Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954)

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in Human Desire

Cast: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Edgar Buchanan, Kathleen Case, Peggy Maley, Diane DeLare, Grandon Rhodes. Screenplay: Alfred Hayes, based on a novel by Émile Zola. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Robert Peterson. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Glenn Ford's boyish nice-guy looks and personality always seemed to me to make him an odd choice for tough-guy roles like the ones he played in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953). Lang apparently didn't have a problem with that disjunction: Having cast Ford opposite Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, he reteamed them in the latter film, with good effect. Still, Ford's limitations are apparent when you compare him with Jean Gabin, who played much the same role, a railroad engineer caught up in seamy doings, in Jean Renoir's earlier version of the Émile Zola novel, La Bête Humaine (1938). Gabin had a solidity that Ford lacks. Human Desire is, for the most part, a good contribution to the film noir genre, especially Burnett Guffey's cinematography, which uses the railway yard shadows to good effect. The screenplay has a few good lines -- "All women are alike. They just got different faces so the men can tell them apart." -- but it cheats with a happy ending for Ford's character that's at odds with the spirit of both Zola's novel and Renoir's version of it. Daniele Amfitheatrof's score is laid on too heavily, as if the filmmakers didn't trust the actors or the screenplay to carry the burden of what's being done and said.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Cast: Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sidney Blackmer, Barbara Nichols, Arthur Franz, Philip Bourneuf, Edward Binns, Shepperd Strudwick. Screenplay: Douglas Morrow. Cinematography: William E. Snyder. Art direction: Carroll Clark. Music: Herschel Burke Gilbert.

The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953)

The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953)

Cast: Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, George Reeves, Richard Erdman, Ruth Storey, Ray Walker, Nat "King" Cole. Screenplay: Charles Hoffman, based on a story by Vera Caspary. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Edward Mann. Music: Raoul Kraushaar.

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Cast: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, John Drew Barrymore, James Craig, Ida Lupino. Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo. Art direction: Carroll Clark. Film editing: Gene Fowler Jr. Music: Herschel Burke Gilbert.

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Robert Ryan and Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night 

Mae Doyle: Barbara Stanwyck
Jerry D'Amato: Paul Douglas
Earl Pfeiffer: Robert Ryan
Peggy: Marilyn Monroe
Joe Doyle: Keith Andes
Uncle Vince: J. Carrol Naish
Papa D'Amato: Silvio Minciotti

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Alfred Hayes
Based on a play by Clifford Odets
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Art direction: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Roy Webb

There's a wonderful directorial touch in the middle of Fritz Lang's Clash by Night that almost makes up for the talky melodrama of the rest of the film: Stealing from the romantic gesture executed by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Lang has Robert Ryan light two cigarettes at once and hand one of them to Barbara Stanwyck. She looks at it with distaste for a moment, then tosses it over her shoulder, takes out her own pack of cigarettes, and lights one herself. It's possible that the moment is spelled out in Alfred Hayes's screenplay, or in the play by Clifford Odets on which it's based, but I like to think of it as Lang's own employment of Stanwyck's great gift for playing women in charge. In fact, Stanwyck's character, Mae Doyle, is hardly ever fully in charge -- she can't control her life because of the men in it, which she describes as either "all little and nervous like sparrows or big and worried like sick bears." The problem with Clash by Night is not the cast, which is uniformly watchable, or the direction, which does what it can with the material, particularly by exploiting the film's setting -- Monterey, the bay, the fishing fleet, and Cannery Row -- but the screenplay. It's full of Odets characters who can't resolve their internal conflicts but also can't stop talking about them. Even the secondary characters, like Jerry D'Amato's father and uncle, can't help putting in their two cents, often in florid Odetsian metaphor. The title of the film comes from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which the speaker laments the loss of faith in a world that has "neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." It's a place where "ignorant armies clash by night." That bleak Victorian pessimism, however, doesn't translate very well to a story in which the clashing armies are men and women, a battle of the sexes that's a little too conventional in concept. Mae returns to her family home in Monterey, and immediately starts making a mess of things by attracting not only the good-hearted Jerry but also his cynical burnt-out friend Earl. Since Jerry is played by the somewhat schlubby Paul Douglas and Earl by the handsome Robert Ryan, we can see immediately where this is going to go, and the wait for it to get there gets a little tedious. There's also a rather pointless secondary plot involving Mae's brother, Joe, and his girlfriend, Peggy, who are played by Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe. The backstories that stars and their personae bring to the roles they play are often valuable. Here, however, Marilyn's presence in the cast has unbalanced our subsequent reaction to the film, which can never be watched without the irrelevant knowledge of the actress's skyrocketing career, troubled relationship with her directors (including Lang, who terrified her so much that she vomited before performing a scene), and pitiable demise. Peggy is a small role, and she plays it well, but it was never meant to be the principal reason many people watch Clash by Night.

