Fritz Lang Epic Collection/M

Rating PG Formats DVD Genre noir Directed by Fritz Lang External Links Kino Video Criterion Collection

A recent box set release from Kino Video and a classic rerelease from Criterion Collection are jointly shining a light on the early career of German director Fritz Lang. As is always the case with this filmmaker, any light is most welcome indeed.

Few men have lived a life as rife with irony as Fritz Lang. An ardent anti-Nazi, his epic Die Nibelungen (1924) would become Hitler's favorite film and the one from which the dictator drew inspiration for the Nazi aesthetic. After the release of his most direct assault on that system, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Lang was called to a meeting with propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. There he was told that his movie was being suppressed while at the same time he was being "offered" directorship over all Reich film.

The ironies went all the way back to his upbringing. Raised by an architect father and trained to enter that profession, Lang rankled at the thought of a life devoted to such a formalist art. Yet, when one examines Lang's subsequent films it is clear that the background against which he rebelled ultimately created the path by which he would succeed. More than any other director of his period, Lang was the great formalist.

Lang's films are filled with images made eloquent by geometric patterns and stagings. Perfectly suited to the profoundly visual medium of the silent film, Lang nonetheless adapted such imagery to his sound films. While other directors were struggling with how to deal with a camera suddenly entombed in a soundproof booth, Lang found ways to adapt his silent imagery to the talkies. This was apparent from his first venture into the new reality. In M (1931), the child murder (Peter Lorre) sidles up to one of his young victims as she peers into a shop window. Both the killer and victim are neatly and violently encircled by the reflection of the knives on display. Nothing else is needed to fill us in on the fate that awaits this child.

As a filmmaker, Lang was profligate in the employment of his aesthetic. Frequently, he expressed this through creating multipart movies. Like most of his early films, these fell into the adventure vein. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler(1922) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse both detailed the nefarious activities of a master criminal and the police manhunt set to trap him. With Die Nibelungen, though, Lang took a different approach.

Set in a mystical Nordic past, Die Nibelungen is Lang's two-part take on the tale of Siegfried, one of the most cherished of German legends. In the first part, Siegfried, the title character (Paul Richter), is determined to win the hand of willowy Kriemhild (Margarete Schoen). Before he can do this, Siegfried must first find then win a bride for his brother the king. This, though, is not an easy task. As with any hero, Siegfried must face a series of tests, ones which will prove his bravery and signify his worthiness to accomplish the next step forward. Part two, Kriemhild's Revenge, takes place after the murder of Siegfried. Thirsting for vengeance, the now hardened Kriemhild exacts a bloody payback, one which ironically mocks the heroics and tests of part one.

The plot will certainly sound familiar to devotees of the opera. Die Nibelungen shares the same source material with Richard Wagner's equally epic "Ring Cycle." Lang, though, was not interested in an adaptation. He believed that Wagner's work had perverted the original intent of the legend. Instead of offering a hymn to German strength, the opera presented a depressing and pessimistic view of German "history." Lang, recognizing the depression into which Germany had slipped in the post-WWI years, wanted his film to be a corrective. Sadly, this intent was misinterpreted then appropriated by the Nazis who would evolved several of their own rituals from imagery in the film.

Die Nibelungen is certainly among the most visually audacious films of its era. Playing like a Teutonic variant of The Lord of the Rings, this is the adventure film as melodrama. Each test through which Siegfried must pass ups the dramatic ante until the first part spins into the realm of the delirious. And no test (indeed, probably no other sequence in all of silent film) is more spectacular than Siegfried's battle with the dragon. A mechanical marvel which required a crew of seventeen to operate its many parts, this dragon was "real" enough to have convinced many that such things do exist. In the second half, this same escalating structure now works in odd parallel. Now the actions are no longer tests but acts of vengeance, ones which do not ennoble, only harden. That Hitler should have missed the underlying moral - that violence only begets more violence - adds an ironic chill to his appropriation of this film for his own ends.

