Fritz Lang, master of silent ci-fi, westerns, noirs

They've been showing some of his noirs over here on BBC2 this week - "The Big Heat" is on tonight.

man I kinda wanna see all of those

I have the dvd of "M". Wonderful film.

I think that's the only one of that list I've seen actually - loved it when I saw it but haven't seen it since high school

Clash by Night has purplish patches but has Marilyn Monroe's least affected perf and Stanwyck's last great one. Authentic seatown ambience too.

watching Marilyn Monroe act is really painful

Oh, rubbish.

She's not painful at all here. I'm surprised she didn't melt beneath Stanwyck's withering glances.

(xpost)

How many of those American Lang films are available on DVD, I wonder? I got a set the 2 first mabuse films, metropolis, spione, and M. Supposedly Die Nibelungen is coming out on DVD in October. Easy to forget how many he made in America, though.

I've never been able to sit through any of her starring roles apart from Some Like It Hot (haven't seen Clash by Night)

I saw The Woman in the Window (excellent) three weeks ago.

M is my favourite film ever. Amongst many wonderful things, it pre-empts modern Policiers with a vengeance.

Yesterday I watched all 4 hours of the two-part silent Dr. Mabuse film, which I'd seen long ago... The plotty stuff is pretty dire, but what atmosphere and effects, esp the one where Mabuse's face is isolated at the gambling table.

I'm reading the recent bio and stopping to watch Lang films when possible. Haven't found out who he allegedly killed yet.

Which recent bio?

Patrick McGilligan from 1997?

The Blue Gardenia is on TCM at 8 AM on Sunday.

"M" is a brilliant piece of a masterpiece piece of cinema really. I don't get why they kept doing police movies after that one.

Is the bio good? Would love to read more about Lang. Love his stuff.

yes, McGilligan; I didn't realize it was that old! It's good but I'm still in the silent era -- have to rent Spiders...

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is such a wild mishmash of serial chases, horror, gangster film etc... can't forget those speeding traveling shots of the trees at night. And I didn't realize the cop was the one from M.

Fritz Lang interviewed by William Friedkin, 1975:

(split into 5 parts, that's the first part)

Just saw M for the first time. Damn, that's a film.

M didn't really do it for me. Love Metropolis, Sigfried, and Ministry of Fear though!

Sorry, it's actually spelled Siegfried.

Obviously a lot of good ones I have yet to see!

just watched the testament of dr. mabuse, which i think i'd seen before (certain scenes were very familiar), but it felt entirely new to me. what a blast! might like it even better than M, and it more than holds its own with the original dr. mabuse: the gambler. the "rhyming" structure is particularly wonderful, with each scene linked to the next by fragments of interlocking dialogue, sound & imagery. and lohmann is such a great character. love the bit where he gets his hat shot off charging up the stairs. it's an almost ceaseless barrage of jaw-dropping moments, interrupted only by the rather tedious romantic subplot between kent & lilli. kinda sad that lang soon after repudiated expressionistic exaggeration - he was so good at!

Finally watched The Testament of Dr. Mabuse myself -- must be the summer for it. Contenderizer and Morbs sum up the film pretty well in their posts, though I couldn't say it's better than M, or rather, it's a different beast. The sense of how quickly Lang had moved in terms of sound between the two films is pretty striking, though; it's not that he had improved on it but that he took more dizzying approaches with Testament. Contrasting M's rather stark opening with Testament's churning, disturbed soundtrack and visual setting says it all.

And the speaking ghost of Mabuse remains pretty damn creepy after all this time.

interrupted only by the rather tedious romantic subplot between kent & lilli

...yeah, a couple of too WTF moments there for me.

"I killed my girlfriend and my best friend, who was sleeping with her."

"Doesn't matter at all!"

Uh.

I watched Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of "M" recently (transplanted to a grimy noir LA - with several great noir actors in the cast as well) and was pleasantly surprised as to how well it stood up to Lang's original.

Watching "House By The River" again this weekend. Love that one. One of his best cheapies.

Saw Human Desire a few weeks ago -- certainly not as good as The Big Heat or Renoir's take on the same material. Gloria Grahame isn't so much fun in lead roles, I noticed.

