Review: Ministry of Fear (1944)

* * *
Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds

Fortune tellers, microfilm hidden inside cake, murders at seances, secret Nazi spy rings - filmmakers working during WWII had a lot at their disposal with when it came to putting together their thrillers. Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear features all those elements and more as it tells a classic "wrong man" tale that leans heavily on Lang's experience as one of the premiere Expressionist filmmakers and in the end reaches (without quite grasping) for the sort of sweeping romantic coda that Lang's contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, would perfect in films like To Catch a Thief and North By Northwest. While not one of Lang's best films (though, in fairness, his best sets the bar pretty high), Ministry of Fear is a serviceable thriller and makes for a highly entertaining watch.

Review: M (1931)

* * * *
Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Peter Lorre

Fritz Lang’s M is a taut crime drama which forgoes the usual preoccupations of the police procedural story to concentrate instead on larger social questions. This isn’t a film that’s about whether a criminal will be caught and how he will be punished, but is instead about the society which delivers such a criminal into the world. It’s an uncompromising film about a brutal, ugly world, and it’s a masterpiece of tone and storytelling technique.

The plot of M hinges on the search and capture of a child murderer played by Peter Lorre. We meet him first as a shadow looming over his next victim and in certain respects this is as close as we ever get to him. He gives an impassioned speech at the end which illuminates – to a degree – his psychological state, but we don’t really get to know him, nor are we meant to. The film is far less concerned with the hows and whys of his crimes than it is with how his crimes affect his community and with what that tells us about the community itself.

The police are, obviously, under pressure to catch the killer, but local criminals have a vested interest in his capture as well. With the heat turned up, the police are especially attentive to and disruptive of the underworld dealings which had previously carried on with relative ease. Using beggars as their spies, the criminal community discovers the identity of the killer and opt to bring him to their own kind of justice with a mock trial and plans for an execution. The scenes of the hunt and capture of Beckert (Lorre) are extremely well done, especially the sequence which finds him hiding in a storage area, trapped like an animal with nothing to do but wait for the hunters to find him. The notion of Beckert as animal is further explored during the “trial” when he insists that he can’t be accountable for his crimes because he was acting on an impulse he can’t control.

The world created for us in M is one of shadows and decay, corruption and hatred. There is no doubt that Beckert is guilty, his crimes reprehensible, but what of the people who want to bring him to justice? Lang contrasts scenes of the police strategizing around a table with scenes of the underworld figures strategizing around a table – if the two groups are so similar (almost indistinguishable, in fact), what hope is there for justice? When Beckert is captured, the tribunal takes the form of a court complete with prosecutor, defence, and jury. It isn’t the crime itself but the corruption of systems of justice that Lang is focused on.

Mob mentality plays a large role in this exploration. Spurred by fear, individuals who are otherwise reasonable find themselves swept up in crowds, turning on their neighbours at the slightest provocation and acting out their fear through violence. M was made on the cusp of Hitler’s rise to power but it presupposes the mentality that would pervade the nation under his rule and which would play a part in driving Lang out of Germany for good. Watching it in this context only makes it all the more fascinating.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Metropolis (1927)

Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Brigitte Helm, Gustav Frohlich

It’s hard to imagine the cinematic landscape without Metropolis. The influence of Fritz Lang’s science fiction classic can be seen in such films as Frankenstein, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, amongst many others. It isn’t a perfect film, but it is nonetheless a masterpiece of the genre, a groundbreaking moment in cinema, and a visually stunning work of art.

The world is divided in two: below ground are the workers (the Hands) who toil at senseless tasks, and above ground are the thinkers (the Head). It’s uncertain what, exactly, the thinkers are thinking of, but it seems to involve a lot of running around with half-dressed women (the more things change, the more they stay the same), which is how we first encounter the protagonist, Freder (Gustav Frohlich). His revelry is interrupted by Maria (Brigitte Helm), who appears with a group of children from the world below. Freder is smitten with Maria and becomes curious about life below ground. What he sees in the depths are men compelled to accomplish tasks which are pointless (what, exactly, does the machine that Freder briefly takes over, the one with the two clock hands, do?), and an industrial complex that is sucking the life out of the people who literally built and maintain the city with their own hands. At one point Freder imagines a machine coming to life, looking like a demonic head which consumes the workers.

The divide between worker and thinker, rich and poor, between those who labour and those who benefit from that labour, is the primary focus of the film. Maria, in a speech to rouse the workers, uses the Tower of Babel as a metaphor: “Those who toiled knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned. And the minds that planned the Tower of Babel cared nothing for the workers who built it.” What is missing in this world composed solely of Head and Hands is “the Heart” which will mediate between the two and make life better for all. It’s a simplistic message, and Freder (if not necessarily Maria) is exactly the kind of wide-eyed innocent who would believe that that’s all it takes.

While Freder is learning how the other half lives and Maria is trying to incite revolution, Freder’s father (Alfred Abel) has teamed up with the mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who has developed the technology to build a robot which will look like a human. The birth of the robot is probably the most famous sequence of the film, with beams of electricity running along the robot’s frame, bringing it to life. The robot is made to look like Maria and displaces the real Maria in order to subvert her work. The robot distracts the workers from any revolutionary ideas and almost leads to their destruction in one of the film’s best sequences, as the depths of the city flood and the people underneath rush to safety. These scenes are nothing short of massive and in and of themselves make the film worth watching.

Although Metropolis was visually ahead of its time (in certain respects, perhaps even ahead of our own: has a city ever looked so sinisterly futuristic as this one?), there’s something about the film that I find difficult to reconcile with its technical innovations. The characters are conveyed in a way that seems very stilted and pantomimic. I know people who consider this simply an attribute of silent film in general, that the lack of sound makes exaggeration necessary, but I don’t think that could be further from the truth. Metropolis came out in the same year as Sunrise, a film that is much more subtle and fluid in the way that it conveys emotion. The overwrought style of the acting may have been a deliberate choice on the part of Fritz Lang, but it results in a film that is decades ahead in one sense, and about a decade behind in another. That being said, however, it should be noted that Brigitte Helm delivers an excellent set of performances here, creating distinct “personalities” for both Maria and her robotic doppelganger.

As I stated before, the message of this film is incredibly simplistic which is perhaps why, if it was deliberate, Lang directed his actors towards an overly stylized, exaggerated form of acting. If the characters were more complex, the film wouldn’t work because the message would seem to be delivered with sneering irony instead of hopeful sincerity. But regardless of what you take from it’s message, this is ultimately a film of images, many of them startling, many of which you recognize from countless other films that this one influenced. This is a must-see film because it represents the roots of science fiction filmmaking as we know it today.