: Editor: George J. Amy. Lewis J. Rachmil (Jerry Wald). Writer:
F. E. Johnson. Second-Unit Director: Cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Mae Doyle), Alfred Hayes, based on La Bete Humaine
Robert D. Webb. Assistant Director: Paul Douglas (Jerry d’Amato), Robert by Emil Zola. Photographer: Burnett
Horace Hough. Ryan (Earl Pfeiffer), Marilyn Monroe Cuffey. Art Director: Robert Peterson. Set
Cast: Tyrone Power (Chuck Palmer), (Peggy), J. Carroll Naish (Uncle Vince), Decorator: William Kiernan. Music:
Micheline Presle (Jeanne Martinez), Jack Keith Andes (Joe Doyle), Milvio Daniele Amfitheatrof. Editor: Aaron Stell.
Elam (Spenser), Bob Patten (Lovejoy), Minciotti (Papa d’Amato). Assistant Director: Milton Feldman.
Tom Ewell (Jim Mitchell), Tommy Cook Shooting: 32 days, including locations at Cast: Glenn Ford (Jeff Warren), Gloria
(Miguel), Robert Barrat (General Monterey, California. Length: 105 Grahame (Vicky Buckley), Broderick
MacArthur), Juan Torena (Juan minutes. Released : June 1952. Crawford (Carl Buckley), Edgar
Martinez), Carleton Young (Colonel Buchanan (Alec Simmons), Kathleen Case
Phillips), Chris de Vega, Miguel Azures, The Blue Gardenia (Ellen Simmons), Peggy Maley (Jean),
Eddie Infante, Erlinda Cortez, Rosa del Blue Gardinia Productions-Gloria Films Diane DeLaire (Vera Simmons), Grandon
Rosario, Haty Ruby. (released by Warner Bros.), 1952 Rhodes (John Owens), Dan Seymour
The entire film, including interiors, was Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Alex (Bartender), John Pickard (Matt Henley),
shot in the Philippines in 48 days. Gottlieb. Writer: Charles Hoffmann, Paul Brinegar (Brakeman), Dan Riss
Original length: 105 minutes. Released: based on a story by Vera Caspary. (Prosecutor), Victor Hugo Greene
December. Photographer: Daniel Hall. Music: Raoul (Davidson), John Zaremba (Russell), Carl
Kraushaar. Song: 'Blue Gardenia’ by Bob Lee (John Thurston), Olan Soule (Lewis).
Rancho Notorious Russell, Lester Lee, arranged by Nelson Shooting: 35 days. Original length: 90
Fidelity Pictures (released by RKO Riddle (sung by Nat ‘King’ Cole). Editor: minutes. Released: September.
Radio), 1951 Edward Mann. Special Effects: Willis
Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Howard Cook. Script Supervisor: Don McDougal. Moonfleet
Welsch. Writer: Daniel Taradash, based Cast: Anne Baxter (Norah Larkin), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1954
on the story ‘Gunsight Whitman’ by Richard Conte (Casey Mayo), Ann Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: John
Silvia Richards. Photographer Southern (Chrustal Carpenter), Raymond Houseman. Associate Producer: Jud
(Technicolour): Hal Mohr. Art Director: Burr (Harry Prebble), Jeff" Donnell (Sally Kinberg. Writers . Jan Lustig, Margaret
Robert Priestly. Music: Emil Newman. Ellis), Richard Erdman (Al), George Fitts, based on the novel of the same title
Songs: ‘The Legend of Chuck-A-Luck’ Reeves (Officer Haynes), Ruth Storey by John Meade Falkner). Photographer:
(sung by William Lee), ‘Gypsy Davey’, (Rose), Ray Walker (Homer), Celia (Eastman Colour and CinemaScope)
‘Get Away, Young Man’ (sung by Lovsky (Blind Woman), Frank Ferguson Robert Planck. Art Directors: Cedric
Marlene Dietrich) by Ken Darby. Editor: (Drunk), Alex Gottlieb, Nat 'King’ Cole Gibbons, Hans Peters. Set Decorators:
Otto Ludwig. Assistant Director: Emmert (Himself). Edwin B. Willis, Richard Pefferle.
Emerson. Shooting: 21 days (December 1952). Costumes: Walter Plunkett. Music: Miklos
Cast: Marlene Dietrich (Altar Keane), Original length: 90 minutes. Released: Rozsa. Flamenco Music: Vincente Gomez.
Arthur Kennedy (Vern Haskell), Mel March 28, 1953. Editor: Albert Akst. Assistant Director: Sid
Ferrer (Frenchy Fairmont), Gloria Henry Sidman.
(Beth Forbes), William Frawley (Baldy The Big Heat Cast: Stewart Granger (Jeremy Fox),
Gunder), Lisa Ferraday (Maxine), John Columbia, 1953 George Sanders (Lord Ashwood), Joan
Raven (Chuck-A-Luck Dealer), Jack Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Robert Greenwood (Lady Ashwood), Viveca
Elam (Geary), Dan Seymour Arthur. Writer: Sidney Boehm, based on Lindtors (Mrs. Minton), Jon Whiteley
(Commanche Paul), George Reeves the novel of the same title by (John Mohune), Lilianc Montevecchi