I watched Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of "M" recently (transplanted to a grimy noir LA - with several great noir actors in the cast as well) and was pleasantly surprised as to how well it stood up to Lang's original.

The interview with the son of M's producer on the Criterion edition goes into that remake a bit, I'm interested to watch it just in terms of location as apparently a lot of the architecture of that area of LA soon disappeared due to new construction and the like.

M and Testament are both monuments to how to convey information via a combination of off-screen action and sound or lack thereof.

Ned - PM me if u want some Lang

William Friedkin interview of Lang video here:

http://emissions.tumblr.com/post/11737740158/highlights-include-viewing-william-friedkin

i don't mean to get all challopsy but so far my favorite american langs are moonfleet and you and me.

some of the ones that get critical love -- manhunt, ministry of fear -- have some awesome setpieces but aren't so hot overall.

Manhunt is eh, agreed. Do you like The Big Heat, The Woman in the Window, or Rancho Notorious? Those were my entry points.

yeah i like those, not as much as the ones i mentioned though. rancho notorious is bizarre.

is manhunt the one where joan bennett does the worst cockney accent ever. i am not exaggerating in the slightest BTW.

tot missed that Pashmina posted that interview in '08.

Scarlet Street is amazingly good for a remake of a Renoir masterpiece.

I have missed Moonfleet and You & Me on multiple occasions.

yeah scarlet street is better than it has any right to be. it's not a patch on the original though IMO.

i mean it's really good but it's not great-great if you get my drift.

for one thing the main character is more interesting in the original. i loves me some edward g robinson, but his character is more one-note than michel simon's.

also the ending to the renoir is 1,000 times more shocking. now lang could have never gotten away with it, thanks to the code, but i don't think renoir's approach would have suited lang anyhow.

I really dig 'You Only Live Once', though part of that is pure undying love for Sylvia Sidney

http://classiq.ro/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/henry-fonda-sylvia-sidney-you-only-live-once.bmp

sylvia sidney is the awesomest. you ought to see "you and me," too--there's a lot more of her in that one than in "you only live once."

Prefer TWITW over Scarlet Street when it comes to the Robinson, Jr-Lang pictures. We were talking about filmed dreams in the Inception thread; the most poignant moment of realism in what's ostensibly a dream comes when Robinson settles into a chair near the end of the picture and mumbles, "I'm tired. So, so tired."

you ought to see "you and me," too--there's a lot more of her in that one than in "you only live once."

Right, I'm ordering this NOW

it's on a german DVD. du und ich.

i think.

I must sing the praises of "Dr Mabuse - Der Spieler" (in English as The Gambler, Player, and so on). It is a far better film than Metropolis, with a better (if bizarre) plot and more memorable characters.

"You And Me" such a fun film. Totally panned (I think) on its release. One of my fave Langs. The mobster "types" almost right out of "M". And, yes, Sylvia Sidney at her most adorable.

yeah dr. mabuse is probably my favorite lang film, tied with spies.

3-pack of his silent "juvenilia":

http://blogs.artinfo.com/moviejournal/2012/11/06/fritz-lang-long-ago/

yeah dr. mabuse is probably my favorite lang film, tied with spies.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, October 25, 2011 1:46 PM (2 years ago)

Forget it, Fritz, it's Metropolistown.

Wow, Scarlet Street is one weird ass movie. Robinson's fantastic, though.

Heh, I love that one.

Very good commentary track by Lang expert David Kalat on the Region 1 Kino DVD of Scarlet Street

Dan Dureya is SO creepy in SS

"Paint me, Chris."

Dan Duryea creepy in everything, including Allan Dwan Western I saw last year, can't remember if it was one Morbius was at too.

Silver Lode is the one I'm thinking of.

Love Robinson's paintings in SS, too - would be great if someone cld do a pataphysical-style recreation of them

http://wondersinthedark.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/scarletstreet.jpg

I realize that I made it sound like I was dissing the film in my original post. Rest assured, "one weird ass movie" is not a put down in my world. But I really was WTF'ing throughout most of the second half.

this week, reviewing silent FL:

http://notcoming.com/features/silentlang/

have you (or any ilxor) ever seen all of die nibelungen? i don't think i've ever sat through a silent film that long

Kevin J.B. and I saw Siegfried at the Austin Alamo Drafthouse about 5 years ago; haven't seen the rest.