The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in The Big Heat

Dave Bannion: Glenn Ford
Debby Marsh: Gloria Grahame
Kate Bannion: Jocelyn Brando
Mike Lagana: Alexander Scourby
Vince Stone: Lee Marvin
Bertha Duncan: Jeanette Nolan
Larry Gordon: Adam Williams
Tierney: Peter Whitney
Lt. Ted Wilks: Willis Bouchey
Commissioner Higgins: Howard Wendell
George Rose: Chris Alcaide
Lucy Chapman: Dorothy Green
Atkins: Dan Seymour
Selma Parker: Edith Evanson

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Sydney Boehm
Based on a novel by William P. McGivern
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Robert Peterson
Film editing: Charles Nelson
Music: Henry Vars

So many of the roles in Glenn Ford's career established him as a figure of middle-American blandness that it comes as a surprise to see the cold-eyed intensity of which he was capable in the role of the vengeful Dave Bannion in The Big Heat. He's still the good guy, fighting crime bosses and corrupt cops, but with the film noir twist that he's willing to resort to some pretty bad means to achieve his ends. He's also a solid foil for Gloria Grahame at her sultriest and a tough foe for Lee Marvin at his thuggiest. We get a glimpse of the more familiar Ford in the scenes with Bannion and his wife and daughter that verge a bit on stickiness, though the more to emphasize Bannion's quest for vengeance after his wife is killed and his daughter threatened by Alexander Scourby's suave mobster, Mike Lagana. (Is it just my prurient imagination, or does the scene in which Lagana is wakened for a phone call by George, his bodyguard, wearing a bathrobe, suggest that George may be doing more to Lagana's body than just guarding it?) The Big Heat is a classic, one of the highlights of Fritz Lang's American career, and it still has the power not only to startle and shock but also to amuse, thanks to a solid screenplay -- Grahame in particular is given some delicious lines to speak, including Debby's classic riposte to Bertha Duncan, "We're sisters under the mink."

Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Mel Ferrer and Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious

Vern Haskell: Arthur Kennedy
Altar Keane: Marlene Dietrich
Frenchy Fairmont: Mel Ferrer
Beth Forbes: Gloria Henry
Baldy Gunder: William Frawley
Maxine: Lisa Ferraday
Mort Geary: Jack Elam
Wilson: George Reeves
Preacher: Frank Ferguson
Harbin: Francis McDonald
Comanche Paul: Dan Seymour
Kinch: Lloyd Gough

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Daniel Taradash
Based on a story by Silvia Richards
Cinematography: Hal Mohr
Music: Emil Newman

Arthur Kennedy was one of those reliably good Hollywood actors who never made it to the first rank of stardom though he received five Oscar nominations during his 50-year career on screen. He gives what is perhaps the most convincing performance in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious as the Wyoming cowboy who obsessively tracks down the man who raped and murdered his fiancée, but convincing acting perhaps isn't to the point when you're up against Marlene Dietrich, one of those larger-than-life movie stars who can upend a scene just by tossing back her shoulders, unleashing her familiar hooded gaze, and letting a famous leg slip from the slit in her skirt. The part of Vern Haskell needs a Gary Cooper or John Wayne just for balance. Nor does Mel Ferrer, his reliable blandness offset by frosted highlights in his hair, fare particularly well as Frenchy Fairmont, the current lover of Dietrich's equally absurdly named Altar Keane. But Lang keeps Rancho Notorious from steering too far into the direction of camp, offsetting its Western clichés with some well-staged action scenes and a steady pace that briskly ties up the plot in just under 90 minutes. Unfortunately, Rancho Notorious, which was originally titled Chuck-a-Luck, was tricked out with a narrative ballad accompaniment, "The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck" by Ken Darby, with the unsingable refrain, "Hate, murder, and revenge," that pops up every time you think you can keep a straight face. Still, the film is as watchable as it is incredible.