412
(Dancer), Sean McClory (Elzevir Block), Maxwell Henry. was billed as Paul Christian in the English
Melville Cooper (Felix Ratsey), Alan Cast: Dana Andrews (Tom Garret), Joan language version. Shooting: 89 days (27
Napier (Parson Glennie), John Hoyt Fontaine (Susan Spencer), Sidney of which were on location in India).
(Magistrate Maskew), Donna Corcoran Blackmer (Austin Spencer), Philip 5-3-1959, Universum, Stuttgart.
(Grace), Jack Elam (Damen), Dan Bourneuf (Thompson), Barbara Nichols
Seymour (Hull), Ian Wolfe (Sally), Shepperd Strudwick (Wilson), Die Tausend Augen des Dr.
(Tewkesbury), Lester Matthews (Major Arthur Franz (Hale), Robin Raymond Mabuse (The 1,000 Eyes of Dr.
Hennishaw), Skelton Knaggs (Jacob), (Terry), Edward Binns (Lt. Kennedy), Mabuse)
Richard Hale (Starkhill), John Alderson William Leicester (Charlie Miller), Dan A West-German-French-Italian Co¬
(Greening), Ashley Cowan (Tomson), Seymour (Greco), Rusty Lane (Judge), production: CCC Filmkunst-Criterion
Frank Ferguson (Coachman), Booth Joyce Taylor (Joan), Carleton Young Films-Cei-Incom-Omnia Distribution,
Colman (Captain Stanhope), Peggy (Kirk), Trudy Wroe (Hat Check Girl), i960
Maley (Tenant). Joe Kirk (Clerk), Charles Evans Director/Producer: Fritz Lang. Executive
Shooting: 45 days (September-October (Governor), Wendell Niles (Announcer). Producer: Artur Brauner. Writers: Fritz
1954)—locations at Oceanside, California. Shooting: March 26-April 31, 1956. Lang, Heinz Oskar Wuttig, based on an
Original length: 87 minutes. Released: Length: 80 minutes. Released: September idea of Jan Fethke and the character
June, 1955. 5, 1956- created by Norbert Jacques. Photographer:
Karl Loeb. Art Directors: Erich Kettelhut,
Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The Johannes Ott. Costumes: Ina Stein. Music
While The City Sleeps
Thor Productions-RKO Teleradio Tiger of Bengal)/Das Indische Bert Grund. Editors: Walter and
Grabmal (The Hindu Tomb) Waltraute Wischniewsky.
Pictures (released by RKO Radio), 1955
A West German-French-Italian Co¬ Cast: Dawn Addams (Marion Menil),
Director: Fritz Lang. Producer:
production : CCC-Films Artur Brauner- Peter Van Eyck (Henry B. Travers),
Bert E. Friedlob. Writer: Casey
Gloria Film-Regina Films-Criterion Wolfgang Preiss (Jordan), Lupo Prezzo
Robinson, based on the novel The Bloody
Films-Rizzoli Films-Imperia Films (Cornelius), Gert Fröbe (Commissioner
Spur by Charles Einstein. Photographer
Distribution, 1958 Kraus), Werner Peters
(SuperScope): Ernest Laszlo. Art Director:
Director: Fritz Lang. Executive Producer: (Hieronymous P. Mistelzweig), Andrea
Carroll Clark. Set Decorator: Jack Mills.
Artur Brauner. Producers: Louise de Cecchi (Berg), Reinhard Kolldehoff
Costumes: Norma. Music: Herschel Burke
Masure, Eberhard Meischner. Writers: (Clubfoot), Christiane Maybach (Blonde),
Gilbert. Editor: Gene Fowler, Jr. Sound
Fritz Lang, Werner Jörg Lüddecke, based Howard Vernon (No. 12), Nico Pepe
Editor: Verna Fields. Assistant Director:
on a novel by Thea von Harbou and a (Hotel Manager), David Cameron
Ronnie Rondell.
scenario by Fritz Lang and Thea von (Parker), Jean-Jacques Delbo (Deiner),
Cast: Dana Andrews (Edward Mobley),
Harbou. Photographer (colour and Werner Buttler (No. 11), Linda Sim
Rhonda Fleming (Dorothy Kyne), Sally
ColorScope): Richard Angst. Art (Comma), Rolf Moebius (Police Officer),
Forest (Nancy Liggett), Thomas Mitchell
Directors: Helmut Nentwig, Willy Schatz. Bruno W. Pantel (Reporter), Marie-Luise
(Griffith), Vincent Price (Walter Kyne,
Costumes: Claudia Herberg, Günther Nagel.
Jr.), Howard Duff (Lt. Kaufman), Ida
Brosda. Music: Michel Michelet (Tiger), Shooting: 42 days. Length: 103 minutes.
Lupino (Mildred), George Sanders (Mark
Gerhard Becker (Grabmal). Released: May 14, i960, Gloria-Palast,
Loving), James Craig (Harry Kritzer),
Choreographers: Robby Gay, Billy Daniel. Stuttgart.
John Barrymore, Jr. (Robert Manners),
Vladimir Sokoloff (George Palsky), Editor: Walter Wischniewsky.

