1950 - AMERICAN GUERRILLA IN THE PHILIPPINES, bland Fritz Lang film.

The book American Guerrilla in the Philippines was purchased by the head of 20th Century Fox Darryl F. Zanuck towards the end of World War II.  The film version of the book was being prepared when studio head Zanuck decided to discontinue making the now exhausted genre of the propaganda film.  The film sat in limbo until it was reactivated a few years later with Fritz Lang as the director

 

For a film made five years after the war it's still mired in a 1940's World War II sensibility.  The Japanese are the demonic invaders, the American soldiers stranded in the Philippines are the usual cross section of good old GI Joe's, and there's lots of rah rah military music on the soundtrack.

The film is supposedly based on the actual experiences of a navel officer who was stranded in the Philippines during the Japanese invasion.  Along with some other stranded soldiers they set up a spy network to keep tabs on the activity of the enemy.  Since this was basically a script written during World War 2 there's the usual inappropriate love interest in this case a sexy French woman for the hero to romance.

 

The star of this film was one of Fox's biggest performers back from serving in the war, Tyrone Power.  Power was frankly starting to age out of these kinds of roles and he had started to lose his boyish good looks.  The female love interest was Micheline Presle who had been in an "ou la la" French film called Devil in the Flesh  a film about a love affair between a teenage boy and an older married woman.  Presle came over to California looking for a Hollywood career but as was typical ended up stuck in uninteresting pictures.

 

 

The director Fritz Lang had stated that this picture was his least favorite but he should be given credit for shooting this film on location and in color.  In 1950 this was still not a common occurrence and the fact that Lang turned in a professional job is worthy of some praise.  American Guerrilla in the Philippines is a mediocre film only redeemed by the on location color photography.

The film was written by Lamar Trotti, the running time is 105 minutes. 

1944 - MINISTRY OF FEAR, minor Fritz Lang spy thriller

Somewhat disappointing World War II thriller based on a Graham Greene book.  Ray Milland is the mental patient who after being released from the insane asylum finds himself up to his ears in German spies and traitorous Englishmen during the London Blitz.

This film while directed by Fritz Lang was heavily influenced by the producer and screenwriter Seton I. Miller in his first shot at producing.  Lang was known for his domineering personality on movie sets but apparently Miller was able to bend him to his will. 

 

The result if kind of a boring and lets face it fairly bland film.  It does have a number of Lang's directorial touches because nobody could make more of fog and shadows than Lang when it came to staging scenes.  Ministry Of Fear also features one of Lang's stock characters the larger then life policeman who represents the voice of authority.

 

All in all this is a decent 1940's thriller made by a great director who was fairly constrained by his producer and probably Paramount studio.

The running time is a quick 87 minutes.

1943 - HANGMEN ALSO DIE, disappointing World War II film noir

This should have been a much better film.  The director Fritz Lang had a lot of control over this project and it would seem right down his alley.  The film is based on a true story.  Reinhard Heydrich was an actual high level Nazi who was assassinated by Czechoslovakian resistence fighters during World War II.  In response to the assassination the Nazis carried out reprisials on the Czech population which numbered approximately 5000 people.

During the making of this film not much was known about the actual facts of Heydrich's death.  Lang and his writers Bertoit Brecht and John Wexley were forced to do a lot of speculation.  This story is about search for Heydrich's killers with a very big dose of 1940's war propaganda thrown in.  Frankly the cast is really not that appealing, Brian Donlevy, Anna Lee and Walter Brennan just don't seem to fit in as Czech citizens.

 

The film is further hampered by a very long story that just seems to go on and on. Apparently Lang and Bertoit Brecht did not get along and I think it shows it in the finished film the film just plods along.  In fact Lang seems to be more interested in the Nazi detective Inspector Gruber who is not unlike the police inspector, Lohmann in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

 

As it is there are a few scenes that are very exciting and the photography from the legendary James Wong Howe is a stand out. Overall though the film is a major disappointment from Fritz Lang. The running time is a long 134 minutes.

1940 - THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES, the sequel to Jesse James

 The followup to Jesse James with Henry Fonda back as Jesse's brother Frank out to avenge the death of Jesse who died at the hands of Bob Ford.

 

The film starred Henry Fonda and in her first role Gene Tierney.  It was directed by Fritz Lang, and anyone looking for some touches of Lang's themes in this film will have to look very hard.  This in many ways a strictly by the numbers western with some beautiful technicolor photography.