Die Nibelungen only seemed to whet Lang's taste for the spectacular, one which would find its greatest expression in his next film. Shortly before filming began on Die Nibelungen, Lang was invited to the United States to observe studio filmmaking methods. As his ship sailed into New York harbor, Lang was struck by the immensity of the city's skyline. The moment proved to be the genesis point for Metropolis (1927), Lang's visionary look at a future that promises much but seems to offer only dehumanization. It is also a highly charged commentary aimed directly at the heart of German society.

By 1927, Germany was laid low by the foolish economic policies of the Weimar government. In order to pay off its war debt, the government had deliberately set out to inflate the value of the mark. The idea was to pay off the debt with worthless currency then bring the value back up once that debt was settled. The foreign governments need only hold onto the marks until their value went back to "normal." The war debt would be repaid, Germany would not have spent much money to do it, and the foreign powers would eventually get full value. This may sound good on paper (does it?) but in actuality it was a disaster. Within a very short time, a lifetime's worth of savings could not pay for a loaf of bread. This gave Hitler the perfect pulpit from which to preach his anti-Weimar doctrines.

For Lang, the solution to this crisis was to be found elsewhere. Acutely aware of the German industrialists supportive participation in the government's fiscal policy, Lang could see the steadily widening divide between capital and labor. Instead of preaching in favor of that division (as the communists were currently doing), Lang used Metropolis to argue for a détente between rich and poor, between those forced to run the machines and those who are privileged to have the fruits of the workers' labor.

If Die Nibelungen captures the mytho-poetical essence of the German past, Metropolis goes for the monolithic regimentation of its future. Set in 2026, Metropolis is a tale of social repression, of a time when machines will not only appear human but may also be perfectly positioned to replace them as well. Everything in Metropolis is oversized. Machines reach up several stories, a perspective given scale by the sight of hundreds of seemingly insignificant men with no better role to play than just another moving cog in that device. The emotions which guide these workers are equally out of scale. Just as he would do in most of his silent films, Lang would enforce a highly operatic acting style, one which was as outsized as his visual style. For this reason, Metropolis, Die Nibelungen and most of his other works refuse to connect on the emotional level. To wish for this, though, would be a mistake. Lang is not going for the emotional jugular. Just like his contemporary and fellow countryman, Bertolt Brecht, Lang wanted to alienate his audience. By keeping us at an arm's length from the characters, we are given the distance and time to consider what the story is trying to tell us.

Spies (1928) is Lang's return to the criminal mastermind genre of his earlier Dr Mabuse the Gambler. Much admired by Hitchcock, Spies is a high-flown adventure film constructed around a classic Hitchcockian MacGuffin. Important secret documents have been stolen, ones on which the fate of the world somehow depends. Do we care about these documents or this particular fate? Not really. Nor are we meant to. Spies isn't about its plot so much as it is about its plotting. The fun is not in the solution but in the many twists and turns that our hero, Agent 326 (Willie Fritsch), will have to go through in order to arrive at it.

Agent 326 shares more than a numerical identity with the later 007 For all intents and purposes, Spies is the prototype for all the Bond thrillers. Agent 326 is handsome and looks great in a tux. More importantly, he has every enemy woman falling hopelessly in love with him and willing to betray her dangerous boss at his request. Haghi (Rudolph Klein-Rogge), the evil overlord, is a wheelchair-bound master of a vast empire secretly housed within a bank. And of course his counterpart at the good spy office is a nebbishy little bureaucrat who is perpetually bemused by the antics of his super agent. The plot even manages to find a reason to board the Orient Express. I half expected a giant underwater battle or at least the appearance of an evil sidekick with a deadly bowler.

Spies represents Lang at his most playful. As such, it appears that any social or political commentary is purely incidental. The spy who falls in love with Agent 326 is Russian and deeply anti-Czar although this does not necessarily make her a communist (anathema to many Germans at this time). One interesting yet unintentional point is the demonizing of the Japanese. In one of those little ironies that would always dog Lang, this was the country that would soon become Germany's ally in the Axis.