Robert Warwick (Amos Kyne), Ralph Cast: Debra Paget (Seeta), Paul Le Mepris (Contempt)
Peters (Meade), Larry Blake (Police Hubschmid (Harold Berger—Henri Films Concordia-Compagnia

Sergeant), Edward Hinton (O’Leary), Mercier in French version), Walter Reyer Cinematografica Champion-Marceau-

Mae Marsh (Mrs. Manners), Sandy White (Chandra), Claus Holm (Dr. Walter Cocinor Distributors, 1963

(Judith Fenton), Celia Lovsky (Miss Rhode), Sabine Bethmann (Irene Rhode), Director/ Writer: Jean-Luc Godard, based

Dodd), Pit Herbert (Bartender), Andrew Valery Inkijinoff (Yama), Rene Deltgen on the novel II Disprezzo (A Ghost at
(Prince Ramigani), Jochen Brockmann Noon) by Alberto Moravia. Executive
Lupino.
(Padhu), Jochen Blume (Asagana), Producer: Joseph E. Levine. Producers:
Shooting: 5 weeks (July-August 1955).
Length: 100 minutes. Released: May Luciana Paoluzzi (Bahram—Tiger only), Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti.
Guido Celano (General Dagh — Grabmal Photographer (colour and Franscope): Raoul
1956.
only), Angela Portulari (Peasant — Grabmal Coutard. Music: Georges Delerue. Editors:
only), Richard Lauffen (Bhowana), Agnes Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan.
Beyond A Reasonable Doubt Helmut Hildebrand (Servant), Panos Cast: Brigitte Bardot (CamilleJaval), Jack
RKO Teleradio Pictures (released by Papadopoulos (Messenger), Victor Palance (Jeremy Prokosch), Michel Piccoli
RKO Radio), 1956 Francen. (Paul Javal), Fritz Lang (Fritz Lang),
Director: Fritz Lang. Producer: Tiger (97 minutes) and Grabmal (101 Giorgia Moll (Francesca Vanini), Jean-Luc
Bert E. Friedlob. Writer : Douglas minutes) were released in the original Godard (Lang’s Assistant Director), Linda
Morrow. Photographer (RKO-Scope): German and French versions as a double Veras (Siren).
William Snyder. Art Director: Carroll bill, in July-August of 1959. American The Embassy Pictures’ American version
Clark. Set Decorator: Darrell Silvera. International released, in October i960, a (subtitled), released in 1964, is three
Music: Herschel Burke Gilbert. Song: badly dubbed version of the two films minutes longer than the French version
‘Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’ (sung by edited into one feature of 95 minutes (100 minutes). Paris premiere: December
The Hi-Los) by Gilbert, Alfred Perry. titled Journey to the Lost City (US) or 27. Shooting: April-June in Rome and
Editor: Gene Fowler, Jr. Assistant Director: Tiger of Bengal (UK). Paul Hubschmid Capri.

413
Appendix to Filmography: The Unrealised
Projects

In the filmographies, books, and articles devoted to Lang and his work, a good
many unfilmed projects are attributed to the director. Most of them are
apocryphal, dreamed up by press agents, hopetul producers, and even critics.