Turner Classic Movies

Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)

Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street is based on the same novel by Georges de la Fouchardière that Jean Renoir had adapted for his 1931 film that retained the novel's title, La Chienne. Both films came at oddly significant points in their directors' careers: Renoir's was only his second talkie, but one in which he demonstrated his mastery of the relatively new medium by a creative use of ambient sound. Lang's was made just as World War II was ending -- a moment when it became possible for him to return to Europe, which he had fled to avoid Nazi persecution. Lang chose, however, to stay on in Hollywood for 12 more years, though he grew increasingly annoyed at the creative restrictions imposed on him by the big studios and Production Code censorship. In this context, Scarlet Street stands out as edgy and somewhat defiant. The Code prescribed a kind of lex talionis: any criminal act demands a punishment equivalent in kind and degree. But in Scarlet Street, Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) gets away with not only fraud and theft but also murder -- a double murder, if you consider that the man wrongly accused of the murder goes to the electric chair for it. Cross is punished by homelessness and by auditory delusions of the voices of those who drove him to crime, but that's much less severe than the Code usually prescribed. There were those, of course, including censors in New York State, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, who noticed the Code's laxness and proceeded to ban the film on their own. Today, Scarlet Street is regarded as a classic, one of the premier examples of film noir at its darkest. It doesn't quite measure up to Renoir's version, perhaps because Renoir was freer in expressing his vision of the material than Lang was. Renoir's film had touches of humor and a gentler, more ironic ending, but the ending of Scarlet Street is entirely in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film, with its traces of unfettered Lang: for example, the shocking viciousness of Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), who if you know how to decode the Code is clearly the pimp to the prostitute Kitty March (Joan Bennett). And Cross's behavior at the end of the film, derelict and delusional, echoes some of the frantic paranoia of Peter Lorre's child murderer in Lang's M (1931). The screenplay is by Dudley Nichols.

Woman in the Moon (Fritz Lang, 1929)

Classic space-travel science fiction, Woman in the Moon was hugely influential on movies up until the time when human beings actually began to travel into space. You can find its traces in everything from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials to Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950) and Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956), and even into the space age in TV series like Lost in Space (1965-68) and the first Star Trek series (1965-69). None of this should be surprising: Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist who was a technical adviser on Fritz Lang's film, came to the United States in 1935 and became an ardent popularizer of space travel and consultant to many science fiction writers and film directors. Actual space travel made some of Woman in the Moon obsolete: the notion that the moon has a breathable atmosphere and a temperate climate, for example. But Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, also consulted with another rocket scientist, Hermann Oberth, while writing the screenplay, and got a few things exactly and presciently right, like multistage rocketry, the need for zero-gravity restraints, and the firing of retro-rockets to slow the descent of the ship to the moon's surface. But perhaps their most influential contribution is the suspenseful (and often hokey) melodrama of the plot. They invented the familiar clichés: the discredited scientist whose theories turn out to be right; corporate villainy and greed at odds with the idealism of the scientists; the romantic triangle heightened by the isolation of the spaceship; the unexpected but useful stowaway; the need to sacrifice a member of the crew to return to safety. Fortunately, Lang never lets things bog down in the nascent clichés, and he has a capable cast to work with. Willy Fritsch is Wolf Helius, an idealistic rocketeer who has planned the space flight with the help of the discredited professor, Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl). Gustav von Wangenheim and Gerda Maurus are Helius's assistants, Hans Windegger and Friede Velten, who have just gotten engaged, to the dismay of Helius, who is in love with Friede. Fritz Rasp is the evil mastermind Walter Turner, who threatens to destroy the rocket unless Helius allows him to come along on the voyage to advance the interests of the greedy corporate types who want to get their hands on the gold deposits that Manfeldt has theorized are plentiful on the moon. (With his hair slicked back across one side of his forehead, Rasp has a surprising resemblance to Adolf Hitler in this movie.) And the stowaway is Gustav (Gustl Gstettenbaur), a boy obsessed with space travel who brings his collection of sci-fi pulp magazines along with him. Even today, Woman in the Moon is good, larky fun.

