In Our Time - Fritz Lang

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-born film director Fritz Lang (1890-1976), who was one of the most celebrated film-makers of the 20th century. He worked first in Weimar Germany, creating a range of films including the startling and subversive Mabuse the Gambler and the iconic but ruinously expensive Metropolis before arguably his masterpiece, M, with both the police and the underworld hunting for a child killer in Berlin, his first film with sound. The rise of the Nazis prompted Lang's move to Hollywood where he developed some of his Weimar themes in memorable and disturbing films such as Fury and The Big Heat. With Stella Bruzzi Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College LondonJoe McElhaney Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College, City University of New YorkAndIris Luppa Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Division of Film and Media at London South Bank UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, Fritz Lang, 1890 to 1976, was one of the most celebrated filmmakers for the last century, working first in Myanmar, Germany, then in Hollywood.

Later audiences know him best for Metropolis, a groundbreaking dystopian vision of the silent, era of a crime movies, such as the Big Heat in 1953. Yet others, such as M, his first film with sound, have been even more influential, and with his earlier silent film, Mapuz of the Gambler, even more disturbing. We need to discuss Fritz Lupa, senior lecturer in film studies in the Division of Film and Media at London South Bank University. Joan McElhaney, Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College City University of New York and Sarah Brutzee, Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities

at University College London. Stella Brutzi, if you were to sit down in a Berlin cinema in the 1920s and know nothing about the film playing, what would make you think, ah, this is Fitzland? Firstly, I think you need to think, thinking about Berlin in the 1920s, Lang shared with many of his contemporaries, fellow filmmakers, a playwright, Bertolt Brecht,

with whom later collaborated on Hangman also die, film critics and theorists such as Siegrey Krakow and many others, the experience of World War I, the Weimar period, and then the birth of Nazism. This kind of background is, I think, absolutely crucial. Just as the 1920s rose out of the ashes of World War I, the decade was also a golden era for cinema, not just in Germany, but in Hollywood and in Russia.

It was a medium of spectacle and of modernity. And I think that's what one thinks of, when one thinks of Fitzland's early films, it was a hugely exciting moment. Films such as Metropolis exemplified that excitement, its futurist vision, and the spectacle, just the sheer spectacle of movement. One thing to say about Fritz Lang's,

he himself had fought in the First World War, and Shrapnel had gone in one of his eyes, and one of his eyes was out of commission, and he wore a black, sometimes. So that was just to add to what you said about the First World War. Yes, no, absolutely. That's quite crucial. He didn't just take the kind of legacy of the First World War, but he really carried the First World War with him. What would you say, this is a British Lang film? There are two ways of looking at that. One is that there's a certain thematic consistency

to Lang's films. The arguably predictable preoccupation in the early films with, for example, mob rule and group think, which is carried on into the later films. And his more than slightly obsessive scrutiny of justice, characters who turn evil, for example, there's also very clearly the visual intensity of Lang's work, especially the early stuff, not only the conventional expressionist traits of exaggerated lighting, looming shadows, angular sets, but also the more Langian touches of the reflection in the mirror or the shop front, for example, the ripples of light shed by torrential rain falling against, falling against windows. There's the interest in stylistic excess, the long shadows, distorted angles, dramatic, futuristic sets.

But in Lang, you get someone who really lives and breathed cinema. What else was being made in Germany at that time that stands comparison with British Lang? Just a brief... Was he on his own or was he one of several? No, no, no, no, no, Fritz Lang was definitely one of several. I mean, I think, you know, firstly, the way that one thinks about, or one contextualizes Lang, are all the Germans slash Austrians who, with the rise of Nazism, went to Hollywood. There was Fred Zinemann, there was William Weiler, there was Wilhelm, Murnau, Robert Seodmak, Douglas Serk, you know, Billy Wilder. But if you think of him, so there were all those filmmakers who later went on to kind of

define Hollywood, really, if you like, and created film noir. But going back to the 1920s in Germany, there, I mean, the kind of big expression is flagship films that, you know, were alongside Fritz Lang, were, for example, Robert Vina's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Murnau's Nosferatu, the first Dracula film, G.W. Pabst, Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks as a female seductress. These were the sorts of films alongside him. And for example, I mean, it was a huge, it was a concentration of filmmaking that one saw in Berlin and Germany at the time. Even Alfred Hitchcock went to work as an assistant director in Potsdam in 1924.