Lang to put it mildly was not a director that Fonda liked working with, he was very much the European bully on the set.  

 

Still for what it is the film is fairly entertaining, it moves along and is only 90 minutes long.

The film was written by Sam Hellman.

1938 - YOU AND ME, Fritz Lang's very strange musical

Well here is one for the movie books.  The director of M, Fury and Metropolis attempts to direct a sort of musical with music by Kurt Weill.  This is a very strange film and it is also a very mixed bag of a film.

Lang's film involves ex-convicts working in a department store attempting to go straight.  The film's message is literally "crime does not pay."  A point driven home by Sylvia Sidney literally  while she is giving a lecture on a blackboard to a group of criminals which says "crime does not pay."

Fritz Lang directs George Raft and Sylvia Sidney 

Lang is at his peak deploying all of his visual noir camera angles throughout the film.  Just to make it interesting Lang also integrates these strange Kurt Weill songs throughout the picture which reminds me of the German Expressionist period in theater. 

The film was not a success when it was released to put it mildly.  However viewed now one has to admit it is a rather unique and weird film from one of the cinema's greatest directors.  Certainly worth a look.

90 minutes, screenplay by Virginia Van Upp.

1960 - THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE, Fritz Lang's final film.

Fritz Lang returns to the thriller genre after his Indian adventure films.  Lang brings back the Mabuse character and more importantly the criminal mastermind plots that usually involve Dr. Mabuse.   The Mabuse thrillers were important films for Lang and helped make his reputation as a master of the crime thriller.

This is a good film with some major issues, primarily the extremely low budget his German producer gave him to work with.  The film has a very cheap look to it.  The crummy sets look like crummy sets. The actors look like they could knock them down if they aren't very careful.

However, this is still and interesting and exciting film.  Lang may have been working with a small budget but he's still Lang and he knows how to create an atmosphere of menace.  The film also has an exciting climax with a shootout and car chase.  The James Bond producers borrowed some of the "gags" from this scene for Goldfinger.

The film is a nice end to Lang's career.

103 minutes written by Fritz Lang.

1929 - WOMAN IN THE MOON or FRAU IM MOND

Another fascinating film from Fritz Lang and his wife the writer Thea von Harbou.  Woman in the Moon is about the first flight to the Moon for the purpose of locating gold.  The complicated plot kicks into gear almost immediately.  A group of businessmen who control the world's gold supply want to stop the flight.  There is an espionage plot, a love story and a fairly crazed idea of what the Moon is like which in this film turns out to have a breathable atmosphere. 

 Since this is a Fritz Lang film made at the UFA studios it is an extremely well done production.  The model and miniature work are very impressive.  The photography and editing are very good, it's hard to find anything that looks substandard in this film.

Woman in the Moon is not considered one of Lang's best silent films.  The chief issue seemed to be the extremely crazy turn the script takes once the spaceship "Friede" lands on the Moon.  There is a young boy who has snuck into the Friede prior to the launch in the great movie cliche tradition of the stowaway.  Further craziness comes with the search for gold on the Moon which involves using a divining rod of all things.

In spite of these last act plot situations the film does have a fascinating ending and while it's no Metropolis, it's not the big disappointment that it is usually labeled as.  Woman in the Moon is an excellent finish to Fritz Lang's silent film period.

156 minutes.

1959 - THE INDIAN TOMB, part 2 of Fritz Lang's Indian adventure epic

The second part of Lang's Indian epic, picks up where part one left off with the lovers, exotic palace dancer Seetha and German architect Harold Berger attempting to escape Prince Chandra the ruler of Eschnapur.  As you can see from this one sentence plot description we are not exactly in the world of documentary realism here.  

As in part one The Tiger of Eschanpur, Lang is playing this extremely old fashioned adventure story absolutely straight.  Lang was working with better budgeted films than he had been given in quite a while.  The result was this two part film that deliberately courted the story lines and situations of the old fashioned adventure epic.

A major highlight of this film is the bizarre cobra dance with a nearly nude Debra Paget dancing in an underground Indian temple which features a gigantic statue of a woman with enormous breasts.  We are now in a strange fantasy film world which is about as fantastic as Lang's Nibelungen Saga.

Fritz Lang's Indian films are probably just to "out of it" and plain weird to appeal to a modern audience used to a Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson spectacle.  However these Indian films are interesting pieces of narrative by a major artist who probably knew more about the art of storytelling then those three could ever begin to understand. 

