The Films of Fritz Lang - by Michael E. Grost

Classic Film and Television Home Page

Fritz Lang

"Lang's vision of the world is profoundly expressed by his visual forms" - Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema (1968).

What ARE these visual forms? The following book on Lang's films will try to offer at least a partial answer to this question. Lang's use of geometric forms such as circles, spheres, cylinders, rectangles, polygons and spirals will be highlighted. So will Lang's exploration of architecture.

Lang's films will be placed against their background in prose mystery fiction, spy fiction and science fiction. Lang's approaches to manhunts, scientific detective work, and the ability of police investigation to change the picture of reality will be analyzed.

Lang's liberal, democratic political ideals will be analyzed, and his support for women's rights and women's jobs.

Lang's deep exploration of mass media and means of communication will be discussed.

Running imagery in Lang will be traced: clocks, mirrors, staircases, shop windows, water and shorelines, models of buildings, maps, uniforms, trains, cars, mazes, rocks, desks, complex machines, underground chambers, massed items. Continuing characters and plot ideas in Lang are explored.

Early filmmakers who might have influenced Lang are discussed: Louis Feuillade, Maurice Tourneur, Mauritz Stiller, Rex Ingram, the films starring Rudolph Valentino, and later, the films of Alfred Hitchcock. There are brief pocket discussions of many of Lang's screenwriters.

The book is formatted as a single long web page, to make searching it easier. Just use your browser's search capability, to track down all references to any topic or film in it.

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People interested in Lang might want to visit:

Fritz Lang: Master of Darkness. The British Film Institute presents a range of events and activities devoted to Fritz Lang: a comprehensive retrospective, new writing on Lang and interview extracts.

Many links to Lang articles can be found in the invaluable Film Directors: Articles on the Internet.

The Spiders Part I: The Golden Sea

The Context of the Film

Lang's The Spiders (1919) is a motion picture serial. Like the serial work of Louis Feuillade, it is made up of an irregularly long series of films, each around an hour in length. Lang only made two of the four films he planned in this series: The Golden Sea, and The Diamond Ship. The Spiders are a mysterious gang, who are up to no good throughout the series. Visually, their costumes are influenced by Feuillade: the head to toe, black hoods and body stockings they wear in one scene seem derived from the bad guys' gang costumes in Louis Feuillade's Fantômas (1913). Plot wise, such gangs remind one of the 1890's prose fiction of Harry Blyth, founder of the Sexton Blake stories. The Spiders show the same hideouts and meetings as Blyth's conspiracies. Just as in Blyth, they have powerful people on their side: in Lang's films, there is a team of top businessmen, clad in the frock coats of the rich of their time, who secretly meet together and finance The Spiders' operations. The Spiders leave a calling card behind: a large model of a spider, sitting on the chest of their victims. It is unclear who was the first to use such a device. Robert Sampson, in his history of pulp fiction Yesterday's Faces, attributes it to Frank L. Packard. His The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1914) has his gentleman thief leave behind small gray seals to sign his crimes; the thief is known as The Gray Seal to the press. This device clearly spread, as Sampson pointed out, from Packard to other pulp writers.

The opening of the film, showing the noble American adventurer Kay Hoog arriving at his club, reminds one irresistibly of Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (1924) some years later. Hoog enters the film in white tie and tails. His clothes, gestures and body postures while taking off his top coat remind one exactly of Keaton's while he makes his entrance as the Great Detective Sherlock, Jr in that film. Soon we're shown Hoog's elaborate mansion; Keaton similarly has his fantasy detective in equally rich surroundings, which in Keaton are delightfully overdone, satirically suggesting the absurdity of such movie traditions of wealth. One wonders if Keaton's film is an actual parody of Lang's. Certainly, the second section of Keaton's Our Hospitality (1923), showing Time Square way back when, is a conscious spoof of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and Erich von Stroheim is lampooned in Keaton's The Frozen North (1922).

Lang draws on several movie traditions, as well. The second quarter of The Golden Sea is structured as a Western, with his American hero dressed as a cowboy, riding around on horses, and fighting a lot of other cowboys in the pay of The Spiders. This whole section is enormously enjoyable. It shows the rich invention found throughout The Golden Sea. The treatment of the heroine and the villainess recalls to a degree The Three Musketeers (1844) of Alexandre Dumas. It leads to a finale that will be repeated in Man Hunt (1941), The Big Heat (1953), Moonfleet (1955) and The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960).

An American Hero

Lang will be consistently pro-American in his politics throughout his career. The Spiders will not be Lang's only German film with an American at its center. His final film, The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), will also be a German-made film with an American hero. Similarly, the German-made Spies (1928) will have a British hero. When Lang will come to the United States and make films during 1936-1956, he will also be sympathetic to United States and British people, contrasting democratic heroes from the United States and Great Britain with sinister Nazi villains. Lang's politics can be described as largely liberal and democratic throughout his career. Like other liberals, Lang can be scathingly critical about social problems: lynching in Fury, police corruption and organized crime in The Big Heat.

Lang's politics seem similar to those of another great artist who fled from Nazi Germany to the US: composer Arnold Schönberg. Schönberg's Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1943) contrasts a scathing look at Napoleon, who stands for all dictators, including Hitler, with a great democratic leader, George Washington. It is a profoundly moving expression of Arnold Schönberg's commitment to democracy.

Lang Themes and Architecture

Outdoor scenes of nature are rarer than hen's teeth in many Lang films. Here they occur twice: once in the cowboy sections, and once at the end. The tragic ending of the film is set in beautiful outdoor locations, full of plants and water. While this is many directors' natural home, it serves Lang instead as a place of extreme emotion, to be used rarely. Some of Lang's Westerns also have natural scenes, as does American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950). These are often cited as Lang's least typical and least personal films. Many of the jungle scenes in Philippines are as mournful as those in The Spiders. Both films also deal with characters who are trapped behind enemy lines, are in danger of death, and who are looking for ways to escape.

Both films have a hero who is a little more mature and more macho tough than those of many Lang movies. Kay Hoog is more confident and capable than many of Lang's later bewildered, persecuted young types. The fact that the hero of The Spiders works at a desk, analyzing documents and sending telegrams, gives him some of the characteristics of Lang's later villains. One thinks of Haghi in Spies, and the father in Metropolis. Like them, he is a competent businessman. Like them, he is in command of high tech communication at his desk, in this case the sending of telegrams. His life centers around his study, like the business offices of Lang's later villains, and not the bedrooms that are the venue of many of Lang's later heroes. He is not at all sinister, like these later villains, but he is capable and accomplished. One can also see similarities between the architecture of the hero's study in The Spiders, and the room just outside Haghi's office in Spies. Both take up more than one story, both are awesomely large, both have numerous staircases, both have railed walkways on the different levels, looking over the open, central vault. These are two of the best pieces of architecture in Lang. One will later see a similar architecture in the bank where Edward G. Robinson works in Scarlet Street (1945).

Points in common between this work and Lang's later films are rarer than one might expect. The elevator in the bad guys' headquarters anticipates the more famous one in Metropolis. The high life of the hero at his club in the beginning recalls the milieu lived in by the hero of Spies (1928).

Visual Style

There are more scenes with ambiguously focused staging here than in later Lang works. For example, an early scene at Kay Hoog's club shows the hero talking to people in the foreground, while a rare bottle of wine is poured out and served in the background. The viewer should be watching both to get the full effect. It is like counterpoint in music, with two melodic lines going on at once. It is not clear whether the early date has something to do with this: apparently many early films use more staging in depth, and more multiple actions, than do later silent films. In any case, the scenes at the club show considerable visual excitement. Most are full of a large number of characters, all doing something, talking, moving, making gestures. These characters' activities all work together to make a visually beautiful whole. They are some of Lang's most beautiful scenes. Lang can have these characters move with startling complexity. In one shot, the characters all start moving downstairs. The flow of the individual characters, and the complex pattern that is shown, is one of Lang's most inventive and delightful scenes.

The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship

The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship (1920) is a much less successful film than Part I. Its storytelling is flat, and it is full of Chinatown melodrama and racistly stereotyped villains. This is really objectionable.

Mazes

The Spiders Part II has a few good shots. One toward the beginning is especially notable. It shows an office building whose floor is a maze of cubicle style offices and corridors. This is a fascinating piece of architecture. The cubicles and doors are full of windows, made up of grids of regularly repeating smaller panes. They remind one of the windows in the heroine's house in Spies (1928). The shot opens with the lower half containing the maze and the people in it, with the upper half consisting of the tall imposing walls of the office building containing it - sort of a giant vault with a maze at its base. This half and half construction is common in early Lang, with the upper portion of a shot showing pure, monumental architecture, and the lower half showing people and their activity. The camera gradually pans down, however, showing more and more of the maze, and less and less of the office walls. Eventually the maze fills up virtually the entire image. The maze is fascinating. We see people wandering around in it, doors opening and closing: it makes a great visual pattern.

There are other shots in Lang showing this sort of overhead, 45 degree looking downward on a maze. The closest are the overhead shots of the police station near the end of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, through which the Inspector moves the doctor. This station is as rectilinear as the office, something that is underscored by all the grillwork and bars - this is the holding jail part of the station. The path through is constantly twisting and turning at right angles.

Other mazes in Lang:

The path outdoors and up stairs to get to the Palais Andalusia casino in Part I of Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler.
The roof top path through which the hero wanders to get to his hotel room near the start of Spies, a 3D maze involving ladders as well as horizontal paths. The ladders are formed of regular rungs of metal, a geometric effect not unlike the bars and grillwork in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
Later in Spies, the overhead shot of the stairwell outside of Haghi's office during the bank raid, also has the feel of a 3D maze.
The shot of the police detection in M investigating the back yards of people's homes.
The water maze in The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), also shown from an elevated angle.
The restaurant in The Blue Gardenia.
The club in The Woman in the Window (also full of right angled turns).
The Greenwich Village apartment in Scarlet Street.

Influence from Maurice Tourneur's Alias Jimmy Valentine

Maurice Tourneur's crime film, Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), also shows a maze-like overhead shot of a bank. Its shot in a railroad observation car on a moving train reminds one of Lang's in The Spiders Part I: The Golden Sea. Its gang of robbers who later attempt to go straight and get respectable jobs anticipate Lang's You and Me (1937), as well as Douglas Sirk's A Scandal in Paris (1946). All three of these films mix crime with a light touch. The star of Alias Jimmy Valentine, Robert Warwick, would later play the newspaper publisher Amos Kyne at the beginning of Lang's While the City Sleeps (1956), although this hardly indicates that Lang must have seen Alias Jimmy Valentine.

Destiny

Destiny (1921) is the usual English title of Der müde Tod, which literally mean The Tired Death, in German. This fantasy film was Lang's first big hit.

The film centers on a loving couple, forcefully separated by death, as in Fury, Rancho Notorious and The Big Heat. By the time of Rancho Notorious and The Big Heat, Lang's couples will be democratic partners, who make all decisions jointly after discussion. Only the couple in the Chinese episode of Destiny seem to have such a democratic union. By contrast, members of the couples in the Persian and Venetian episodes make unilateral decisions without consulting their partners, with disastrous results: the Persian hero disguises himself and goes to the sanctuary, ignoring the heroine's alarmed protests when she discovers him there, and the Venetian heroine seems to be a law unto herself, plotting a murder with equally calamitous results. It is harder to tell anything about the couple in the German episode, and how they live their lives. We do not even know where they are from - they seem to be visitors to the village.