And you see expressionism really feeding into and bleeding into his third film, The Lodger, which he made when he came back to the UK. Well, that's a terrific summary. There's a great richness there. Thank you. Erie Sluper. How did Fritz Lang get into filmmaking in the first place and get started? Yes, Fritz Lang, he was born and raised in Vienna, and he was enrolled to study architecture

when he discovered that he preferred painting, and he enrolled in the fine arts in Vienna University instead. He was quite influenced by the paintings of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and he also spent some time in Paris, where he went to galleries and studied painting. but in August 1914 Lange returned to Vienna and voluntarily enrolled in the army in 1915 and he served in the infantry

and it was in 1916 that when Lange was convalescing in Vienna after having received an injury at the Eastern Front which is the shrapnel in the eye that we referred to earlier that he met another film director called Joe May who was a fellow Austrian like Lange. And after being discharged from the army in August of 1918, again due to injury, Lang met up with Erich Pomer, who was a Weimar film producer and who owned a production company called Dekler. And at this point, Pomer invites Lange to come to Berlin and work as a scriptwriter

for Declay. So Lange then writes several quite successful scripts for Dekler. Long was promoted to direct his own script, The Spinnens, The Spiders, which is another serial adventure movie. Of the early films, can you talk about Mabusa the Gambler? What makes that stand out? So Mabuse, the Gambler,

premiered in one of Berlin's blended picture palaces in the spring of 2022. And we could think about it of Dr. Mabuse, who on the surface is, he says a respectable, psychoanalyst, but in reality is this master criminal, hypnotist and murderer. We could think of him as a symbol of corruption, the duplicity and the power struggles during that politically instability.

Yeah, but you could think of him as the man he was, and he was a gambler. He hypnotized the people he gambled with and therefore tended to win all the time. He fiddled with the stock market and so on. He was a swindler right, left and center, and a terrible man. and nothing stood in the way of his quest for power and money through gambling of various sorts. He plays with stock market shares, with money, with cards, with people and their destinies. And that's actually, this gives us this enticing idea of the similarity

between the character of Dr. Mabusa and the role of the film director. So the way that Mabusa has power over all the characters and conjures up these fantastic images and visions, There is a moment in part two of Dr. Mabuseva-Lung gives a lecture in suggestion and mass hypnosis, where he hypnotizes a whole theatre audience to see images and visions of a caravan with camels and servants walking through the lecture theatre, which we as audience in the cinema share. And perhaps again a very telling moment is the opening moment of part one, of Dr. Mabuse, where we see the opening shot of someone holding a set of cards,

and the cards are portraits of the same man in various disguises. We then have a dissolve to the second shot, and we have this incredible moment where the stack of playing cards is dissolved onto the face of Dr. Mabuse. We see him shuffling the cards, and then he picks his first disguise of an elderly stockbroker, and that sets the action in motion. Thank you very much. Joe, Joan McElheny, what kind of reputation was Lang starting to make at this stage, especially with the film that Eris has just talked about?

Well, the 1920s really marked the high point, I would say, of Lang's international reputation. And he didn't do it alone, though. There were two key figures here, Eric Palmer, whom Eris has already mentioned. And the other is the writer Te'an Harbu. And he met Van Harbu, Lang did, in 1920. And they began, collaborating on screenplays. In fact, she would go on to write or co-write all of his screenplays up through the testament of Dr. Mabusa in 1933. And she was also frequently on the set of these films. Now, they married in 1920, and that was the same year he became a German citizen. But if I can go back one year to 1921, which was a key year for them, because that was the year they made the allegorical drama, The Weary Death, or Destiny, as it was.

was called in English-speaking countries. And that was really a breakthrough of success for them. It was a film, Hitchcock and Luis Bune UL would later cite as a crucial film for them and showing them that the cinema now was truly a distinctive art form. And for the next few years, they could do no wrong, I would say. And Lang was helped in no small measure here by Eric Palmer. First, through his company, Declabioscope, which is where Destin, was made, and then as the head of production at Ova Studios, when Declah was absorbed into

Ufa. What changed, let's come and move to Metropolis in 1927, a massive film, and for many people, the one people remember most. First of all, the film was the most expensive production in the history of Oofa Studios, and it was designed by Palmer to be a film, along with Mernouinus Faust, made a year earlier, to compete with Hollywood, to show that the Germans could make a film on the same kind of scale and the same kind of international appeal of Hollywood. The film was, as was Faust, a huge financial failure.

It was such a failure that, in fact, Palmer lost his job at Ufa. For those listeners who don't know, can you just say what the central story was? The core of Metropolis is the story of a young man named Freighter, who's the son of the owner of Metropolis, this huge city, a Metropolis. and that employs factory workers who are exploited by this head of Metropolis, the father figure that Freeder is rebelling against. Freighter falls in love with a woman named Maria, who is trying to lead the workers into a much more enlightened state

and to effectively to revolt against the master, and Freider becomes involved in this particular situation. He did an immense amount of clashing of different styles, was inside it, didn't he? Metropolis? Yes, in particular. Yes. Because there is first of all the fairy tale element, the Gothic romantic element, there is the

biblical element, there is the futurist element, there is the allegorical, all of these, I'm probably leaving out about six or seven other things going on in this film. It is so layered in terms of what Lang and Van Hoob Harbour were attempting here. I think it was just too much cinema for people at once when it was just too much cinema for people at once when open. Bunuel reviewed it and he said that the story was fast, completely moronic, as far as he was concerned, a completely banal story, but he said the spectacle of it was just stunning, just overwhelming and truly innovative. Stella, Selle Brutzi, in 1991 Langmaid M, his first film with sound, talkie, if you like, well, half talkie. What opportunity did his sound give to him?