Seen both, on successive weekends in Munich. Go.

TCM has Metropolis, Fury, Scarlet Street, The Blue Gardenia, Moonfleet and While the City Sleeps on Friday.

Found Ministry of Fear to be kind of a discount Hitchcock. Fun for a while, then less interesting as more of the plot was revealed. Not surprised to hear that Lang was unsatisfied with the ending, though I did laugh at the last line.

"I've never been thanked like this before!"

Been meaning to see Destiny and Die Nibelungen for years.

destiny and esp. die nibelungen are both incredible, though the latter requires a serious time investment. (totally worth it)

i have to admit to being generally underwhelmed by most of lang's wwII-era films. they all have some great things in them, but also some terrible things, and often they don't really follow through that well on an intriguing premise.

I've seen some amazing screenshots of Destiny but rarely see much talk of it. Glad to hear an enthusiastic recommendation of both.

i think the existing DVD of "destiny" kind of sucks, unfortunately, and may be a cut version. there's a blu-ray of "die nibelungen" that's stunning, though.

"Cut" as in censored or just a shorter version (because a lot of silent films have incomplete versions)?

Ministry of Fear is pretty non descript. I was excited to watch it when the uni library got a copy. Casting Ray Milland = the deal is off.

"Cut" as in censored or just a shorter version (because a lot of silent films have incomplete versions)?

i think maybe just missing parts of a fuller version that exists. i'm not sure.

xpost

oh, i like ray milland.

i think joan bennett's accent in "man hunt" may be the worst thing in any fritz lang movie (caveat: there's a few i haven't seen)

Ray Millbland more like

haha yes re Bennett's accent. I love her though, esp her perf in The Woman in the Window.

oh yeah, joan bennett is fantastic, just don't ask her to do a cockney accent.

ray milland is pretty great in the lost weekend, no? and in the man with x-ray eyes!

joan bennett got a man shot, what more do you want?

Ray Millbland more like
lol. Have you seen this excerpt from the Charles Brackett diaries?

March 18: . . . went on the set, to find distress: Ray Milland giving a dry, wooden performance (his usual performance to speak the truth)

i have to admit to being generally underwhelmed by most of lang's wwII-era films.

not Scarlet Street, surely.

I like Milland most of the time! You guys better stay clear of ilx superfan Virginia Plain.

I rewatched M this week, now knowing that FL did 20 takes of the hoods throwing Lorre down the stairs. Lang couldn't figure out why Lorre was cool to him in the Hollywood years.

I mean La Chienne > Scarlet Street, but closer than you'd think

Still have to read Lorre bio.

I guess I meant the war/spy thrillers. isn't scarlet street 1945... i think of it was post-war.

xpost

yeah, scarlet street nearly as good as la chienne. la chienne has two big points in its favor: michel simon, and the ending.

Is there anything Michel Simon isn't great in?

possibly, but i haven't seen it

apparently he was a really malevolent (and, naturally, extremely eccentric) dude

Mmm ... Scarlet Street > La Chienne

If only for that last minute.

Anyone have any defence of The Blue Gardenia? I found it to be an OK time-waster, but really nothing more.

I'm reading descriptions and trying to figure out if I saw it a couple of years ago or not. I'm about 80% sure I did--if so, the uncertainty indicates I had the same reaction.

Is that the one with creepy Raymond Burr? If so I liked it only for creepy Burr.

i don't think i've ever seen that one. moonfleet still my favorite american lang.

Angry Raymond Burr, Nat King Cole singing, some nice noir details. Isn't there a big set piece scene of the crime with broken glass or mirrors or nightmare logic or something? Only saw it the once, but seemed to be worth seeing again.

Raymond Burr's character here similar to the one Rear Window?

What's the general consensus on Fury? I found a few tasty Lang touches, but mostly this was exactly the kind of strident, heavy-handed "issue" movie that I generally hate. And that dissolve from the old women gossiping to a shot of the hens? Tacky!