Der müde Tod (Fritz Lang, 1921)

Death (Bernhard Goetzke) and the Young Woman (Lil Dagover) in Der müde Tod

Der müde Tod, which means "Weary Death," was released in English-speaking countries under titles like Destiny, Behind the Wall, and The Three Lights, all of which miss an essential premise of the film, which is that Death (Bernhard Goetze) has grown weary of his encounters with human suffering. So when he takes a Young Man (Walter Janssen) whose fiancée (Lil Dagover) seeks out Death and pleads for his return. he is inclined to give her a break: He will give her three chances to save the life of someone destined to die, and if she succeeds, he will return the Young Man to life. So we see the Young Woman in three episodes set in wonderfully fanciful versions of the past: ancient Persia, Renaissance Italy, and imperial China. Each time she tries to save her lover from the death she knows is coming, but each time she fails. Dagover and Janssen play all three pairs of lovers, with Goetze lurking in various fatal incarnations in each episode. When she fails, Death gives her one last chance: Returning the Young Man to life would leave an empty place in the afterlife, but if she can persuade someone to give up his or her life to replace him, he will spare her fiancé. It's a beautifully constructed fantasy, written by Fritz Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, and directed by Lang with his usual exploitation of elaborate sets and camera effects. The art direction is by Robert Herlth, Walter Röhrig, and Hermann Warm, frequent collaborators with the great German directors of the period between the wars, such as Lang and F.W. Murnau.

Die Nibelungen (Fritz Lang, 1924)

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried

Hanna Ralph in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried

Queen Ute: Gertrud Arnold

Kriemhild: Margarete Schön 

Brunnhild: Hanna Ralph 

Siegfried: Paul Richter 

King Gunther: Theodor Loos

Hagen Tronje: Hans Adalbert Schlettow

Mime / Alberich: Georg John

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge

Margarete Schön  in Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge

Kriemhild: Margarete Schön
Queen Ute: Gertrud Arnold
King Gunther: Theodor Loos
Hagen Tronje: Hans Adalbert Schlettow
King Etzel: Rudolf Klein-Rogge
Slaodel: Georg John

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou
Cinematography: Carl Hoffmann, Günter Rittau, Walter Ruttmann
Art direction: Otto Hunte, Karl Vollbrecht
Costume design: Paul Gerd Guderian, Aenne Willkomm
Music: Gottfried Huppertz