I think that N is an amazing film. I would say Fritz Lang's masterpiece. It tells the story of character M of the title called Becker, played by Peter Lorry, a city terrorised by someone who is abducting and killing children, and they chase down Peter Lorry. A wonderful illustration of the integration of the visual expressiveness that one sees in Lange's film is the first time that we see Becker, the Peter Lorry character.

The schools have just finished for lunches where it all starts. Yes, there's a nursery rhyme that there's a little girl walking home bouncing a ball. She bounces the ball against a poster offering a 10,000 marks reward for any information that'll lead to the capture of the child murderer. The shot lingers, a visual clue straight away that this is a more than passing detail. Then the silhouette of a hatted man comes into view casting a shadow over that poster, in particular the word murder. The silhouette looks down. a little and the childish voice of Peter Laurie says, what a pretty ball you have there.

It inclines towards the little girl and says, what's your name? Elsie Beckman, she says. There's a cut at that point, not to the man himself. We still don't know who this person is, but rather to the mother, we've seen earlier preparing lunch,

and edit, which is hugely ominous. With maximum economy, we realise, through a deft combination of sound and image, the full danger of this moment. We then see M again, but from the back, so again we don't see Peter Laurie's face. A high-angle shot of him buying Elsie a balloon from the blind street seller. His whistling greig's in the hall of the Mountain King.

And if I can, there's a nice point of trivia, which is the Peter Laurie couldn't whistle, so that that's actually Fritz Lang whistling that you hear on the soundtrack. Em must think he's safe from detection, but clearly isn't. The whistle is therefore a kind of sound equivalent of the shadow, another light motif that functions as a shorthand for M. So you see the integration of sound and image very clearly. After a few minutes later, two ominously silent shots come of a child's ball rolling across Scrabland and a balloon entangled in telephone wires before drifting up, perhaps into void, perhaps to heaven.

We don't know. It's fascinating, the power of the silence. It resumed to add to that and take the story on, as it were. So this little girl, we know, has been murdered and, What happens next that's significant and significantly new in this half sound, half silent film? So I think the way that Elsie's death is actually depicted through a set of objects, you know, the empty chair at the kitchen table, the empty staircase, and as we said, the ball that rolls out of the hedge and the balloon tangled up in the wire.

And they're powerful images that, interestingly, as a spectator, keep us in a somehow distatched detached observational position, which is quite remarkable considering the topic. But interestingly, the film doesn't sustain this mode of filmmaking. And actually what the film does, it moves on to kind of really testing our viewing habits and checking whether we as audience are able to play close attention to what's happening on screen. So following the death immediately is then we don't return ever to, the children or the mothers until the very last shot of the film.

And instead, the film invites us to focus on the mass hysteria that is created by the murders. And, of course, then the race between the police and the ring organizations, the criminal organizations of Berlin. So the film takes us through the press coverage, the police, and the criminal detection, and how it gets underway. And, you know, so Lange uses sound British. and parallel montage to blur the distinction between the police and the criminals. And he then even goes a step further by aligning us closer and closer with the criminals.

So the police are presented as a kind of bumbling and forensic but slow, whereas the petty criminals are really wily and effective, especially when they enlist the help of the city's beggars in finding the murder. I may say the petty criminals gang together, And this man is ruining their profession. Every one of them is being examined. Every one of them is suspected of being the murderer. And they can't get on with being criminals, really.

And they decide that they will track him down. Joe, do you want to take us to what Fritz Lang is saying about the moral degradation of M? We have this heavily built man, Peter Lorry, in this Trilby Hat, most of them want Trilby Hatts, intent on the most terrible deed. Well, first of all, Lange said his intent in making the film was to create a picture of a society in the grip of self-destructive urges. And I think that's manifested in the film in several interesting ways.

And we can begin, for example, with the title itself and what the letter M represents, which is most obviously murder. But also, the lines on the palm of every hand have the letter M on it, which is the line of fate. So the hand in this film performed several functions. When one of the criminals draws a chalk mark on the M line of his hand, he uses this as a way

of imprinting the letter M on the back of Hans Bechard's jacket so that it not only becomes a mark of shame, it's also a trace of something left behind so that Bechard can be tracked down and caught. And Lank Cinema increasingly becomes a cinema of traces, inscriptions, marks, things left behind

and often related to crime. But there is also... Under Hunt. And the hunt, absolutely. Absolutely, yes. One of his anti-Nazi films in Hollywood is called Manhunt. But there's also the importance of gesture to the film and how gestures canote this aspect of a degraded, self-destructive or simply destructive society.