Lang insists he has never heard of the majority ot them. Nonetheless, there are
a small number of such projects, authenticated by Lang himself, which he had
had the intention of making as films, and which had reached various stages ot
completion before being abandoned for equally various reasons.
DIE LEGENDE VOM LETZTEN WIENER FIAKER (The Legend of
the Last Viennese Fiacre). In 1933, after Das Testament des Dr Mabuse, during
the dark time of Hitler’s rise to power, Lang wrote (without the aid of Thea
von Harbou) the outline for a scenario full of humour and gaiety, reminiscent
of his Viennese origins and prefiguring to a degree the fairy tale, picture book
heaven of Liliom.
Lang’s story has all the drollery ot Raimund, the once tamous and popular
comedy writer of early 19th century Vienna.
The ‘Fiaker’ (he shares the appellation with his coach) is a proud proprietor-
driver. With haughty graciousness, he gives his lowly ‘Waterer’ (the man who
looks after the horses and gives them water) a lottery ticket which he had been
forced to buy, but which he believes is beneath his dignity to keep. Contrary
to all expectations, the ‘Waterer’ wins a huge sum, which he immediately
invests in a factory which manufactures the new automobiles which the
‘Fiaker’ strongly detests. With his new found wealth, the social barriers
between the ‘Waterer’ and the ‘Fiaker’ dissolve, and the ‘Waterer’s’ son is
able to marry his beloved, the ‘Fiaker’s’ daughter.
Only one consolation rests for the ‘Fiaker’ who is so proud of his horses:
those ‘damned poor, horseless cars’ are not allowed to drive on the principal
allee of the Prater. Yet, while the two new fathers-in-law are drinking a toast
with new wine (‘Heurigen’) to the young couple, an ‘extra’ headline in a
newspaper announces that Emperor Franz Josef has given a special
dispensation: the automobiles are now allowed on the allee. The news shatters
all the ‘Fiaker’s’ illusions; he suffers a stroke.
At the Heavenly Gates, Saint Peter receives the dead ‘Fiaker’, but when the
coachman wants to drive in with his horses and coach, Saint Peter furiously
bangs the gates shut, and rushes off to arrange a special concert for Saint Cecile.
Although all of the great composers have been invited. Saint Peter can’t find
them in their bungalows when the concert is about to begin. He finally
discovers them all sitting on comfortable clouds, listening in bliss to the
‘Fiaker’ singing his Viennese lieder. Saint Cecile is waiting; there is only one
thing to do: report the entire matter to the Lord.
Our Lord arrives at the gates and speaks to the coachman. As the ‘Fiaker’
refuses to budge without his horses, the Lord appoints him His special
coachman, gets into the fiacre, and proudly the ‘Fiaker’ drives into Heaven. As