The Persian and Chinese episodes conclude with manhunts, which try to track down the hero. Such manhunts will have a long career in Lang's films, such as M, You Only Live Once, Man Hunt, Hangmen Also Die!, The Woman in the Window, House by the River, The Blue Gardenia, Moonfleet, While the City Sleeps, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt..They also are a mainstay of Alfred Hitchcock, who was much influenced by Lang.

The disaster that ensues in the Venetian episode, where the heroine takes the law into her own hands, returns in further Lang films which warn about the dangers of vigilantism: Fury and The Big Heat.

Links to The Tiger of Eschnapur: Politics and the Treatment of Women

The architecture of heroine's room in the Persian sequence, with its lattice work walls, anticipates the Indian palaces to come in The Tiger of Eschnapur. The big outdoor staircase, on which the Caliph makes an announcement, will be followed by an even bigger outdoor staircase in The Tiger of Eschnapur. In both films, there are numerous people on the staircase, and it makes a pleasing spectacle. The booted explorer's outfit the hero wears in the Persian sequence will return for the hero in The Tiger of Eschnapur.

Both films show sinister dictators and anti-democratic forces: the Caliph in the Persian episode, the Emperor in the Chinese, the member of the secret Council of 14 in the Venetian episode. All of these anticipate the later despot in The Tiger of Eschnapur. Lang wrote his first version of The Tiger of Eschnapur around 1920, and it is possible that the criticism of despotic regimes was already present in this early version. In most of these films, both The Tiger of Eschnapur and the Destiny episodes, the despot is trying to force himself on a woman, and her boyfriend is in jeopardy because of it. It is a striking pattern. The exception is the Persian episode, where the despotic killer is the woman's brother, instead. This same pattern will soon extend to Siegfried (1924), which the hero in love with the betrothed of a king. The anti-dictatorship theme looks forward to Lang's anti-Nazi movies. And the sinister forcing of a man's attentions on a woman anticipate Lang's attacks on sexual harassment in The Woman in the Window, House by the River and The Blue Gardenia.

Links to M: Models of Towns

In Destiny, Lang creates a whole sociology of the village, showing its leaders, professions, government, institutions and ways of operation. This anticipates what he will do on a larger scale in M, where he tries to examine the operation of an entire city, as Jonathan Rosenbaum pointed out. Both village and city are under ominous siege: with Death a stranger in the village, and a serial killer stalking the city. Both village and city are German. Both have democratic government, in this pre-Hitler era, although in neither do we see an election or a political campaign: that will wait till Rancho Notorious (1952).

The miniature Army, perfect in every detail, anticipates the model house in M, around which the circle is drawn on the map - as well as the model building in The Tiger of Eschnapur. The model army also reflects Lang's filmmaking technique. The village scenes in Destiny recreate a human village inside Lang's film. The film Destiny can be seen as a miniature "model" of a village. And M can be seen as a "model" of a city. At a time when other men loved to create miniature model landscapes as part of their toy train sets, Lang created models of villages and cities, using the medium of film. Lang's models are more virtual, as in "virtual reality", than purely physical constructs. They encompass the town's activities and institutions, as well as physical sets.

The overhead shot of the birthday reception for the Emperor, spells out the geography of the scene in detail, like the high angle shot of the back yards investigated by the police in M. These too have the same perspective as a human looking at a model train set or city. (The birthday reception also has the same elaborate spectacle as some of the court scenes in Siegfried.)

The table at the inn, where all the locals gather to drink, recalls a tavern table in M, at which men discuss the murders.

Links to Ministry of Fear: Characters

Some of the German sequence imagery anticipates Ministry of Fear. The cemetery wall and gate, with its high angle, looks like Lethbridge asylum gate in the later film. The folksy village locals here anticipate the village fete in the later film.

In Ministry of Fear, the hero is falsely accused of euthanasia of his late wife; here, all the sick people in the hospital, and others too, refuse to undergo a voluntary death. The hero's struggles in Ministry of Fear to take care of his dying wife, are perhaps echoes of the heroine of Destiny, and her repeated attempts to protect her dying boyfriend.

The heroine's brother in the Persian episode anticipates the heroine's brother in Ministry of Fear.

Death in Destiny is such a distinctive character, that it is hard to find analogues of him in other Lang films. But the Scotland Yard inspector in Ministry of Fear comes close. Both are played by fiercely macho performers, both are implacable and unstoppably forceful in pursuance of their duties. Both enter their films as mysterious figures who stalk other men. Both wind up kidnapping the young hero of the film, and taking him captive inside their impregnable fortress: in the inspector's case, Scotland Yard headquarters. Neither man has any relationships with women. Both wish to be to be reasoned with, and wind up issuing challenges to other characters in the film, asking them to prove something to them. Long scenes follow, in which the other characters try to meet these rigorous challenges (the heroine in Destiny, the young hero himself, having the police look for the remains of the cake in Ministry of Fear). The imagery associated with the inspector - he can project transparent slides on walls, which he superimposes on other images - seems oddly reminiscent of the special effects associated with Death, who creates transparent spirits out of those he summons. Both characters have vast stores of knowledge, which are denied to ordinary people. Both characters are on the side of Good, yet they are so fierce that audiences find them more frightening than warm.

Death is the only virile, dynamic grown man, in the German frame sequence of the film. All of the town leaders are shown as petty, trivial people, who are barely effective at doing anything. And visually, they seem much less macho than the forceful actor who plays Death. None of them are ever seen socializing with women - and the title card explicitly tells us that the Apothecary has never had a young woman in his home. And the heroine's fiancé is a strikingly young and mild-mannered man, without any trace of heroism about him. Death is also surrounded by phallic symbols: his staff, and the tall candles. His hidden gateway, outlined in stone on his wall, is one of the most explicitly phallic symbols in film history - in fact, it might have been hard to get it by the censors at a later date! Death's costume, a coat with an extra cape on the shoulders, was also considered extremely macho in its day. The cape emphasizes and expands a man's shoulders. It too, has something of a phallic image. Later, in the Chinese sequence, Death assumes the role of an archer - more phallic imagery. Riding his horse as an archer, towards the end of this episode, he looks uncannily like Siegfried riding through the forest, to come.

The hero shows his least passivity in the Persian sequence. Here, his adventuring is the cause of his death - which might just indicate his idiocy, but which also is a sign of his being active. The way the hero runs away from the crowd, going up a set of steep stairs and out through a trap door onto the roof, recalls the escape of the hero Kay Hoog from the cowboy mob in The Spiders Part I: The Golden Sea. Just as Kay Hoog was glamorously dressed as a cowboy, here the hero gets a macho explorer's outfit, with big boots. By contrast, the hero's costume in the Venice sequence looks like Wimp City. The hero seems constantly on the go, throughout the film. We first see him and the heroine in a carriage, and he is in transit throughout much of the film, either on foot, or in vehicles. The hero also seems nosy and curious: he penetrates the sanctuary in the Persian episode, apparently out of sheer curiosity, and he is always looking down over the edge of the flying carpet in the Chinese sequence.

Gay Themes

The way Death is a macho somewhat older man, who stalks and kidnaps or persuades the handsome young hero to leave his girlfriend and come stay at his place, can easily be given a gay interpretation. Whether Lang intended such an interpretation is unclear. Because Murnau was gay, most people have no trouble reading such a gay interpretation into similar encounters in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Tartuffe (1926). Lang certainly knew about homosexuality. The DVD of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) has an actor recalling how Lang directed him to play his crook's character as gay. The actor did so, although it is hard for modern audiences to see anything "gay" in the way the character is performed. Lang also told Peter Bogdanovich that he made a Nazi villain in Hangmen Also Die! be homosexual. Lang films also candidates for possible gay interpretations, include:

Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler, where the villain hypnotizes the young hero,
Siegfried, with its brotherhood ceremony,
Woman in the Moon, where the hero saves the villain's life on the staircase at the start by embracing him,
Western Union, with what seems like a love story between Randolph Scott and Dean Jagger's characters,
Ministry of Fear, with its Scotland Yard inspector,
The Big Heat, with the mob boss' bodyguard George (played by Chris Alcaide, who would become a Joseph H. Lewis regular),
Moonfleet, with the sentries who want to be inspected by Stewart Granger,
While the City Sleeps, with its hero buddies played by Dana Andrews and Howard Duff, and its serial killer with Gender Problems.

In many of these films, such possible gay material is limited to a supporting character, or a subplot. They are not principally about homosexuality.

Lang sometimes signals gayness, by having a man violate another man's personal space. Examples include:

Death intruding and sitting at the young hero's table in Destiny,
the Scotland Yard inspector appearing next to the hero's bedside after he has abducted him in Ministry of Fear,
George standing very close to the mob boss' bed in The Big Heat.

These are all older man-younger man combinations.

Gay themes form a relatively small part of Lang's oeuvre, which mainly concentrates on heterosexual relationships. Even in Destiny, while Death's taking of the young man is the main story in the German half of the film, there are few traces of any gay elements in the Persian, Venetian or Chinese episodes, although Death as the archer is consistent with a gay identity for this character. On the other hand, there is more gay material in Lang than most people seem to acknowledge. One prominent critic claims that the serial killer's gender issues in While the City Sleeps are the only instance of anything gay in Lang. This does not seem accurate, either.

Links to The Woman in the Window: The Poles

The opening shots include many of outdoor crucifixes, often standing on tall poles. Lang links these to a large, standing, crossroads sign, which has pointers going in three dimensions, unlike the two dimensions of the crucifixes. It is an odd equivalence. A crossroads sign will later serve as the opening shot of Moonfleet (1955).

The crossroads sign looks like the traffic signal in The Woman in the Window (1944). It too has pointers sticking out in different directions, pointing to different roads. The Woman in the Window also shows a street clock on a large pole, at the beginning of the same nocturnal, disposal of the body sequence.

All of these images on poles - crossroads signs, traffic signals, crucifixes, public clocks on the street - can be seen as part of the mass media: mechanisms that inform the broad public. Lang will have a persistent interest in mass media throughout his films. The telephone pole which catches the balloon in M, and the telegraph poles in Western Union, are also examples of this sort of imagery. All of these images on poles, also anticipate the finials in the engagement procession at the end of The Indian Tomb. The candles in Destiny also stand on high poles. Death stands by a narrow tall white pillar at the end of the Venetian episode, in an otherwise black room: a visual echo of the tall white candles. The radio tower at the start of Spies, and the broadcasting microphone at the restaurant, might also fit in here.

The fountain in the German village, and the fountain on which the hero sits at the end of the Venetian episode, have tall poles, out of which come spigots standing straight out, in numerous directions. These are echoes of the crossroads seen at the start of the film, also a pole with signs sticking out. The fountains, with water spurting out, seem like phallic symbols. The basin of the Venetian fountain is octagonal, which echoes other octagonal imagery in the film.

Links to House by the River: Sets and Imagery

There is also imagery in Destiny which anticipates House by the River. The sudden, shocking vision of the hour glass anticipates the killer's sudden vision of the flying fish in House by the River. In both cases, still lifes suddenly come to life, transforming into something different, with frightening results. Both carry unwelcome reminders to their viewers of bad things they would rather avoid. Lang will soon include more hallucinations in Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler (1922), where the hypnotized prosecutor will see imagery in his cards and the table which hold them. In all three of these films, the hallucinations are on table tops, and involve objects there.

The whirling dancers that open the Persian sequence anticipate the groups of square dancers in House by the River. Both are dances of groups of people, both involve people twirling around, both are full of enthusiasm; both make geometric patterns.

Bird imagery is everywhere in the German sequence of Destiny, including the goose of the old lady in the carriage, the bird fed by the minister, the owl, the apothecary's bird on the skeleton. Except for the owl, these are all birds owned by humans. This anticipates the birds on the island in House by the River, who are disturbed the villain in his boat, and the chicken in a cage held by the hero's client.

