The Indian Tomb (1921)

Joe May’s 1921 silent epic The Indian Tomb was based on Thea von Harbou's very successful 1918 novel The Indian Tomb. Thea von Harbou was of course married to Fritz Lang. Lang and von Harbou wrote the screenplay for the film.

The novel, although extremely good, contains one very serious flaw. Interestingly enough that flaw is corrected in the movie. I don’t know whether it was von Harbou or Lang or May who made the change but it was very much a change for the better.

The movie is in two parts, Part I: The Mission of the Yogi (Die Sendung des Yoghi) and Part II: The Tiger of Bengal (Der Tiger von Eschnapur). It is in fact a single story with no obvious break between the two parts and the only reason it was originally released that way was the 3 hours and 40 minutes running time.

The story begins with a prologue. A yogi buried alive is resuscitated by the fabulously rich Ayan III, the Prince of Bengal (Conrad Veidt). According to legend when this happens the yogi must grant the person who revives him one wish. The prologue is important because it establishes that the yogi, Ramigani (Bernhard Goetzke), has supernatural or at least paranormal powers. And it establishes that Ramigani is compelled to carry out out the Prince’s commands even when he disagrees with them.

The Prince instructs Ramigami to persuade famed architect Herbert Rowland (Olaf Fønss) to travel to India to build a tomb for him. Herbert understands that the tomb will house the body of a princess, the beloved of the Prince. Herbert is persuaded that he must leave for India immediately without informing his fiancée Irene Amundsen (Mia May). Herbert departs on the Prince’s steam yacht. Irene is however a resourceful woman and she sets off for India as well.

On arrival in India Herbert discovers that there are very important things he hadn’t been told. The tomb is not to house the body of the Princess. It is to house the memory of a Great Love. A love betrayed. The Princess is alive. She has betrayed the Prince with a dashing but unscrupulous British officer and hunter, MacAllan.

The Prince has plans for revenge but his plans are not straightforward.

Herbert suffers several misfortunes, the most serious being that he is infected with leprosy. Nothing can save him. Or perhaps something can. But the price will be terrible.

MacAllan is a hunted man.

Irene is more or less a prisoner. The Prince’s feelings towards her are ambiguous. It’s possible that he desires her but his feelings about women are more than a little distorted.

Herbert and Irene become involved in attempts to rescue the Princess.

There is plenty of action and adventure. Narrow brushes with hungry tigers! Crocodile-infested rivers. A desperate escape across a rickety rope bridge over a chasm. A shootout at MacAllan’s bungalow. All filmed with style and energy.

This is however mostly a story about love. It’s a story of love betrayed, of misguided misplaced love, obsessive love, unhealthy love. But also noble love and faithful love.

Conrad Veidt is perfectly cast. He could play heroes or villains or victims or mysterious ambiguous characters and the Prince is all those things. He is probably mad, but he was probably once a very good man. Veidt also had tremendous magnetism. He’s in top form here.

The whole cast is good.

There’s plenty of interesting ambiguity. The Prince is not a mere villain. He is a man so shattered by emotional betrayal that he is no longer quite sane. The Princess is no innocent victim. She did betray the Prince’s love. And MacAllan is no hero. He not only seduced the Princess but boasted about it afterwards. Hebert Rowland is perhaps a little ambiguous as well, a man who allowed his artistic ambition to override his judgment. The yogi seems sinister at first but then we start to wonder.

This is a breathtakingly lavish production. The sets are jaw-dropping.

The movie might be better remembered had Lang directed it himself but I can’t fault May’s direction. This is a stunning emotionally complex movie and it’s very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed Thea von Harbou's novel The Indian Tomb and also Lang’s own 1959 version, Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959).

I’ve also reviewed another worthwhile Joe May movie, Asphalt (1929).

The Spiders (1919-20)

The Spiders (Die Spinnen) is one of Fritz Lang’s earliest films. The original intention was to make four linked feature films. Only two were completed - The Golden Sea (Der goldene See) in 1919 and The Diamond Ship (Das Brillantenschiff) in 1920. Both were written and directed by Lang. The great Karl Freund did the cinematography on part 2.

These two movies combine action and adventure in exotic locales with romance and intrigue.

I think it’s fair to say that Lang’s movies became more complex and interesting when he started collaborating with Thea von Harbou. She added a bit more psychological depth. Having said that there are still plenty of distinctive Langian themes and Langian touches in this very early movie.

The hero of The Golden Sea is playboy sportsman Kay Hoog. He is about to compete in a major yacht race when he finds a message in a bottle. The message was written by a Harvard professor who vanished five years earlier. The message speaks of a lost civilisation and hidden treasure, and gives the geographical location in which both can be found. This appeals to Kay Hoog’s sense of adventure and sportsmanship a lot more than a yacht race. He sets off in pursuit of the treasure although it’s reasonable to assume that the adventure attracts him more than the treasure.

He discovers a lost remnant of the Inca Empire. There is plenty of gold, but also plenty of danger. The Incas still practise human sacrifice and Kay might well be the next sacrifice.

He also rescues a beautiful Inca high priestess, Naela (Lil Dagover). They fall in love. The fly in the ointment is that she’s the who will have to offer Kay as a sacrifice to the sun god.

His other problem is the Spiders, a secret and ruthless criminal society who are also after that gold. His particular problem is the leader of the Spiders, the glamorous but wicked Lio Sha (Ressel Orla). He doesn’t yet know just how dangerous a woman she is.

Kay and Naela have lot of narrow escapes. There are exciting action sequences. There are some splendid visuals. The sets and costumes are impressive.

