DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER, PART I (Fritz Lang, 1922)

Agile, intricate and visually expressive (such as with its superimpositions), the first part of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Ein Bild der Zeit) exemplifies Fritz Lang’s fascination with criminal behavior and intrigue while creating a convincing portrait of post-World War I German society. The first episode, detailing the complicated scheme by which criminal mastermind Mabuse, a deranged psychoanalyst, malicious hypnotist and master of disguises, seeks to make a killing on the stock exchange, dazzles; dizzyingly brilliant, it employs the best material that wife Thea von Harbou, adapting Norbert Jacques’ novel, ever wrote for Lang. Regrettably, though, the film becomes increasingly labored and repetitious—so much so, one hopes that each of almost all the chapter-like “acts” will be the last. I will not suffer Part II of the entire 4½-hour film anytime soon.                                                                                       

Mabuse is a tyrant who terrorizes his gang members; one of these is so incompetent that the viewer might imagine that Mabuse has engaged his services just to rail against him. Indeed, Mabuse’s core beliefs are also perverse: “There is no such thing as love—only passion. There is no such thing as luck—only the will to gain power.” One might categorize Mabuse as a solipsist who assesses the nature of things by projecting his own limitations. A dispenser of fear, he is secretly the prisoner of his own fears: an embodiment of the tormented national psyche following Germany’s recent humiliating defeat.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge makes for a curiously hollow, recessive Mabuse; this hypnotist seems, himself, to have been hypnotized. He seems semi-robotic, as though he is haplessly “playing out” the distasteful destiny that has been imposed on him.

Throughout, the lustrous set designs by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Stahl-Urach and Karl Vollbrecht enhance this boring silent’s beauty.

SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (Fritz Lang, 1947)

Despite its faux-Freudianism and the director’s own rejection of it, Secret Beyond the Door is without doubt Fritz Lang’s best film of the 1940s. Indeed, it is a fabulous, dreamy blend of the Bluebeard legend and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), which it eerily evokes, and, like Rebecca, one of the most compelling tortured-romances to emerge from Hollywood—one that turns on a stunning, charming, volatile, intricate and complex performance by brilliant Michael Redgrave. The film’s suspense very nearly, moreover, always gives me cardiac arrest.
     The film opens in a dream. Expanding concentric circles ripple a pond as though the water were responding to an invisible stone that was tossed in. We hear the dreamer, Celia, as voiceover. Awake, in a New York office, she appears fixated on her older brother, Rick. (Someone upon entering mistakes Rick and Celia for sweethearts.) Celia will go off on a Mexican vacation, where she will meet a mysterious, troubled architect, Mark; they will fall in love and marry in a matter of days. In his creepy mansion in upstate New York, Celia feels as though she has entered another kind of dream, where his unmarried older sister, Caroline, is fixated on Mark. Rick dies; periodically, the film drifts into Celia’s or Mark’s mind and voiceover.
     Mark’s mind is, clearly, unhinged. Before marrying Celia, Mark never mentioned his former marriage—Eleanor is deceased—or his bookish son, David, who blames his father for his mother’s death. “The way a place is built,” he had told Celia in Mexico, “determines what happens in it.” Mark “collects rooms”: from all over the world, “felicitous” rooms in which a man has murdered his wife—rooms that Mark has added to his mansion, conducting grisly public tours of them. One door is locked; the room behind it goes unseen until Celia finds a way of sneaking in. The “secret beyond the door” is that the room is waiting for her.
     I have not mentioned a major character who is even more twisted than the emotionally damaged Mark, who wrongly believes that his mother locked him up in his room when he was a child: this is Miss Robey, whose face may have been burned in the fire from which she once rescued Mark. This is the Miss Danvers of the piece; but, whereas Miss Danvers is fixated on her dead mistress in Rebecca, Miss Robey, also a spinster, is secretly in love with the dead wife’s widower.
     In the stormy dark of night lit by a blazing fire, things will come to a head. Mark and Celia: “It was a marriage like any other marriage” (Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, 1941)—a union of strangers.
     It is certainly the case that Joan Bennett is not so successful as Celia as Redgrave is as Mark; despite the character’s name, Bennett is not heavenly here, as she was earlier the same year in Jean Renoir’s Woman on the Beach. Commentators note that Bennett and Redgrave show little or no “chemistry.” But the dream elements fascinate, as do the mental torments with which the characters variously cope. Bennett’s blankness, moreover, probably helps us to accept the madness of Celia’s love, her willingness to be murdered in order to loyally keep the secret beyond the door.
     Anne Revere is fine as Caroline; Barbara O’Neil, Scarlett O’Hara’s mom, outrageously good as Miss Robey.
     Silvia Richards’ crackpot script is partially drawn from Rufus King’s novel Museum Piece No. 13. The shadowy, shuddering black-and-white cinematography is by Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles, 1942); the dreamily noirish/heart-assaulting score, by Miklós Rózsa (Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944). And there is Lang’s terrific filmmaking: the fluid tracking shots; the chilling use of mirrors; the remarkable instance where a dropping scarf—what Mark grips with both clenched hands as he approaches his wife—somehow conjures the sense of his organ coming out of erection. If nothing else, this may be Lang’s most “felicitously” weird movie.