The way people live on the water in the Venetian episode, and travel by small boats, will recur in House by the River.

The sets have common features too. In Destiny, the heroine first stands outdoors, outside Death's wall. Then the door opens, and we see a huge inner staircase inside which she proceeds to ascend. Similarly, in House by the River, the garden outdoors opens through doorways to the inside sets of the house - and we always see the staircase inside the house through the door - the staircase where the murder was committed. Lang also stages the heroine's encounter with the beggar on the inn stairway in Destiny, as well as many of the chase scenes in the Persian episode.

Death's giant wall, and the huge wall with the murals of the sky, past which the hero walks in Venice, are like the giant wall above the staircase in House by the River. This mural wall is unusual in Lang in that it is full of painting, a device regularly found in Sternberg, but much less frequent in Lang. The Chinese archer also stands in front of painted screens. The staircase wall in House by the River is full of a busy wallpaper, abstract repeated circular designs, a different effect. The stonework on Death's wall is of the same kind as the front of the inn. Whether this is a deliberate echo, or just an artifact of design, is unclear.

Geometry

The heroine's room at the palace in, the Persian episode, has a polygonal design on the floor (maybe octagonal). The howdah cage on the elephant in the Chinese episode is also octagonal, and in many ways can be seen as a small room. This is in keeping with Lang's fondness for polygonal rooms, such as the octagonal summer house in House by the River. The fountain in Venice is also octagonal.

The Chinese segment shows three nested circular doorways, one inside the other in the frame, in a long, tunnel-like effect. Also notable are the concentric circles on the ground, in the center of which the cockfight is staged in the Venetian episode. Such "circles within circles" will recur in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, although none seem so deeply nested as these in Destiny.

A square doorway is seen through a circular one, in the Chinese sequence. A square within a circle will return in Spies, in that film's boxing arena, and in the microphone used for radio broadcast from the restaurant near the end. (The opposite pattern, circles within squares or rectangles, is much more common in Lang.)

There is an alcove behind the Chinese emperor, one of many in Lang. The emperor also has circular steps in front of him, like the mob boss' house in The Big Heat.

A screen in the Chinese episode is full of rectangles with rounded corners. This is an atypical shape for Lang. His films are full of pure rectangles with sharp, 90 degree corners, and pure circles as well. But he rarely mixes the two to make a rounded corner.

The hero wears a round hat with a spherical ball in its center, in the Chinese episode. This looks a little like the banisters in the staircase in House by the River. Death wears a truncated conical hat. At the Chinese court, attendants carry huge cylindrical banners. The sculpture at the end has a cylindrical base. The sculptures on the crucifix in the opening shot are on a cylindrical bole.

The cemetery gate grillwork is full of diamond patterns.

Many of the Venice interiors put the characters in huge, purely rectilinear rooms. These are like giant boxes. Towards the end, a sweeping black curtain falls from an entrance alcove, making the giant room seem even more box like. The actors look lost in these large spaces. The hero makes his final entrance in a composition that stresses symmetry: often a sign of the sinister in Lang. The hero's house in The Big Heat will also be purely rectilinear.

Lang uses circular masks repeatedly in Destiny, to frame the image.

The Persian segment is full of architecture with zigzag walls. These have a step-like construction, filled with 90 degree corners. There are also step-filled, zigzag designs painted on the walls, as ornamentation. This universal system of design will return in Siegfried (1924). The rug in front of the Chinese emperor also contains zigzag patterns. One of the main buildings in the German village also has a step-like facade. The staircase seen in silhouette near the start of the Venetian episode also forms two zigzag step patterns. The carriage that opens the film also has a zigzag construction. It seems to have not one chamber, but two, one of which is wider than the other. This forms a zigzag side wall in the carriage.

Lang Imagery

The film is full of that Lang trademark, the staircase. The film is more unusual in Lang's work, for the many shots of bridges. These bridges tend to be staircases of a sort, too: people walk up one side of the bridge, and down the other, as if the bridge were a pair of joined staircases. There will later be an unusual bridge in The Return of Frank James .

The German sequence contains a number of silhouette images: the sign on the Golden Unicorn inn, various crosses seen at the cemetery and the crossroads, Death's staff. The Venice episode also opens with silhouettes. And Lang will use silhouettes in Spies (1928). Silhouettes were part of the repertoire of techniques available to silent film photography; they became less common with the arrival of sound. Lang would not employ silhouette photography in most of his sound movies, but he would still find a way to include a shot of an actress silhouetted against a screen in While the City Sleeps (1956). There, however, the silhouette is part of the story, the action of the film - it is not a photographic technique of Lang's camera, per se. Silhouettes were a technique sometimes used by Maurice Tourneur; this might reflect an influence from him on Lang. The early landscapes in the German sequence, with their jutting trees over a lower and richer ground, also are a kind seen in such Tourneur films as Alias Jimmy Valentine.

The Apothecary's wall, shelves full of objects, is an early example of the "massed items" one regularly finds in Lang.

The German village has a clock at the top of a tall building, presiding over the village square. The whole German sequence is synchronized to the passage of time, called out elaborately by town criers. This reflects Lang's fascination with clocks, and their sinister control over our lives. But the town criers also are an example of Lang's interest in mass media. Even in this primitive village, there are means of mass communication, that reach all the villagers. These are soon echoed by the criers calling out from towers in the Persian sequence. We also see letter carriers in the Venetian segment, and a humorously giant letter in the Chinese one. The magician makes it fly away - comic instance, perhaps, of the "destruction of the media" imagery in Lang which is usually much more tragic. A more sinister version of the destruction of the media: when the henchmen murder the messenger carrying the letters in the Venetian segment. This murder, with three assassins converging on the messenger, anticipates some of the "assassination on the road" imagery in later Lang pictures.

Imagery in the inn, where the town leaders are introduced, will get echoed later. One man puts salt on a sliver of food: this is like the poison being sprinkled on the end of the sword in the Venetian episode. The knife used to cut and eat cheese anticipates all the knives in the episodes. The notary adjusts the candles on the chandelier: this seems like a small, comic version of the Candle Room to come. The figurine sitting on the chandelier also anticipates the statue into which the heroine transforms herself, at the end of the Chinese episode. Similarly, some of the night time carnival images in Venice anticipate the final fire in the village.

Links to Metropolis: The Gothic

Gothic style sculptures appear around the pedestal of the outside crucifix in the opening scene, and later on a cabinet at the inn. These anticipate the Seven Deadly Sins sculptures in Metropolis. The architecture of the city council room also suggests the Sins.

While the apothecary is a man of science, his imagery often suggests alchemists: he gather herbs by the moonlight, and his lab equipment looks more like an ancient sorcerer than a modern chemist's. Similarly, the scientist to come in Metropolis will have a Gothic look to his house.

The way the villagers form a fire fighting unit towards the end, anticipates the final disaster scenes in the underground city in Metropolis. These scenes recall the burning vicarage in Mauritz Stiller's Sir Arne's Treasure (1919), which a large group of villagers also worked to contain.

Fantasy

Both the German and Chinese episodes are full of fantasy, depicted with still delightful special effects. By contrast, the Persian and Venetian sequences are essentially realistic, with only brief transformations of Death at their ends offering anything fantastic.

Lang is careful to situate all aspects of Death's behavior within a Judaeo-Christian framework. God is mentioned, and a quote from The Song of Songs in the Bible plays a key role. This makes the film part of a long tradition of "religious fantasy" in film: films which include fantastic elements, to convey religious ideas. Death also sketches a cross with the Greek letters Alpha and Omega, well known symbolism to Roman Catholics like Lang.

Lang also tries to undercut anything that might lead to a supernatural view. While we see spirits of the dead, they do not perform any hauntings, get involved with curses, appear at seances, or any of the other appurtenances of the supernatural world view. Instead, the spirits are purely taking part in the afterlife, that is part of orthodox Christian and Jewish religious tradition. The transparent spirits do recall visually those in Mauritz Stiller's Sir Arne's Treasure.

If the Death scenes are religious fantasy, the Chinese magician is a pure what-if kind of imagining, like the folk tales in The Arabian Nights, or Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Lang offers no explanation of how the benevolent magician performs his tricks. It is simply a burst of "what if" imagination, with Lang implicitly asking, "what if magic were real, and magicians could make flying carpets, and other clever tricks?" It is an exercise in pure imagination. This is fantasy, but without any religious elements, or metaphysical implications.

Characters in Destiny keep changing their appearance, as they take part in various episodes. And Death's change of appearance is shown right on screen, a magical transformation provided by special effects. In later, non-fantastic Lang films, characters will also undergo complete changes of appearance and costuming: see the heroes' transformations in Spies and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.

Influence on later filmmakers

Luis Buñuel was inspired to be a filmmaker by viewing Destiny.

When Truffaut asked Hitchcock if any films had impressed Hitchcock during his years as a young aspiring filmmaker, Hitchcock immediately mentioned Destiny.

Schatten / Warning Shadows (Artur Robison, 1922) opens in a traditional German village that looks much like the one in Destiny.

Lola Rennt / Run, Lola, Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998) is a multi-episode film. The heroine is magically given three chances to save the hero's life, as in Destiny. We watch her attempt this in three episodes, as in Lang.

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) is also a two episode film, with the same actors playing different, but related, roles in the two sequences, as in Destiny. The first sequence is realistic, the second fantastic, recalling Lang's mix of the two modes. The second episode has one character as a magical hunter in a forest, the other character transforming himself into a tiger hunted by the first character. This is like the finale of the Chinese episode of Destiny, in which the hero is transformed into a tiger, and Death becomes an archer, who hunts him down and shoots him. The hunter in Tropical Malady also hears talking animals, just as Siegfried will in Lang's film.

Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler: Part I

Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler (1922) is a four and a half hour crime thriller, that Lang created as a serial. It is often shown in English as Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler.

Mabuse, hypnotism and kidnapping

Early scenes in Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler suggest that Lang is repeating patterns from his previous film, Destiny. In that film Death stalks the young hero, then uses his powers to get the hero to leave his bride, and go home with Death to Death's walled domain. Similarly, in Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler Dr. Mabuse first stalks, then uses hypnotism to persuade young hero Eric Hull to leave the theater, and come along with him. However, the parallels stop here. Dr. Mabuse takes the hypnotized hero, not to Mabuse's home, but to a club where he can fleece Hull through gambling. At this point, Mabuse drops his hypnotism of the young hero entirely. Instead, Mabuse takes up a new gambit, sending a femme fatale in his employ to vamp young hero Hull - which she does most successfully.

Death's taking of the young man home with him in Destiny suggests homosexual interpretations, although these are never made explicit in the film. Dr. Mabuse's hypnotism of young hero Hull in Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler also suggests homosexual meanings. But this is soon dropped for a heterosexual story, the relationship between hero Hull and the femme fatale. This heterosexual relationship takes up far more of the running time of Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler than the brief hypnotism scene does.

At the end of Part I, Dr. Mabuse actually does kidnap a character, and take that character to his home. But this kidnapped character is a woman, the film's heroine, the Countess. The story-line here is just like that of Destiny, only here the kidnapped victim is female. The film makes this kidnapping explicitly heterosexual: the evil Dr. Mabuse is kidnapping this woman for sexual purposes, probably rape. This is one of many films in which Lang explores the tragedy of rape.

Narrative Structure

Lang has some striking cuts, that move the story between one event and another, through visual rhymes. Dr. Mabuse's lecture to a dry-as-dust scientific society has the symmetry that is often associated with the sinister in Lang. Lang cuts from Dr. Mabuse on stage, to a strip club showing an exotic dancer on stage. These two scenes are visually close to each other - but in shocking dramatic contrast in their content.