Lil Dagover makes a fine heroine. And Lio Sha is convincingly devious.

Kay is determined to escape and to take Naela with him.

In The Diamond Ship Kay Hoog and the Spiders have some unfinished business to attend to.

At stake in this episode is a diamond in the shape of the head of Buddha. Stolen 400 years earlier it is believed to be the key to restoring Asian greatness and independence from the European great powers. Lio Sha and the Spiders want that diamond. So does Kay Hoog.

The search takes Kay into the hidden Chinese city beneath the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Lio Sha has embarked on the ship Storm Bird.

There’s a kidnapping and there are exciting chases through hidden passageways, betrayals and plenty of gunplay.

The Spiders anticipates thematic elements that would appear in Lang’s slightly later movies. The sinister secret criminal organisation, the shadowy conspiracies and the hints of paranoia would be quite at home in Dr Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) and Spies (1928).

There’s a fascination with secret worlds and also with technology (which would play such a large rôle in Lang movies such as Metropolis and Woman in the Moon).

To appreciate this movie fully you need to know something of the popular culture landscape of the time. Diabolical criminal masterminds were all the rage. The first great example of the breed, Dr Nikola, had been created by Australia writer Guy Boothby in A Bid for Fortune in 1895. It was followed by a sequel, Dr Nikola Returns. By the time Lang made this movie Sax Rohmer had written his first three Dr Fu Manchu novels. In 1911 Fantômas, created by by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, made his first appearance in print. Louis Feuillade’s first Fantômas movie serial was released in 1913. Lang was tapping into a major pop culture obsession of the time.

The Spiders demonstrates the extraordinary technical sophistication of the German film industry in 1919 and the 29-year-old Lang’s confidence and ambition.

For many years this film was thought to be lost but a print was found in the 1970s.

The Spiders is a rather outrageous rollicking adventure romp. Highly recommend.

The Kino Classics DVD offers a reasonable transfer given the film’s age and rarity.

It’s interesting that almost at the end of his career Lang returned to Germany and made another two-part movie, known popularly as the Indian Epic, with a somewhat similar feel to The Spiders.

Rancho Notorious (1952)

The period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s was the golden age of the Hollywood western, an age of westerns that were more than just horse operas. Intelligent, emotionally and morally complex grown-up westerns. But parallel to this was the flowering of a much smaller crop of slightly offbeat westerns - overheated western melodramas and westerns that were defiantly unconventional. It started with Duel in the Sun and continued with movies like The Furies, Johnny Guitar and Forty Guns. Another western that seems to belong in this oddball category is Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952).

Rancho Notorious gives us the initial impression that it’s going to a straightforward revenge western. Ranch hand Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy) is looking forward to marrying his sweetheart in eight days’ time but while he’s out riding the range outlaws arrive in town and rob the assayers’ office where Vern’s fiancée works. She is killed, but before she is killed she is raped (something that is made surprisingly explicit for 1952 Hollywood).

A posse is formed but they are forced to give up the chase. Vern however is determined on revenge even if he has to go it alone. He has one clue, picked up from a dying outlaw. The word chuck-a-luck. Vern knows that this is the name of a popular gambling game but he knows that the outlaw used the term in a more specialised sense. It has to refer to a place, maybe a saloon somewhere, or maybe it refers in some way to a person. He can unravel that clue he’ll find the man who killed his bride-to-be.

He finds some other possible clues. If he can find a woman named Altar Keane and an outlaw named Frenchy Fairmont he may find the answers he seeks. We get a series of flashbacks through the eyes of several different people all of whom have vivid memories of the outrageous Altar Keane.

He finds Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer) and helps him break out of gaol and he finds Chuck-a-Luck. It’s an isolated ranch, and it’s run by Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich).

Chuck-a-Luck isn’t so much a ranch as a haven for outlaws. It’s a place they can hide out when they need to. Altar gets a cut of the proceeds of their robberies. There are nearly a dozen outlaws holed up there when Vern arrives. He thinks one of them is his fiancée’s killer but he doesn’t know which one. If he stays long enough he might figure it out.

Complications arise due to a mutual attraction between Vern and Altar. Altar is Frenchy’s girl. Frenchy likes Vern but he has no intention of allowing anyone to take Altar away from him.

The revenge theme and the lust theme (the romantic triangle between Vern, Frenchy and Altar) never lets up in this movie.

Due to budgetary constraints this movie was shot entirely in the studio apart from a few scenes on the backlot. There’s none of the location shooting that was beginning to be seen as absolutely essential in the western genre. This not only makes the film claustrophobic it also makes it seem very artificial. As someone who despises the cult of realism that’s one of the things I love about this movie.

Lang conceived this movie right from the start entirely as a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich.It didn’t work out the way he’d hoped. By the time the movie was finished they weren’t speaking to each other. But Dietrich still dominates the movie and her charisma makes her performance work.

This is a very unusual western. There’s no straightforward hero and no straightforward heroine. Vern seems initially to be set up as a conventional outlaw but he turns outlaw and he isn’t just pretending in order to catch that killer. He happily participates in robberies. His response to the murder of his girl is to reject all the social norms in which he once believed.

Frenchy is an unrepentant outlaw. Altar is a crook as well.

In spite of this all three are thoroughly sympathetic characters and the movie encourages us to take their side. The message seems to be that being an outlaw is a perfectly respectable lifestyle option. Thieves can be really nice people. And here we have a hero who starts out good and comes to realise he can never return to his old life. But being an outlaw isn’t so bad. And there’s no suggestion that we should condemn him for this.