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THE INDIAN TOMB (Joe May, 1921)

Fritz Lang intended to direct this film. He helped Thea von Harbou write the script, which was based on her 1917 novella. In 1922, Lang and Harbou married. (The marriage lasted until Harbou joined the Nazi Party and Lang fled Germany, eventually settling in the U.S.) The 3½-hour, two-part lavish adventure in India (filmed in Germany), Das indische Grabmal erster Teil—Die Sendung des Yoghi and Das indische Grabmal zweiter Teil—Der Tiger von Eschnapur, ended up being directed by Joe May, who had pleaded Lang’s inexperience to the studio. Lang, though, returned to the material, filming his own version in the late 1950s.
     The Maharajah of Bengal plans on entombing alive his unfaithful wife; he has a yogi bring over from England an architect to design the tomb—a point of interest, since the wife’s lover, whom the Maharajah has imprisoned, is a British officer. The Maharajah is thus also taking revenge against British colonialism, but little of this irony, apparently, survived May’s superficial treatment of the material.
     I say “apparently” because I stopped watching this maddeningly boring movie after the first part. It is nothing but visual storytelling—bastard cinema. A good many visual devices are applied, but they are decoratively rather than expressively used. May’s fixed camera never becomes a stabilizing coordinate in tandem with fabulous imagery, as happens in Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924). There are okay moments—for instance, the willed disembodied hand of the yogi traversing the study and confiscating a letter, which the architect has left behind for his fiancée, before she can discover and read it; but these offer only the faintest resistance to the film’s sluggish pace and turgid melodrama. The lepers, the tigers—the sickly and the exotic stuff: none of this leaps to life.

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CLASH BY NIGHT (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Perhaps the most solitudinous love poem in the English language, where the poet’s lover, whom the poet addresses, may as easily be absent as present, someone to whom he speaks as though she were with him, Matthew Arnold’s phenomenal 1867 “Dover Beach” endorses fidelity, at least the illusion of love and peace, in a loveless, tumultuous world “where ignorant armies clash by night.” The sea that begins in calm in this meditative poem thus resolves itself in crashing waves which both divide the lovers and spur at least the poet’s defiant desire that they come—that they be—together. No poem better situates the love of a couple, if there is a couple, in the larger world. One thing only is certain: uncertainty.

Clifford Odets borrowed the title of his 1941 play from the fabulous final metaphor of Arnold’s poem. The U.S. was on the brink of engaging in the Second World War. When Fritz Lang, also a Leftist, made his film based on the play about ten years later, the war was over but the U.S. was embroiled in a civil war, a footnote to the Cold War that the U.S. initiated in part by the way it had ended the world war, where some American citizens, fired-up by a monster named McCarthy, retroactively assaulted the patriotism of other American citizens. In Lang’s remarkable film, Uncle Vince (played by J. Carrol Naish, who had worked for William A. Wellman, Jean Renoir and John Ford) announces, “The trouble with this country is too much education, too much free speech.” I have no idea whether this character exists in the play (his instigative role in exciting marital jealousy in one of the main characters, suggesting Iago a bit, is largely indigestible), but this utterance of his suggests Senator Joseph McCarthy’s influence perfectly.

In short, Lang’s film resonates—and it opens brilliantly, with a documentary prologue that follows a catch of commercial fishermen from ocean to unloading dock to cannery assembly line in Monterey, California. (Odets’s play is set in Staten Island.) Everyone here is engaged in productive, responsible work; but it is monotonous, draining work that has long since replaced human beings with zombies or automatons. (Lang, of course, earlier directed Metropolis, 1926.) Jerry D’Amato—in the play, Wilenski—later makes an interesting remark. Asked whether he enjoys his work as a fisherman, he defensively answers, “It’s what I do!” It is as though he were responding to the question with his own question: “What kind of question is that?” The implication is that work is a necessity, not a choice, and there is scarcely any choice involved as to what kind of work one ends up doing. Uncle Vince doesn’t work. Jerry’s father, on the other hand, simply wants to be working. “I like to work!” he announces, as though the fact indicates his character. A widower who apparently hasn’t a clue as to the nature of his son, his delusion about his own character may be all that he has to hold on to.

In this film, people don’t much know the people in their midst, even the ones to whom they are most closely connected. Mae, who has returned to Monterey after a decade-long absence during which her dreams of success and happiness have collapsed (“Home is where you come to when you run out of places”), tries dissuading Jerry after he proposes marriage: “People have funny things swimming inside them.” She is talking about herself, of course; it doesn’t occur to Mae that the same is true about Jerry, her view of whom is as limited and simplistic as his father’s. Ignoring her own remark, she marries Jerry, hoping that the financial security he offers will give her “confidence” and “a place to rest.” It is doubtful that this is possible. Jerry: “I suppose that’s what everyone’s afraid of. Ending up getting old and lonely.”