102 minutes. Screenplay by Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou and Werner Jörg Lüddecke.

1959 - THE TIGER OF ESCHANPUR, part 1 of Fritz Lang's Indian adventure film.

Probably one of the oddest things I've seen.  Fritz Lang, towards the end of his career returned to Germany to film this exotic adventure story that he was to have originally shot in the early 1920's.  Lang and his wife Thea Von Harbou, prepared the film but for whatever reason Lang was removed from the project.  Forty years later Lang was hired to remake The Tiger of Eschanpur based on Harbou's original script.  Lang's approach was to have his actors play the material absolutely straight with no campy stuff allowed.

The result was an old fashioned pulpy adventure story without a sense of irony.  The critics were completely dumbfounded and gave the film very poor reviews.  However audiences in Europe ate it up and film was a big success.  Lang's decision to treat the material seriously instead of with his tongue in his cheek paid off.

You probably have to be an admirer of Fritz Lang to fully appreciate this film.  All of his themes are present in this film.  Characters fighting against an unseen destiny.  A central figure, in this case the ruler of Escanpur, who is not unlike Lang's famous criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse, controlling the fate of the main characters.  A strange eroticism also runs throughout the film.  The overall result is one really weird piece of cinema.

Filmed in bright rich colors, one can only conclude that Fritz Lang knew exactly what he was doing when he made The Tiger of Eschanpur but was very deep into his only psyche particularly the adventure stories he wrote and grew up on.  The Tiger of Eschanpur has a lot in common with Lang's silent classics with it's deliberate pace and somewhat stilted performances.  A fascinating film.

101 minutes, written by Fritz Lang,Werner Jörg Lüddecke and Thea von Harbou.

1933 - THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, is Fritz Lang's excellent thriller

Probably as close to perfection for a crime thriller and one of Fritz Lang's best films.  The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is a sequel to Lang's massive silent film about the master criminal.  Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou pick up the Mabuse story ten years later with Dr. Mabuse now locked away in an insane asylum.  A new crime wave has started up supposedly headed by a "Dr. Mabuse."  It's up to Inspector Lohmann the same character in Lang's film M to figure out what is going on.

Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse was clearly a major influence on the James Bond films with a criminal mastermind attempting to wreak havoc on society.  Inspector Lohmann is also a larger than life hero trying to outwit Mabuse.  The movies have been stealing from this film for years

The action and the large scale factory fire set piece are filmed in that exciting technique Lang had mastered during his silent films.  The photography and staging are impressive for an early sound film.  Lang was a director who understood almost immediately how to adapt his technique to avoid static and stagy dialog scenes in his  early sound films.

In interviews,  Lang also stated that The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was a veiled reference to the rise of Nazism in Germany, a somewhat dubious claim.  However the film was banned by Joseph Goebbels so there may be some truth to this.

124 minutes, written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang.

1934 - LILIOM, Fritz Lang fantasy film

If the plot of Liliom seems familiar it's because the story of an irredeemable wife beater (based on a play by Molnar) was also the same source material for Rogers and Hammerstein's musical Carousel.  Guess which version is better.

The director Fritz Lang who specialized in thrillers about criminal masterminds would have seemed the wrong choice for a film like this but he had experience with fantasy subjects with films like Die Nibelungen and The Weary Death.

 

 

Charles Boyer who usually played some sort of continental playboy is the low life carnival barker and he has to make a completely unsympathetic character interesting.  Even when he dies and goes to heaven he still doesn't seem much interested in reforming faced with the prospect of eternal damnation.

The film's best sequence,  Liliom's ascension to heaven was apparently singled out as a distraction from the plot because of the elaborate special effects that Lang used.  Watching it now this seems like an almost ridiculous criticism, the sequence is well done and actually quite restrained.

A good film and not a boring butt busting musical number to be found during the running time.

119 minutes, written by Robert Liebmann and Bernard Zimmer.

1924 - KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE, the conclusion of Lang's Die Nibelungen saga

Stills from the conclusion of Lang's Die Nibelungen saga two years in production at UFA studios.  An amazing fantasy film.

 Hagen of Tronje

Attila the Hun

The Cathedral at Worms.

The tomb of Siegfried

145 minutes, written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou.

1924 - SIEGFRIED, first film in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen.