I have no idea how this got past the Production Code Authority. I can only assume that somehow they simply didn’t notice that a movie that is unapologetically on the side of law-breakers was being slipped past them. And in this movie law-breakers don’t necessarily pay for their crimes. Some do, some don’t.

The plot is pretty straightforward but the plot doesn’t matter too much and the movie ends up being a strange very stylised western that makes no concessions to realism. In its own way it’s as bizarre and unusual as Forty Guns (which is pretty much the gold standard for bizarre westerns).

Rancho Notorious wasn’t liked by critics at the time and it’s still generally dismissed as one of Lang’s weakest films but it’s actually a totally fascinating mesmerising movie and I loved it. Highly recommended.

Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959)

The Tiger of Bengal (also released as The Tiger of Eschnapur which is a more faithful translation of the original German title Der Tiger von Eschnapur) is the first instalment of Fritz Lang’s so-called Indian Epic, a two-part adventure epic set in India and made in 1959 after Lang’s return to Germany. The second instalment was The Indian Tomb (Das indische Grabmal). They are in fact a single two-part movie. The Indian Epic is based on the 1918 novel The Indian Tomb by Thea von Harbou, who was married to Lang from 1922 to 1933. She and Lang had written the screenplay for a film adaptation to be directed by Lang in the early 20s but, much to Lang’s disgust, the project was taken away from him by the producer.

The film bears only a passing resemblance to the novel. What it does retain from the novel is the strange, beautiful and sinister atmosphere of the enormous palace that is the setting for most of the action.

In the film German architect Harald Berger (Paul Hubschmid) arrives in Eschnapur in India where he is to design and build schools and hospitals for the local ruler, the fabulously wealthy Maharajah Chandra (Walther Reyer). On his way to Eschnapur Berger had made the acquaintance of the dancer Seetha (Debra Paget). He is fascinated by her and she is by no means indifferent to him. Unfortunately the Maharajah is equally fascinated by Seetha. He hopes that she will take the place of his deceased maharani.

It’s obviously a very dangerous situation that is likely to lead to big trouble for all concerned. The Maharajah does not intend to abandon his attempt to win Seetha and Berger does not intend to give her up.

There’s also trouble stirring behind the scenes at the palace, with conspiracies and counter-conspiracies.

The Tiger of Bengal and its sequel, The Indian Tomb, were released several months apart in Germany but they are in fact a single film, with a total running time of something like three hours and twenty minutes. Turning a fairly short novel into a very long film obviously meant that apart from the other plot changes a lot of stuff was going to have to be added. Some of the mystery and the dreamlike quality of the novel are lost but there’s a great deal of extra action and excitement and the story is (not unnaturally) made a lot more cinematic.

The Indian Tomb continues the story where The Tiger of Bengal leaves off - in fact The Tiger of Bengal even has a classic cliffhanger ending. There is however a slight change of tone - the foreboding in the first film becomes outright menace in the second and Berger’s sister and her husband, who have arrived from Germany in search of Berger, take centre stage for a large part of The Indian Tomb, and do so in a way that those who have read the novel will find rather interesting.

The movie has often been criticised for its special effects. I have no idea why. Some are a bit iffy but on the whole they’re no worse than you’ll see in most movies, even big-budget movies, of its era. There’s some great Indian location shooting (the palace on the lake is the same one that appears much later in the best of the Roger Moore Bond films, Octopussy). The sets are superb, the costumes are gorgeous. It looks like a very expensive movie which it almost certainly wasn’t. At least not by Hollywood standards, although there was obviously some serious money spent on it. But if you want to make a great looking movie you need talent more than you need money. And Lang had the talent.

Debra Paget did not have the greatest of Hollywood careers (although she was terrific in Princess of the Nile) but she was absolutely the right choice to play Seetha. She has the right slightly exotic beauty and she knows how to make a dance suitably erotic. Seetha is supposed to be half-Indian and half-European and Paget has no trouble getting away with that. She looks right for the part and that matters more than her performance (which is in any case perfect adequate).

Paul Hubschmid is perhaps a little too passive. Walther Reyer does very well as Chandra, who is not so much a villain as a man who has been corrupted by too much unquestioned power. His motives are comprehensible and he really is justified in feeling betrayed even if his response is excessive. Chandra is a more interesting character than Berger and he is in many ways the real focus of the story.

Of course the characters are not meant to be real flesh-and-blood characters with lots of psychological complexity. It’s not that sort of story. It’s much closer to fairy tale than realistic psychological drama and we don’t expect in-depth character analysis in a fairy tale.

This is a movie that bewilders some Lang fans, mostly because they make the mistake of taking him too seriously. He was one of the greatest film-makers of all time and made plenty of complex, intelligent and provocative movies but he always understood that before anything else a movie has to be entertaining, and he liked to entertain. He also shared with Thea von Harbou an enthusiasm for pulpy popular adventure fiction. This was a movie that Lang had wanted to make for nearly forty years. It was a true labour of love. Although Werner Jörg Lüddecke gets the screenwriting credit Lang made major contributions to the script. There are lots of echoes of Metropolis (which had also been scripted by Lang and Thea von Harbou). Lang was able to make the movie the way he wanted to and it is in many ways very characteristically Langian. Even in his American period he made the underrated adventure film Moonfleet (which is interestingly more highly regarded in Europe than the U.S.). It was by no means some strange departure for Lang.