Lang isn’t one to contest too strenuously Odets’s male chauvinism, which perhaps takes the form in Odets’s play of a coded defense of his unfaithfulness in his marriage to Luise Rainer. If so, it isn’t cricket that Odets made the wife the unfaithful one. Still, in Lang’s film Mae’s gravitation towards Jerry’s best friend, Earl, whom she despises and then suddenly “loves” and with whom she is prepared to run off, fascinates. It is willed, like what the speaker proposes in “Dover Beach,” but in Mae’s case because she wants to be irresponsible again, this time by exiting her marriage and, possibly, Gloria, her and Jerry’s infant. The film, I understand, ends more tidily than the play—though not too tidily. No irreparable violence occurs, and Mae and Jerry tentatively reconcile.

Lang is greatly assisted by Nicholas Musuraca’s black-and-white cinematography; but his chief asset, beyond his own visual gifts, is his cast. Only Robert Ryan, as Earl (he had played Mae’s brother on Broadway), is largely out-of-focus through too much familiarity with awfully similar misogynistic roles. Barbara Stanwyck is best as Mae, whose decision that she has been selfish and should change convinces precisely because it is willed, a product, that is, of Mae’s sensitive intelligence. In a role that Tallulah Bankhead and Kim Stanley played before and after her, Stanwyck is flawlessly modulated and bone-deep. Moreover, her appearance in the role additionally resonates because Stanwyck had played Lorna Moon in Rouben Mamoulian’s Golden Boy (1939) based on Odets’s 1937 play, and Mae is soul-sister to Lorna—in effect, Lorna having traveled a different life-path. (Jerry’s showing his daughter the moon for the first time is surely an “in”-reference linking her mother to Moon.) Paul Douglas is strong as Jerry, who doesn’t know himself and doesn’t want to, and Marilyn Monroe is excellent as Peggy, who capitulates to Joe, Mae’s brother, who demands that she shed all of his sister’s unconventional influence. Monroe, in an early straight dramatic role, is not only believable but always interesting—although the irony of her quarrel with Joe frightens: life in this instance would duplicate art when Monroe married her own highly similar Joe a couple of years later.

Irritatingly unreal: the nearly invisible, silent baby.

I’ve written enough here; I’m not getting into the debate as to whether Lang’s Clash by Night is or isn’t a genuine noir—there is no murder, after all—except to say that anyone who doesn’t recognize it as such is a fool. Who has no business watching movies.

WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (Fritz Lang, 1944)

Richard Wanley, assistant professor of psychology at Gotham College, worries that middle-age has dimmed his “spirit of adventure.” His wife and children out of town, he embarks on a platonic dalliance with a mysterious young woman whose portrait is displayed in the window of the shop next door to his men’s club. He thus becomes involved in the killing death of her jealous lover, who attacks him in her apartment, and which he goes to great lengths to cover up. It turns out that the victim is a high-profile fiancier who has been carrying out his clandestine affair under an alias—and a sleaze, quick to blackmail, has been paid to routinely follow him.
     Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940; Roxie Hart, 1942) contributes an exceptionally fine script based on J.H. Wallis’s 1942 novel Once Off Guard, from which Fritz Lang directs brilliantly, creating a beautifully paced melodrama full of wicked, dreadful suspense. Much as we hope that Tom Joad and Roxie will prevail in their run-ins with the law, we root for Dick Wanley to get away with not-quite-murder. Intriguingly, the film opens with Wanley lecturing his class about legal gradations of killing: second degree versus first degree murder; murder versus self-defense, manslaughter—although what this has to do with psychology, even criminal psychology, is never made clear.
     Those bemoaning a “tacked-on ending” miss the presentation of a dream from the get-go. The woman in the portrait, Alice Reed, is introduced as a reflection in the dark of night, which a point-of-view shot, keyed to Richard’s wish fulfillment, delivers to still ambiguous substance. An overload of mirrors, including one that reflects the back of Richard’s head, makes a through-the-looking-glass suggestion; inside Alice’s apartment, Richard is subtly lit in the foreground of a shot while Alice herself is subtly darkened in the background. Clocks may seem to insist on the reality of time—but, in context, they are headed at the club for the moment when Richard has already asked to be told that it’s a certain time so that he can go home.
     Excellently acted by Edward G. Robinson, this is among Lang’s very best American films—a tale of equal ambivalence about growing old and imagining oneself a bit younger. The little jabs of the scissors, handed to him by Alice while he is tussling on the floor with the intruder, by which Richard will take the man’s life, are both funny and sad, lethal and impotent: a reflection of the professor’s low social status vis-à-vis someone he would wish to kill under any circumstances.