Later in Part I, Lang will cut from the spectacular circular gaming table of the Petit Casino, to a group at a seance with their hands around a circular table. Once again, the visual echo is striking, but the content is radically different.

Modules: The Gambling Tables

The Casino table at Schramm's has circular openings, for where the gamblers sit. These form the "repeated units" or modules containing people that run through Lang's work. Later, the chairs at the Count's card table will have triangular backs with circular openings at the top. The room will also be full of trapezoidal wall supports.

The card tables at the Pontoon Club are arranged in regular, repeating rectangular grids. They form set of modules containing people, too.

Triangles

The Schramm Grill set is almost entirely made up of triangles. The walls and ceilings are composed of sloping, interlocking triangles, like a huge crystal. Then one notices that the tables in the restaurant all seem to be triangular, something I've never seen in any other movie, or real life restaurant. And the chair backs are made up of two jutting triangles. There are also repeating triangle designs on the grill. The whole is one of Lang's most geometric environments.

Rectilinear Environments: Private, Male Wealth

Towards the beginnings of the film, we see two locales that are the domains of wealthy, upper class men: These include the Stock Exchange, and the Pontoon Club. Both are all-male environments. Both feature men who are identically clad in formal wear: the daytime frock coats and top hats of the stockbrokers, the tuxedos worn by the members of the Pontoon Club. Both are private areas, open only to a restricted membership, not the public. And both will be swindled by Dr. Mabuse, who has no difficulty in invading these bastions of wealth and taking the members' money.

Both environments are notable for their purely rectilinear designs. Both involve elaborate, four-sided, rectilinear pillars. The "backstage" or office area of the Stock Exchange, and the first look we see of the Pontoon Club with its pillars and corridors, are strikingly similar in architecture, as well. Both involve a perspective from one region which is fairly office-like, into an area in the back of the shot that is used by the membership as a whole. The Stock Exchange and the Pontoon Club thus visually echo each other.

The young hero Eric Hull who is a member of the Pontoon Club is explicitly a son of a wealthy businessman. He is not an aristocrat, like the Count we will later meet. While fabulously wealthy, he is a member of a business class. This links himself and his friends at the Pontoon Club with the brokers at the Stock Exchange.

State Prosecutor Wenk's office is also rectilinear, although it is much simpler than the Stock Exchange or Pontoon Club. It does not have the pillars that serve as phallic symbols in those places. Wenk's staff is also all male. There will be a long tradition of good guys in Lang films showing up in rectilinear environments: see the hero's hotel room and bath in Spies, the hero's apartment in Woman in the Moon, Glenn Ford's home and office in The Big Heat, and the minister and his church in Moonfleet.

Wenk's office reminds one of Inspector Lohmann's to come, in Testament of Dr. Mabuse.

Circles: Public Entertainment

Circles in Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler tend to be associated with public places and public entertainment. They are also places where men mingle with women, in racy ways. These locales are perhaps the most important in the film. They are certainly the most visually striking: once again, Lang has used circles to highlight a film's most important imagery. These locales convey the atmosphere of "Weimar decadence" that is a key subject matter of the movie. And perhaps what an audience wants to see most, the glamorous areas of public pleasure.

The curtain at the strip club has unusual spherical weights on the bottom of each of its segments.

When femme fatale Carozza is seen in her dressing room, it is full of circular wreaths of flowers on the wall. The lighting fixtures also have circular supports.

The lobby of the Hotel Excelsior, at the opening of Part I, Act Three, is circular. It is organized around many concentric circles, from a circular opening at the top with a railed balcony, to a circular chandelier, to a circular table under the opening.

Schramm's Palais has a rounded - but not quite circular - dance floor. Its band are playing circular instruments: drums, cymbals, a banjo.

The most jaw-dropping set is that for the Petit Casino, late in Part I. This is formed by a series of nested cylindrical areas. The players sit in boxes, like those in a theater, within the two outer cylinders, while the croupier is on a rising circular platform at the very center. Between the croupier and the players are a set of radial arcs, which divide a huge circular platform into segments that approximate the triangles we saw earlier in the film.

The Petit Casino is also seen from the outside, where its boxes are decorated by complex curvilinear valences. Such elaborate, non-standard curves are not common in Lang. One is reminded a bit of Mizoguchi's Street of Shame (1956), whose buildings are full of even more complex curvilinear patterns. However, Mizoguchi's curves are "biomorphic" they echo the curved forms of living animals and the human body. Lang's curves here seem more purely geometric, and not at all biomorphic. Many of the curves incorporate almost full circles into their grill work. These round, open circular grillwork components recall the circles that supported the lamps in Carozza's dressing room.

Kinetic Art - and Circles

The Petit Casino has many moveable components.

The croupier and the camera revolve, in a full circular camera movement. This is two years before Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924), a film that ignited interest in complex camera movement around the world. It is also three years after Mauritz Stiller's Sir Arne's Treasure (1919), a film that probably influenced both Lang and Murnau. Stiller has a camera movement following a soldier down a circular corridor. It is less elaborate than this film of Lang's, but it still contains the idea of combing camera movement with circular forms.

The revolving platform and other movable parts allow one to consider the Petit Casino as a work of "kinetic art": art objects that contain moveable parts, and which move as part of their exhibition. The first work of kinetic art is often said to be Vladimir Tatlin's sculpture-architecture combination Monument to the Third International (1920), so Lang is coming to the world of kinetic art very early in the game. Lang's kinetic art, like Tatlin's before him, is composed of geometric forms, and involves revolving components. Later, the huge moving rocket ship in the launch sequence of Lang's Woman in the Moon (1929) also has elements that recall kinetic art. So do some of the revolving spirals found in M.

Other circle-based areas in Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler have kinetic art aspects as well: the curtain at the strip club goes up and down. And the lobby of the Hotel Excelsior is entered through revolving doors - like the hotel lobby soon to come in Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924).

The strange giant masks, seen in Carozza's stage act (Part I, Act Two) have movable cheeks that puff in and out, also making them a form of kinetic art. The cheeks are roughly circular in outline, and are spherically curved. The masks look vaguely Polynesian, and remind us that Lang collected primitive art masks. The masks here have outrageously phallic noses.

Polygonal Alcoves

Dr. Mabuse's study at the film's opening has a polygonal region at its rear, with angled walls surrounding a window. Similarly, the elevator on the upper floor of the Hotel Excelsior has a trapezoidal recess leading back to it. These are examples of Lang's love of polygonal rooms and alcoves.

The hero has an octagonal table, which he uses while entertaining.

Still Lifes and Massed Items

The table filled with food and flowers created by the hero to entertain the femme fatale bears some resemblance to the many table top still lifes in later Lang films. Unlike them, however, it is hard to identify the many individual elements on the table: they all blend into a huge blur of flowers and dishes.

Similarly, the shots of food that open the Schramm's Grill sequence are both like and unlike the "massed items" one sees in later Lang. Only the shot of liquor and cigars has the items arranged in the flat, rectilinear patterns of the true "massed item" shots found in later Lang.

Some of the imagery in Schramm's rise to wealth also is vaguely like the later Lang "massed item" approach. Both the dolls and gewgaws he peddles on the street, and the many papers he works on during 1913-1918, are large scale depictions of items. Although, once again, these are not in the flat repeated rectilinear arrangements found in later Lang.

Clocks and Art

The stock exchange is dominated by a giant clock. This circle has two sets of 12 hour numbers marked on it, one in Roman numerals, the other in Arabic - presumably for AM and PM. These markings are unique.

The clock at the Pontoon Club is ornate, suggesting wealth. It sweeps around, indicating the sinister passage of time while the young hero is being fleeced by Dr. Mabuse.

A wall clock has a circular dial, within an octagonal frame. This is another example of the nesting of a polygon and circle, a construction that runs through Lang.

The elaborate clock at the Countess', tricked out with every sort of gewgaw and geometric extension, seems more like a work of modern art, than anything else. It anticipates the elaborate art doorbell to come in Ministry of Fear. That doorbell was at the home of a woman who worked as a dealer of modern art, and there are a number of art examples on the walls. Similarly, this clock at the Countess' is part of rooms that contain a full gallery of modern art on their walls.

Mirrors

The young hero has a hand mirror, which he uses to check his perfect appearance before the femme fatale shows up. This anticipates the hand mirror used by the villain to primp, after he slugs the engineer, in Woman in the Moon. In both cases, there is something sinister about this hand mirror, and its expression of male vanity.

Maps and Technology

Dr. Mabuse sees a floor plan of the strip club, when he picks up his ticket at the box office. A note he reads tells him the location in the seats of the young hero.

Later, he outlines a plan to his henchmen, using a city map that shows the location of the Petit Casino. In both cases, it is the villain in this film who uses map technology, to carry out his schemes.

Dr. Mabuse also employs science and technology. We see him in his lab, extracting poison from a snake's fangs. And he uses poison gas on Wenk trapped in a back seat of a car. Such scenes will become clichés in later pulp fiction thrillers, such as Raymond Chandler's prose mystery short story "Nevada Gas" (1935).

By contrast, Prosecutor Wenk has little of the technological apparatus that will be used so formidably by later Lang policemen.

Costumes

The roles played by the actors here suffer in comparison with those in other Lang films. The young hero-of-sorts is played by Paul Richter, soon to have the more glamorous title role in Siegfried. Actually, this character is just a rich young man who likes to gamble: he never does anything heroic. He is a sort of walking Arrow Collar ad, whose very perfection of grooming suggests a certain superficiality and devotion to social convention. These clothes also emphasize his youth. Unlike the hero of Metropolis, who also starts out as a playboy-lover type, the young hero of Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler never develops any sort of social conscience.

Bernhard Goetzke, so formidable as Death in Destiny, plays the hapless State Prosecutor Wenk, who seems mainly to be one of those "authority figures who can't stop the bad guy", like Army officers who fail to blow up Godzilla or the Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1950's sf thrillers. Alfred Abel, so impressive as the Master of Metropolis, gets a thankless role as the wimpy Count.

Wenk has to wear the bow ties, that are the mark of later ineffective, low life characters, such as Bruce Cabot in Fury, Dan Duryea in Scarlet Street and Robert Ryan in Clash by Night. And indeed it seems to underscore Wenk's helplessness as a policeman to do much to stop Dr. Mabuse throughout most of the film.

In his next to last scenes in the film, we finally see the young hero in a suit. It is pinstriped, sort of, but the stripes are very widely spaced - an effect I do not recall seeing in any other suit, either real or on screen. In some ways he looks really sharp; in other ways, the whole effect is strange. This too seems to suggest the young hero is not really an effective character, unlike the later pinstriped suited characters to come in Lang, such as the heroes of Woman in the Moon and The Big Heat. Towards the end of Part I, Dr. Mabuse will himself wear a suit with widely spaced stripes, although it seems to have some other patterns mixed in with it too.

In his earliest scenes in the film, the hero is in a less dressy tuxedo, while Dr. Mabuse is in full white tie and tails, a more dressed up and upper class outfit. This helps suggest the villain's ability to dominate the hero through hypnosis. His friends back at the club are also all in tuxedos, which adds visually plausibility to the way the better dressed Dr. Mabuse can persuade and control them. Rogues who manipulate others through wearing the clothes of the upper classes have a long history in prose fiction, something of which one suspects Lang was aware.

In his final scenes at the Petit Casino, the young hero is at last in white tie and tails. They are splendid, with what seem to be unusually shiny black satin lapels.