I have the opposite response: powerful, marred by Expressionist imagery and pace. Tracy's best performance too.

i.e. a good and sometimes great film with blemishes

yeah crypto, c'mon

plus a good hen party gives me a laff

Ambivalent on Fury. Scarlet Street otoh is amazing.

The Woman in the Window too.

Eric, have you seen the Renoir version?

Fury could be my fave US Lang.

I have. I think Lang's version is the better one.

xpost

All of this is convincing me that perhaps I need to take a second look at Fury one day down the road, mainly because right now I'm finding the idea of anyone thinking it > The Big Heat mind boggling.

also a great early Tracy performance, to stack next to Me and My Gal.

that you found Fury an apt occasion to being up "Oscarbait" on Letterboxd boggled me!

Also if you're going to call it a "social issue" movie, you might as well call M one too. Lang usually gets at something existential in addition.

what's the line? "I could smell myself BURNING."

L'ecran challoptique

Wow, Metropolis is batshit... There's a Lang retro next month. Doing some writing on Pynchon's use of Lang and such. It's all very very insane and strange.

Saw The Woman in the Window for the first time in ages; so good. People still fight over the "cop out" ending, but it works better than it should. Edward G Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea *almost* as good as they are the following year in Scarlet Street.

Saw a Metropolis screening on Friday night at the BlueDot Festival with Factory Floor's new score accompanying. V good.

Saw The Woman in the Window for the first time in ages; so good. People still fight over the "cop out" ending, but it works better than it should.

I just watched it for the first time and there's definitely some great stuff here (the scenes between Bennett and Duryea especially) but I actually think the ending works *less* than it should--not only do they go there, they go full on Wizard of Oz with it too!

It's better than Scarlet Street.

i watched Metropolis earlier this year it was incredible

xpost

What do you make of the ending?

The rhythm of the film is akin to a dream anyway, so it don't bother me; besides, it seemed less fatuous in the 1940s.

On zing so can’t easily search, wondering if this thread mentions his interesting appearance in Contempt

Just seen the Destiny/Der Mude Tod. Lil Dagover looking very fine and Death looks quite striking too (as he should) but not quite the sets/compositions I was hoping for.

Extras show screens of a really incredible candle scene from another film apparently inspired by Destiny. Cant remember the name, perhaps a Mexican film.

Fritz Lang on the comic strip. pic.twitter.com/z9V2Q1zzZt

— SHADOWPLAY (@dcairns) June 28, 2020

Heard Hans Magnus Enzensberger talk about that once.

very cool

I watched THE TESTAMENT OF DR MABUSE (1933).

I love Inspector Lohmannm, and admire the style of love interest Lilli (though I'm not sure she's terribly well acted).

* LOHMANN - as they say in the film.

FURY (1936) feels like a US allegory of Nazi demagoguery and mob rule - which would clearly make sense with Lang at the time - though I'm not sure whether that was the idea. Powerful film!

Curious that Sylvia Sidney isn't better known.

She peaked in that era -- have you see Sabotage and You Only Live Once? Then she turned to the stage.

I love that the trial evidence in "Fury" is footage from the movie itself.

I'm planning to watch YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE!

Interesting about ms Sidney, and I've been informed today that her last film was MARS ATTACKS! She was also, remarkably, briefly married to the publisher who got Ulysses unbanned.

Yes I enjoyed that footage and especially how it was freeze-framed!

She was also, remarkably, briefly married to the publisher who got Ulysses unbanned.

LOOOL

A fave bit of trivia: Sylvia Sidney played Mother Carlson in the WKRP pilot, but declined to do the series because she thought it was stupid.

Oscar-nominated for the sleepy Joanne Woodward soaper Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams and was of course in Beetlejuice.

Yeah, was gonna say that performance is like supporting actressexual manna (well both, actually, but mostly meant the one she was actually nominated for).

Xp Joyce had issues with his bookmarks too

I just watched RANCHO NOTORIOUS (1952).

A very eccentric Western!

Dietrich brings something like Weimar singing (and accent) - in a role unlike most I've ever seen for a woman in a Western. Lang brings repeated flashbacks, big close-ups, and a satirical vignette on crooked politics. It's all framed by a rather dubious cowboy ballad.

An odd film, for better or worse (often better).

