DVD Tuesday: Late Lang![]() In a bit of home video serendipity, the films Fritz Lang made in Hollywood and Germany from 1956 – 1959 were all recently released on DVD. The Warner Archive put out re-mastered versions of his last two Hollywood films While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), while the UK Masters of Cinema label produced a luminous edition of his two-part Indian epic, The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) and The Indian Tomb (1959). All four films snare their main characters in webs of malevolent fate. The first two pin their characters inside geometrically arranged compositions, granted the illusion of motion in a world constantly boxing them in. This is garishly illustrated in the Indian Epic, as seen above, with elaborate imagery of imprisonment emerging from the set design. They use strikingly different methods to pursue similar ideas of fate and desire, from threadbare pulp to embroidered imperialist myth. After the financial failure of the astonishing Moonfleet (1954), which had his highest Hollywood budget at $1.9 million, Lang was finding it difficult to attract studios’ attention. So when producer Bert Friedlob offered him a modest two-picture deal with distribution through RKO, he accepted. The two titles were prepared simultaneously, according to Lang biographer Patrick McGilligan, and the director split his time between the screenplays – working with Casey Robinson on While the City Sleeps and Douglas Morrow on Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Both were shot in SuperScope, and the Warner Archive is releasing them in a 2:1 aspect ratio, which looks just about right to me.
In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the Dana Andrews character Tom Garrett is on trial for murder. The shadow story is
As the reporters race around to save their future inside these all-public spaces, the killer Manners still stalks the streets. Mobley lures him into town with a baiting television broadcast – the televisual as another kind of all-seeing eye boring into even the psycho’s shabby apartment. Let out into the open, Manners stalks Mobley, and stumbles into another space of hyper-visibility, the bar down the street. Stumbling downstairs, he finds the ace investigative reporter and TV personality canoodling with the woman’s advice columnist Mildred Donner (Ida Lupino). Even the killer cannot escape this public theater that Kyne has introduced. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt flattens the theatrical world of While the City Sleeps into strips of men standing next to walls. Where there was depth in the newspaper office, here there is nothing but static two and three-shots, everything pushed close to the foreground of the frame. It is so pared down it amounts to the characters simply standing and telling the story to the camera, as in the modernist distancing of Manoel de Oliveira’s Francisca, in which his characters stare at the camera and read the dialogue from Agustina Bessa-Luís’s 1979 novel Fanny Owen. Jacques Rivette saw something similar in his review of the film for Cahiers du Cinema in 1957:
This world of necessity was partly brought about by the low budgets Lang was working with, but he turned that to his thematic advantage, the spartan set decoration and limited set-ups illustrating the mechanics of the crime thriller itself. The editor and writer are shown planting evidence and documenting the planting of this evidence, authoring their own crime movie in the middle of a crime movie. Eventually they get caught in the machinery of their construction, and the brutal ending shows a man lost inside of his own story. Where Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is spartan, the “Indian Epic” is overstuffed, a lavish spectacle that is beloved (and screened) at the same level as It’s a Wonderful Life in Germany, according to this article in Rouge (Lang’s is the third version of the film. He was slated to direct the first version in 1921, scripted by his future beau Thea Von Harbou, but producer Joe May took the reins instead to great success. Tom Gunning has written an exemplary essay that includes all this and more in the Masters of Cinema set). A German architect named Harald Berger (Paul Hubschmid) is contracted to expand the made-up fortress city of Eschnapur in India. He soon falls in love with the religious dancer Seetha (Debra Paget), whom the Crown Prince Chandra (Walter Reyer) is madly in lust with. This love triangle pulsates for over three hours in various permutations of escape and capture. As a representation of India, the movies are ridiculous, a hodgepodge of sparkly costumes and wild misrepresentations