Die Niebelungen

I would give Siegfried (1924) somewhat of a negative review among Lang's works. The relentlessly downbeat film has many problems. In general, one never gets caught up in the story here, or finds the characters believable. Its militaristic view of life, with the physical strength of warriors seen as life's highest virtue, is hard to take. The misogyny of the film, with blabbermouth, irresponsible idiot, traditional feminine Kriemhild, and the evil pushy, tough woman daring to usurp the role of men Brunhild, also seems wrong. The notorious make-up of the evil Alberich, dressed like an anti-Semitic caricature, is the film's low point, and a career low point for Lang.

The Dragon and the Talking Bird

Siegfried contains a giant dragon. He resembles the dinosaurs to come in next year's American film, The Lost World (1925). That film in turn was the model for King Kong (1933), and then countless other movies featuring giant creatures. Of course, the Oz films of Frank Baum also include fantastic animals, long before Lang. One also suspects that the gruesome scene of Siegfried attacking the dragon's eye was the inspiration for the even more sinister famous shot of Un Chien Andalou (1929), a film I've never liked. Certainly Buñuel is on record as being influenced in general by Lang. The dog-like nature of the dragon, anticipates the hero's dog in Fury. There is an interview with Ermanno Olmi, on the DVD of Il Posto, in which he talks about his childhood love of the dragon scenes in this movie.

The scene where Siegfried begins to understand the talk of birds, and hears them speak in their own language, perhaps influenced a number of later works. Darwin Teilheit's The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934) is an early anti-Nazi mystery novel, set in Germany. The hero seems to hear a talking bird, just as in Siegfried. And Gardner Fox had his comic book hero Hawkman understand the language of birds, a major part of his characterization. Such bird imagery also anticipates Alfred Hitchcock, a filmmaker who learned much from Lang. The huge forests in Siegfried, with their giant trunks, perhaps reappear as the redwood forest in Vertigo.

The flowering apple tree perhaps finds an echo in the small flowering trees on the farm, at the opening of The Return of Frank James.

Lang Themes

Even in the ancient world of Siegfried, Lang is interested in the media. We get a detailed look at a minstrel, and how his song conveys the news of Siegfried and his deeds to the court. His song is as much an informational news bulletin, as it is a work of art or entertainment. Previously, we saw Siegfried learning about the court through storytelling. The shocking scene in Kriemhilds Rache in which a musician smashes his instrument anticipates the many scenes of "death of the media" to come in Lang.

The core personal relationships in Siegfried, between Siegfried, Gunther, Kriemhild and Brunhild, are fascinatingly complex. They anticipate other characters in Lang's work. Just as Siegfried is in love with Gunther's sister Kriemhild, so is the hero of Ministry of Fear in love with the sister of the other major male character. The way that Siegfried and Gunther share Brunhild, will return in Human Desire and While the City Sleeps. There many men offer their girlfriends or wives to other men, for a variety of sinister and exploitative reasons.

Brotherhood

The most amazing scene in Siegfried is the pledge of blood brotherhood. This comes right after the wedding scene, and is formally equivalent to it. While the weddings take place in the cathedral, the pledge is set in the forest. Just as Kriemhild ritually courted Siegfried by offering him a drink, so do Siegfried and Gunther each offer each other drinks here. A similar crater like bowl is used in each instance. This bowl is the most important circle imagery in the film. It offers a contrast to all the parabolic arches in the court at Worms. Such a wide circular cup seems like female symbolism. One certainly interprets it that way when one sees it for the first time, being proffered by Kriemhild to Siegfried. But during the pledge, both men take on the same role assumed by Kriemhild in the earlier scene. The brotherhood pledge is very close to being a gay marriage ceremony.

Brotherhood organizations for young men had long been immensely popular among German speaking peoples in Austria and Germany. Men in their teens and twenties would join them, and made mystical pledges of brotherhood with other young men. There were a bewildering number of such organizations, ranging from small local clubs to huge national organizations, and they had a bewildering number of goals, everything from common interests in music or art, to idealistic visions of progress for the German people, to militaristic units where men wore uniforms, to seemingly apolitical social clubs - where men could also wear fancy uniforms. Brotherhood organizations seem to have been deliberately ambiguous on whether there was a gay aspect to them. They offered straight young men a chance to join in strong groups with other men, and young gay men a chance to express deep longings to other men that were part romantic, part similar to the bonding desired by straight guys. Lang's film is in part a reflection of this brotherhood tradition.

Visual Style and Spectacle

Siegfried resembles the second half of The Spiders Part I: The Golden Sea, and the Persian episode of Destiny. All of these take place in a barbaric world, full of primitive splendor. All are adventure films; all have many "outdoor" settings. Other films that contain elaborate court spectacles also suggest that their filmmakers might have been studying Siegfried. Leo McCarey's Marx Brothers spoof, Duck Soup (1933), has elaborate scenes of this type. So does The Wizard of Oz (1939).

The film's visual style, with its geometric patterns all over robes, shields and rooms, seems less creative than that of many Lang films, although it is certainly an interesting experiment. The zigzag patterns on the armor of the knights is the first glimpse we have here of the court. This shows similarity to the zigzag design that runs through the Persian episode of Destiny (1921). Such in and out rectilinear designs anticipate the many alcoves jutting off the rooms in Scarlet Street and Clash By Night. The elaborately patterned carpet, and geometrically ornamented walls, anticipate the more elaborate futuristic world of Metropolis.

Metropolis

Metropolis (1926) is Lang's famous science fiction epic, and his most popular picture today. Most of the interest in Lang on the Internet, for example, is centered around this work. This is partly because it is such an influential science fiction film, and partly because many people today are so much more fascinated by science fiction than other genres of film. Metropolis is now available in a beautiful 2001 restoration by the Munich Film Archive. This version is rich in story detail, and has a continuity that is easier to follow than earlier versions.

Metropolis takes one to a wholly imagined, future world. It is still one of the most transformed, completely developed futures of any science fiction film. The future depicted here shows Lang's gift for geometric forms.

Precursors of Metropolis

It is often stated erroneously that Metropolis is the first major science fiction picture. Although it is hard to define "major" precisely, this is plainly not true. For example, Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924) preceded it. The underground factory sets of Metropolis often recall Aelita, especially in their use of elaborate staircases, which are often open on trapezoidal ramps. Also, some of the trapezoidal pillars are similar. The article on its director Jacob Protazanov discusses Aelita. The American Stuart Paton did an early feature length version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916), by Jules Verne, a film which is widely available on video today. Dramatically, the film is ordinary, but its underwater photography must have wowed audiences in 1916. I have seen Aelita and 20,000 Leagues, but there are other early sf films I have not. Forest Holger-Madsen directed Himmelskibet / Heaven Ship (1917), a Danish film about a trip to Mars. The clip I've seen shows considerable excitement as the space ship is prepared and takes off. This article on Lang suggests that he was influenced in many ways by the serial maker Louis Feuillade. Himmelskibet also reflects the Feuillade tradition by clothing its space travelers in head to toe black leather uniforms, like Haghi's security force in Lang's Spies (1928). Another film reported to have influenced Lang is the six part German sf serial Homunculus (1916), directed by Otto Rippert. Readers can find discussions of these films in John Baxter's very fine book, Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970).

There are other early films that perhaps influenced Metropolis. The young hero imagines that the machinery is consuming workers like the human sacrifice demanding pagan god Moloch. Moloch is mentioned in the Bible. A statue of Moloch plays a vivid role in one of the best known of early feature films, Giovanni Pastrone's historical epic, Cabiria (1912). Pastrone's film is one of the ancestors of most subsequent spectacle films, including D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916). It has huge sets, a cast of thousands, and much dramatic conflict. Lang would almost certainly have seen it and been familiar with it. Lang's The Spiders Part I: The Golden Sea (1919) also shows a lost world that demands human sacrifice. Lang's imagery in The Spiders is similar to that of his later Metropolis. Both films have huge sets. In both, there is much giant statuary around, and attendants wearing costumes that suggest pagan, barbarian splendor. All of these are features than remind one of Cabiria, as well.

Politics

The future world depicted in Metropolis owes something to H. G. Wells' novel The Time Machine (1895), that most influential of all science fiction stories. Wells' story visits a future world, in which the descendants of rich capitalists live on the surface leading a leisurely existence, while descendants of the factory workers live deep underground, running machinery. Lang's film shows a similar dichotomy. Wells' novel takes place in the far future, in which these two groups have actually evolved into new kinds of beings. Lang's film takes place in a much earlier future, in which both the underground workers and the above ground wealthy are still completely human.

Both stories are concerned about the battle between capital and labor, which is depicted as the key feature of both future societies. Wells' approach is essentially Marxist. Lang's is the direct opposite. Instead of preaching Marxist-inspired class warfare, Lang advocates religiously inspired reconciliation between classes. His heroine preaches peaceful solutions to the conflict, a direct embodiment of what we today call "non-violence".

Other influences on Metropolis are films about the French Revolution. Such films were popular in the early 1920's, and were made by top directors around the world. They include Ernst Lubitsch's Madame Dubarry (1919), Carl Theodor Dreyer's Leaves From Satan's Book (1920), D. W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1922), Rex Ingram's Scaramouche (1923) and Abel Gance's Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927). Metropolis is especially close to Scaramouche. Both films are full of vividly directed mob scenes, showing large revolutionary crowds running amok through the streets of cities. Both mobs often carry implements, such as the large hammers used to smash the gates in Metropolis. Both films center on a refined young man, who sympathizes with the common people and who joins their cause. Both films have an older man as their villain, who is a powerful, wealthy leader of the upper classes.

The politics of Scaramouche are similar to those of Metropolis. Both depict the way the rich exploit the lower classes as dreadful. Such exploitation is the main subject of the first halves of both films. But when lower class mobs erupt into revolutionary violence in the films' second halves, the films condemn this too. Both films depict this as useless, destructive, counter-productive anger that destroys and accomplishes nothing. Other films of the era had a somewhat similar politics. Much of Ben-Hur (Fred Niblo, 1924) deals with the horrendous mistreatment of the ancient Jews under Roman occupation in the First Century. This oppression resembles that of the upper classes in Scaramouche and Metropolis. The hero Ben-Hur originally believes in revolutionary violence against the Romans. But he is converted to the way of Christian peace, through his reverent encounter with Jesus Christ. This is similar to the peace preached by the religious leader Maria in Metropolis. It seems likely that Lang was familiar with Scaramouche and Ben-Hur. Both were among the biggest super-productions of their day.

There are also similarities between Metropolis and an earlier film directed by Rex Ingram, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). That film interrupts its realistic modern-day narrative, to have one of the characters tell about the Biblical four horsemen. The horsemen are dramatized in a vivid, highly symbolic passage. This scene is actually the high point of the movie. Similarly, in Metropolis, Maria tells the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which is dramatized on the screen as she narrates. Also, later in Metropolis we see the Seven Deadly Sins, which are visually personified in the way that the evil four horsemen were in Ingram's film. The horsemen have a medieval look, anticipating both the Gothic elements such as the Seven Deadly Sins in Metropolis, and the medieval kings and heroes of Lang's previous film Siegfried. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse also has a young hero (played by Rudolph Valentino) who anticipates that of Metropolis. Both heroes are rich, spoiled young womanizers from wealthy families, handsome, good natured, self indulgent young men, who gradually gain tragic insight into serious social problems.

Both the father, who is the Master of Metropolis, and the workers, emerge as destructive forces. They contribute to the orgy of destruction that fills the second half of the film. By contrast, the foreman Grot, and the father's aide Josaphat, try to prevent the destruction. These men represent skilled labor and the white collar middle class, respectively. They seem to echo the truism that middle class characters are the backbone of social stability. The white collar work that goes on in the father's office early in the film, seems almost as dehumanizing as that of the factory workers underground.