I love the paragraph in Patrick McGilligan's biography - there's a more interesting/amusing film than Mank to be made about Fritz Lang getting togged up to go barn dancing:

Lang had become enamoured of American square dancing. "He wanted to try it out," said Richards. "We watched what the people did. Pretty soon we were do-si-doing." For a spell the director and his screenwriter-girlfriend were regulars at Los Angeles square dance events. "Fritz wore a wonderful Western shirt with a silver bull's head holding the kerchief, and cowboy boots," Richards said. "I wore ruffled petticoats and skirts. We went square dancing all over this town for about a year and a half. Let me tell you, there's nothing like a man square-dancing in a cowboy suit with a monocle."

Just saw The Tiger of Eschnapur was available on Kanopy. Didn’t finish it yet but great so far.

Wow, you still have access to Kanopy.

Huh?

A bunch of us used to get Kanopy through our public libraries but it went away due to the way they billed the libraries

Oh that really sucks.

kanopy: thoughtful entertainment. what are you watching now?

I guess it definitely seemed too good to be true.

Kanopy still exists! Glad my local system is still hanging onto it, for now

Starting watching Man Hunt and was wondering if George Sanders could actually speak German and came across this:

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/interview-with-fritz-lang-beverley-hills-august-12-1972

George Sanders' accent in Man Hunt was discussed in the German film publication Revolver 38. Christoph Hochhäusler comes to the conclusion that Sanders wasn't a German speaker and that Lang must have "tortured him until he was bleeding" to achieve the required result. For Hochhäusler, two or three of Sanders' sentences sound pretty authentic, but the actor betrays his roots when he has to display emotion in German.

Thanks! The way I was hearing it was that his accent was close but a little bit off and often he was speaking really fast, much faster than necessary, which ended up making it worse and giving the game away that he wasn’t totally comfortable with what he was saying.

That's one of the few Lang films from its era I've still not seen. Similar period to CLOAK & DAGGER with Gary Cooper?

Both are okay.

That whole Revolver 38 article seems interesting, thanks again.

Was watching it because it was part of the Joan Bennett collection that’s about to go off of Criterion because of you but then switched over to the Guru Dutt collection instead. To me, all Hollywood Lang is kind of of a mixed bag, apart from The Big Heat and Rancho Notorious . Or maybe even The Woman in the Window which is also in the collection, maybe I should revisit that one. This one has some interesting elements- screenwriter Dudley Nichols, based on the recently republished by NYRB novel Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Householder- so maybe I should finish watching and then report back.

The Woman in the Window and Fury are his best Hollywood flicks.

Certainly those are both very strong.

So are YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, YOU & ME, THE BIG HEAT, HUMAN DESIRE.

I've been putting off watching SCARLET STREET for years, must do it.

The Westerns of 1940-1 are, to be honest, not his strongest, though still worth seeing.

Truly beyond my ken are the two late films in India.

Oh yeah! The Big Heat.

YOU & ME is one of the most Brechtian Hollywood films I've ever seen, not least in its extraordinary opening montage about money, as I recall. It even has songs by Kurt Weill.

or Bert Brecht as the credit on HANGMEN ALSO DIE has him

Yes, another tremendous film. I only didn't list it above because I didn't think of it as American ... but I suppose it is.

the BERT has always made me chuckle which is why it sticks i think

is manhunt the one where joan bennett does the worst cockney accent ever. i am not exaggerating in the slightest BTW.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, October 24, 2011 2:55 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

They really should've just rewritten Bennett's part with some American backstory or something so she didn't have to sound like that. Her accent has a vocal uncanny valley effect, really criminal that they just rolled with it. I wonder if Fritz Lang couldn't really tell the difference and everyone else on set just shrugged.

Just turned it on again to George Sanders rushing his way through his phonetic German. It’s almost like some Mirror, Mirror version of Sid Caesar doing it, with the opposite effect. Sid Caesar’s shtick was uncanny. On the one hand he was clearly an English speaker mixing some words from his Muttersprache with some German words within some kind of Kino approximation of the grammar, sentence structure and overall sound of German. On the other hand it is easy to just close one’s eyes, listen to the melody of the words and imagine he is actually speaking some kind of underheard Germanic dialect. Whereas with Sanders it sounds like he is reading or reciting the words but didn’t practice enough to speak them quickly in a convincing manner.