Some images from Siegfried, directed by Fritz Lang and written by Thea von Harbou.  An amazing fantasy film series.

Brunhild the Amazon queen of Iceland.

Siegfried and the dwarf.

Entering the castle of Die Niebelungen.

The famous full sized dragon.

Amazing stuff.

143 minutes.

1956 - WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS, one of Fritz Lang's final American films

One of the last films that Fritz Lang directed before he wrapped up the American phase of his career.  While the City Sleeps has some good and not so good stuff in it.  Lang had to juggle two separate stories, the search for a creepy serial killer and the machinations of a group of executives to gain control over a large Murdock like news organization.

At this point in his career Lang was sick of the film business, tired of dealing with stupid producers and studios.  Lang was always a dictatorial difficult personality to deal with on a film set and like Orson Welles struggled to play the game.  Lang's film budgets got less and less as he descended into "B" movies.  While the City Sleeps isn't exactly a "B" film but it does look kind of cheap.

The film has a good old school Hollywood cast, Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Ida Lupino and Howard Duff.  If they weren't exactly on the "A" list they were all seasoned professionals. 

Lang was still good at the crime stuff, the creepy serial killer with a "mama's boy" fixation, the actual killings, a good chase in the subway chase scene.  What Lang seems uninterested in is the board room drama of who will control the news corporation which takes up the major part of the film.

Also, kind of dramatically suspect is the behavior of the reporter played by Dana Andrews who goes out of his way to provoke the serial killer through his news stories.  At one point Andrews even uses his fiancee as a decoy to draw out the killer. 

The amount of drinking that goes on in this film is amusing to watch,  people are constantly drinking and drinking a lot, Andrews goes out to lunch and just doesn't have one drink he has about four, it's hard to believe anyone could even function at their jobs during the afternoon.

In spite of its flaws, I would still put While the City Sleeps a lot higher than the overrated The Big Heat.

100 minutes

1953 - THE BIG HEAT, dated but influential crime film.

Time has kind of worn down the classic status of The Big Heat.  The film now looks like just another cop show in a lot of ways but the director Fritz Lang had a few tricks up his sleeve to make this more than another crime thriller.

Glenn Ford's the cop on a mission of revenge for the death of his wife at the hands of a nameless crime syndicate.  Gloria Grahame is a gangster's "girl friend."  Lee Marvin is slimy in the bad guy period of his career and the rest of the cast is pretty good if a little too clean cut.

However the plot of The Big Sleep has been copied in so many films, any originality the film once had has been drilled out of it.  It also doesn't help the film that it looks like it was filmed completely on studio sets.  Everyone looks very clean, the sleazy night clubs, the police station and even the junk yards.

The Big Heat was an important film for Fritz Lang.  It helped revitalize his reputation as one of the cinema's most important directors.  The film has the kind of things he was attracted to, a Mabuse like leader of a mysterious crime syndicate with lots of colorful characters and some shocking out of nowhere violence. 

Fritz Lang directs Ford and Gloria Grahame

What Fritz Lang does get right are a couple of sadistic scenes inflicted on Gloria Grahame and a little emotion out of the poor man's Spencer Tracy, Glenn Ford.  Grahame is the best thing in the film she was always a challenge of a performer to work with but Fritz Lang was known to eat actors for breakfast.

The Big Heat is good film noir but kind of a questionable classic. 

89 minutes. Written by Sydney Boehm.

1946 - CLOAK AND DAGGER, spy vs spy stuff from Fritz Lang

Gary Cooper is a scientist working on the Manhattan project when he is sent on a secret mission by the OSS to rescue an Italian scientist.  The story is very episodic with Cooper zipping along from one spy caper to another.

This is the kind of spy film that Fritz Lang could film on auto pilot and probably did.  Lang was one of the inventors of the modern espionage film. Herr director Lang loads the film up with a lot  of atmosphere and suspense.  He's also good at all this sneaking around spy stuff since his first dip into the genre with Spione in 1928

Gary Cooper was a rather odd choice to play a scientist.   The intention seems to have been to have an all American male mixed up with Nazi spies.  Cloak and Dagger shows how a plain speaking guy can triumph over these devious Teutonic devils.  Cooper does have a very cool fight scene with a Nazi agent which is pretty brutal for 1946.

Except for a boring love plot that brings everything to a halt for about 20 minutes, Cloak and Dagger zips along pretty well.

106 minutes.