Lang Themes and Characters

The young hero in the film is a sensitive, caring young man, full of feeling and emotion. His father is a stern, macho oriented traditionalist. These are the same character types as in D.W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920). Even earlier than this, we see a similar relationship between the sensitive kind hearted young priestess in The Spiders Part I: The Golden Sea (1919), and the stern traditionalist high priest who wants her to perform human sacrifices. The high priest's motive is to restore his society's former greatness, which he believes the magic of the ritual will accomplish. Similarly, here in Metropolis, the father cares more about the smooth running of the city and its business, than of any of the individual human characters caught up in it. This relationship recalls those in Sophocles' Antigone, where the harsh, older male ruler Creon is concerned only about the good of society and the obeying of its laws, whereas the young characters like Antigone want to see moral and personal values to prevail.

Lang's heroes are often extremely sensitive, despite their macho fronts. They have often been put through some terrible event that makes them hyper emotional. The hero of Ministry of Fear (1943) has coped with his wife's terrible illness, the hero of The Big Heat (1953) has lost his family to a mob attack.

The father in Metropolis is depicted in ways that links him to villains in other Lang films. He has a huge office that is the center of operations for a large business empire; his minions report to him there for orders. This is similar to the villainous spy chief Haghi in Spies (1928), Lang's next film. Both offices are full of high tech equipment, centered on their desks; both are at the top of their buildings. Both are reached by staircases in outer chambers beyond their doors. In real life, rich people tend to have elevators, while poor people use stairs. In Lang's film, however, it is the poor workers who use elevators, while the powerful men have grand staircases leading to their high level offices.

A lynch mob goes after the heroine Maria in Metropolis. It anticipates the mob that gathers on the street after the suspect early in M, and also the lynch mob that attacks the hero of Fury. The mob of angry workers in Metropolis reminds one of the later mobs that attack the mad scientists in Frankenstein movies (and Far Side cartoons). They are raising their hands high, and they are composed of bewildered, angry ordinary people, trying to cope with a public disaster in the only way they know how. A somewhat similar lynch mob attacks the hero of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (1926), released the same year.

Technology

The television telephones in Metropolis are years ahead of their time. They exemplify Lang's interest in new media of communication. They perhaps reflect the mirror surveillance devices in Feuillade's Judex (1916). The mirrors that are everywhere in Judex also anticipate Lang's love of mirrors.

Maps in Metropolis include the sketches used by the workers to find their way to the catacombs beneath the city. There do not seem to be any maps of Metropolis itself: somewhat strange, in light of the city maps in M. The many views of the city, created using scale models, have a bit of a map-like effect, however.

There are also few mirrors in the film, also atypical of Lang.

Architecture in Metropolis and M - and the People who use it

In a much quoted assertion, Lang said that Metropolis had its genesis in his trip to New York City in October 1924, when he saw American skyscrapers for the first time - they didn't exist in Europe. This story is undoubtedly true, but one has to point out that The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship (1920) opens with a shot designed to establish that his hero Kay Hoog is back in America. This shot shows skyscrapers, indicating what is supposed to be a "characteristic" American landscape. So Lang had skyscrapers on his mind as part of his image of America long before Metropolis.

Articles on contemporary movies often cite Lang as the ancestor of any modern film that has large, Gothic sets. The city sets of Metropolis are certainly awesomely huge, but they do not seem to be especially Gothic. The skyscraper buildings shown in Lang's future city tend to be plain and functional, in a style closer to the both New York skyscrapers and the Bauhaus than to Gothic cathedrals. Similarly, the office building that is the scene of the massive manhunt in M seems to be a nice, cheery "Modern" office building. Its architectural style is identical to the skyscrapers shown in Metropolis. This style shows repeated, slightly recessed windows, set in a concrete grid. It is not quite identical to any real life buildings that I know of, although it seems closest to real life New York City skyscrapers of the period. It would be interesting to learn the real life sources or models, if any, for these buildings in Metropolis and M.

As the middle class office workers in M leave their building at night and go home from work, the building is gradually taken over by members of the underworld. This recalls the way the workers in Metropolis contest the city owned by the masters. There is a parallelism in the way the characters in the two films dress. The middle class workers in M are in coats and ties; so are the masters in Metropolis. The underworld characters in M are in working class outfits, as are the workers in Metropolis. The middle class occupants of the office building in M are blithe, cheery and confident. They are the first people we have met in the entire film who are not consumed with anxiety over the killings. They seem completely oblivious to the sinister events in their city, being concerned only with business. Similarly, the masters in Metropolis take the city and the workers completely for granted, and have no interest in the suffering or struggles around them. The masters are serene to the point of being blasé; they seem to be played by vacuous actors.

In Spies, we saw the white collar, middle class looking workers of Haghi's Bank under arrest and being led off by police, something they hate. But one gets the impression that Lang is enjoying seeing middle class crooks under arrest. Both the exterior of the bank, and the exterior of Sonja's house in Spies, have some similarities with the modernist architecture in Metropolis and M. Both the bank in Spies and the office building in M, will have their interiors partly destroyed by full scale technological demolition.

The police in M also recall the workers in Metropolis. We see them arrive and leave from work, completely exhausted after terribly long shifts, in scenes that recall the famous entrance and exit of the workers in Metropolis. Like the police, the workers are uniformed, however drearily. For all of Lang's fascination with uniforms, I do not recall anybody of any individuality or significance ever wearing one in his films, except for Tyrone Power in American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950). Uniformed characters are always worker bees, people on the fringes who exist to offer support to more important people, carry out orders, open doors, and add to fire power in battle scenes.

Design in Metropolis

Many of the sets involve a Lang trademark, "circles within rectangles". The huge clock like dials in the factory are one set of circles. The father's office has a semi-circular desk, a circular window, and a huge circular clock on the wall, all within the rectilinear confines of the room. The Seven Deadly Sins are arranged in a circular arc. The false Maria emerges from a giant circular box during her night club dance, a box that somewhat resembles that of a Faberge egg. All of this circular imagery is sinister. It anticipates the sinister circles in Ministry of Fear (1943), such as the cake, the clock face, the astrology chart and the seance table. In both films, making such objects circular really makes them stand out to the viewer. They become vivid and unforgettable, even years after people have seen the films.

The young hero's apartment is full of furniture that seems inspired by the Art Deco movement, then scarcely a year old in Paris. His bed, his lamps, his living room chairs, are all highly geometrized, in the Deco tradition. The elevators leading into the Eternal Gardens also seem in Deco mode. The entrance to the Yoshiwara night club is also in a rich geometric style. This is two years before the film usually regarded as the beginning of Art Deco in Hollywood, Harry Beaumont's Our Dancing Daughters (1928), with its sets by Cedric Gibbons. The geometric patterns on the hero's apartment wall also seem Deco. So, to a degree, are the geometric designs on the walls of the father's office, and in his carpet, although these have a quality that is a bit more De Stijl.

By contrast, the large standing objects in the father's office seem more Constructivist that Deco. These objects are in pairs along the walls, and are full of complex round solids, mixed in with long straight poles. They are full of 3D geometric forms, that in general terms recall the Constructivist costumes in Aelita. It is not clear what these objects are: lamps? electrical equipment? abstract decorations? Like the dream objects in Secret Beyond the Door, they are both visually striking, and mysterious in nature.

Spies

Lang constructs Spies (1928) in six Episodes: 1) A non-character driven opening, showing the criminal spy network run by evil master mind Haghi, and the spies' high tech networks of communication. 2) The story of the hero and heroine of the film, noble English spy Donald Tremaine and Sonja Barranikowa, the Slavic spy who is assigned to get information on him 3) The attack on the sympathetic Japanese spy Akira Matsumoto by the evil spy organization. 4) The attack on Tremaine's life in the train. 5) The final destruction of the evil spy organization. 6) Tracking down Haghi, the master evil spy. These stories are virtually independent episodes, although they all use common characters. Lang's use of independent episodes will often occur in his other work. It has both strengths and weaknesses. The individual episodes are brilliant, but they do not tend to "build" on each other. They can also produce a sense of anticlimax. For example, the final episode of Spies is hardly a climax to the whole film, in any conventional sense. It is not as exciting as the events in earlier stories. One has a similar structure in Lang's later Ministry of Fear (1943). That film contains one brilliant set piece after another. They are linked together like pearls on a string, with little direct connection between them.

Lang's hero, Donald Tremaine, is played by an actor who looks rather like Lang himself. One wonders if there is a bit of a fantasy here, Lang imaging himself as a spy. This is not at all self indulgence: a large number of great storytellers imagine themselves in their stories. It is part of the creative process.

Spies and British Spy Fiction

Despite speculation by some critics, I find it hard to regard Spies as a commentary on the coming Nazi era, soon to hit Germany. For one thing, the nationalities in the tale, English, Russian and Japanese, seem to be picked to be as far from Germany as possible. This is an escapist tale of international espionage, not a look at Germany itself. For another, Spies is in the tradition of a huge body of prose spy fiction, that had been flourishing since the late 1890's. Critical histories of spy fiction suggest that this genre is mainly centered on England, although it has representatives in many languages and countries. For example, see the introduction to Michael Cox' excellent collection, The Oxford Book of Spy Stories (1996). Lang's film is straight out of the British spy tradition, as embodied in the earlier stories in Cox' anthology. Lang's hero Tremaine is plainly English, and his boss seems to be the head of the British Secret Service. This sort of hero, agency and superior were staples of early (and later) British spy fiction.

Lang's film seems close in its approach to the work of, the at one time very popular British spy writer, William Le Queux. Some parallels in both Spies and Le Queux: a gentlemanly English hero, who works for the British Secret Service. He is a full time professional, and brings considerable expertise to his job. The hero's boss, an agency official who is an older, typical English gentleman, bluff, honest and refined. A look at upper class high life as the area of operations for his hero, filled with bon vivants, and upper crust but racy social activities - in Lang's case, his hero has a valet, a million dollar wardrobe, and hangs out in expensive hotels and nightclubs. A concern with getting information about secret treaties, as the chief aim of espionage. An emphasis on means of communication of secret information. An international perspective, involving named countries throughout the world, and an "inside" look at their social customs - Japan in the case of Lang's film. Glamorous, somewhat lurid women who have liaisons with the hero, and who are sometimes involved in spy schemes. Physical peril and death traps for the hero. The use of chases, and high speed vehicles. All of these are common elements in Lang and Le Queux. Le Queux had been publishing since 1890, and was a long established writer by the time Lang began his film work, so I am suggesting an influence from Le Queux to Lang, not the other way around.

Le Queux, as noted above, was full of schemes for communicating secret information. Lang is as well, but he gives a uniquely high tech twist to this. The opening of Spies shows radio, cameras, telephones, duplicating devices and other high tech appurtenances used by his spies; and the bank raid later on shows radio sets and a man hanging from a telephone pole, talking on the line (a similar telephone pole will capture a balloon in M). This is typical of a long range fascination in Lang with modern communication technology's ability to dominate and control people. In Lang's While the City Sleeps (1956), the television network and its broadcasting and news divisions are shown reaching out their tentacles, and gaining control of everybody and everything in the United States. One also recalls the mirror device for spying in The Spiders (1919), the automatic alarms in the office building in M (1930), the news reel cameras in Fury (1936), and the television monitoring in The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). These reflect the mirror device in Feuillade's Judex (1916).

