DVD MIA #3: While the City Sleeps

US, 1956. Directed by Fritz Lang. Starring Dana Andrews, Thomas Mitchell, George Sanders, Ida Lupino, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price, Howard Duff.

I don't think While the City Sleeps is the best of Fritz Lang's American films (The Big Heat almost certainly holds that title), but it may be my favourite - it's certainly the most entertaining. It`s a sly, funny and suspenseful tale set at a news syndicate while a series of sex murders is going on in the big city. The man who founded the empire has died, leaving the works to his useless son (Vincent Price). The only man dad thought worthy of the job was the resident editoralist and TV news anchor (Dana Andrews), who has no interest in such a job, since he routinely fires off bestselling books and receives Pulitzers where he is. So Junior decides to pit three veteran department heads - wire service man George Sanders, newspaper editor Thomas Mitchell, art department head James Craig - against each other for a coveted managing director position, little suspecting Craig is sleeping with his wife (Rhonda Fleming at her va-va-voomiest). The contest: whichever department head can unmask the sex killer first gets the job.

Sanders and Mitchell immediately try to convert Andrews to their causes, using two women - Sanders`mistress, gossip columnist Ida Lupino, and his secretary, Andrews`potential fiancee, Sally Forrest.

Anyone who enjoys vintage Hollywood movies should get a jones for this movie just looking at that cast, and I`m happy to report that Lang and the scenario use them all to marvelous effect. Ever the perceptive social critic, Lang is fascinated by how the various players used the police and other peoples lives purely for the advancement not even of their common employer`s cause, but their own selfish ends. Craig doesn`t even actively pursue the job, preferring the let Sanders and Mitchell cancel each other out and just gets it on with Fleming in the meantime. Andrews, on the surface the most respectable of the bunch, thinks nothing of putting his fiancee out as bait for the sex killer, figuring the end justifies the means.

The dialogue is witty and acidic, the suspense sequences solid, even if the actions that initiate the murderer`s ultimate capture ring a bit false. Why this isn`t on DVD is beyond me, so if it pops up on TV or you find an old tape of it, I highly recommend you seize the opportunity.

DVD MIA #2: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

By decree of the boss man, movies/DVDs only count towards the great 2010 viewing tally contest if Gen X carries the film for rental. For my extracurricular viewing, I've created DVD MIA, a series covering movies not available on DVD in North America.

US, 1956. Directed by Fritz Lang. Starring Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sidney Blackmer.

Fritz Lang's last American film, and it's a solid one. Thriller fans may find it routine, in spite of a satisfying twist that maybe isn't the one most viewers will expect. Lang's concern here isn't with crafting suspense but with exploring degrees of culpability among his characters. Proof positive of the film's lack of suspense movie oomph is that the recent Michael Douglas remake seems to have screwed around the plot to the point where it barely resembles the original's.

One thing the two have in common is the central gimmick - a writer of integrity (here it's Dana Andrews) sets up an elaborate plot to frame himself for a murder in order to prove a point. He's given the idea by newspaper publisher Sidney Blackmer, whose daughter (Joan Fontaine) is his fiancee. Blackmer fiercely attacks capital punishment in the pages of his daily, with frequent verbal blows directed at the pro-C.P. district attorney. By planting evidence and secretly, scupulously documenting Andrews' actual innocence, the pair hope to get Andrews sent to death row, to be saved at the last moment by the exculpatory documentation. I'll bet you've never seen a movie before if you haven't already guessed that something is going to throw a wrench into their plan, and it wasn't the wrench I was expecting.

Lang is clearly happy as a pig in filth with how many avenues this scenario opens up to explore his obsession with human guilt. Blackmer and Andrews may have noble motives in their plan, but is it noble to hijack - maybe permanently - the investigation of a lonely stripper's murder in order to make their point? What kind of sexist, patriarchal monsters do they have to be to mess so much with the emotions of Fontaine, the woman they have in common? How about the police detective who once romanced Fontaine, what are his motives for steering the case in the directions he does, to the point of contradicting himself in two back-to-back sentences in the climactic scenes? And what of the murder victim, never spoken of positively by a single witness, in contrast to the relatively noble motives of one particular lawbreaker? Not to mention all of the other gray areas I won't bring up so that I don't ruin the plot.

The film is very low budget, and looks it, so one will often search in vain for the striking Lang visuals established from the very beginning of his career. For fans of ambiguity and thought in mainstream genre cinema, however, there's plenty to chew on here.

Chris 2010 Viewings #7: Man Hunt

US, 1941. Directed by Fritz Lang. Starring Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders, John Carradine, Roddy MacDowall.

Vintage Hollywood often had a bewildering array of accents on display, but Man Hunt is especially disorienting. Canadian Walter Pidgeon plays an upper-class Englishman with no pretense of an English accent. American Joan Bennett plays a cockney streetwalker with an appropriate accent that is mostly admirable but occasionally slips. George Sanders plays a monocled Nazi, speaking his German lines with what sounds to me like an unimpeachable accent, but his English lines in that lofty British George Sanders voice. American John Carradine plays someone we must assume to be a German, but is pretending to be an Englishman, and thus delivers his two lines in a mushy English accent. None of this is to the detriment of the film, I just found it endlessly amusing.

Pidgeon is a master game hunter on holiday in pre-war Germany who wants to prove to himself that he could take out Hitler. He assumes the position with an unloaded rifle, gets a clear shot, then puts in a bullet so that, he claims, he can really know that he could have done it, by jove. But that's just when a Nazi minion catches him, and takes him to visit George Sanders, who has him brutally beaten - in an effective off-camera manner that is far more uncomfortable than what they could get away with showing in 1941. Lang left Germany in the mid-1930s and there is no doubt regarding his feelings about the Nazis in this film, made before the U.S. entered the war. Through suggestion and tense, claustrophobic cinematography, he plays up the brutality of the regime to the hilt.

Pidgeon escapes onto a cargo ship back home to England, but once he arrives he discovers that if he makes his presence known it will create an international incident, so he and the newly-arrived Nazi spies engage in a game of cat and mouse.

The scenario of a man on the run in a landscape littered with memorable eccentrics bears more than a slight resemblance to the Hitchcock formula, written in stone by 1935's The 39 Steps. But the feel of the film is entirely Lang's own, and Hitchcock was never this political - Lang's scenarist was Dudley Nichols, who won an Oscar for John Ford's IRA classic The Informer (watch this space!), and became the first person to ever refuse the award, for the Academy's refusal to show support for the actors' and writers' unions.

Man Hunt manages to go on just long enough to milk its premise without wearing out its welcome. The final showdown between Sanders, who has trapped Pidgeon in a cave, with only makeshift items from which to construct a weapon, and his quarry is thoroughly satisfying. It's not a masterpiece, and I'm convinced the only reason it scored a DVD release was the recent phase of assassinating-Hitler movies (all two of them), but is well worth a look.