I had not made that Peter Cushing pensive look in Star Wars connection before to the patriarch looking out of his window as everything goes dark in Metropolis, but that's a great connection!
domino harvey wrote: ↑Sat Jan 01, 2022 4:48 pm
This week’s
In Our Time episode is about Lang. Had to laugh at Bragg trying to initially set up an emphasis on
Metropolis and all the Lang experts pivoting to
M instead (as you’d expect). Good discussions mainly of those two,
the Big Heat,
Fury, the first
Mabuse,
Hangmen Also Die, and an ending debate on
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’s merits
I have finally managed to listen to this episode now and it was very interesting. Beyond Bragg's introduction and getting one of the guests to describe the plot (which doesn't happen with any of the other films!), Metropolis does not get too much focus beyond a listing of all of its themes ("fairy tale, Biblical, sci-fi...it was just too much movie for audiences") and that along with Murnau's Faust its box office failure brought UFA to its knees. I liked the discussion of M, although I could have done without all the comments on how plump and fat, and therefore unassuming and overlooked in his apparent sweaty pudginess (especially in his hands) that Peter Lorre was, though that did lead to the really nice pointing up of Lorre's bare wringing hands as he wrestles with his overwhelming urges contrasted with the gang leader's leather clad and often pointing (when not splayed out over maps of the city of Berlin) hands that suggests a more conscious and premeditated and coordinated horror. For all of the emphasis on the first shot on the shadow across the missing child poster as the unseen killer picks up another victim, I also would have liked the moment in the film when after the first half hour Lorre finally appears on screen making faces in the mirror before they become a frozen rictus of madness as the playacting becomes too revealing even to the man himself to have been discussed at least once!
It was interesting to hear one of the guests spending a bit of time talking about Hangmen Also Die, mostly relating the behind the scenes troubles with Bertolt Brecht's clashes with Lang over the script than anything too thematic. I did think they missed a trick in not equating the obvious 'fakeness' of the themes here to the later discussion of the 'flaws' in Beyond A Reasonable Doubt as something that might have been a conscious approach rather than a terrible flaw in Lang's filmmaking skills (I would say it is less 'fakeness' but more a healthy dose of cynicism!), although two separate guests talked about each of those issues separately so maybe the correlation did not get made because of that.
In terms of other German émigré filmmakers at the time who were not mentioned in the discussion, I wondered if Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer would have been good contrasting comparisons?
I was particularly interested in the final section on the legacy of Lang on other filmmakers that came afterwards. Michael Mann was an interesting name thrown out there, although I wonder if he may have been more influenced by other more romantic German Expressionist filmmakers such as Murnau or Pabst rather than the rather precise and austere Lang? David Fincher was an interesting figure to compare Lang too, although not just in the interest in crime stories but also in the sheer preciseness of construction of shots and camera movements. Which itself reminded me of that
Claude Chabrol 'remake' of a scene of M on the Criterion disc where in his introduction to it Chabrol talked of how he realised that it was impossible to re-do the scene of the killer being marked and chased without having to precisely follow the timing of camera movements in certain shots in order to achieve the intended psychological effect.
Regarding the Hitchcock versus Lang contrasts that get brought up, just as important as talking about filmmakers it might have also been worth noting those two Michael Douglas starring remakes that came out in recent years that might make for an interesting compare and contrast experience in themselves (throw in David Fincher's The Game whilst we are at it!): the remake of Dial M For Murder in 1998's A Perfect Murder; and the remake of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt in 2009! (And whilst on Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, I wonder if it had any influence at all on Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor?)
Whilst it was nice to have a lot of focus on Dr Mabuse, The Gambler I was rather surprised that there was no mention at all of Testament of Dr Mabuse or The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse charting a kind of through-line in Lang's career (let alone Chabrol's own tribute to the Mabuse canon with 1990's Dr M!). Beyond Metropolis those were the bigger omissions of the discussion. None of the post-Hollywood German films get mentioned at all. Also it was rather surprising that While The City Sleeps was not brought up at all, as that feels like a particularly interesting American companion piece to M, just with the criminal mob replaced with similarly hard-nosed newspapermen!
And whilst his work is often talked of as indebted to Bertolucci, Dreyer and Tarkovsky, I could not help but think whilst listening that it might be just as fruitful to think of Lars von Trier's first feature The Element of Crime through a Lang-ian lens! After all it is about a naive idealist pursuing a serial child murderer who inevitably finds out that his whole methodology of investigation inherited from his revered mentor is flawed (or more correctly, was rather too close to home!) and expands out from just being about a specific crime into implicating an entire European society! And in a Mabuse-touch it is all told by the main character under hypnosis which adds another layer of unreliability to the events being played out!
. The example was a white man was hanged from this 1943 film.