Fritz Lang's two-part epic, based on the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, will confuse anyone who knows the story only via Richard Wagner's Ring cycle: There are no Rhinemaidens or gods or Valkyries, nothing of Siegfried's parentage, and, since it lacks gods, consequently no Götterdämmerung. It consists of two films, Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge, that tell the story -- parts of which will be familiar from the final two operas in Wagner's cycle -- of how Siegfried slew the dragon and bathed in its blood, becoming invincible except for one spot on his back that the blood failed to touch, then killed the dwarf Alberich and took possession of a magic net that renders him invisible. He travels to Burgundy, where he wins the hand of the beautiful Kriemhild by helping her brother, King Gunther, subdue the warrior maiden Brunnhild. But Siegfried is killed after Gunther's advisor, Hagen, tricks Kriemhild into revealing his vulnerable spot. Brunnhild kills herself and Kriemhild vows revenge on the whole lot, which in the second film she accomplishes by marrying King Etzel, aka Attila, and provoking war between his Huns and the Burgundians. Lang tells the story with an eye-filling blend of tableaus, set-pieces, and scenes swarming with bloody action, concluding with a spectacular fire in which the Burgundians are trapped in Etzel's castle. The performances are pretty spectacular, too. Richter plays Siegfried as a muscular young goof ensnared by fate, Ralph is a formidable Brunnhild, and Schön modulates from naïve to terrifying as Kriemhild. But it's the production design by Otto Hunte and the costuming by Paul Gerd Guderian that lingers most in the memory. The production evokes late 19th- and early 20th-century book illustrators like Arthur Rackham and Walter Crane, but also the stark hieratic figures of Byzantine mosaics, especially Kriemhild, who becomes more powerfully static as the film progresses. Much has been written about the way the film fed into the heroic German myth that was co-opted by the Nazis, especially since the screenwriter, Thea von Harbou, Lang's wife at the time, later joined the party. (Lang, whose mother was Jewish, left Germany in 1934.) In fact, the Nazis sanctioned only the first half, Siegfried, after they came to power. Kriemhild's Revenge, with its depiction of the corruption of power and its nihilistic ending, didn't suit their purposes.

Fury (Fritz Lang, 1936)

The major Hollywood films about lynching -- this one and The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943) -- had white men as the victims, when the unfortunate fact is that black men (and a few women) were statistically by far the more frequent targets of vigilante mobs. Not until Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949), can I think of an American film that confronted the reality of the situation. But I don't think Fritz Lang, making his first American film, was thinking about the United States at all when he made Fury. He had seen rampaging mobs in Germany, which is why he left in 1933. That's why the film reaches its full actuality in its scenes of the mob in full cry. Those scenes alone are almost enough to establish the film as a classic, although much of the rest of Fury feels a bit scattered and aimless. It starts like a conventional romantic drama, with Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) and Katherine Grant (Sylvia Sidney) window-shopping for furniture for the home they hope to make when they're married. There's some sidetracking into Joe's relationship with his brothers, Charlie (Frank Albertson) and Tom (George Walcott), which although it seems like it will bear fruit -- Charlie has been associating with some shady characters, to which Tom objects -- is pretty much a narrative dead end. And after Katherine leaves for California, where Joe plans to join her when he makes some money, there's an injection of cuteness when Joe adopts a small dog he names Rainbow.* But when Joe finally gets to California his reunion with Katherine is interrupted by the law, who arrest him on the basis of circumstantial evidence as a suspect in a kidnapping. Gossips immediately take up the story and a mob led by a layabout named Kirby Dawson (Bruce Cabot) storms the jail and burns it down with Joe (and Rainbow) inside. Joe escapes (Rainbow doesn't) and goes into hiding, where he plots revenge. Eventually, when a trial leads to conviction of 22 members of the mob and their sentencing to death, Joe is presented with a moral dilemma: to reveal that he's alive, thereby saving the mob members from hanging, or to stay hidden and get his revenge. This being Hollywood, the decision is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Lang's direction is not so sure-handed as it was in his German films, but it keeps Fury watchable even when you spot the holes and compromises in the screenplay he co-wrote with Bartlett Cormack based on a story by Norman Krasna. Tracy is fine, though the character seems to split into two almost discrete roles: the affable Joe of the first half of the film and the obsessive revenge-seeker of the latter part.

*An oddly prescient name: Rainbow is played by Terry, who also played Toto in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939).  