With Lang you always have to remember that he was raised as a Catholic and whether or not he was a practising Catholic or a good Catholic his outlook remained essentially Catholic throughout his life. Critics who obsess over the rôle of fate in Lang’s films miss the point. Lang believed that fate was inescapable but he also believed in free will - whatever fate has in store for us we can still choose how to deal with that fate and redemption is always possible. It always amazes me that there are critics who fail to see the importance of redemption even in a Lang film like You Only Live Once in which it is absolutely central. In the Indian Epic fate certainly plays a part but Seetha, Berger and Chandra all make choices. If you doubt any of this watch the ending of this movie closely. It’s all about redemption.

It’s also important to realise that the movie was in some ways an exercise in style. The visual impact, the atmosphere and the mood are more important than the plot.

The Indian Epic is an adventure film but it’s also to some extent a fairy tale. It takes place in a world that is supposed to be contemporary India but looks more like an imagined version of 19th century India with hints of the Arabian Nights and other fantastic fictional worlds. There are no radios or telephones or automobiles. You might think that Lang could easily have chosen to set the movie in 19th century India but it’s significant that he did not do this. The presence of the British would have been a fatal complication - it is important for the Maharajah to be an absolute ruler with no limitations on his power. In this respect it’s very reminiscent of the world of the Arabian Nights rather than India.

Mention must be made of Seetha’s snake dance. OK, the cobra isn’t very convincing, but when you’ve got a near-nude Debra Paget doing a startlingly erotic dance I don’t think anybody is going to be looking at the cobra. It’s one the scenes that amply justifies Paget's casting.

Lang is smart enough to make few compromises with any kind of strict realism. The film takes place in its own world, which is as it should be.

The question of authorship is intriguing. Thea von Harbou wrote the original novel. She and Lang wrote the screenplay for the 1921 film which Lang had hoped to direct. There was a 1938 German remake directed by Richard Eichberg and a number of plot points from that version found their way into Lang’s 1959 version (for which Eichberg gets a writing credit in Lang’s version). Werner Jörg Lüddecke wrote the original screenplay for the 1959 version but it was very substantially rewritten by Lang.

To add some confusion the two Lang films were edited together into a single 90-minute version for U.S. - Lang hated everything about this version apart from the title Journey to the Lost City which he loved.

Lang’s Indian Epic was a huge box-office hit in Germany. It made a lot of money and it went on making money. The critics in Germany hated the film. Being mid-century film critics they wanted serious realistic politically aware miserable films. They simply could not process the idea that a lavish exotic adventure movie might be something worthwhile. They also disliked the movie because they thought it old-fashioned. Which of course was exactly what Lang was aiming for. Most of all they hated it because it was incredibly popular. Anything that the public loved had to be bad. Critics still struggle with this movie and tend to dismiss it. But Lang liked making popular movies. Unlike the critics Lang had no problem with the idea that a movie could be artistically satisfying and also entertaining and also popular. He liked making adventure movies and science fiction and thrillers and yes he also liked making westerns. He added his personal stamp to all these genres.

It’s worth adding that to appreciate this movie fully it certainly helps if you’ve seen Metropolis, and probably Moonfleet, but definitely Metropolis. There are a lot of fascinating parallels.

Eureka’s Region 2 DVD release offers superb transfers and it’s packed with extras.

The Indian Epic is visually stunning and it’s terrific entertainment. This is pure Lang. He had complete creative freedom. This is a movie he desperately wanted to make and he was able to make it exactly the way he wanted to. It’s not the movie that critics at the time wanted him to make and it’s not the movie that many modern critics wished that he had made, but it is the movie he wanted to make and I think it succeeds. Very highly recommended.

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

The early 50s had been slightly difficult for Fritz Lang but 1953 saw him make an impressive comeback with The Blue Gardenia and The Big Heat. The Big Heat is of course one of Lang’s masterpieces. The Blue Gardenia doesn’t get as much attention but it’s still a fine film.

Three girls work as telephone operators and share an apartment. Norah (Anne Baxter) has a boyfriend who is currently fighting in Korea. Norah is rather a romantic soul. It’s her birthday and she’s going to spend it with her boyfriend, even though he can’t be there. She’s going to pretend he’s there. She’s cooked a special dinner and she’s bought champagne. She’s had a letter from hi but she’s been saving that up to read after she’s opened the champagne. Maybe it’s just as well she had that champagne since the letter is to give her the good news that her boyfriend has met a fabulous hot nurse named Angela  in Korea and they’re madly in love and they’re going to get married so he’s dumping Norah but he wishes her all the best. Norah is pretty cut up about this and she does something very uncharacteristic - she accepts a date with Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr).

Prebble is an artist. He’s the kind of artist who does pictures of pretty girls in skimpy clothing. He’s a notorious womaniser. He’s also terribly obvious. Any girl who goes out with Harry Prebble knows what to expect. Norah however is not exactly thinking straight. She just knows she wants to go out and have fun and forget that awful letter. Harry is a sleaze but he’s fun if a girl is in the mood for that sort of thing and Norah is in the mood for anything to dull the pain. And after the first half dozen formidably strong cocktails she’s not feeling any pain at all.

Norah has an impressive hangover the next day. She has no idea what happened the night before. She’s more than a little disturbed when she finds out that what happened the night before is that Harry Prebble got murdered. The unknown blonde with whom  he was seen dining at the Blue Gardenia Cafe is the prime suspect. The unknown blonde is of course Norah.

The story is all very straightforward and obvious. Sooner or later some girl was going to put up a fight to defend her virtue and Harry was going to get clobbered with a poker. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day. Which of course immediately makes us suspicious. If the case was really that straightforward Fritz Lang would never have bothered to make the damned movie so there has to be more to it.