The ways that Peter Lorry's Hans Beckerrude indicates his helplessness in the face of his own urges quite often has done through gesture, in particular the trial sequence with his fat hands. But even before the trial sequence, it's that wonderful sequence where he sees the girl through the shop window in the toy shop and he turns and he puts his hand to his mouth and he sort of just takes a deep breath in and resets himself and you think now he's going to go and do the terrible thing yes yes this this trying to contain this sense he says when he's on trial I can't help myself I can't help myself and you see that through gesture but he's you know he has the body of a child in the hands of a child and one of the sort of ironies of the film really is

the fact that these children in the film, children aren't afraid of him. They don't run from him. They happily sing about him in the opening sequence of the film. One day the man in black will come along and chop your head off. They don't care. It's the adults who are frightened of all this, or the adults who want to rise up and get rid of this Hans Bechard, who's making their lives more complicated than they need to be. And the character of Shranker, the gangster thief, is so interesting in relation to this, because in the trial sequence, for example, His hands are always covered in leather gloves, so he doesn't leave any trace of himself, any fingerprints behind. And when he's in the trial sequence, he's constantly pointing his index finger at Hans Beckert,

hypocritically convinced of his own moral rightness. Stella, can we go to that Kangaroo court? It's been mentioned two or three times. Very swiftly, Beckett realizes that he'd be better off in a real court of law. There's this lovely, tight pan along the faces of the criminals, as their leader declares, that they're going to try him. And there they are kind of packed into the basement of this dilapidated distillery. But the institution of law is always in Fritz-Lang films severely limited in terms of its inability or ability to meet out justice.

And here you get very ironically the city's criminals whose livelihoods are, are seriously threatened and curtailed by the child killer's activities, putting on trial this child murderer. You get them, though, however, giving him a defence attorney, another petty criminal, which is really interesting, because he raises the issue about should we be actually killing this person? Because one of the most moving sequences,

and it's very classic Fritz-Lang moment, really, is that we've kind of hated Beckett, But as Joe said, you know, obviously Peter Laurie is very childlike, rotund, huge eyes, big pudgy fingers, just like kind of toddlers, really, toddlers' fingers. He's described very movingly how he feels this compulsion to kill. And there's this wonderful monologue done in wonderful close-ups. In Laurie's monologue, he details these compulsions and the voices that he hears

is actually the most emotional, it's the emotional core, the film's most emotional speech. So we, as the spectators, are really torn. Eris talked about us being detached and observational. For most of the time, we are. But here we're suddenly thrown into the turmoil, if you like, of the true ambiguities of finding the truth of executing justice. I mean, should we execute this person? And also the straightforwardness of him saying,

I can't help it, I have to do it. And you cut to some of the criminals nodding as if they too have been in that position. Yes, but then you cut later, just a few moments later, to the mothers saying kill the murderer, kill the murderer. You know, so you've got this real kind of tension at the, you know, so that and the open-endedness of the ending, the ambivalence of the ending, tells us that actually there's no straightforward way of interpreting Beckett at all. We never find out what Becker's punishment will be. Iris, following the rise of the Nazis, Lang left Germany in 1933. And he said he made Goebbels and decided that that was enough for him and gone home, packed a bag, quartered train to Paris, and never came back.

It wasn't quite as easy as that, was it? No, not at all. So we have got Lange's, if you like, kind of own film script, almost like fictional account. of how he had this meeting with Goebbels and he was looking at the clock on the wall and he was just hoping he'd catch the last train to Paris. So that's not what happened. What we do know for sure is that in spring 1933,

Goebbels saw the testament of Dr. Mabusa and he decided that it should be banned, so it couldn't premiere. And we also know, or it is quite possible, that Lange was present when Gourbel delivered his first speech to German filmmakers in early 1933.

What Lange then does, he travels quite freely between Paris and Berlin quite a few times, but finally leaves Berlin for Paris in July of 1933 and then spends almost a year in Paris where he makes a film for Erich Pomer

and and Fox Europa called Lilium and at that point he already starts making connections with David O'Seltznik who was producer at MGM and when Fritz Lung finally arrives in the United States in July at 1934 he arrives with a contract from MGM in his pocket which of course is a lot more than all the other exiles

often had and could take with them Iris, why did he fever about his relationship with girls? I mean, he didn't rush home and pack a bag and catch a train immediately. He hung around for quite a while, and then he travelled to and from Paris for the next few weeks or even a few months. So what was you doing by doing that? I think you have to see it from the perspective of the Emmy Gray

who's trying to score brownie points in Hollywood. You know, the more long presents himself as being this kind of anti-Nazi director, who was offered the biggest position in the German film industry but turns his back on that because he doesn't agree with Nazi rule. That of course gives him brownie points. But it's interesting. Lange actually didn't have to do any of that

because what is really striking about Lange's time in Hollywood and which not much gets talked about is his active engagement in humanitarian activities and causes in terms of helping out and supporting immigrants still stuck in Europe. Lange is instrumental in securing the financial means for Brecht to come to Hollywood. And he, so he doesn't kind of show his anti-Nazi sentiment, not just on screen, but in physically getting involved in trying to get people out of Europe and into America,

which was, of course, the safe haven at the time. Thank you. Thank you. Joe McElheny, how did he do you, Hollywood change lying as a filmmaker? Well, we could talk on the one hand of the production circumstances or conditions of these films. Lange like so many European immigray and refugee film artists in the 30s and 40s had difficulties in adapting to Hollywood methods to having such oversight from producers and studio executives. He was also much more autocratic than actors and crew members were used to.