M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Point of view is everything in a thriller. Let the viewer see events through the wrong eyes, and suspense goes out the window. The remarkable thing about Lang's great thriller is that the point of view changes so often. It starts with that of anxious parents, knowing that a child-killer is on the loose, then narrows to one particular parent, waiting for her daughter to come home from school for lunch. But then we see the object of her fears, her daughter, making contact with a strange man, and our suspense builds as we return to the worried mother. But as strongly as we sympathize with the mother, we also eventually learn to focus our anxieties elsewhere: on the beleaguered police, on innocent victims of people's suspicions, on the criminal underworld harassed by the police, and eventually even on the murderer himself. There are even moments when, as he becomes the object of the manhunt, trapped in the attic of a building swarming with the criminals in search of him, we find ourselves semi-consciously rooting for him to escape. Then we find ourselves rooting for the criminals to capture him and to escape being caught by the cops. And then, when he is put on trial by the criminals, we root for the police to arrive and rescue him. In short, the movie is a study in the ways in which sympathy can be manipulated. Lang and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Thea von Harbou wrote the screenplay, and the atmosphere of the film is superbly maintained by the cinematography of Fritz Arno Wagner and the sets of Emil Hasler and Karl Vollbrecht. But none of it would work without the presence of some extraordinary performers, starting with Peter Lorre as the sniveling, obsessed Hans Beckert: a career-defining performance in many ways, considering that Lorre had been known for comic roles on stage before Lang made him a movie star. Then there's Otto Wernicke as Inspector Lohmann, whose performance was so memorable that Lang brought him back as the same character in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), stereotyping Wernicke as a cop for much of his career. And Gustav Gründgens, the imperious leader of the criminal faction, who later became identified with the role of Mephistopheles in stage and screen versions of Goethe's Faust (Peter Gorski, 1960) -- not to mention in Klaus Mann's 1936 novel, Mephisto, based on Gründgens's embrace of the Nazis to advance his career.

Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Metropolis strikes me as the most balletic movie ever made. I'm not referring just to Brigitte Helm's fabulous hoochie-coochie as the False Maria, which so thrills the goggling, slavering gentlemen of Metropolis, but to the fact that as one of the great silent films it brilliantly substitutes movement for the speech and song the medium denies it. In addition to Helm's terrific performance as both Marias, we also have Gustav Fröhlich's wildly over-the-top Freder, who flings himself frenziedly about the sets. We may find the performance laughable today, but it's best to watch the film with the understanding that subtlety just wouldn't work in Fritz Lang's fever-dream of a city. Certainly that's also true of the always emotive Rudolf Klein-Rogge, whose Rotwang is pretty much indistinguishable from his Dr. Mabuse. But even the stillest of the characters in the film -- Alfred Abel's Joh Frederson, Fritz Rasp's superbly creepy Thin Man -- are there to provide a sinister contrast to the hyperactivity going on around them.  And then there are the crowds, a corps de ballet if ever there was one, whether stiffly marching to and from their jobs, or celebrating the fall of the Heart Machine with a riotous ring-around-the-rosy. There are times when Lang's manipulation of crowds reminds me of Busby Berkeley's. Lang's choreographic approach to the film is essential to its success as a portrayal of the subsuming of the human into the mechanical. Is there a more brilliant depiction of the alienation of work than that of the man who must shift the hands around a gigantic clock face to keep up with randomly illuminated light bulbs? Metropolis is usually cited as a triumph of design, and it probably wouldn't have the hold over us that it does without the sets of Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht, whose influence over our visions of the future seems indelible. Would we have the decor of the Star Wars movies or any of today's superhero epics without their work? There are those who would argue that the film is long on visual excitement but short on intellectual content -- the moral banality, that the Heart must mediate between the Head and the Hand, hardly seems to suffice as a justification for the film's Sturm und Drang -- which weakens its reputation as a masterpiece. But that seems to me to ask more of movies than they were ever designed to provide. So much in Metropolis reverberates with history -- from the French Revolution to the Bolsheviks to the Nazis -- that it's a film we can never get out of our heads, and probably shouldn't.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)