Columnist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte) doesn’t know yet if the case is clear-cut or not but one thing he does know - this is the sort of story that sells newspapers. Glamour, sex, murder. And there’s the vital clue - the blue gardenia found at the murder scene. That gives him the hook that will make this a really big story - he christens the unknown murderess the Blue Gardenia. In his column he tells this unknown murderess that he and his newspaper will help her if she goes to them rather than the cops.

Richard Conte was one of those actors who could play a chilling villain or a very likeable hero with equal facility. That’s useful in a film like this, where things seem obvious on the surface but maybe they aren’t so obvious. Casey Mayo is a likeable kind of guy but he’s a newspaper reporter so he has no morals whatsoever.

This is a pretty disillusioned little film. The guy who seems like he’s being cast in the hero rôle would sell his soul for a good story. His handling of the Blue Gardenia story is crass and cynical. And the public laps it up. The cops don’t like it but if it helps to find the killer it’s OK by them - it’s not like they actually care about people.

Anne Baxter made a very big splash in All About Eve but of course Bette Davis made an even bigger splash in that movie. Baxter’s career overall didn’t amount to as much as one might have expected.

In 1953 Raymond Burr was still almost exclusively playing heavies and villains and doing so with enormous success. He’s delightfully sleazy here.

George Reeves (TV’s Superman) is OK as the cop in charge of the case. Ann Sothern is also good as Norah’s good-natured room-mate Crystal.

A lot of people will violently disagree with me but I think Fritz Lang’s American movies are better than his German movies. The German movies have brilliance and were clearly made by a man touched with greatness but he’d been allowed to do pretty much anything he wanted to and they’re also undisciplined and a little on the self-indulgent side. You couldn’t get away with that in Hollywood in those days. Lang was smart and he was a fast learner and he was adaptable. He adapted very quickly. His Hollywood movies are very tight and very disciplined. They’re very focused. Lang may not have liked submitting to that kind of discipline but it actually worked in his favour. The Blue Gardenia is typical. There are no wasted scenes.

The movie was shot in black-and-white and in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. This movie doesn’t have the obvious noir visual signatures. This was 1953 and that obvious style was going out of fashion in favour of location shooting and a self-consciously “realist” style. Nicholas Musuraca was the cinematographer so it still looks very impressive.

When analysing Lang’s movies it’s always worth bearing in mind his Catholicism. He can be dark but the idea of life being meaningless was anathema to Lang. Lang also believed very strongly in free will and the possibility of redemption. Whether his films offer a happy ending or a downbeat ending (and I’m not going to tell you if this film has a happy ending or not) the apparent meaning of the ending of a Lang film is not always the real meaning. Lang was one of the masters of film noir but the paradox is that film noir is fundamentally pessimistic and Lang was fundamentally optimistic, although not in a naïve manner.

The Blue Gardenia is generally regarded as minor Lang but it’s actually a very well-crafted little movie. Highly recommended.

Human Desire (1954)

I decided to follow up Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (The Human Beast) by watching Fritz Lang’s American remake, Human Desire, released by Columbia in 1954. In this case it really is a remake, since Lang based his production on Renoir’s film, and not on Zola’s novel. In fact there’s speculation that Lang didn’t even bother to read the novel!

The first surprise is that Lang opens his movie in exactly the same way. The opening of Renoir’s movie is a visual tour-de-force, an extended dialogue-free sequence involving  trains and railway tracks and setting up the relationship of the hero to the trains he loves so much. The images are magnificent, and for Lang to open his film in exactly the same way was a very brave thing to do. While it’s not quite as impressive, Lang gets away with it.

This opening also sets up a difference between the two versions of the story. The hero of Renoir’s version, Jacques Lantier, loves his locomotive dearly and there’s something almost organic and passionate and even perhaps slightly erotic in the relationship and in the images. Renoir’s railway is connected with life. Lang’s hero, Jeff, loves his job but the railway for Lang seems to symbolise something darker and more impersonal. It’s as if Lang’s railroad tracks don’t really lead anywhere, or they simply take us wherever fate wills.

The stories in the two films run mostly in parallel until the ending. Jeff (Glenn Ford) has returned from the Korean War to his job as a train engineer. He becomes involved with the wife (Gloria Grahame) of the assistant yard manager, and a witness to what appears to be a murder.

Lang’s task was much more difficult than Renoir’s, hampered as he was by the demands of the Hays Office and of a studio anxious to offend nobody and to provide a straightforward and if possible happy ending.  Given those constraints Lang does a reasonably good job.

The biggest change is in the personality of the hero. Jean Gabin as Lantier has a darkness within him, but Lang admitted he was forced to make Jeff a much more conventional hero. Glenn Ford is no Jean Gabin anyway, but he has little to work with. In some ways that perhaps suited Lang’s purpose. It makes Jeff a complete victim of fate.

It also puts more pressure on Gloria Grahame. Her character has to bear most of the burden of the moral murkiness of the movie. In fact she becomes the central character, and her relationship with her husband (played by Broderick Crawford as a pathetic but nasty drunk) becomes more central as well. Jeff becomes more of an innocent bystander caught up in events he never quite comprehends (rather like Ray Milland’s character in Lang’s earlier and underrated Ministry of Fear).

Fortunately Grahame is  equal to the task. Her performance is so good that the viewer, like Jeff, is never quite sure how much of what she’s telling him is the complete truth, an embellished version of the truth, or complete fabrication. The frustrating thing for us, and for him, is that there is certainly a considerable element of truth in her story.