As playful as it might be, Lang still finds many opportunities to indulge in his gift for mise en scene. Spies opens with a beautifully executed montage of nefarious activities, all canted angles and visual effects. And his geometric patterns are much in evidence in small details like the way the staircases crisscross at the evil headquarters or the wonderful overhead shot of a highly formal boxing ring which is suddenly engulfed by the chaos of dancing couples.

In Woman in the Moon (1929) Lang splits the difference between Metropolis and Spies. This is a futuristic fantasy told in classic adventure terms. Modeled a bit self-consciously on Georges Melies' earlier A Trip to the Moon (1903), Woman in the Moon is a similar Verne-esque tale about a private mission to that floating rock. This, too, features a supposedly mad scientist who must weather the skepticism of his colleagues and accept the largesse of benefactors in order to make his trip. Woman in the Moon also features a quick flight to a generally hospitable atmosphere where nicely tailored suits and heavy sweaters are all that is needed to protect the intrepid traveler from the lunar environment.

Its overall quaintness helps to make A Woman in the Moon highly entertaining today, probably even more so than it was at the time of its release when it was a notable box office failure. Bereft of any practical (or for that matter real) scientific knowledge of what outer space must be like, I have to assume that most audiences of the time thought that what they were watching was possible. For this reason, they may have been less willing to overlook some huge gaps in the film's narrative logic. Dramatic ideas are introduced and then dropped. There is a love triangle at the beginning that barely makes a comeback until the last ten minutes and a feeble attempt to draw an Idealist versus Industrial theme that is also forgotten until the final curtain. At the same time, Lang goes all out for his set pieces. The launch of the rocket - all models and animation - is a wonderfully naive yet kinesthetically gratifying piece of cinema while the crash landing on the moon can still draw a solid gasp.

Lang's best known film of his German period, though, is undoubtedly M. In many ways, this film does for Weimar-era Germany what Triumph of the Will did six years later for the Nazi period: It fixes in the popular eye exactly how the people of that particular day and time perceived themselves. Given our easy assumption that all Germans in this period were either incipient hooligans or racist exterminators, M reminds us that regardless of political or ideological fixations, the Germans were just like us. They worried about the state of their lives, the cost of bread and, most important, the safety of their children. And maybe it's our historical knowledge mixed with our response to the normalcy on view here that makes it seem even queasier and more terrifying today than it must have at the time.

Probably the first film to explore the mind of a psychotic killer (in this case, a child murder played by a young Peter Lorre), M refuses to give its audience simple answers or easy outs. Instead of portraying the murderer as a drooling psycho, Lang has the courage to play him for sympathy. Never losing sight of the unspeakable crimes, the film presents us with a man who is capable of distinguishing right from wrong but incapable of acting in favor of the latter.

Like many great films of the early sound period, M has a lot to answer for. Structural and thematic ideas, generic rules and the relationship between the visual and aural components of film were all formed in these early years. M can quite reasonably be seen as the starting point for every examination of the impulse to kill from Night Must Fall to Psycho to Silence of the Lambs. Even the film's weakest moments reveal the start of something new in the movies. Although they slow the narrative to a crawl, M's minute detailing of the police work would lead directly to the police procedural films as well as nearly every cop drama ever presented on network television.

Kino's new five disc box set, "Fritz Lang Epic Collection" packages two previously available titles, Metropolis and Die Nibelungen, with the never-before-released Spies and Woman in the Moon. Each film is not only given the best possible transfer, it is also presented in its fully restored original length. These add anywhere from 40 to 100 minutes depending on the title and allow for a serious critical reevaluation, particularly of Spies and Woman in the Moon. Sadly, these two films are given only production photos in their extras folder (the earlier releases, though, are well appointed in this regard). Criterion's rerelease of M, on the other hand, includes a treasure trove of new extras including an interview with Lang, a Claude Chabrol short inspired by M, various other interviews and a first class commentary by Eric Rentschler, author of "The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife," and British Film Institute writer Anton Kaes.