Monday, June 1, 2009

Wartime Lang: Manhunt, Hangmen Also Die and Ministry of Fear

by Bob Clark

Prologue: The Man of Twists and Turns

We all know the story about Fritz Lang and Joseph Goebbels—how the premier architect of German movies was offered the head position of the film ministry by the premier architect of fascist propaganda, and how that meeting motivated the director to flee from Nazi territory as soon as possible. It was a story Lang himself loved to share, and it only got better every time he told it. Replete with suspenseful details like ticking clocks and a tense conversation concerning Faustian temptations for ultimate artistic power and barely veiled racial threats (“We decide who is Jewish, Mr. Lang!”), the visionary filmmaker embellished this incident from his past so vividly it almost became a scene from one of his own spy-thrillers. The story eventually did make its way onto the screen, in a way, as an anecdote quoted during Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, where the elder statesman of German film played himself, working on a tantalizing reimagining of “The Odyssey”. Just as Homer’s Ithacan could never quite escape the wrath of Poseidon, Lang’s legacy would forever be shaped by the nemesis he found in the Nazi regime.

To the end of his career and his life, Lang always carried with him the aura of World War II, the spirit of a man forever lingering in the shadows of Nazi spies and criminals, even when he emigrated to languish as a Hollywood director. Lang himself was largely responsible for this—while he tried and failed to manufacture a fitting nickname to rival Alfred “The Master of Suspense” Hitchcock, he successfully branded himself in the United States as an anti-Nazi renegade. But it’s the man’s films, rather than his own overblown reputation, that gain him the most authentic credence as a counter-fascist provocateur. Hitler and Goebbels might’ve loved the wonders of Die Nibelungen and Metropolis, but they overlooked the way in which those films questioned many of the most deeply ingrained aspects of German identity which Nazi ideology upheld as chilling Aryan ideals. More recent pictures like M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, a vivid sequel to Lang’s earlier silent-classic, received harsher scrutiny, suffering censorship and outright banning for their more boldfaced condemnation of dictatorial power. Yet still, the Nazi leaders remained blind as to the director’s true feelings towards the authorities that had risen in the vacuum of the Weimar Republic. Lang knew how to hide his politics and agendas just as well as his own spies and criminals did, in the movies.

It’s fitting, then, that amidst his American output some of the most engaging films were anti-Nazi war-pictures—sometimes bold, sometimes compromised, but always rich with striking imagery, taut suspense and fresh-off-the-front-page drama. Between his early socially-conscious Sylvia Sidney pictures like Fury & You Only Live Once and the classic noir couplet of Woman in the Window & Scarlet Street, Lang directed three noteworthy WWII movies in a row— 1941’s Man Hunt, 1943’s Hangmen Also Die and 1944’s Ministry of Fear. While Lang’s work before and after could sometimes yield greater results in his attempt to marry his own artistic sensibilities to the mainstream demands of the studio-system, few other films from his time in Hollywood feel quite as Langian as these. Created alongside collaborators such as The Third Man’s Graham Greene, Stagecoach screenwriter Dudley Nichols and theater-legend Bertolt Brecht, Lang’s wartime trilogy of underground assassins, resistance fighters and foreign saboteurs provides some of his best and most ambitious work, especially in America.

I: A Sporting Stalk

Of all his WWII movies, Man Hunt is probably Lang’s most famous, and it’s not difficult to see why. Based on Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male, a popular smash on both sides of the Atlantic, the film follows an aristocratic British hunter (Walter Pidgeon) who ventures deep into the heart of Germany to hunt the most dangerous prey in the world—Adolf Hitler himself. After he’s discovered by the Fuhrer’s bodyguards and escapes from their attempts to torture and murder him, the hunter finds himself caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse across occupied Europe and the city of London, chased by a gentleman Nazi (George Sanders) who’ll stop at nothing to make him sign an official confession and blackmail England into outright war. Along the way he’s aided in his escape by a whole assortment of characters, from a bright, knowing cabin-boy (Roddy McDowell in his screen debut) and a spirited young cockney woman who may or may not be a streetwalker (Joan Bennet, in the role Fritz Lang discovered her for).

