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 […]
Tag Archives: Fritz Lang
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Dennis Grunes 