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

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.