As a piece of Hollywood entertainment, Man Hunt is easily Lang’s best blend of his own inimitable style and the demands of the mainstream. Its premise is both straightforward and simple enough for anyone to understand and powerful enough to unspool a wealth of political, ethical and dramatic ideas all at once. From the moment we first see Pidgeon’s target through the scope of his rifle, we know we’re in for something daring, especially for a time before the United States had entered the war, or even officially declared which side they were on. Equal parts provocative filmmaking and anti-Nazi propagandizing, Lang’s film was singled out in the fall of 1941 when Congress started looking more closely at movies believed to improperly cast Germany in a negative light and violate the Neutrality Act, a serious offense at a time when many Americans still maintained lucrative business ties to the Nazi regime. Of course, this was a moot point come December, but before then it was a one-of-a-kind blend of action-adventure and political potboiler, and even after Pearl Harbor it was still timely as ever, the only film in theaters to vilify Hitler as much as Tommy-Gun gangsters or painted-face Indians.

Thanks to Dudley Nichols, the film enjoys both a studied structure, effective in helping to drive the plot and essential message home to the audience, and a surprisingly warm emotional undercurrent, making it one of Lang’s most accessible pictures from either side of the Atlantic. While at times depending upon creaking Hollywood conventions, the subplot involving Joan Bennet’s character is equal parts innocent and romantic. Even through her occasionally grating, tone-deaf cockney accent, Bennet’s performance remains lively, endearing, and daring enough here and there to sidestep the Hays Code restrictions involving her character’s shady occupation. Walter Pidgeon’s casual demeanor as the hunter-who-has-become-the-hunted doesn’t work quite so well—he’s just barely convincing as a man being chased by an international network of spies and assassins, and he’s not convincing at all as a British national (Nichols’ sometimes touristy script doesn’t do him any favors—Pidgeon must be the only man in England who’s never heard of fish and chips, let alone eaten them).

But even he delivers at least one powerhouse performance by the end, trapped by George Sander’s effortlessly civilized Nazi in a scene where the two men wage a battle-of-wits that sums up all the film’s political, philosophical and emotional themes in an inventive sequence that rivals anything found in Lang’s German works. Indeed, the entire production carries a rich, professional quality worthy of the director’s silent-epics at Ufa. Before winning an Oscar for John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, cinematographer Arthur Miller (no relation to the playwright) proves himself an adept collaborator for Lang, crafting palpable textures to the director’s stark compositions and inventive shadowplay. Art director Richard Day pulls off impressive set-designs, carrying the film from the dense, Wagnerian forests of Nazi territory to the foggy streets of nighttime London, which from Lang’s angles look as though they could’ve been swapped from the Berlin-atmosphere of Dr. Mabuse or M. The entire world becomes a deadly, labyrinthine trap in this expert production, and with a set of stakes ripped straight from the headlines of 1941, it’s easy to see how Man Hunt is so well remembered, no matter how little seen it may be today.

II: No Surrender

Hangmen Also Die, however, is not quite so lucky, both little seen and largely forgotten. Telling a fictionalized story of a Czech underground fighting back against Nazi reprisals in the wake of Reinhard Heidrich’s assassination, this 1943 film is remembered, if at all, mostly for Lang’s collaborator on the project—famed German playwright and lyricist, Bertolt Brecht. Lang had earlier worked with Brecht’s Threepenny Opera composer Kurt Weil on the ill-fated Sylvia Sidney picture You and Me, and over the course of the script’s development this project would prove just as contentious. Alongside screenwriter John Wexley, a leftist veteran of the film industry who’d been hired as a buffer between the two egomaniacal artists and wound up hogging most of the screenplay’s credit for himself, Lang and Brecht had diametrically opposed motivations from which they wished to approach the story. It is that very oil-and-water mixture of sensibilities, however, that helped create the vivid film Hangmen Also Die became—a classic piece of Langian cinema practically begging to be rediscovered by cineastes at large.

