And of the German emigres who would bring their mysteriously dark visions to Hollywood, Fritz Lang, born Friedrich Christian Anton Lang in 1890, is perhaps the greatest. Lang would helm over a dozen films that are irrefutably the heart of any definition of what constitutes film noir. His universal appeal was established by the grandiose visuals of his Teutonic epic Die Nibelungen (1924); a two-part series of fantastical silent films that starred Paul Richter and Margaret Schon and another defining moment for the director, would be his proto-science fiction masterwork of 1926, Metropolis. It would however, in spite of these acclaimed works, be his ground-breaking crime movies, Doctor Mabuse der Spieler (1924) and M (1932) (which was inspired by the flux of serial killers in 1920's Germany) that provided the link with the films of his highly successful and illustrious career.
According to Fritz Lang himself; a story that has oft been scrutinized for its credibility - his panic riddled flight from Germany to Paris in 1933, (the year the Nazis seized power of the industry) was precipitated by an offer (of the can't refuse variety) from Dr Goebbels himself, with a twenty-four hour deadline to decide, (The Ministry of Propaganda had previously made the decision to ban Testament des Dr Abuse), if he was to play a key role in the The Third Reich's film industry.
 |
| Banned as a result of the Mabuse of power. |
Lang's brief dalliance in France was followed by twenty years in America where he would release the well-polished Fury (1936), despite his abhorrence of studio interference, would be off to a swimmingly well start with Fury and its horrific vision of an innocent man at the mercy of a lynch mob. Fury, which featured Spencer Tracy, had a nightmarish force far more potent than any of the homespun directors were expressing at the time. He would release the subsequent You Only Live Once in 1938, the story of an ex-criminal (Henry Fonda) trying to get on the straight and narrow,who - as a consequence of Sod's Law is incarcerated for a robbery and a killing of which he is completely innocent. Both films center on the plight of a wronged individual and how fear and alienation ultimately become self-perpetuating.
 |
| Don't Fear The Reaper, or that shadow...Ministry of Fear (1944) (Ray Milland ,Marjorie Reynolds) |
Though Lang trained as a fine artist in Vienna, before he would be drafted at the age of twenty four in World War I, his Germanic films are heavily associated with the aesthetics of expressionism, the visual styles of his American productions are very much aligned with their subject matter - from the baroque stylization of the Brechtian worlds in Ministry of Fear (1944) and Secret Beyond The Door (1950) to the relatively repressed Clash By Night (1952) and 1953's The Blue Gardenia - the latter two lensed by the subtlest of noir cinematographers Nicholas Musuraca.
 |
| Joan Bennet is that Woman in the Window (1944) - taking a bed break |
And more than any visual signature, it is Lang's astoundingly adroit nature as the master storyteller that shines through his films, in his plots that unravel - in an almost obdurate clarity and logic, through the careful accumulation and conveyance of human detail. Despite his being a reputed martinet on-set, Lang's crafted films articulate their tales of ordinary folk that often find themselves in unexpected and extraordinary situations. A testament to this theory is seen in two veritable masterpieces, 1944's The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street (1946) which both starred the diminutive Edward G. Robinson and a fetching Joan Bennett; while he certainly didn't shirk in the subsequent While The City Sleeps (1956); an idiosyncratic newspaper noir that oozes Lang's steely-eyed perception of humanity, released the same year - Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (1956) has Dana Andrews (the President of the Screen Actors Guild 1963-5) as Tom Garrett, a novelist who confesses to a murder he doesn't commit ultimately revealing its subterfuge in a plot as highly unlikely as it is ruthlessly impelling.
 |
| Friedrich Christian Anton Lang (1890-1976) |