of religious ceremonies. But as a lesson in how visual style can convey inner tensions, it’s rather wonderful. It begins in the set design of Willy Schatz, who helped create the never-ending web imagery that will snare every character in turn. In one telling sequence, Seetha has been corralled by the Prince into one of his chambers. She is kneeling in front of a gold cage, the imagery more than obvious. But the next cut is to the Prince leering through one of the web-like grates in the wall, looking more imprisoned than Seetha, who is situated outside the cage. But the Prince is tied by heredity to this intricately designed fortress-mansion, and is doomed to love a woman who will never love him back. These set patterns weave their way throughout the film, with geometric shapes filling the space behind the Prince’s head during Berger’s arrival, a real cobweb that hides a fleeing Berger and Seetha, and the high-angle shots which turn regular courtyards into clashes of giant rectangles. The fortress contains prisons within prisons, until Berger is stashed below the surface of the mansion, in a deep well in a network of catacombs located beneath the mansion. The space envelops everybody, rendering them mute and impotent against their implacable fate. The happy ending involves another escape, but since the film is based on a cyclical rhythm of freedom and capture, perhaps Lang just elided their eventual return to this venus fly trap of cities, which wraps the characters in its vise-grip jaws, never letting them go. 10 Responses DVD Tuesday: Late Lang
![]() I’m a Debra Paget fan, especially in exotic roles where she could use her incredibly loveliness to great advantage, and I’d love to see her in this epic tale. I’ve never loved her more than when she jumped into a volcano in 1951′s “Bird of Paradise”. I’m sure I’ve seen “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” somewhere along the line, but need to watch it again after reading your assessment. What a troupe of pros acting in it — wow! And poor Dana Andrews; he just looked like he was waiting for the world to kick him around a little bit more. What a talented actor. Great post! ![]() You get to see a _lot_ of Debra Paget in the Indian Tomb, particularly in the dancing sequences- they’re surprisingly provocative for something from the 50′s. The acting is mostly pretty flat, but Paget seems like she was correctly hired more for her dancing skill than for her acting in this one- the male lead is kind of a big white lump, though. I’m surprised there was no mention of David Kalat’s commentary track on the MoC disc, though! ![]() You get to see a _lot_ of Debra Paget in the Indian Tomb, particularly in the dancing sequences- they’re surprisingly provocative for something from the 50′s. The acting is mostly pretty flat, but Paget seems like she was correctly hired more for her dancing skill than for her acting in this one- the male lead is kind of a big white lump, though. I’m surprised there was no mention of David Kalat’s commentary track on the MoC disc, though! ![]() I’ve never seen Lang’s “Indian Epic” but now I really want to. Those color images are gorgeous! Debra Paget was a knockout. ![]() I’ve never seen Lang’s “Indian Epic” but now I really want to. Those color images are gorgeous! Debra Paget was a knockout. ![]() You’re right Tom, I should have mentioned that fellow Morlock and audio-commentary master David Kalat does a track for the MoC disc. I didn’t have time to peruse many of the extras aside from Gunning’s great essay. And Medusa and Kimberley – Paget dons some outrageously kinky outfits during her dance sequences. If you are Paget fans, it’s a must see. ![]() You’re right Tom, I should have mentioned that fellow Morlock and audio-commentary master David Kalat does a track for the MoC disc. I didn’t have time to peruse many of the extras aside from Gunning’s great essay. And Medusa and Kimberley – Paget dons some outrageously kinky outfits during her dance sequences. If you are Paget fans, it’s a must see. Leave a Reply |
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I’m a Debra Paget fan, especially in exotic roles where she could use her incredibly loveliness to great advantage, and I’d love to see her in this epic tale. I’ve never loved her more than when she jumped into a volcano in 1951′s “Bird of Paradise”.
I’m sure I’ve seen “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” somewhere along the line, but need to watch it again after reading your assessment. What a troupe of pros acting in it — wow! And poor Dana Andrews; he just looked like he was waiting for the world to kick him around a little bit more. What a talented actor.
Great post!