The most unfortunate thing about Human Desire is that the plot does follow that of La Bête humaine rather closely so comparisons are inevitable, and it has to be said that Renoir’s is the better and more complex film.

Lang’s movie though is Lang’s movie, not Renoir’s, it reflects Lang’s concerns, and if you’re prepared to judge it on its own merits it’s a fine example of late American film noir. Highly recommended.

Western Union (1941)

Western Union, made at 20th Century-Fox in 1941, was Fritz Lang’s second western. Lang, rather surprisingly, actually liked westerns a good deal. While his movies in this genre don’t attract the same critical plaudits as his exercises in film noir like Scarlet Street and The Big Heat they do tend to be interesting. Western Union is not as eccentric as Rancho Notorious but it’s a little unusual.

In 1861 Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line. It was an epic tale of adventure and danger. Well actually it wasn’t apparently, it was fairly uneventful, but  screenwriter Robert Carson took care of that little problem.

The movie opens with a chance meeting between Western Union’s chief engineer Edward Creighton (Dean Jagger) and Vance Shaw (Randolph Scott). Shaw is a bank robber on the run and he steals Creighton’s horse but just as he’s about to make his getaway successfully he realises that Creighton is badly injured. So he takes Creighton with him to seek medical help. 

Creighton owes Shaw his life and he soon gets a chance to repay his debt. Although he knows Shaw is an outlaw he gives him a job with the company as scout. It’s a vital job since the telegraph is going to be laid through some mighty hostile country. Trusting Shaw is a gamble, but will it pay off?

The third of the movie’s stars is Robert Young who plays a dapper tenderfoot from the East named Richard Blake who’s not quite such a helpless fool as he first appears.

The film’s love interest is provided by Virginia Gilmore as Creighton’s sister Sue who soon finds herself with two ardent suitors in the persons of Blake and Shaw.

John Carradine plays a supporting role as the company’s genial but cynical doctor and he steals every scene he’s in.

The screenplay throws in a few unexpected twists. Attacks by hostile Indians provide the biggest hazard faced by the crew building the telegraph line, although that’s what appears to be going on but in fact things are not at all what they seem.

The movie was supposedly based on a novel by Zane Grey but in fact it has little in common with the novel beyond the title.

The movie was shot in Technicolor and it really does have an epic feel. There are two action climaxes coming one on top of another at the end and both are impressive. Opinions seem to vary quite a bit on the final action sequence with some people believing that Lang made a hash of it whilst others believe he handled it perfectly. I fall into the second camp. It works for me.

Opinions on the film as a whole also diverge sharply. It’s a movie that changes gears dramatically in the last half-hour. The first hour is quite light-hearted but then the mood darkens significantly, and becomes quite overtly Langian. I think that makes the latter part of the film more effective - it comes as a shock when we realise just how completely trapped the hero is.

While I mentioned the three main stars earlier in actual fact the movie belongs totally to Randolph Scott. By 1941 he had already perfected his minimalist approach to acting and it serves him very well. Robert Young is, surprisingly, quite good. Dean Jagger drew the short straw and got the least interesting of the three main roles but he’s solid enough. Virginia Gilmore is charming.

This is the story of a great feat of engineering, and it’s a love triangle, but the only real plot strand that matters is the one involving Vance Shaw and it’s handled well enough to qualify this as one of the first great classic westerns.

Western Union is a fine movie, visually very impressive, and is highly recommended.

Scarlet Street (1945)

Although Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street has long been recognised as one of the key movies in the American film noir cycle it had the misfortune for many years to be seen only in very poor quality DVD releases. That problem has now been largely solved by Kino’s Blu-Ray release. It is now possible to see the film as it should be seen and to judge it accordingly.

Scarlet Street had an interesting history. It’s a remake of a 1931 Jean Renoir film which retains most of the plot elements of the earlier film but with some very important changes in both tone and in the nature of the relationship between the characters.

Scarlet Street is in some ways a logical follow-up to Lang’s 1944 hit The Woman in the Window. That movie also starred Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea and had relaunched Bennett’s career after a hiatus due to motherhood. The success of The Woman in the Window had convinced Joan Bennett that her best hope for maintaining her career as a major star was to continue working with Lang. She felt that Lang was the director who could get the best performances out of her, and that was an entirely accurate judgment on her part. She persuaded her husband, producer Walter Wanger, that it would be an extremely good idea to join Lang in setting up an independent production company. The company would have three huge assets - Bennett’s star quality, Lang’s reputation as a director and Wanger’s established relationship with Universal which would take care of the distribution angle. Diana Productions would have a brief and turbulent history.

While Diana Productions eventually met an unhappy fate in the short term Scarlet Street fulfilled the high expectations everyone involved had for it. It was well received by the critics and it was a box-office hit.

The story comprises two intersecting romantic triangles, although perhaps romantic is the wrong word for such spectacularly perverse relationships.

Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) is a meek cashier whose one genuine satisfaction in life is his painting. He was unwise enough to allow loneliness to tempt him into a disastrous marriage with the shrewish Adele (Rosalind Ivan). He is the sort of man who just lets life happen to him, rather like a train wreck. His attempts to take control of his own destiny will lead him to make some disastrous mistakes that will make his life a whole lot worse. Taking control is a good idea but it helps if you have some judgment. While some people see Lang’s characters as victims of fate Chris is entirely a victim of his own poor decisions and lack of judgment. Wishful thinking is not a good plan. It’s an especially bad plan when you’re dealing with someone like Kitty March (Joan Bennett).