So he alienated a number of people when he first arrived in Hollywood. He also built up, though, some positive professional relationships with certain collaborators, the producer Walter Wanger, also the actor Sylvia Sidney and Joan Bennett. And he also had a very productive relationship with a number of screenwriters. Now, he was very prolific during his Hollywood period. Now, the Hollywood films are perhaps, certainly for many people, not as formally audacious as some of his German films. But I think they're no less interesting or important than what he was doing in German. So we might be more productive to ask not whether his Hollywood films are as good as his German films, but what links we can draw between the German and Hollywood films while also being aware of differences. And I think the central obsession running throughout lines Hollywood work is how do these things we call reality and the truth become constructed, become a matter of appearances rather than being simple facts, givens?

The world of appearances in Lang's American films takes place through the recurring use of things like audiovisual media, the world of fiction of journalism, through art, through cinema, through politics, and through the criminal justice system. And they all construct their own versions of the truth, which is repeatedly shown by the films to be a construct, but which nevertheless completely entraps the protagonists. It's almost as though the protagonists of these films cannot fight. against the overwhelming tide of false appearances that dominate American culture, to the point where the protagonist often becomes the appearance,

the image, which they and we know to be false. Stella, where in Hollywood, do you think Lange was struggling with the same three pieces as he had in Germany, or, as has been implied by Joe, he had to change quite a lot? M was the first of several trial films, most obviously his first Hollywood movie, the Spencer Tracy film, Fury, in which he has a more standard courtroom.

And there you get the audiovisual evidence, you know, in the form of a newsreel that Joe's described right through to his last Hollywood film Beyond a Reasonable Doubt from 1956, which is all about probing evidence, reality. So often in Lang's films, the official judicial systems are found to be wanting and not to be trusted. their ineffectual, wayward, capricious, that's not how you get to the truth. How you get to the truth is through, for example, the randomness of luck,

just a piece of, just a fluke, a slip of the tongue, for example, just someone suddenly remembering something, putting two and two together, which leads to, for example, Anne Baxter's acquittal at the end of the Blue Gardena. Right, triumphing over wrong in Lang's films, has very little to do with the competencies

of the institutions of law, and all of this goes back, I think, to what you see, see an M. And then he takes forward, there are vestiges of the German films. I mean, there's the mob rule that you get in Fury, for example. I know that's an early film.

But you get the kind of arbitrariness, I think, touching on what, extending what Joe's talked about, the kind of arbitrariness of the dividing line between good and evil is so often shown on the level of performance. and on the level of lighting and on the level of style. So, for example, Joe Wilson, the Spencer Tracy character in Fury,

who's been presumed killed in the jailhouse fire, as the lynch mob set the jailhouse on fire and he's assumed to have died, he escapes and arrives at his brother's apartment. Tracy's entire expression, his voice, his demeanour, are all altered from the cheery, happy, go lucky Joe before to this brooding noirish figure, who actually has a kind of almost vampiric aversion to the light. He gets his brothers to turn the light off.

And you see the same in the big heat. Iris, how successful were Lang's Hollywood collaborations with Brecht and Vile? You've mentioned that he helped them. Lange will always say he was a lifelong admirer of Brecht. And they both started working on an outline for a film called Hangman Ulzodai about the depicting the assassination of Reinhard Heidrich, the deputy of rice protector for Bohemia and Moravia in May, 1942. And it's as early as June. So literally just a month later that Brecht and Lange start collaborating on an outline for a story about the assassination

and then the subsequent brutal retribution and revenge taken out on the Czech civilians by the Gestapo. And we know a lot about this collaboration. due to Brecht's journal entries. And it's wonderful to hear Stella talk about those strokes of luck and flukes in Lange stories because this is exactly what irritates Brecht about working with Lange writing on a script where he says, you know, Lange introduces these ridiculous plot twists like an injured resistance fighter hiding behind a curtain during a Gestapo house search and they don't find him. And he becomes so frustrated by that.

And he says, Lange just says the audience will accept it. And he finds that incredible that Lange just thinks, no, the audience will accept it. And Brecht also mentions that Lange seems to be more interested in surprise than creating suspense. Eventually, you know, Lange passes the rest of the script writing on to Brecht and the young American author, John Vexley. and they present him with a 208-page long script, which is twice the length of your average Hollywood script. So long cuts it down by half to fit in with the shooting schedule and that deeply upsets Brecht and humiliates him.