In the eyes of Brecht, longtime follower of Marx and devout believer that one day the people of Germany would one-day throw off their Nazi oppressors as surely as the world would one-day triumph over capitalism, the film would be a paean to the city-wide underground resistance. It would also be a document of authentic European class struggles, with members of all social statuses joining in to fight fascism, and finding conflict amongst themselves as well. Finally, it would be a hard-hitting expose of the brutality of the Nazis, with emphasis placed on the violence and hatred towards the Jews of Czechoslovakia, at long last bringing light to the ugly face of anti-Semitism. Full of speeches and songs, the film that Brecht envisioned was one that even Wexely believed in, to an extent, with titles like Trust the People bandied about to maximize its populist potential.

Only one thing stood in the way of that film-to-be, however—Fritz Lang. While Brecht was a believer in the masses, despite his biting cynicism, Lang remained skeptical of them, if not outright fearful, throughout his career. Films like M and Fury showed how he saw easily people could descend into violent, psychopathic lynch-mobs. Others like his Dr. Mabuse series and Metropolis highlighted how easily they could be manipulated by demagogues and tyrants, early indicators of tendency of masses to elect 20th century dictators into power. Even seemingly apolitical works like the mythical Die Nibelungen displayed how otherwise noble traits like love, loyalty and justice could turn to barbaric self-sacrifice when inflated to the scale of epic realism. Lang’s heroes were seldom the masses, but rather the doomed individuals who waged Sisyphysian battles with fate, often brought to life by raging crowds of mindless rioters, or the stealthy automatons of spies and criminals, devoid of identities as shadows and masks.

Following a string of studio-system rush jobs and failed projects (Confirm or Deny, with Joan Bennet and Clark Gable, and the Jean Gabin vehicle Moontide, both of which were finished by studio-understudy Archie Mayo) Lang finally found a project he could really sink his teeth into, and in so doing found perhaps his rarest, most prized experience of artistic control during his Hollywood period. With Czech émigré Arnold Pressburger funding the project and pulling out all the stops, Lang was privileged with near-unrestricted creative freedom for the first time since his days on the throne of German cinema, and was therefore unconcerned with Brecht’s objections as he reshaped the material into the film it finally became. While he allowed many compromises to make the film more palatable to American audiences—most tellingly removing all references to anti-Semitism or Judaism at all, save for a fleeting stock-footage shot of a Hebrew clock in Prague—Lang also worked hard to keep as much of Brecht’s populist perspective intact without betraying his own individualist-skepticism, and while supplying the customary suspense any typical Hollywood thriller demands, the type that Lang was an expert in.

The plot that rises from all those creative differences is a compelling one—after Heidrich’s assassination, the Gestapo begins taking hostages of everyday citizens, placing them in concentration camps and promising to execute them at regular intervals until the killer is discovered. Lang follows a large cast of characters—a Czech surgeon turned assassin (Brian Donlevy), a young woman tempted to give him up to the Nazis (Anna Lee), her father, a professor arrested as one of the hostages (Walter Brennan), a gregarious, quick-witted German detective bent on tracking down the killer (Alexander Granach) and a Czech beer-brewer turned Nazi collaborator (Gene Lockhart), as well as many more in the underground resistance, Gestapo headquarters and everyday life filled out by capable, colorful character actors of the day.