Chris’s paintings are very much in the style of naïve art. He has had no art training and has never mastered the technique of perspective (just as he has never mastered the technique of perspective in his own life). One of the reasons this movie works so well is that his paintings (which were done for the movie by an artist friend of Lang’s) are so very convincing. They really do look like the work of an untrained amateur, they really do look like the paintings that a man like Chris would paint, and they really do look like the kinds of paintings that trendy art critics would hail as the product of an untrained genius.

Dudley Nichols had written the screenplay for Lang’s 1941 hit Man Hunt and was anxious to work with him again. Nichols provided Lang with exactly what he needed for Scarlet Street, a strong script which allowed free rein for Lang’s visual imagination.

Lang would adapt fairly well to the changing tastes and the demands for more location shooting in the 50s but he was really at his best shooting in a studio where he could have absolute control. In this case everything comes together perfectly - Alexander Golitzen’s art direction, the sets, the costumes, the acting, Lang’s visual brilliance, all complement one another. Kitty’s studio apartment makes a perfect contrast with the sordidness of Chris’s apartment.

Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett had already proved themselves to be a very successful and dynamic pairing in The Woman in the Window. They’re even better in Scarlet Street. As terrific as Robinson is he is perhaps overshadowed by Bennett’s extraordinary (and career-best) performance. Dan Duryea does what Dan Duryea always does, and does it with style.

Kino’s Blu-Ray is the best this movie has ever looked. A company with greater resources might have provided a better transfer but this one is a huge improvement over the generally horrible previous DVD releases. On his stimulating an informative audio commentary David Kalat does make a very good point about the ending, a point Lotte Eisner made in her excellent book on the director. Chris’s fate has more to do with the fact that he has failed to win Kitty from Johnny, rather than with actual guilt for his (Chris’s) crimes.

Be warned though - his audio commentary includes major spoilers for three other Lang movies - The Woman in the Window, Fury and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. If you haven’t  yet seen those movies you might want to think about skipping the commentary from around to the 65-minute mark to around the 80-minute mark. The spoilers are absolutely crucial and will pretty much wreck your enjoyment of those three movies. I understand that he could not make certain important points in his arguments without revealing those spoilers but it’s still something to bear in mind.

Scarlet Street is not only the best of Lang’s American films, it’s the best film of his career. Yes, even better than M. Very highly recommended.

Ministry of Fear (1944)

Ministry of Fear, released by Paramount in 1944, is not one of Fritz Lang’s more admired American movies. Lang himself was not entirely happy with it. In spite of all that I’m going to go out on a limb and describe it as a minor Langian masterpiece.

Lang admired Graham Greene as a writer and was initially enthusiastic when approached by Paramount to film Greene’s 1943 novel Ministry of Fear. Lang was usually very careful to make sure that any contract he signed would give him the right to make any alterations to the script that he considered necessary. On this occasion he neglected to take that precaution and then found screenwriter Seton I. Miller to be annoyingly resistant to making the changes that Lang sought. That may account for Lang’s later lack of enthusiasm for the movie, and possibly also for the relative disdain critics have displayed towards it. Regardless of all this it’s obvious when you watch the movie that Lang put a great deal of thought into the making of the movie. It includes some of Lang’s most effective visual set-pieces.

As the film opens Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is about to be released from what we assume to be a prison. As he passes through the gate on his way out we find that it is in fact a mental hospital. At this stage we have no idea why he had been confined in such a place and we will not be given that information until well into the movie.

While waiting for his train to London Neale wanders into a fête run by a wartime charity, the Mothers of Free Nations. He has his fortune told and wins a cake. His winning of the cake seems to cause a surprising amount of consternation among the other attendees of the fête. This strikes Neale as slightly curious but he is too anxious to get to London to worry about such trifles. He boards his train and this is the occasion for the first of Lang’s virtuoso moments in this film. A blind man enters Neale’s compartment and now Neale discovers that the cake he has won is a great deal more than just a cake.

That cake lets Stephen Neale in for a good deal of trouble. He soon starts to suspect that the Mothers of Free Nations might not be quite the innocuous charity it appears to be. When he meets the people who run the charity, Willi Hilfe (Carl Esmond) and his sister Clara (Marjorie Reynolds), his suspicions are somewhat abated. They are Austrian refugees and seem to be harmless enough. In fact Neale is rather taken by Clara.

Nonetheless Neale is determined to find out why a cake has caused him so much trouble and has almost cost him his life. He wants to track down the clairvoyant from the carnival and this quest leads to a séance, and the séance scene is handled brilliantly by Lang. It also introduces Dan Duryea as Cost, a character who will play some unexpected parts in the story.

Associated with the Mothers of Free Nations is a psychiatrist named Dr Forrester (Alan Napier). He has written a book offering a psychoanalytical examination of Nazism. Neale is rather puzzled by Dr Forrester and he is increasingly concerned about being shadowed by a rather sinister unidentified figure.

Neale is very unsure about trusting anyone concerned in these doings and the other characters are equally unsure about trusting him. Neale seems to have good reasons for not trusting them but then they seem to have equally valid reasons for not trusting him.

The audience has seen all these events from Neale’s point of view and knows no more about what is really going on than he does. On the other hand the audience has very incomplete knowledge of Stephen Neale himself and when snippets of information about him are revealed they may be inclined to be as suspicious of him as he is of the other characters in the story, especially when the reasons for his incarceration in the asylum are revealed.