What you could argue, despite all of Brecht's reservations about the collaboration, Hangman also dies an incredibly hard-hitting topical film. So despite the ludicrous plot twists and the... love story, you know, there are moments of real pavers when we see the sacrifices that were made by the Czech civilians to resist the Nazi occupation. And if anything, what we can take from Hangman Ulzubai is this clash between the playwright who will always prioritize the word versus the film director who believes in the power of the images and lets the image do the talking.

Thank you. Joe, we mentioned the Big Heat. Do you want to tell us how you think it relates to Lange's other work in quality? I mean, it's a very interesting film in relation to what we've been talking about so far in terms of the Hollywood films versus the German films or the Hollywood films and the German films. But I think we have in the Big Heat one of Lange's most perfectly achieved American works. And it's deceptibly simple in style. So there's little of the interest in constructing the work. world of literal highs and lows from Metropolis and M. The film is mainly shot at eye level. The more heavily symbolic language of his German and early films in America is muted. What we have instead is a very remarkable, I think, tight causality, a compressed intensity.

But as an M, everything in this film is connected to something else, but perhaps in a less emphatic manner than an M. But what you have, again, connecting the big heat to M, is this idea of the world of crime, the world of politics, the world of law and order, all being intimately connected with one another. And so like M, it's a film about degradation, about garbage, the gutter, filth,

but where things look clean. So it's really about these facades of respectability. I don't like gutter talk, says the gangster, Mike Lagana. But what the big heat gives us that M does not is, I may call him, I guess, this figure of the mediator, an in-between figure. And that's Dave Banyan, the Glenn Ford character,

of the police sergeant. He's a very moral individual, but his morality is so inflexible that it causes a number of violent, unfortunate events to occur because he doesn't think anything through. He simply acts on the basis of his immediate moral response to something,

and this indirectly leads to the death of his wife, the murder of his wife, something a bomb intended for him that she receives and said when she steps inside of the car and turns it on. So what we have in this film, this tight causality creates an impression that every action performed has a dimension, a consequence, and revenge comes to dominate the second half of the film. And Dave, in the second half, after the death of his wife, assumes a tragic dimension.

Stella, is he still, is he breaking new ground here, or is he reworking old ideas? What he's done is more, I think, honed his style and honed his interest. You get, Mannion, saying the Glenn Ford character, being as inflexible as Joe says, but you get Lang, as he always has done through his career, using style to undercut that and to show the ambiguities there. So when, after his wife's murder, he goes from being kind of smiling and brightly lit, to becoming far more ambivalent and emotionally complex, in a way going to the dark side of the gangsters,

a transition that's marked in various scenes by him becoming characterised by the kind of, you know, surrounded by the expressionist gloom and the destabilising shadows that you see around Lee Marvin and that side of it. I mean, in terms of his style, Lang's films get gradually less stylised and less visually extravagant.

So it isn't that I think Lange develops away from the German. He just refines it. Thank you. Iris, was he ever seen as tarnished by his Weimar films? The two things that perhaps could have tarnished the Weimar films is a perhaps having a wife who's a member of the Nazi party as your writing partner. His wife was a bit and stayed on.

He left, she didn't leave with him. and she rose in the Nazi hierarchy and got very good jobs there, yes. Yes, so Thier von Harbu. So Long actually divorced from Harbu in early 1933. So in that year, you know, literally none for everything happened. So he gets divorced from Harbu, Testament of Mabuzi's band,

and he turns his back on Germany. But so apart from perhaps, whatever we might say perhaps about this political leanings, I think the actions speak louder than words. the fact that he leaves Germany, leaves Thier von Harbu behind and becomes so actively involved in infighting the Nazis on screen and in all his voluntary help for organisations and immigrants. The other thing that slightly tarnished the reputation

was the publication of two books shortly after the end of the World War by Secret of Krakawa, called from Caligari to Hitler, and Lottie Eisner's, the haunted screen. And in those books, particularly secret Krakawa, makes the link between, if you like, Weimar film culture and political history. And what Krakawa argued was that Weimar cinema is littered with all these criminals, tyrants, mad scientists, hypnotists, magicians, and that in some way you can read the films of the Weimar period as almost a premonition of, the rise of Nazism and Hitler. And of course, Nelang's films were amongst the ones that he singled out.

So Dr. Mabusa and Metropolis as these films, which are already almost subduced with this kind of dark, dark ideology that kind of rises to the four in the 1930s. Thank you very much. Joe, finally. Who did Fritz Lang most influence? The influence of Lang is very complicated and is perhaps not as clear. straightforward as, for example, Hitchcock's is. I would say the movement, the film movement that perhaps embraced Lange, most clearly,

most strongly, would have been the French New Wave. There is, for example, Lang playing himself in Goddard's 1963 film contempt. And then there's Jacques Rivett's first feature, Paris, belongs to us, where a clip from Metropolis is shown. Claude Chabroble has also stated that Lang was actually a more. important an influential figure for him than Hitchcock because even though Shabroch wrote the first book late study of Hitchcock's films but it's it's uh I think perhaps for Hitchcock Lange's influence was strong but um not one that Hitchcock wanted to embrace and in fact

I'm sure Hitchcock felt that he whatever it was that he took from Lang he also took that in a very different direction and that direction he took it in Hitchcock I think also accounts for his much greater success, both of the time he was making films and in the years since. But I think more recently, perhaps someone like Michael Mann has also certainly spoken of the importance of Lang's work. And The Big Heat is a particularly important film for Scorsese. And I think the ethics at work in a film like The Big Heat, this question of morality in relation to a flawed male protagonist is something Scorsese certainly responds to very strongly. you see this in a number of his films, even though I wouldn't call Scorsese's films particularly Langeon.

