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

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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.