With such a wide breadth of characters, there comes a challenge not only in fleshing them all out fully enough as human beings to relate with them, but also to capture them strikingly enough to help audiences keep track of them all. Sometimes this means distilling the essence of their personalities to stock figures, two-dimensional characterizations and easily recognizable patterns. Unlike Brecht, who wanted to use a cast of all European actors (including his wife and friends in self-serving roles), Lang at once makes the cast manageable and relatable to audiences by having his actors play things naturally—everyone playing Czechs speak in comfortable mid-American accents, and only the Nazis speak in thick, teuctonic accents. Language itself gets played with a lot, as the Nazis only speak their own tongue for long stretches, leaving the English-speaking audience and Czechs in the dark until somebody provides a translation. Lang’s resistance members even use a German joke to help finger a traitor in their midst, a clever scene with as smart a use of sound as the innovations of M.

The effect of all this play with language and accents is noteworthy—simulating the experience of foreign occupation. Lang pairs this subtle soundplay with some of his most accomplished and striking visuals. Given free reign with sets and lighting, the director gives us his most ambitious Hollywood production—art director William Darling fashions a convincing reproduction of Prague in the studio, from busy city streets, folksy restaurants and posh upper-class interiors to waterside warehouses, Gestapo cells and dire prison-camps. Famed cinematographer James Wong Howe delivers stunning results, ably paired with a director known for his stark shadows and finessed camerawork. Perhaps most importantly, editor Gene Fowler Jr. (who served as an assistant editor on Man Hunt and helped the director sneak in and assemble his final cut) stands back and gives Lang the most cooperation he ever experienced in an American cutting-room. Many scenes, and most of the movie itself finds itself constructed along Lang’s influential question-and-answer editing philosophy—quite literally in a montage of Gestapo interrogations, a scene that seems to be repeated in almost any given episode of “Law and Order”.

As such, the movie not only looks and plays like a classic Lang film—it feels like one, too. Being one of only three films which he wrote the screenplays for (the others being Fury and the curious Marlene Dietrich western Rancho Notorious), the personal obsessions of lone-men pitted against the massive organs of fate are clearer and more focused here than in nearly any other picture he helmed in the United States. You can sense not only the emotional but intellectual investment the director has in this movie, which at times becomes a sort of inversion of the films he made over in Germany. Alexander Granach’s Inspector Gruber, with his bowler hat, keen insights and large appetite for food, beer and women closely resembles Inspector Lohman from M and Testament of Dr. Mabuse, a chillingly affable agent of the Gestapo instead of an underdog cop vying against the Nazi stand-ins of criminal empires. Gene Lockhart steals the show as the traitorous Emil Chaka, who ultimately finds himself the victim of an elaborate city-wide conspiracy, not unlike Peter Lorre’s tragic child killer in M. A movie that makes excellent use of the spirits of its time and creators, Hangmen Also Die is a cinematic marvel. Not only is it one of the best films he made in America—it’s easily one of the best films he ever made, period.

III: Don’t Bother With the Past

Perhaps it’s the great creative success of Hangmen Also Die, and the popular success of Man Hunt before it, that make the otherwise intriguing Ministry of Fear such a profound disappointment. On paper, it sells itself as an ideal situation for Fritz Lang, adapting a novel that’s equal parts spy-thriller and psychological-drama from Graham Greene, the man who would later pen Carol Reed’s classics The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, both of them near-perfect matches of Langian intellect and suspense with matinee-movie charisma. Greene himself was a devoted fan of Fritz Lang, writing passionate appraisals of his pictures when he worked as a film critic, holding the director’s work as an example of how to create smart, artsy thrillers, as opposed to the comparatively shallow efforts of fellow countryman Alfred Hitchcock. However, when Ministry of Fear came out in theaters, Greene was unhappy with the results—as was Lang himself. The pairing of Greene’s source material and Lang’s talents would seem a perfect match, and perhaps it might’ve been, had it not been for the one obstacle that always seemed to get between Lang and greatness in America—the studio-system.