414
the wheels turn, a new constellation is born: The Big Wagon. The story is
worth repeating in some detail it only to remind those critics who tend to
forget Lang’s Viennese background that he is not the total pessimist they
sometimes describe him as being.
HELL AFLOAT. In i934> Lang wrote, with Oliver H. P. Garrett, a story
based on the 5.S. Mono Castle fire in which over a hundred people died.
David O. Selznick rejected the story for M.G.M.
THE MAN BEHIND YOU. In 1935, Lang wrote this modernJekyll and
Hyde story concerning a doctor who identifies more and more with the evil
nature of man. It is a pity that the director was unable to make the film; it
seems a natural subject for the director of M.
MEN WITHOUT A COUNTRY. After You and Me, 111 1939 Lang
planned this film for Paramount in collaboration with Jonathan Latimer. It
was to have been a story dealing with a secret weapon which destroys eyesight.
WINCHESTER 73. In 1948, Lang worked with Silvia Richards (who had
done the script for Secret Beyond the Door) on a script of Stuart N. Lake’s novel.
The film was planned for Lang’s own company, Diana Productions, for
release by Universal. The film directed by Anthony Mann in 1950 has no
relationship to the Lang project. There was never more than the first page of
the outline at any rate.
DARK SPRING. In about 1954, Lang planned to shoot a script by Michael
Latte, and only gave up his plans to film it when the problem of casting the
child’s role became insurmountable. The story concerns a girl of eleven or
twelve who is to inherit an enormous fortune from her dead father when she
comes of age. Her mother marries again. Her second husband is a seemingly
successful lawyer, who is being forced to pay a huge sum to a group of
gangsters he once cheated. The lawyer attempts to kill the girl three times in
order to gain control of the inheritance. Only a friend of the girl, a boy of
fifteen, understands what is actually happening. The mother believes her
husband when he tells her that Bettina, the girl, is paranoid and is only
imagining things. Before he can carry out his fourth attempt at murder, the
lawyer is himself killed by a gangster. One is inclined to wonder if it were only
casting problems which decided Lang against making the film. While at first
glance the subject seems appropriate to Lang, on closer examination certain
elements become apparent which might well have made Lang more
uncomfortable as the project progressed. Cold-blooded murder for profit has
never been central to his work. In M and Secret Beyond the Door, for example,
Lang deals with psychopaths who cannot help themselves; the victim in
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is not an innocent girl, but a hardened blackmailer.
TAJ MAHAL. In 1956, the Indian government invited Lang to India to
make a film. The project was about the 17th century maharajah who built the
Taj Mahal in memory of his love. Lang dropped the project when it became
clear that the Indian ideal of beauty was completely different from that in
Europe, so that casting became a great problem. This stay of several weeks,
however, was of great help later for his German films set in India.
UNTER AUSSCHUSS DER ÖFFENTLICHKEIT (Behind Closed
Doors). Although this title appears regularly in filmographies and he has been
treated in detail by Alfred Eibel (see bibliography), Lang insists it is a pure
invention on the part of Arthur Brauner (Lang’s producer on the last three
German films) as a publicity stunt for Peter van Eyck in i960. It was never a
Lang project, and the film which was produced in 1961 with the same title has,
of course, no connection with Lang.
KALI YUNG and MOON OF DASSEMRA. In about i960, Lang was
offered the chance to make two further films set in India. The projects were
finally dropped, however, when the Italian producer insisted on certain script