Think some of the other Joan Bennett movies in the series may be better, including the three Raoul Walsh’s.

Yes, they are.

Nobody told me “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” is heard in this.

Fury was very good, You Only Live Once was downright magical. I want so badly for You and Me to continue the trend because it seems a shame for Lang's Sylvia Sidney trilogy to end any other way.

I dunno - I really like all his American films including the Westerns.

Yeah I think his US work only suffers in comparison with the history-making stuff he did in Germany.

Cloak & Dagger for instance has a lot of interesting stuff! The nuclear angst there before pretty much anyone else (yes it's toned down from the original concept but still there), a depiction of war torn Europe that acknowledges the conflict was quite different for those who lived where it took place, and of course that brutal fistfight.

I have read (possibly in Tom Gunning's long book on Lang) the idea that Lang mostly used slightly second-string actors in the US, was considered a second-string director perhaps?

Thus Sylvia Sidney and Joan Bennett rather than ... Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor? George Sanders and Glenn Ford rather than James Stewart and Montgomery Clift? Can you even imagine Archie Leach in a Lang film?? Though the great Gary Cooper in one picture is a counter-instance.

But then the counter-argument must be that this actually makes Lang more interesting somehow, or that the quality of his work elevated these actors above what they would otherwise be known for.

I think this was an evolution? Thus he starts with a listers like Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper, ends up with Glenn Ford and Dana Andrews.

This overall turn in the discussion is interesting and I tend to agree in general that even with the decline of his budgets, his authority over the crew and the star power he was able to command he is still more interesting than lots of others. Something like The Blue Gardenia, for example, is considered minor, but if another director with a different career path had made it, no doubt somebody would be saying “Hey, check out this guy!”

Also, the eponym of my current screenname resents the implication that his first wife was some kind of Less Than B-Lister.

Lang captured actors on their way to stardom though: note Lee Marvin in The Big Heat.

I know you didn't mean "slightly second-string" disparagingly, and the "slightly" is the correct equivocation, for Silvia Sidney and especially Joan Bennett were known quantities, and Bennett herself took advantage of the brief window in the late '40s for female leads in noir (Sidney was starting to fade).

Slightly Scarlet Thread

Ooh, pretty tempted by this new graphic novel biography of Fritz Lang.

https://www.froelichundkaufmann.de/out/pictures/generated/product/1/540_540_80/fritz-lang-biographie-graphic-novel_1414879.jpg

cool!

Sylvia Sidney has been such a revelation as I've been working my way through countless '30s films over the past couple of years. She was sooo good throughout that decade and then she more or less dropped off the map until Beetlejuice. IDGI.

Roddy McDowall plays the kid on the ship in Man Hunt! First Hollywood role, I think.

very taken with "ci-fi"

Never noticed that before.

Anyway Man Hunt had its flaws but still looked great, had some nice sequences, and was much better than expected given some things people were saying. Joan Bennett’s cockeyed cockney that outdid Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins- she apparently even had a vocal coach by the name of Queenie Leonard! - didn’t bother me that much as overall her performance was pretty good, seems like it was considered a next level breakout role for her at the time. What did bother me, more than some plot points that I couldn’t follow and didn’t care about, was wooden Walter Pidgeon, who makes certain lackluster Gregory Peck performances seem like Marlon Brando in comparison. Seems like he was much better with Roddy McDowall in How Green Was My Valley, directed by John Ford, who originally was supposed to direct this, hence the Dudley Nichols script, which nonetheless led to further Lang collabos, said film being shot later but released earlier. Still haven’t actually seen it. Maybe I will watch Scarlett Street next, which maybe I have seen before bit have no recollection of for some strange reason.

Was wondering how many typos and what their nature would be, lol at Scarlett Street.

Bonus trivia question for identifying the singer who originated the musical motif, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

The only movie where I've seen Pidgeon come to life is in Advice & Consent as the stolid majority leader.

I don't actually know anything about Roddy McDowall, but he did also have a child-actor part in CONFIRM OR DENY (1941), a Blitz drama that as I recall begun by Lang (uncredited) and finished by Archie Mayo.

