Moontide

Ida Lupino in Moontide (dir. Archie L. Mayo [replacing Fritz Lang], 1942).



Jean Gabin as Bobo.



Alcoholic montage sequence courtesy of Dalí.

The massive publicity campaign undertaken by Twentieth Century-Fox to make French star Jean Gabin into an American heartthrob was largely a failure. It's interesting to think what audiences made of him in Moontide. He's aggressively aloof, ungainly, almost simian. It appears at times as though America is an alien planet for him, with an unbreathable atmosphere. But it's also clear why he was a star in the first place: he seems in control of every interaction between every part of his body and the camera, down to the minute shadows cast by his facial pores and wrinkles.

The same can be said for Ida Lupino, whose ethereality is always compellingly at play with her back-alley sickliness. She glides limpingly, you might say. You might say that's what this entire movie does. The limp can partly be attributed to the replacement of Fritz Lang as director with the terminally prosaic Archie Mayo, but fortunately enough of Lang's touch remains to give Mayo a healthy push start.

The entire movie is shot on sets, creating a dislocated, dreamlike sense (or the sense that you are watching a filmed play, depending on how generous you want to be). A brief, surreal montage sequence by Dalí is barely a departure from the general mood.

Cloak and Dagger

Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer in Cloak and Dagger (dir. Fritz Lang, 1946).

Lang at his most conventional, but nevertheless a moving story. His signature preoccupation with urban paranoia is evident throughout, and the scenes of active suspense are well handled, if few and far between. Gary Cooper, pardon me, is rather boring as a civilian academic drafted into espionage against Nazis pursuing nuclear research. The fault is not entirely his: the script calls for him to be a babe in the woods who gradually learns tough lessons about stealth and sentiment during wartime. A dispiriting, thankless routine. Lilli Palmer carries the burden of his upstanding innocence admirably with her portrayal of a seasoned but vulnerable resistance agent.

The Return of Frank James

Henry Fonda in The Return of Frank James (dir. Fritz Lang, 1940).

It's a disappointment that Fritz Lang's first western is not quite as good as the film it is a sequel to (Henry King's Jesse James). Not as good, that is, at being the kind of film the first was: a big romantic crowd pleaser with lots of action and glamor. This would be fine if it were as good as other Fritz Lang films, but that's not the case either, although there are some attractive visual arrangements in which you can spot his emotive signature of brooding and dread. Henry Fonda reprises his performance as Frank James, and he's good, but he never delivers fully on the promise of wraithlike sternness he showed just standing in front of the camera in Jesse. Gene Tierney doesn't make much of her movie debut: all she gets to do is be a perky kid reporter and make a few concerned noises. John Carradine is a pleasure to watch as Robert Ford, but here as in the first film, he has sadly little screen time. The Jackie Cooper character (gung-ho kid tagging along after Frank) is useless. The color is dramatically more muted than in the first film, and that would make sense if Lang were consistently true to his downbeat aesthetic, but the screen captures I've posted above nearly exhaust the moments when this is the case, so a lot of the time things just look dull. There's a brief but mildly inspired scene where Frank walks in on the Ford brothers doing a heinously false cabaret "reenactment" of Jesse's murder, with the delightful help of career extra Barbara Pepper as Nellie Blane, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the West."

House by the River

Lee Bowman in House by the River (dir. Fritz Lang, 1950).



Louis Hayward.

Louis Hayward plays Stephen Byrne, a dissolute writer who accidentally kills his attractive young maid Emily (Dorothy Patrick) in the act of trying to rape her, and must enlist the aid of his (usually) morally upstanding but wooden-legged brother John (Lee Bowman) in hiding the evidence. To complicate things, Stephen's wife Marjorie (Jane Wyatt) and John are secretly in love with each other. What lifts this out of the trough of garden-variety gothic melodrama, besides George Antheil's score and Edward Cronjager's cinematography, is Hayward's creepy performance as Stephen, who is all the more menacing for his simpering weakness: as his desperation and paranoia grows, his front of humanity steadily drops away, leaving a loathsome trapped animal. Not that he's a prize moral specimen to begin with, of course. When he stalks Emily on the stairs before squeezing the life out of her, his grinning, predatory face is a chilling mask of evil.

Bowman is not as engaging a performer as Hayward (and to be fair, his part calls for him not to be), but his character is interesting in other ways. As his brother's keeper, he is torn between his own ethics and his desire to protect Marjorie from the trauma that would ensue if the crime were discovered (Stephen lies and tells him Marjorie is pregnant). When we first meet John, he is trying to get into Stephen's house, an action that has obvious symbolic overtones in light of his feelings for Marjorie. He appears first as a shadowy pair of eyes only partly visible behind the little window on the door, sending Stephen into a panic: he is thus clearly set up as the conscience of the film, but a conscience that itself becomes complicit. This is indicative of the tortured morality of Lang's films: even those figures who represent surveillance and ideological monitoring are caught up in the complex of existential entrapment that, here as in other films, is manifested by claustrophobic corridors, cul de sacs, and dead ends. A typical device of Lang's is a long shot of the subject at the end of a hall, often closing a door against the observing world (cf. Edward G. Robinson at the end of The Woman in the Window). Throughout House by the River, Stephen and John are shown in positions of this sort, sometimes in relation to each other, as in the scene mentioned previously. Additionally, John's physical disability can be seen as a figural analogue to Stephen's crippled soul--a device that does not so much diminish our identification with John as qualify our impression of Stephen, who in this way comes off as just one more casualty. Another way of saying this: Lang tends not to have heroes or villains in the usual sense, but victims ... all victims all the time.