Lang's Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) hardly needed a sequel, but the director makes it worth our while by adding sound to the concoction. Take, for example, the segue from the tick ... tick ... tick of the timer on a bomb to the chip ... chip ... chip of someone removing the shell from a soft-boiled egg. It's a witty touch that not only eases tension with laughter, but also demonstrates the prevalence of the sinister in everyday life. Hitchcock, it is often noted, learned a great deal from Lang. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is more of a felt presence than a visible one in this version, confined as he is to an insane asylum where he supposedly dies, only to haunt not only the inmate Hofmeister (Karl Meixner) but also, and especially, the head of the asylum, Prof. Baum (Oscar Beregi Sr.), who is compelled to carry out Mabuse's plans for world domination. As in the 1922 film, there is a doughty policeman, Commissioner Lohmann (Otto Wernicke), who is determined to foil Mabuse's nefarious plans. Wernicke, whose character Lang brought over from M ( 1931), is not as hunky as the earlier film's von Wenk (Bernhard Goetze), so Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou add to the mix a young leading man, Gustav Diessl, who plays Thomas Kent, an ex-con who escapes from Mabuse's snares to aid Lohmann in trapping Baum in his efforts to fulfill Mabuse's plot. It's extremely effective suspense hokum, not raised quite to the level of art the way the 1922 film was, but still a cut above the genre. As is usually noted, this was Lang's last film in Germany. It was suppressed by the Nazis, ostensibly because it suggested that the state could be overthrown by a group of people working together, but perhaps also because of its suggestion that world domination might not be such a good thing.

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922)

It's a four-and-a-half-hour movie, and I've seen two-hour movies that felt longer. It zips along because Fritz Lang never fails to give us something to look at and anticipate. There is, first and foremost, the hypnotic (almost literally) performance of Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Mabuse, a role that could have degenerated into mere villainous mannerisms. There is his dogged and thwarted but always charismatic opponent, von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke), who seems on occasion to resist Mabuse's power by mere force of cheekbones. There is the extraordinary art decoration provided by Otto Hunte and Erich Kettelhut, which often gives the film its nightmare power: Consider, for example, the exceedingly odd stage decor provided for the Folies-Bergère performance by Cara Carozza (Aud Egede-Nissen), in which she contends with gigantic heads with phallic noses (or perhaps beaks), or the collection of primitive and Expressionist art belonging to the effete Count Told (Alfred Abel). The story itself, adapted from the novel by Norbert Jacques by Lang's wife-to-be Thea von Harbou, is typically melodramatic stuff about a megalomaniac psychiatrist, who uses his powers to become a master criminal. But l think it succeeds not only because it has so much to say about the period in which it was made -- i.e., "from Caligari to Hitler," as TCM's programmers would have it, following up on a documentary about Weimar Republic-era filmmakers based in part on the 1947 book by Siegfried Kracauer -- but also because of our continuing fascination with mind control. Maybe it's just because this is a presidential election year, but I'm reminded that there's a little Mabuse in everyone who seeks power. Somehow we continually lose our skepticism, born of hard experience, about the manipulators and find ourselves once again yielding to them. And somehow we usually, like von Wenk, find a way to pull ourselves back from the brink. But, as Lang himself experienced, we don't always manage to do so. 

Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941)

Walter Pidgeon spent much of his movie career at MGM, playing prince consort to Greer Garson: He was Mr. Miniver, Mr. Parkington, and M. Curie -- they made nine films together, if you count their cameos as themselves in The Youngest Profession (Edward Buzzell, 1943). So it's interesting to see him on his own in a 20th Century-Fox film, playing an action hero, the big-game hunter Alan Thorndike, who nearly assassinates Hitler, is beaten by the Gestapo, is pushed off a cliff and survives, escapes to a seaport where he boards a freighter for England, eludes his relentless pursuers, goes to ground in a cave, survives by killing his chief antagonist, and at the film's end parachutes into Germany, presumably to start it all over again. In fact, Pidgeon is a little too starchy for the role, which was better suited to someone like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, and he's upstaged (as who wasn't?) by George Sanders as the villain. Joan Bennett gives a nice performance as Jerry Stokes, the cockney "seamstress" (read: prostitute) who helps Thorndike escape. There's an entertaining scene in which Jerry encounters Thorndike's snooty sister-in-law, Lady Riseborough (Heather Thatcher). Roddy McDowall makes his American film debut as the cabin boy Vaner. This was the first of four films Bennett made with Fritz Lang as director, and they remain probably the highlights of her long career. Although Lang's American films never reached the heights of the ones he made in Germany, such as M (1931) and Metropolis (1927), he had a sure hand with the kind of suspense on display in Man Hunt. Dudley Nichols did the screenplay based on Geoffrey Household's novel Rogue Male.