In both Le Queux and Lang, the realism of the social setting is implicitly used to justify a loosening in sexual morality. These are heroes that have to function effectively in the real world of upper class men and international diplomacy. The safety of their countries depends on this. They cannot exist in a straight laced fantasy world of Sunday School moralists. Instead they have to live in the real world of well to do men, mistresses, high society parties, romantic liaisons and intrigue. Because of this, they are constantly involved with glamorous loose women. Furthermore, their lives are filled with turmoil, and near sudden death. All of this suggests that they can and should have affairs. These arguments are undoubtedly specious, but they make superb escapist entertainment. One hastens to add that the heroes are always single men, that they treat the women well, and that the women want the affairs just as much as the men.

One can see aspects of Lang's interest in Le Queux' themes as far back as The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship (1920). The hero of that film is placed in a death trap: an underground pit that fills with water. The gang of The Spiders is mainly interested in getting hold of international treaties.

Staging, Posture and Gesture

Rooms in Lang tend to be large. His characters are rarely hemmed in, although the hero of The Spiders seems often to be climbing up and down ladders between floors. We often see the corner of one of Lang's large rooms in his shots. It reminds one of J.G. Ballard's dictum, that there is a moral significance to the angle between two walls. There is a recurring shot in Spies, of a woman hurled into a room's corner. Haghi tends to be always seated at his desk, which seems to be an extension of him; whereas the women in his office are either standing, sitting at external tables, or seated spectacularly on top of his desk. One always sees that they are outsiders in these shots, but outsiders with spectacular power. A recurring Lang posture shows a woman holding something up at arm's length to look at it. These are among the most glamorous shots in Spies.

One can also see the influence of Feuillade on Lang's compositions in Spies. One of Feuillade's trademarks, the double door with one door open and one door shut, occurs in Spies as well; it will recur in the doctor's office in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), and in The Indian Tomb (1959). Feuillade liked to compose scenes in several flat planes, as David Bordwell has pointed out; we get a similar effect in Lang. A door or window will be open toward the back of the shot, revealing another wall with people standing in front of it. We see such shots in Haghi's office, in the telegraph office towards the beginning, and the shot where Sonja sees in Tremaine's railroad car from her own. The shots of the stairwell in Haghi's building are built on the sort of diagonals one occasionally sees in Feuillade, as well.

When people walk in Spies, they tend to do so in forceful straight lines. For example, we see guards marching purposefully past Haghi's open office door, parallel to the planes of the shot, perpendicular to the spectator's light of sight. Also: at the dance, when the hero is looking for the heroine's dropped necklace, we see first a close-up of feet moving in one direction, then another set of feet moving exactly perpendicular to the first. Third example: at the telegraph office, the bad guy exits directly towards the back of the shot, followed by the entrance of the hero perpendicularly, straight from the left of the screen.

Lang tends to show people in medium shot, say from the waist up. There is often plenty of "upper" space in Lang's compositions. It shows the high walls and ceilings of Lang's sets, which are usually tall and imposing looking. It also gives room for Lang's characters to jump up or suddenly stand up, which they do frequently. Feuillade's shots also often have this sort of upper space: the lower half of the shot shows the people, the upper half shows the architecture of the place in which the characters find themselves.

A whole parallel world in Spies are the close-ups of characters' hands. Lang often cuts to hand shots, showing the characters holding clues, guns, papers or the Russian icon which plays such a key role in the plot.

The policeman trying to halt the bad guy's car in front of the hotel has his arms stretched out wide. A similar gesture will soon be used by one of the officers at the bank. Both recall the worker stretching out his arms on the huge circular dial in Metropolis.

Costumes

The unusual uniforms worn by Haghi's guards also recall Feuillade: here they are in head to toe black leather. In general, Lang's film is full of uniforms of every sort: Lang seizes every chance to include police and Army members and include them in his compositions. Leather uniforms will also be worn by Mabuse's chauffeur in Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler (1922) and the villain's henchmen in Woman in the Moon.

The leather uniforms of Haghi's guards also recall a bit the elaborate leather coat worn by Rudolph Valentino in Beyond the Rocks (Sam Wood, 1922) - and so does the leather coat worn by the underworld chief in M. There are echoes throughout Lang of various Rudolph Valentino films, suggesting that Lang was a fan. The glamorous, sophisticated and well-dressed heroes of many Lang works, including Spies, seem in the tradition of the characters Valentino played. Maurice Tourneur, an early director whose films might have influenced Lang, also had his hero in a really elaborate black leather costume in Lorna Doone (1922). We have already mentioned the leather flight suits in Forest Holger-Madsen's Himmelskibet / Heaven Ship (1917). And in Cecil B. DeMille's Why Change Your Wife (1920), Gloria Swanson flirts with a pilot in a leather flying coat.

Imagery

Spies is full of shots of clocks ticking away. These anticipate the opening of Ministry of Fear, which also shows Ray Milland up all night, watching a clock. They also recall the workers in Metropolis, who tend machines that look like large clocks. Both Metropolis and Ministry of Fear suggest that human beings are subjected to such time oriented machines. One also remembers the many clocks that control the action in The Woman in the Window, the pickpocket with the watches in M, and the alarm clocks in Clash by Night.

Other Lang devices include the mirror in the hotel suite, recalling the store window in M, and the mirror around the fireplace in The Woman in the Window, which are used by Lang to show a single person reflected at two angles.

A striking shot uses a shadow as a sinister way for a character to make an entrance, like the villain in M. Some of the fighting in the bank will also be shown as shadow silhouettes. Silhouettes were part of the repertoire of Maurice Tourneur, a director who might have influenced Lang.

Circles: Mainly Technology

Lang's most important skill as a director is his use of composition. His shots tend to show elaborate geometric patterns. One favorite Lang composition shows a large circle dominating the space of the shot, playing off against the rectangular border of the frame. In Ministry of Fear, we see the circular table, and the characters gathered around it for the phony seance. In Spies, there is the circular tunnel down which the train speeds. The interior of the train itself also shows a circular corridor.

In some Lang films, circles are used to highlight "sinister" objects, and activities of the villains. In Spies, however, both sides have their own circular devices. The common denominator of circles in Spies is instead technological: circles tend to be associated with machinery, technology or engineering. One of the main subjects of Spies is that innovative technology is now in play in the world's spy organizations. The use of circles highlights technology, making it catch the viewer's eye.

The radio broadcast animation shows circular radio waves being broadcast from the towers.

The miniature camera has a circular lens, surrounded by the rectangular camera box. This is one of Lang's trademark "circles within rectangles".

Haghi's desk has a transparent circular clock on a stick in front. It resembles the sight-scope on a rifle, and looks menacing and threatening. We see the action aligned with this, with the camera looking from Haghi's desk over the clock, to the opening door of his office, bringing in the escaped murderer. The visual effect of a rifle scope is especially strong here.

The alarm clock used by the hero in the flop house near the start, has an extra tiny dial inside for setting the alarm. This is one of the most complex clocks in Lang. It has the "circles within circles" effect that will be a major motif in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The clock also has round bells at its top, making the whole thing be one of Lang's elaborate machines, like the mysterious office equipment used by the Master of Metropolis, or the gas pumps in Fury.

The heroine has a complex machine of her own, full of tall cylinders, which she uses to dispense coffee or tea at her home. She also has a round table full of desserts, almost all of which are on round platters - although there is also a rectangular box on the table. This anticipates the "still life" of breakfast in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Like them, it also features "circles within circles": the round dishes inside the circular table.

The train corridor has hemispherical lights along its walls. And the tunnel is a cut-off circular arch. There is a second round tunnel, through which the hero's motorcycle passes at the end of the chase. The motorcycle has a large circular headlight.

Haghi's radio set is full of circular gauges and wheeled handles.

The radio broadcast unit in the restaurant is circular, with a square inside, three triangles, and a V pattern below. The V and the triangles make vertical diamonds, which are echoed, after a 90 degree turn, by the horizontal zigzags and diamonds on the wall paper behind. (Radio broadcast units will return in Woman in the Moon.) The agent making the sinister broadcast has his face much hidden by the elaborate geometry of the broadcast microphone. The fusion of the two suggests that the human form is merging with technology, and with geometric patterns.

The cart with the spherical coconut smoke-bombs has large round wheels, and a building window sign behind it is shaped like a rounded arch. This street scene anticipates the one early in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in which men roll out barrels from a truck that burst into flame in the street. In both cases, a deserted, quiet urban backstreet is suddenly filled with smoke or fire. The cylindrical barrels and the spherical smoke-bombs, both circular forms, make vivid, eye-catching imagery. Somewhat more distantly, one recalls the yard incinerator in The Blue Gardenia, which also generates flames in a placid, deserted outdoor setting.

Haghi's leather uniformed guards carry club-like objects attached to their belts. These clubs are made up of three cylindrical regions. The clubs prove to be bombs.

The door to the bank vault room has both circular and rectangular holes. The vaults themselves have circular handles, and large cylinders of acetylene are used to burn them open. The multiple vault doors recall the room with many doors in the mad scientist's house in Metropolis.

Rectangles

Much of the rectangular imagery in Spies is architectural, involving rooms, or environments (such as the hero's built-in bath).

The hero is associated with the complex rectilinear equipment of his bath. The rest of his hotel room, including the door mirror, is also rectilinear, as was the path and ladders he took over the roof to get to his room. His train compartment is also full of rectangular regions, such as his seat. This association of the hero with rectilinear imagery will return in The Big Heat.

The boxers at the night club are in a square boxing ring. This is in turn surrounded by a circular dance floor: a rare instance in Lang of a square inside a circle, instead of the other way around. Lang gets some good overhead camera angles here. The regularly arranged steps down to the dance floor add to the geometry of the composition.

There is a spectacular overhead composition, showing police and motorcycles lined up outside the bank on its steps. The steps form a shallow, rectilinear pyramid, and the men and bikes keep to these strong rectilinear forms.

The square sidewalk plugs through which Haghi Bank employees try to escape are visually striking.

Polygons

In the same shot as the cylindrical water reservoir (which will recur in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), there is a building whose upper floors all have an alcove sticking out on the corner, making a complex polygonal shape. Both alcoves and polygonal buildings are Lang trademarks. It is more typical, however, to see alcoves inside Lang rooms, rather than from the outside of the building, as Lang shows them here.

The doorbell to Sonja's home is a recessed, four sided pyramid. The pyramid panels are triangles, which ascend to a square base. Elaborately geometric doorbells return in Woman in the Moon.

The thermometer used to measure the hero's bath water is narrowly pyramidal in shape.

Characters and Society

There is some doubling up of characters in Spies. The Japanese spy and Kitty echo the hero and heroine of the movie. The benign head of the British Secret Service is a double for Haghi, who heads his evil spy ring. Both men are usually shown in their office, behind their desk, a desk loaded with high tech communication equipment. There is some difference in staging here. The British character is always shown with men in his office, while Haghi is typically entertaining his women agents. The British Secret Service head acts as a father figure to the hero. He gives him personal encouragement, but mainly this seems designed to certify that everything the hero does is fully approved by the patriarchy that runs society, symbolized by the Secret Service chief. The British office is set up to indicate the Secret Service chief's authority. He sits on a tall chair, while the hero and other visitors are in a chair whose seat is at virtual floor level. The relationships in the office are simple: a boss with men subject to his authority. This makes the hero's relationship to society simple and straightforward: he is subject to the proper, male social authorities, and approved by them. By contrast, Haghi's relationship to the women is vastly more complicated. They are often shown sitting on top of his desk, like visiting queens. They are in a huge number of different postures and positions in his office.

The hotel that is invaded by the bad guy after the chase to the city seems to be the very same one as in Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924). It has the same famous revolving door: something which Lang has his bad guy wreck. This seems both like a homage by Lang to Murnau, and a gleeful destruction of his chief setting. Perhaps this is an inside joke.