But you can see the influence of M on David Fencher's film, seven, I think very strongly as well, this idea of marginalising the serial murder and then creating a kind of allegorical space of corruption. Thank you very much, Joe McElhaney, and Stella Brutzi and Iris Lupa and to our studio engineer John Boland. We take a break next week,

and then we're back on the third. 13th of January with the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Basically, this next bit is for you to say now what you didn't have time to say in the programme. Here is, can we start with you?

Yeah, I think there's a lot more I'd like to say. But I'll limit it down perhaps to one point, which I think feeds both. Melvin, what you had to say about the shop window sequence. And that, of course, is again the link to Brecht. So I think perhaps what we should think about this is the way in which Lange really aligns us with the criminals. You know, because they're so witty, so witty, so wily, you know, they really get onto the case of how to capture this murderer. And Lung at the time cast even the parts of the same. small petty criminals with very well-known Weimar film and theatre actors,

such as, you know, Theo Lingen, Rosa Valletti as the barmaid, Paul Kemp. And what is interesting is that he, when we get to the kangaroo point, and we realize how quick these friendly criminals turn into a lynch mob, perhaps we realize that lung has tricked us. you know, he's done one of these, what he does always. You know, he challenges us to really think about what we're seeing. Simultaneously, in the representation of Beckett, Lange gives us a much more complex picture of the murderer

than perhaps we first might think. So we start off, as Stella described beautifully, with, you know, the shadow on the advertising column, the idea of the murderer as the monster, the man in black, not a bogie man from the children's rhyme. But as the film continues, Lange gives us this incredibly complex study of the murderer's struggle to suppress his urge to kill in the famous shop window sequence. And what I'd like to say briefly about the shop window sequence is A,

that it's fascinating that we never see the murderer and the child in a two-shot. So we never see both characters standing next. next to each other in the frame. What we get instead is, again, something Stella referred to, with the idea of reflections in shop windows, the murderer sees the girl's image, which is reflected in a mirror which is placed inside this wonderful display of crockery and knives in the shop window.

So he's enticed by the image of this child. We then get a close-up of the most stunning most, of Peter Laura using facial expression and gesture to represent to us the struggle and then failing to resist the urge to follow this child. And we see this, he's been munching an apple and we see him take the apple to his mouth with one hand and then using the other hand to try and stop himself. We see the struggle and then he drops both the hands and we see him turned from this kind of, if you like, innocent flaneur into this psychopathic stoker. What makes the scene so interesting is, of course, the connection to Brecht in a way

that Peter Lauer at the time of working on M was also in a Brecht production. And we can say for sure that Brecht, that Peter Laurie was trained in Brechtian techniques of acting. So the so-called demonstrational acting, you try to appeal to the audience's reason and understanding in presenting social processes. Would you like to come in, Joe? Well, what I would have liked to talk about is something that really interests me in terms of the American work. But this also begins with M and the Testament of Dr. Mabusa. And that has to do with spoken or written language.

And spoken language and written language in Lange's work is rarely the straightforward vehicle for communication. Its meaning is always questioned and becomes another terrain for interpretation. And they often have words, often have a dual or multiple significance. So that in Fury, for example, Joe repeatedly confuses the words, Memento with Momentum, seemingly innocent mistake. But that confusion over two words is germane to the entire project of Fury. And then if I can backtrack or bet or actually bring up the big heat again, the chief hangout for the gangsters in that.

film is a bar called The Retreat. And a character later in the film, a secretary at a wrecking company named Selma Parker, one of the crucial, many crucial women in the film, has trouble remembering the name of this bar. But she says it sounds like a monastery. You know, she says, a place where people go off to think. A crucial line and a crucial mistake or a crucial blank that she draws in this film where the act of thinking of learning to think is absolutely fundamental. Now, revenge is central. Let's say something about revenge because it's so interesting. Well, revenge, what's interesting about the Big Heat?

Because Dave Banyan feels like he's going to be the vengeful character. What happens in the Big Heat is the ultimate acts or gestures of vengeance occurred not by Dave, but actually by Debbie Marsh, the Gloria Graham character. This is a film about thought, about thinking, about thinking before you act and think through the consequences of what you're doing. Dave doesn't really do that. Debbie Marsh finally does, but only after her boyfriend, Vince Stone, another gangster, scalds her face, scars it by throwing hot coffee on it.