The one thing that seems to be beyond doubt is that espionage is involved, but in this movie nothing is really beyond doubt. Everything and everybody seems equivocal (hardly surprising when the source material is a Graham Greene novel). It’s all shades of grey. Anyone could be guilty but we can’t be sure exactly what they might be guilty of.

The resolution of these various doubts will afford Lang the opportunity for a series of stunning visual tours de force.

Whatever reservations Lang may have had about Miller’s screenplay it does capture much of the distinctive Graham Greene flavour of the novel, although Lang’s handling of the material possibly contributes even more to the very effectively ambiguous feel of the movie.

Ray Milland is ideally cast. He had the ability to be very likeable whilst also leaving us in some small doubt about whether the characters he played were really what they seemed to be. Marjorie Reynolds is an effective female lead. Dan Duryea has little screen time but as always makes his presence felt playing a decidedly but subtly sinister rôle. The supporting is uniformly impressive.

The amount of time and effort Lang was able to put into his visual set-pieces makes it obvious that Paramount had provided him with a rather generous budget. The movie has  the definite feel of being a movie shot entirely in the studio and on the backlot but that was true of most of Lang’s best movies of the 40s (a feature that is particularly evident in Scarlet Street and Woman in the Window). I feel this was very much to the advantage of his movies of this period, giving them a wonderfully stifling claustrophobic feel but even more importantly giving them a deliberately artificial feel that adds extra layers of ambiguity.

Optimum’s Region 2 DVD offers no extras but a superb transfer.

Ministry of Fear is often dismissed as a lightweight Lang movie but it is nonetheless very Langian and is also one the most visually impressive of his American movies. There are enough layers of complexity and ambiguity to satisfy any reasonable Lang fan. And it’s also an extremely entertaining movie. Very highly recommended.

House by the River (1950)

House by the River is rather unusual among Fritz Lang’s American films. It’s a period thriller, set presumably sometime in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. And this is unquestionably a gothic thriller.

This was a low-budget movie, made by the Republic studio. Republic was a Poverty Row studio although they did make the occasional A-picture. They were certainly not as low down the food chain as PRC where Lang’s fellow-countryman Edgar G. Ulmer spent most of his career. House by the River doesn’t suffer too badly from its low budget. Lang had adapted surprisingly well to his lengthy sojourn in Hollywood. None of his American pictures have the lavish budgets of his early German movies but Lang by this time needn’t need big budgets. His style had become much more economical with a much greater focus on character. What he did need was a decent cast, and in this instance he has that.

Louis Hayward is Stephen Byrne, an unsuccessful writer. As we gradually discover, he’s not really much of a success at anything. His brother John (Lee Bowman) is continually rescuing him from one scrape or another. And he’s certainly not much of a husband. When he first meet him he’s trying to seduce his wife’s maid. He is as unsuccessful at this endeavour as he is in everything else, but this time with much graver consequences. He ends up strangling the maid.

As he explains to his brother, it was an accident. It could have happened to anybody. It’s clear that nothing is ever Stephen’s fault. Life is always conspiring against him, causing publishers to reject his manuscripts, and now causing him to commit murder. Against his better judgment, John once again agrees to try to keep Stephen out of trouble.

This proves to be a very poor decision. The evidence at the inquest seems to point more towards John than Stephen, and Stephen does nothing to lessen these ill-founded suspicions against his brother. While John finds himself more and more enmeshed in a nightmare Stephen prospers. One day of course the reckoning will come for Stephen, but will it come too late for John?

Louis Hayward does a very fine job. He gets the self-pity just right. Stephen is a boy who has never grown up, never accepted responsibility. His grip on reality is less than perfect. Much less. The whole world revolves around him. He assumes that because he wants to be a writer he must be one. It’s just those fools of publishers who can’t appreciate his talent. Now he has found a theme that will guarantee the recognition that he believes he deserves. Typically enough his choice of theme is thoroughly self-centred and selfish. He will use the murder he himself committed as material for the novel that will cement his reputation. And in fact the notoriety that surrounds the murder does establish his fame as a writer. Stephen is a nasty piece of work but he is so wrapped up in himself that he’s entirely unaware of it.

Lee Bowman does a capable job as John, while Jane Wyatt is very good as Stephen’s wife Marjorie. But it is Hayward’s performance that is crucial to the movie’s success and he  delivers the goods.

Edward Cronjager was a more than competent cinematographer. He rarely worked in either the film noir or gothic areas but when he did do so he proved himself quite capable, his most impressive work being the very underrated 1947 Technicolor noir Desert Fury. Lang and Cronjager evoke the necessary gothic atmosphere exceptionally well considering the modest budget they had to work with. The scenes on the river are suitably moody and ominous.

Film noir and the gothic overlap quite a bit, both genres tending to focus on doom and the remorselessness of fate, and Stephen Byrne’s story has that sense of inevitability about it that one associates with both genres. The nightmare that John Byrne finds himself living has that same sense of inevitability. John will always try to rescue Stephen, and he was always going to come to grief one day as a result.

The Kino DVD is all too typical of this company’s output. Picture quality is mostly quite acceptable but there is some print damage. It’s certainly nowhere near up to the standard that a Fritz Lang movie deserves. Lang has been both lucky and unlucky where DVDs are concerned. It’s been a positive asset to his reputation that just about all his American movies have been released on DVD and are therefore accessible, but very few have been given top quality releases.

House by the River is an unusual but unjustly neglected part of Fritz Lang’s filmography. Lang and the gothic prove to be a good match and this movie is highly recommended.