The great dictator
David Caute
FRITZ LANG: THE NATURE OF THE BEAST by Patrick McGilligan Faber, £20.00, pp. 548 In 1994 (Patrick McGilligan reports) the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin invited 324 film critics to name the 100 best German films of all time. Fritz Lang's M easily topped the list, with 306 votes, ahead of Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari. Lang's spectacular Metropolis stood at number eight — although it must have been judged by the critics from many different cut and mutilated versions. The only other German director with as many films in the critics' top 100 was G.W. Pabst.
Lang was born in Vienna in 1890. His active film career spanned some 40 years, but only the first 16 were spent in Weimar, working with German producers, designers, writers and actors. But what a fever in the studios of that noisily silent era, the time of Grosz, Feininger, Kirchner, Piscator and Brecht, when expressionism, symbolism, futurism and plain sadism fought over the rolling eyeballs of the human psyche from the last stand of the Kaiser to the raised jackboot of Hitler.
Then came propaganda minister Goebbels, menacingly taking note of Lang's minimally Jewish ancestry and promising to erase it from the Reich's files if Lang would accept the office of president of the Reichsfilmkammer. Lang fled to Paris within the day, not even daring to withdraw his money from the bank. Or did he? Did Goebbels make any such offer? We have only Lang's word for it. Patrick McGilligan does not think much of Lang's uncorroborated word about this episode or any episode. By this portrait, the man in the monocle was an unremitting self- publicist and mythologist.
At some date Lang did get out of Ger- many (just as he had caught the 'last train' from Paris as war approached in 1914). Reaching Hollywood under the patronage of David 0. Selznick, he encountered the real metropolis of alien moguls and unionised film crews entitled by law to take a rest after five hours' work. Subordinates hated Fritz Lang but the Hollywood pro- ducers respected his professionalism and his box-office record. Manhunt was well received. Hangmen Also Die involved a famous collaboration with the exiled and enormously sceptical Bertolt Brecht — 'the only genius among us,' Lang remarked. Lang's Hollywood fees were never in the highest class, about $50,000 a film.
As for his leading ladies, Lilli Palmer among them, the sadistic Lang continued where he had left off with Brigitte Helm in Germany, hectoring, shouting, placing them in physical danger and reducing them to tears. 'Fritz Lang was the director I detested most,' Marlene Dietrich recalled. Evidently this aversion did not arise out of their brief affair (neither could easily remember whom they had slept with) but out of their single collaboration, Rancho Notorious, in 1952.
In the 1950s and 1960s the young French cineastes of the nouvelle vague began to idolise Lang, cheekily preferring his Holly- wood films to M, Metropolis and Doktor Mabuse. His American films were held to reveal a residue of expressionist stylisation which was the vital language, the en-soi, of cinema itself. Lang would strip down a hotel room and then place one object on the wall to signal, undeniably, 'cheap hotel room'.
The Big Heat (1953) filled the young Francois Truffaut and the Cahiers du Cine- ma with joy. Godard later put Maitre Lang, then retired and semi-blind, into his first acting role as someone called Fritz Lang. Brigitte Bardot was seen in the bath hold- ing a book about the work of Fritz Lang. Godard's producers wanted more of Bar- dot and less of the book.
How good was Lang's M, which the crit- ics later rated the best German film of all time? As Foster Hirsch has written, 'Lang's creation of atmosphere, his use of closed frames, his famous counterpoint between sound and image, are unsurpassed.' Yet Lang's gangsters and policemen, in their smoke-filled rooms, are tediously garru- lous, as if the director was revelling in the recent liberation from silent cinema. The young Joseph Losey saw the film in Munich in the year of its release, 1931. Nineteen years later Lang's producer, Seymour Nebenzal, also a refugee from Nazi Ger- many, invited Losey to direct a remake updated and set in Los Angeles. Lang was furious, although not above directing remakes himself, including Jean Renoir's marvellous La Belle et la Bete, which emerged from Lang's version (Human Desire) as a Hollywood hash.
In Lang's M, the pop-eyed, psychopathic sex-killer played by Peter Lorre breaks off from his compulsions to chuckle villainous- ly — hee-hee-hee — over a whole city's fruitless search for him. By contrast Losey's actor, David Wayne, was entirely inner- directed, a stranger to himself, and con- vincing. Lorre's villain seems to have been born of the devil, le mal pour le mal. Lang's films reek of the gratuitous and of a death fetish. Lang may or may not have shot dead his first wife, Lisa Rosenthal, but thereafter, as McGilligan documents, violent deaths spilled over the Langian screen: the suicide of Brunhild, the clown who shoots himself on stage, the man who turns the knife on himself, the wrong man lynched, a murder faked as suicide by the Nazis, and more.
To those fascinated by the ultra-modern in Weimar Germany, it is Lang's Metropo- lis which sets his stamp on the epoch. Shooting started on 22 May, 1925. Holly- wood could scarcely have matched the 750 actors, the 26,000 male extras, the 11,000 female extras, and 750 children. Even if, as McGilligan believes, these statistics are `dubious', mere production company pro- motions, it was quite something. Lang had been 'weaned on Wells', but H.G. did not repay the tribute when he saw the film: `Almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechani- cal progress ... served up with a sauce of sentimentality.' Peter Gay calls it 'a fantasy without imagination'.
Patrick McGilligan's life of Lang is well researched and energetic, but I wish he had more often broken free of the standard narrative march through the thickets of production intrigues, film-set bullying, edit- ing disputes, box-office receipts, journeys and love affairs. Too often the trees obscure the wood.
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