You Only Live Once

Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda in You Only Live Once (dir. Fritz Lang, 1937).

Compared to a lot of other Fritz Lang films, this is a little pedestrian at times, but it's definitely got that nice "everything is hopeless and everyone is doomed" vibe one expects from him. Sylvia Sidney is such a chirpy little beam of sunshine that it's truly painful to watch her get sucked inexorably into Henry Fonda's vortex of shit luck.

Hangmen Also Die

Hangmen Also Die (dir. Fritz Lang, 1943).



Alexander Granach and Anna Lee.



Nana Bryant and Alexander Granach's shadow.

Although screenwriting credit went to translator and script-tweaker John Wexley, who insisted on it, Fritz Lang and Bertholt Brecht (credited as "Bert Brecht") co-wrote the story, and that alone should send you scrambling frantically to watch this heavily dramatized account of the "Czech Bloodbath" that ensued after the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich--the "Hangman" of the title. For wartime propaganda, it's remarkably nuanced in its treatment of sacrifice: not merely the potential sacrifice of one's own life in the service of the anti-fascist cause, but of the lives of citizens taken hostage and methodically executed in the wake of underground operations. Lang and Brecht are undoubtedly both responsible for this nuancing in different ways, and to different effect, but the combination of their labors here feels unified. The Nazi characters are of course cartoonish grotesques: Heydrich, in his brief appearance, is portrayed as a foppish, enervated twit. But they're imagined with a great deal of wit, and Alexander Granach in particular, as Gestapo Inspector Alois Gruber, is both terrifying and clever. He cavorts in his role with a loathsome charisma, and it's nerve-wracking watching him figure things out: one can almost imagine him as a popular detective of Third Reich serials.

The Woman in the Window

Joan Bennett's reflection and a painting of Joan Bennett in The Woman in the Window (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944).



Dan Duryea and Joan Bennett.



Edward G. Robinson.

Fritz Lang made The Woman in the Window the year before Scarlet Street, which also featured Robinson, Bennett, and Duryea. Their stories are similar: in both, Robinson plays a sensitive soul drawn by a romantic obsession with a woman in a painting into a dark and sordid world of prostitution and murder. Window is even more harrowing than Street for most of its running time. Anne actually had to stop watching about halfway through, as the tension was just too much. She says that Lang was insane and had a sick soul. Well, yeah. She stopped watching just before Duryea came on and did his reptilian blackmailer bit. "You have to watch, it's Dan Duryea!" I said, but to no avail.

There is a plot turn in Window that is bound to infuriate anyone who loves noir, or just self-respecting screenwriting. I'm trying to convince myself that this particular turn is actually a wry bit of intentional self-subversion (as Spencer Selby argues here), but it's hard.

Watch for a young Robert Blake as the Professor's son, and George "Spanky" McFarland as an intrepid boy scout (in an inspired comic scene).

Ministry of Fear

Publicity still of Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds in Ministry of Fear (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944).

Much of Lang's genius for evoking atmospheric dread in crowded public settings as well as dark stairwells is on evidence in this pleasant-enough diversion, which would probably be more impressive if it weren't clearly an attempt to mimic the formula of The 39 Steps and other of Hitchcock's early thrillers--an attempt that is about 65% successful. It also doesn't help that one senses some material has been ruthlessly and clumsily edited out. I was excited to see Dan Duryea in the title credits (he's insanely great in Lang's Scarlet Street from the following year), but he's only in the film for a total of five minutes or so. He does have one nice little bit that comes when you've given up on him, however. The most memorable scene is the very last, about which I will only say that it tries to be funny and succeeds, but not in the way it was meant to. Ray Milland's delivery of the final line deserves an award for sublime (mis-)timing.

The Blue Gardenia

"Can I get high on one of these?" Anne Baxter and Raymond Burr in The Blue Gardenia (dir. Fritz Lang, 1953).

If this weren't a Fritz Lang film, I'd probably consider it a minor treasure. But knowing that this is the same director who gave us Fury, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat (to say nothing of M, Dr. Mabuse, Metropolis, etc.), makes it a little disappointing. Still, I will watch even the worst midcentury noir with a big fat contented smile on my face, and this is by no means near the worst. Contains a nice little "music video" of Nat King Cole singing the title song, and a priceless moment when reporter Richard Conte's editor hands him a press pass for an assignment, saying "Front-row seat at the next H-bomb blast--on the house."

Scarlet Street

Joan Bennett pretends to be a self-portrait in Scarlet Street (dir. Fritz Lang, 1945).

I love this movie. Dan Duryea is so good it hurts. The Leger-esque paintings in this film, which are supposed to be the work of Edward G. Robinson's character (frustrated amateur artist Chris Cross), and which end up displayed as the work of Joan Bennett's character (the prostitute who cons Cross out of his money), are actually the work of Hollywood portraitist John Decker. Looking him up in Wikipedia, I see that a biography about him came out last year: C. Stephen Jordan, Bohemian Rogue: The Life of Hollywood Artist John Decker (Scarecrow Press, 2005).