How talented was the person of Fritz Lang, what an artist! Every bit the cinematic compatriot of F.W. Muranu, subject of yesterday's rhapsody, the two men yet could not be more different in terms of sensibility and personality.
Far more concerned with the concrete aspects of the darker side of humanity, Lang rejected the ethereal side of darkness and somber dreams, a la Murnau; he was far more interested in the nightmare going on right outside his front door on the dingy, dirty streets of first Europe and later America.
The criminals, the beggars, the obsessive manipulators, the cranks and the crooks, the ways government traps a man in his own mind, with his own fears, and manipulates his world like a hidden puppeteer. These are the areas that Lang's mind regularly gravitated towards.This is not to say the two men were complete opposites-- both (especially during their German phases in the first half of the 1920's . . . for Lang in the pre Gerda Maurus days, for Murnau the pre-Fox days) were strict perfectionists, working within the totalitarian state of the UFA studios of producer extraordinaire Erich Pommer's golden years to labor endlessly over images until a product of extreme lustre and burnishment was at last achieved. It is known that Lang admired Murnau on the record (after seeing Der Letzte Mann)--I'm not clear of Murnau's feelings for Lang's work. I have not encountered--or if I did I just don't recall it at the moment--an on the record statement by Murnau in which he is responding to a film of Lang's.
The man's biography is so studded with hyperbole and buildup, hype and flat out taletelling that I'm not going to get into a detailed chronology of his life leading up to his golden Weimar years of Destiny, the two Mabuses--Testament and the preceding Der Spieler--Nibelungen, and of course Metropolis, or relate his tale about how he "invented" the frame story of Caligari, or alternately suggested the Expressionist design of the film, nor relate to his self-promoting "Good anti-Hitler German"tale, since proven by the stamps on his passport to be false, of his fleeing Germany the moment Josef Goebbels sat him down and asked him to be a minister in the propaganda department oversseing the medium of the German cinema.
Probably my two favorite films from Lang's German period are Der Mude Tod, aka Destiny, and the subsequent Die Nibelungen epic. For a moment there in Germany, while making the sprawling epics of Mabuse's two-parter, the Nibelungen two parter, as well as the now recovered original epic cut of Metropolis, Fritz Lang had become everything that Erich von Stroheim was already attempting to accomplish in America--with equal measures of talent and perhaps even more innovation than Lang--but was continuously getting butchered by his studios with every attempt in the manner that Lang suffered but once, with Metropolis. This was Pommer's genius where Louis B. Mayer and the Laemmle's failed the annals of history. Lang commanded outrageous budgets, monumental effects, armies of extras and craftsman on sprawling sets and locations; he geometrically moved his elements like Rommel on the battlefield: exuding power, velocity, innovation, special tactics, inspiring future maniacal behavior from William Friedkin by firing Walther pistols on set to command his actors and craftsmen attention.
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For reasons that we assume were indeed political and decent--but not of the heroic slap in the face of blatant desertion viz Joe Goebbels--Fritz Lang did indeed flee to the United States via an intial interlude (Liliom) in France to make a new start in Hollywood, while leaving his wife and constant screenwriting partner Thea von Harbou, regular actor collaborators like Georg John, Paul Richter, the cuckolded then rewarded-with-starring-roles Rudolf Klein-Rogge (husband of von Harbou who Lang snatched from Rogge's arms), Gerda Maurus, Willy Fritsch, and of course Otto Wernicke as the venerable, gutbagged Inspector Lohmann.
Lang flourished (at least to the degree that he consistently made films.. Langian films) in America in spite of himself--he survived entirely owing to his 1) filmmaking power, and 2) legend in Germany, which saw him always generating interest in the mind of ambitious independent producers like Walter Wanger, small studios like Republic, and any number of others.
Despite the journeyman quality of his life running from the Thirties to the postwar years in the USA, Lang's sound era Hollywood films are a startling mishmash of titles and genres. Beginning with the stunningly raging Fury with Spencer Tracy (where it is rumored that there was a legitimate murder plot afoot onset among the carpenters and other crew--apparently some ceiling rigging was set to "fail" right above Lang during shooting, sending heavy equipment and set material right down onto Lang's exposed kopf and coiffure.
Thankfully this attempt was nullified by cooler heads--were it not we'd have been deprived of blazing subsequent titles full of ripsnorting Langian paranoia and angst like You Only Live Once (with the delicous Bronx girl Sylvia Sidney starring with young Henry Fonda), The Woman In The Window and Scarlet Street with Eddie G Robinson, all of these acidic titles foundational entries in the then embryonically darkening genre of fatalist, white knuckle, high contrast crime drama that eventually wound up taking the tag of Film Noir.
But between these first couple of American titles with Tracy and Fonda (Fury and You Only Live Once) and the Robinson duo in 1944, just after a couple of first dips of the toe into the genre of the western, we come at last to the title that I wish to speak about. The title is my favorite of all of Lang's American films; it's a film rich with literary quality, glorious acting, silly humor, profound and legitimately gutsy war statements while WW2 was raging in Lang's home country. It's a film as complex as scripts are likely to come--they don't come out of Hollywood this supremely complicated very often. The film has its own circulatory system as complex as that in the human body. The film is full of off-ramps, reroutes back in, false trails, layered realities piling one on the other according to false information and covert action, and a Brechtian (hmmm... I wonder why....) self-reflexivity that calls attention to the tempo of its unfoldment.
Hangmen Also Die is the film of course. Distributed by UA in the year 1943, and produced by a Pressberger (not the guy you're thinking of), it's a film I can literally watch over and over again, year after year. The film is a miracle, even if its home video releases have been a bit shabby.
More--Part Two-- tomorrow, to close out the week.
P. Clive/Schreck
3/12/2015***