My recollection is that exactly the same thing happened with MOONTIDE (1942).

Patrick McGilligan says William Wyler did a screen test of 12-year old Blitz evacuee Roddy McDowall which impressed Lang so much that he changed the age of the character named Vaney so he would be a cabin boy. He also has some stuff about both those walkouts the pinefox mentions: in the first case, Lang claimed he had gallstones, in the second he picked a fight with Jean Gabin by bragging about an earlier affair with Marlene Dietrich! Who denied it when confronted by Gabin when he came home that night but, according to her daughter Maria Riva, she always did that.

Roddy McDowall seems to show up in a lot in Silver Screen bios of actresses to sing their praises as one of their friends and confidants.

She set to work on Gabin’s English pronunciation. His French accent did not have the lilt of Chevalier’s, nor the sexy softness of Boyer. Gabin growled; in French his voice could give a dead fish goose pimples, but in English, he sounded like an angry headwaiter. She fought for him at his studio and made enemies for him in absentia. She even persuaded someone to assign her old lover, Fritz Lang, to direct Gabin’s film. Fortunately, he was replaced in the first four days of shooting. As it was, the film turned out to be such a nonentity, it wouldn’t have mattered who directed it! Still, Lang must have had enough time to have a man-to-man talk with Gabin, for he came home one day and accused her of having had an affair with Lang, to which she replied, utterly amazed: “That ugly Jew? You must be joking, mon amour,” and enclosed him in her embrace. Throughout her life, Dietrich did that constantly—erased lovers from her memory as though they had never existed. Not just a convenient trick to get out of a sticky situation, but true mental erasure. She could do it with other things too, a frightening trait.

Riva, Maria. Marlene Dietrich: The Life (p. 687). Pegasus Books.

Whatever the stated reasons or pretexts, it might well have been that he was chafing under the yoke of working for Zanuck at Fox.

Did Archie Mayo ever do anything good? I seem to recall having just read something unpleasant about him goossing some young starlet on her first day on the set with a joy buzzer, much to the amusement of the crew.

Ah, it was Gloria Stuart, she of Titanic, according to this Myrna Loy bio I have.

In her autobiography the actress Gloria Stuart describes being goosed by a buzzer—to much hilarity on the set—on her first-ever day of shooting. The man with the buzzer turned out to be her director, Archie Mayo, also Myrna’s director in State Street Sadie, Crimson City, and Beware of Married Men, all from 1928.14

Leider, Emily W.. Myrna Loy . University of California Press.

James...

Someone else says that Dolores del Rio once slapped him for similar behavior, which I can also believe, although the source is gossipy and unreliable.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Get on the Oscars thread. We're distracted tonight.

Unless somebody wants to start an Archie Mayo thread. *ducks*

Oh wait, I already started it.

Do not listen to them James, strongly support your counter-programming for those of us who don't give a fuck about the Oscars.

Archie Mayo as a creepy practical joker is surprising, since most times I've encountered his name it's been in stern faced message movies. I do love Petrified Forest, stagey and overblown though it may be.

Well, the Oscars have ended.

Huge if true.

People watching Lang.

The thing that made fascism click for me as an ideology before and beyond a specific political formation was watching Metropolis. Brilliant propaganda film and all the more so because few people clock it as one, even today. I'm not even sure Lang did. Anyway, check it out.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) March 14, 2023

Not sure about this "few people clock it as one", everyone in the ILX Film Club seemed to.

Not surprised to hear that Lang was unsatisfied with the ending, though I did laugh at the last line.

― That shit right there is precedented. (cryptosicko), Saturday, January 17, 2015 1:23 PM (ten years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i enjoyed MINISTRY OF FEAR but have to agree about the ending, which seems to come very abruptly. however, it's such a bizarre change of tone, and the last line is so funny, that i couldn't really be disappointed.

the scene that struck with me most is when Ray Milland follows the man from the train into the field during the air raid. there was something so creepy and unpleasantly nightmarish about how he seemed compelled, seemingly against all rationality, to keep moving forward through this dark, menacing, pulsating landscape. it caught me off guard and instilled a very real sense of dread

I need to rewatch this one along with "Spione" and "Man Hunt". Some of my favorite Langs.