415
alterations, in spite of his contract with Lang giving the director full artistic
control. The Kali Yung film would have concerned the greatest criminal
conspiracy in Indian history, the Brotherhood of Thugs. More than ten
million innocent travellers were strangled with the ‘rumal’, a kerchief
curiously knotted at the corners, presumably in honour of the bloody goddess
Kali, in order to rob them of their valuables. The fact that even Mahradschahs
and other high level personalities belonged to the secret organisation made it
even more difficult for the British authorities to exterminate the evil cult.
Set in 1875, the film centres about a young doctor who runs a cholera clinic.
When his Sikhs disappear while bringing him supplies, he requests the
resident, a sick old man who wants to avoid trouble, to investigate, the request
is refused. The matter is further complicated when the doctor discovers that
the girl he had loved in England was already then the resident’s wife. A Thug
murder is committed and the doctor falls under suspicion. In order to clear
himself, he and an Indian companion undertake their own investigation (a
dancing girl leads them to the Thugs) and become involved in various
adventures. His love and understanding of India prevail, the Thugs are
exterminated, and his name is cleared.
... UND MORGEN: MORD! (. .. and Tomorrow: Murder!). Planned in
1962 (written in Beverley Hills in 1961 and in Munich in 1962), the story deals
with a seemingly respectable bourgeois, a severe defender of moral traditions,
president of many social associations who in his youth had suffered various
repressions which caused him to commit obsessive, sexual crimes. When he is
discovered, he commits suicide. Only the police commissioner, with some few
others, know the reality behind the lauditory obituary of the dead man.
DEATH OF A CAREER GIRL. In 1964, Lang was president of thejury at
the Cannes Film Festival; Jeanne Moreau was a member of the Jury and
suggested that they make a film together. With the actress in mind, Lang
wrote a detailed outline of a script. A mature and still beautiful woman, the
head of an international economic network contemplates committing suicide
because her life and ambitions seem to her to be empty. Her whole life is then
seen in flashbacks. Beginning as a young girl working with the French
resistance during the Nazi ‘occupation’, and, like Gina in Cloak and Dagger, by
‘touching scum becomes scum’ in having affairs with Nazi officers. Poor and
ambitious she uses men unscrupulously to further her career. As the only man
who loves her and treats her with respect sadly explains to her, in the struggle
upwards she has lost her soul. At the end of the film, she decides against
suicide; as one of the living dead she opens yet another business conference
with cold triumph. The agents of Lang and Moreau were unable to settle the
conditions of production to their mutual satisfaction and the project was
cancelled.*
After this, Lang seriously considered making one last film in spite of his
failing eyesight. Claude Chabrol, long an admirer of Lang’s work, brought
him together in Paris with his own producer, Andre Genoves, who offered
him both complete artistic liberty and an adequate budget. Lang planned a
story about contemporary youth, their conflicts and desires, their striving to
free themselves from the traditions of the establishment, and their use of drugs.
He described to me one beautiful sequence: coloured balls leap from a roof
terrace and glide easily down stairs and through the air. A young girl intensely
involved in a LSD dream glides down with them. Lang finally decided that his
failing sight would not allow him to make the film.
* For an accurate and more
complete discussion of DEATH
OF A CAREER GIRL, consult the
article on the project by David L.
Overbey (see bibliography).

416
Aate Due
 PN 1998 .A3 L357713 1976
Eisner, Lotte H. 010101 000
Fritz Lang / by Lotte H. Eisne

0 1163 0064184 6
TRENT UNIVERSITY

PN1998 .A3L357713 1976

Eisner, Lotte H.
Firtz Lang.

kECON

2Z9536