And so she goes into retreat in Dave's hotel room. And she says at one point that she has never thought before in her life until this moment. Now she's starting to think. And she actually exposes all the corruption in the city, makes it all come forward. I've never felt better in my life, she says, and she's about to kill the woman. who is basically behind all, not behind the corruption, but behind hiding the corruption. And this finally, this big key, this gangster film, seemingly male-dominated genre, is finally, I would say, dominated and shaped by the women.

And the women of the film are very strongly connected and contrasted with each other in this very powerful way. Again, culminating in the confrontation between Debbie Marsh, bad girl who's really the good girl of the film, ultimately, and the widow of the policeman who commits suicide at the beginning of the film and pulls the secret, but the widow is keeping these in her safe deposit box. They're both wearing mink coats, but she says, Debbie says to her, we're sisters under the mink. Salad, do you want to come in?

Oh, and you didn't follow that. Is she anything that you... Yeah, no, I was just thinking, Melvin, we've talked a lot about, quite rightly, about Fritz Lang as a great stylist, but there's also something very kind of practical and schematic. There's a really practical and schematic dimension, I think, to his filmmaking, to his plotting, to his love of procedure, as I mentioned earlier,

to the way that he concludes his films. There's a lot of emergency exits, as his fellow emigrate Douglas Serk might have put it, endings that either don't extend causally from what's transpired before or are the last minute results of some new information coming to light or a sudden vault fast as we get at the end of at the end of Fury, which Joseph has been talking about. And there's a real, I mean, there's also a sense thinking about that.

He was a great stylist, but also he didn't perhaps quite know when to give up. And I've always, I always wish I liked, well, his last film in Hollywood, beyond a reasonable doubt, is his most schematic film. It's all about, it's so schematic, it kind of, you know, it doesn't really, it can't, it's very pared down. You can't really, doesn't really breathe as a film. The acting is pretty wooden, I think. The film is pretty wooden. Because it's all just a ruse. It's sort of, uh, the central premise, which is overly schematic, is,

a writer Dana Andrews setting out to prove that an innocent man can be found guilty and executed by framing himself for a murder that he didn't commit, only he did commit it, but then he makes a little error at the end, the kind of, you know, momentum, memento type error, there's a little slip of the tongue, which then proves he was guilty after all.

And you can feel the cogs, you can feel and see, sense the cogs working. And it's really, I would have liked to have asked Fritz Lang why he wanted to make a film like that which had all of his favourite films around justice, around human nature, around slips, around chance, around luck, and do it so badly. But when I didn't have the, I know there are some people

who really love the film. I've watched it so many times. I wish I did. But there's a kind of, you can see in a sense, It's the quintessential Fritz-Lang film, but it has none of the style. And so I think he was a deeply ambivalent figure, really, because of that.

He was great stylist, but he didn't always use it. And I just would have liked to have had the long conversations with him about when he made those choices, really. I actually love Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. I think it's an amazing film. So I'm in that camp. I just don't. I wish I did.

I just kind of, I would, because I write about justice. I've read about the law so many times. And I just, I look at Joan Fontaine's performance. And I just think, how could you get such a bad performance out of Joan Fontaine? I love Joan Fontaine. Well, I think that's part of the allegorical impulse at work here. You know, just like empty it of any kind of obvious human expression because it's about something else, something larger, more important.

It's a world that's already good. And I think it's interesting, Stella, because what you touch on is something that critics, of his Weimar film. So Weimar film critics at the time often accused Lang of. So with Metropolis, one critic said, this is ridiculous. How can he make an ideological film without ideology?

In M, Lang was constantly accused of not taking sides, you know, and they said, well, is he for the death penalty or is he against? But one critic then literally pointed out that perhaps his fellow colleagues have what he calls principles instead of eyes because what he's saying is that actually fundamentally Fritz Lung's films

are much more concerned perhaps with seeing and blindness in the sense that the narratives are so powerful and Lung's mastery of cinematic techniques is so powerful that he can take us on the right, you know, he takes us along with the criminals, you know, with Dr. Mabuse, we're charmed by Dr. Mabuse We're completely complicit with the criminals in M until they turn into a lynch mob. And it's interesting then perhaps to see how quickly they resort to violent retribution when actually the film's character, the murderer, really struggles with the impulse to curb his own violence.

And I think perhaps that Lung is, in many ways, you know, he is, I mean, it sounds big, lip, but he is a filmmaker's filmmaker. He's interested in, in a very self-reflexive way. He's interested in the power of film to misguide the audience, you know, to make us think that we know everything that goes on, but only to reveal them to us that we're partially cited. Well, thanks very much. That was so good. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Paltice a new podcast series

for BBC Radio 4 uncanny. Do you believe in ghosts? No. Have you seen one? Yes. Real life stories are supernatural,

told by the people they happen to. Presented by me, Danny Robbins. There is a very strong sense of pure evil. Subscribe to Uncanny on BBC Sounds.