Unlike the carte-blanche liberty he enjoyed on Hangmen Also Die or the loose restrictions he put up with on Man Hunt, Lang’s experience during the production of was a big step down as regards to his creative freedom. With nearly all the actors already cast, the production schedule marked on calendars and the script already set in stone by screenwriter/producer Seton I. Miller, who kept close watch over the director’s work while taking care to avoid spending any time with him on set, Lang was never fully in charge of the film, and it shows. Ministry of Fear is easily the least of the three war-pictures that Lang directed during wartime, a mostly dull and by-the-book thriller that goes through the motions of espionage and very seldom rises to meet the expectations one might have of a Lang/Greene pairing.

Still, the movie is entertaining enough for what it is, and occasionally benefits from Lang’s presence in a handful of scenes that usually recall better moments from the director’s own oeuvre. With its dominant imagery of ticking clocks, swinging pendulums, train-car robberies and rooftop shoot-outs, Ministry of Fear at times plays like a demo-reel of Lang’s greatest hits, a motion-picture portfolio he could shop from studio to studio to show them all the kinds of filmmaking he was capable of without asking them to sit through several hours worth of silent or subtitled movies. At its best moments, like a foggy pursuit across a bomb-swept English countryside, a shadowy séance and a heartfelt personal confession in London’s underground Tubes in the midst of a German air-raid, the movie plays with an airy, not-quite lucid quality. Most of Lang’s films draw out like nightmares for their protagonists, but this one shares the dreamlike lightness of Liliom or Scarlet Street, and one can easily recognize that had the director been given the same creative autonomy that he enjoyed on those projects, Ministry of Fear might’ve been more than just a mild diversion.

As it stands, however, there’s little else remarkable about the film—Ray Milland delivers a fine performance as a former inmate from an asylum returning to London who finds himself caught in a lazy spy-ring of Nazi sympathizers, but nothing special. There’s a few familiar faces to devoted Lang-fanatics (look out for cameos by Bryan Fougler, resistance leader in Hangmen Also Die, and Dan Duryea, hustler and pimp in Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street both, here as a deadly dandy with a giant pair of scissors who manages to die twice in the same movie), and on the whole there’s a much more legitimate English atmosphere sustained throughout than there was in Man Hunt, but none of the same spark or vitality that made up for the lack of authenticity. It carries with it a rather deflated feeling that comes with an enterprise full of undercurrents Lang would’ve been able to personalize far more had he been allowed to be more heavily involved. Especially interesting is the subplot of a husband’s hazy role in a wife’s suicide—Lang’s own first wife mysteriously died upon finding him in flagrante delicto with Thea von Harbou, and while her death by gunshot was officially ruled suicide, there have always been questions as to what really happened.

Suicide casts a long shadow in all of Lang’s best and most personal films—even his seemingly mercenary spy-thrillers are peppered with enemy agents collapsing under the weight of cyanide capsules. Ministry of Fear therefore stands as a lost-opportunity not only for the director to flex his suspense-crafting muscles, but also to exorcise the demons of his past as directly as a piece of Hollywood war-movie would ever let him do. Maybe that’s why Lang wrote the film off so much in later years, still stinging from the fleeting chance to express that most enigmatic moment from his life in a forum that could be digested the whole world over, a chance to creatively declare his innocence or confess his sins. What could’ve been a mea culpa or a salvation, in the end, was nothing but a cinematic Hail Mary—a desperate, failing attempt at something more than just another piece of wartime trash. Lang had been able to raise his efforts above mere propaganda twice before, but third time, on this occasion, was definitely not the charm.

Epilogue: The Fog of War

After Ministry of Fear, Lang had better luck—Woman in the Window reunited him with the comely Joan Bennet, more comfortable as a seductive femme fatale than a childish cockney girl, and the sleazy Dan Duryea. It also marked his first foray with the haunted Edward G. Robinson, probably the best male lead he ever worked with in the states, with whom he’d bring back Bennet, Duryea and Man Hunt screenwriter Dudley Nichols on Scarlet Street, an American version of Jean Renoir’s biting La Chienne that countless critics today hail as one of the few Hollywood remakes that’s better than the original.

But it wasn’t long before Lang gave in to the siren song of World War II once more—1946 brought the Gary Cooper OSS thriller Cloak and Dagger, an entirely lukewarm movie whose most memorable moment was the ending its producers cut out, where an American scientist-turned-secret agent discovers an empty factory just recently used to produce Nazi atomic weapons. He was even lured back in the 1950’s to helm the forgotten American Guerilla in the Philippines, this time showcasing the Pacific theater of the war, but even Lang couldn’t be bothered to remember it afterwards. He wanted to keep the cinematic threat of fascism and his cronies alive, even though the war had been won and all the old enemies done away with. Even Goebbels and his family were found dead in Hitler’s bunker, victims of their own doomed fates and suicidal hands (a shame Lang was never offered a chance to put their lives on film).

In the coming years he would return to the spy-genre only once more, in his last film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, where gain the spectre of Nazi Germany would be fleetingly mentioned in a hotel formerly fitted by the Gestapo with camera surveillance, now repurposed by the latest incarnation of Norbert Jacques’ criminal mastermind. It might seem curious that in the spy-crazy days of the Cold War that he never turned his espionage talents to films focusing on the agents darting back and forth between both sides of the Iron Curtain, but Lang’s hazy left-wing politics never quite fit into the post-war paradigm shift. His crowning and influential spy-thrillers always kept their politics dodgy and subliminal, anyway, always hiding the real faces of his villains behind the anonymous masks of organized crime. World War II was such a creative boon to the man because for the first, and really only time, he could fully flesh out the villains that capered about in his daydreams and nightmares.

Once the war was over, however, his spies couldn’t be spies anymore, at least not while keeping with his own sympathies. Briefly hounded by the Red Scare himself for his tenuous Communist ties before the war, Lang kept strictly to melodramas like Clash by Night and newspaper pictures like While the City Sleeps, but mostly and most passionately to noir-ish crime thrillers like The Big Heat—big, brass pulpy stories he could involve himself heavily in and indulge his most deeply held paranoias without having to justify them within any set political spectrum. Forever the young boy with fleeting curiosities and skepticism for how the world works, Lang was, in the end, an incurable escapist, cut from the same cloth that men like Lucas and Spielberg tuck the world’s audiences to bed in whenever they head for the multiplex.

After his sojourn in the wilderness of Hollywood, Lang was finally lured back to Germany to direct three last filmgs— the two-part Tiger of Eschnapur & The Indian Tomb, and the aforementioned Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Both films were produced by Arthur Brauner, a man who almost singlehandedly revitalized the German film industry following World War II with crowd-pleasing efforts and remakes of classics from the silent heyday of the studios Ufa and Nero. Before convincing Lang to return to the fatherland with the two-part Indian epic—which Lang and von Harbou had originally written themselves before the project was overtaken by Joe May—Brauner briefly tempted the director to helm an upcoming World War II project that caught the his eye: Der 20 Juli.

Detailing a failed assassination plot against Adolf Hitler by his own generals, Lang found the prospect tantalizing, but far too developed already for him to have the most desirable impact upon it, leaving the film to be directed by former journalist Werner Jorg Luddecke, and Lang’s swan-songs for later. The same story would later be filmed by the particularly Langian American director Bryan Singer as Valkyrie, and it’s tempting to see it as something close to how the great monocle-wearing one might’ve imagined it. In the end, however, Lang was best left off the battlefields, once the armistice was called. War might’ve jolted him awake for a brief time, like that legendary meeting in Goebbels’ office and his subsequent flight from home, but once the battles were done, the monsters and all their dental-history identifications buried, he was more than happy to throw himself back into his pillows headfirst to pour himself into the lower depths of high adventure once again—the stuff, so the saying goes, that dreams are made of.