Woman in the Moon

Woman in the Moon (1929) is Fritz Lang's second and only other science fiction film, after Metropolis. Its German title is Frau im Mond. Lang would later try unsuccessfully to make science fiction pictures in the 1950's in the United Sates; this is one of great "might have beens" of the cinema.

The best part of Woman in the Moon is the middle section: the planning for the launch, the launch of the rocket and the journey to the moon. The rocket launch is so much like later, real-life launches at Cape Canaveral that one wonders if NASA used the film as a model. The fact that Lang made this film thirty years before humans were launched into space, and forty years before they went to the moon, is astonishing.

Politics

While most of the moon launch anticipates the real future, the film differs from reality that the rocket is entirely created by a private company. The company's head, Wolf Helius, also seems to be the leader of the engineering development of the ship, although this is not made entirely clear. The company and Helius are attacked by an international consortium of capitalists, who demand to control the flight. These rich but crooked businessmen recall the conspiracy of wealthy businessmen in The Spiders. They also recall sinsiter banker Haghi in Spies and look forward to The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in that they use terror and violence to achieve their ends of world domination. Helius and his company on the one hand, and the consortium on the other, represent the good and bad sides of capitalism. They recall similar examples of good capitalism as the Dean Jagger character in Western Union, also head of a corporation building high tech; and bad capitalism, the Master of Metropolis.

Before the flight, the heroine officially congratulates the many workers who helped build the rocket ship. This is both a human gesture, and an official recognition of the role Labor had in constructing this landmark in human history. The relation here between Capital (Helius) and Labor (the workers in his company) is exactly the cooperative one advocated at the end of Metropolis. And like the end of that film, the relationship is symbolized by handshakes. The joyous celebration is one of the film's most inspiring and moving scenes.

Earlier, we saw the foreman of the company, toasting the heroine at her engagement party. This too, recalls the sympathetic foreman of Metropolis.

The heroine shows determination, and insists on being part of the moon flight. This is a feminist stand. She anticipates the later heroine of Western Union, who wants to be part of building telegraph lines. There is also a woman among the villains, one of the crooked consortium, which otherwise consists of four men. Both the heroine and this female villain are associated with phallic symbols: the men's tie the heroine wears, just like the hero and the engineer; and the villain smokes big cigars. These symbols seem to reflect that the women are taking part in a man's world. One of the women in the anti-Nazi undergound in Hangmen Also Die! will wear a shirt and tie.

The opening scenes show the poor professor's terrible hunger. There must have been lots of hungry people in 1920's Germany. After this, the film switches to the most elegant of upper middle class apartment buildings. These buildings seem strikingly modern in their decor. Although the film seems to be set in 1929, not the future, Lang has chosen the most modernistic, futuristic design elements throughout the film. These enhance the science fictional tone of the movie. The switch from settings of poverty for the hero in the opening scene, to luxurious settings in his home and car, recalls the transformation of the hero at the beginning of Spies.

The film's villain is an agent of the crooked consortium. He seems to be their representative, not their leader. Lang has him played by the same actor, Fritz Rasp, who was the Thin Man, the spy and agent serving the Master of Metropolis. Here Rasp is once more dressed in formal clothes, like both the Thin Man, and John Carradine's Nazi villain to come in Man Hunt. However, these formal clothes in Woman in the Moon are especially lavish and elegant. Their opulence and utterly upper crust élan contrast with the business suit worn by the film's businessman hero Helius. Helius is a business man who actually builds things; Rasp is a representative of Wealth or Finance, looking like the capitalist plutocrat of a million cartoons. Rasp's card says his character is "Walter Turner, Chicago". Little is made of this man's Americanness in the rest of the film, although the Chicago connection might be a reference to Al Capone and other gangsters, already world famous. He's billed in the titles as "The man who calls himself Walter Turner", and both the name and the Americanness might be fake. The character is a master of disguise, like Haghi in Spies, and his henchmen wear black leather uniforms, like Haghi's men, and like Mabuse's chauffeur in Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler. The uniforms are not as sharp as Haghi's agents', and the henchmen look more thug-like.

The woman flower seller who attacks the hero is one of a series of related characters in Lang. We have the brainy and creative blind vendor who recognizes the killer in M, the fake blind man who is the spy in Ministry of Fear, and finally the sympathetic blind flower seller at the night club in The Blue Gardenia, who unites the two kinds of characterization, flower vendors and blind people. One notes that the two genuine blind characters in M and The Blue Gardenia, are both sympathetic people.

Clocks

Fritz Lang reportedly invented the countdown for the film - one of its most dramatic sequences. The countdown is linked to clocks controlling the launch: Lang's archetypal image of clocks controlling our lives and work. Lang also comes up with another unique clock: this one shows 24 hours in two loops around the dial. Lang's films are full of unusual clocks, each one having some unique property. There is also an unusual small clock on the hero's study table, done in a modernist design, and containing a pendulum. The hero's housekeeper has a clock in her kitchen. It is on the wall over where she works, and seems in an archetypal Lang position of control over her work.

The terrorist attack on the factory is timed: it has a 24 hour deadline. By contrast, all aspects of the rocket launch and flight are also carefully timed. The rocket timing is one of the few possibly "good" uses of clocks to control human activity in Lang. Even here, it includes the eight terrible minutes of high pressure which might kill people.

Media

Woman in the Moon is full of Lang's interest in the mass media. Film itself is present within the film, as it will later be in Fury. Newsreel cameramen cover the launch, in some of Lang's most dynamic compositions. There are films of past, unmanned flights. And on the moon itself, the heroine will take movie footage. She is later shown developing the film: shades of The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1928), and its interest in all aspects of film production. The fact that it is a woman who is taking pictures seems significant. This is one of Lang's most feminist films, showing women trying to break into high tech activities, rather than leaving them exclusively to men. The heroine here anticipates that of Western Union, who also wants full participation in the telegraph enterprise of her time.

When an unmanned rocket goes to the moon, it contains an automatic camera, which takes motion pictures of the moon's surface. Lang shows the elaborate clockwork mechanism that controls this camera, its various telephoto lenses, and shows the results of the filming. This is remarkably imaginative for 1929.

Radio broadcasts describe the moon launch. Title cards describe how bells and sirens all over the world are announcing the launch. A sky-writing plane also announces the launch.

We see the professor lecturing to a learned society. This anticipates the academic lecture in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, although that was to students, and this is a lecture to colleagues. The skeptical colleagues jeering a professor for making visionary science fictional statements are a staple of books, films and comics, although this is the earliest film version I recall. Jor-El in Superman stories will be greeted skeptically for announcing the coming explosion of Krypton. The lecture also recalls Maria's preaching in Metropolis, the speeches to the workers in Western Union, and the sermon in Moonfleet. The professor's jeered lecture will later be contrasted with the hero's radio broadcasts, announcing the rocket launch.

We see many scientific documents, and these include mathematics and diagrams, as well as text. There are also similar scientific writings, complete with illustrations, on the wall of the professor's room at the start. This is a brilliant piece of visualization, that helps establish the character, as make his ideas vividly come across at all times in the shots. The walls also include newspaper articles. Later, we will see illustrated scientific botany books on the neighbor's desk.

The film includes an animation of a scientific diagram, showing the planned trajectory of the flight from the Earth to the Moon. There were other animated passages in silent Lang. This one is the most informative and detailed. We also see a still version of this animation, as a drawing on the hero's wall.

We see entries into the ship's log. And the manuscript of a book by the professor.

The telephone shows up. A woman muffles its bell at a party, preventing communication. This is like the "death of the media" imagery that runs through Lang's films. The hero's telephone has what seem to be "bugs" removed from it by the villain, an act which exposes the mechanism of the phone.

The boy Gustav reads science fiction magazines, about a space adventurer named Mingo. These are illustrated, as well, and contain a science fiction story recursively within the main science fiction tale of the film. Earlier, the consortium of villains had watched a film within the film, complete with title cards. We see this film being projected.

Circles: Mainly Science Fiction

Throughout Woman in the Moon, circles tend to highlight science fictional elements.

Lang uses circles for some of the most important images in the natural and scientific world: the Moon and Earth. These images include both literal views of these bodies in outer space, and representations of them. These representations include both photos and scientific diagrams. They also include the globe of the Moon the scientist sleeps with: one of the film's most moving images.

The animation shows circular lines of gravity radiating from the Earth and Moon. These recall the circular lines broadcast from the radio towers in Spies, and the circular ripples on the pool in Secret Beyond the Door.

There are also circular dials on the spaceship's control panel. The gauges showing speed and acceleration are especially important. Lang has explained the science so clearly leading up to this scene, that we have no trouble following the different values on these dials, and the progress of the plot they represent. They fall naturally into the smooth "flow" of the storytelling.

The weightlessness produces spherical bubbles of liquid floating in the air. These are captured by hand, and re-united into one mass.

On the moon, the bubbling pools of liquid are nearly all pure circles. And the bubbles often seem spherical. This is a geometric world made up of circles which the heroes enter.

The rocket ship is shaped like a 3D version of the doorway in Death's wall in Destiny. Whereas that doorway is flat, the rocket is round. Its emergence from a hangar is somewhat like the hidden doorway emerging from the wall in Destiny. Blueprints of the rockets looked at by the consortium include circular cross-sections. Interiors of the actual rocket also emphasize its circular walls and floor plan. They also show the circular hole linking the two floors. Both the real rocket, and its model, contain struts with repeated circular holes.

The boy descends the giant staircase in the hero's building by riding the banister. This staircase is rounded, and perhaps is another of Lang's spirals. It is a striking image, one that suggests the boy's flexibility, and willingness to travel fast. It hints about his later involvement with the moon flight, whose trajectory also involves giant loops.

There is also some circular imagery in the early espionage segment, that does not relate to science fiction. Most importantly, when the hero is attacked in the car, we see his round bowler hat roll into the street, next to a bulbous cylindrical ironwork and its shadow. This iron reminds one of Marcel Duchamp's bottle rack ready-made sculpture, although Lang might not have intended the comparison. There is also a circular table in the hero's study.

There are two beautiful "still lifes", one showing mainly rectilinear articles on the botanist's desk, but also including his circular glass lenses, and a cylindrical telephone. Some of the rectangular photographs in the articles show plants which also are rounded. I cannot be sure, but I think the plants in the photos are cacti. Lang cuts on this to a still life of the celebration at the party, which is all circular forms, glasses, ash trays, and a conical glass.

Polygons and the Rocket Launch

The crooked consortium meets in a polygonal room. Such rooms with angles other than 90 degrees in their corners are Lang favorites. They watch film footage of the moon flight there. This is the start of a series of polygonal and bent angled line imagery that will proliferate throughout the rocket launch sequences.

The rocket jet (seen in the film within the film) is a hexagon embedded in a circle. Lang will mix polygons and circles again with the wheel at the well in Moonfleet.

The model of the rocket launch area, seen in overhead moving camera shots, is full of angled lines. This vision of an entire miniature city is one of the most inventive shots in the film. It anticipates another overhead view of an architectural complex: the ranch in Rancho Notorious. Both seem to be created through model work. And both remind us that Lang trained to be an architect. Such overhead panoramas anticipate futuristic vistas in comic books, showing science-fictional buildings in landscapes: Alonzo Vincent's art for Calling 2-R (1940) in Target Comics, and Sid Greene's vistas in the 1950's and 1960's in such science fiction comic books as Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures.

The rocket is supported by gantries, with bent angled lines. Much of the supporting scaffolding on which the reporters and photographers climb is also at non-90 degree angles. So are the huge moving structures which form one of the most dynamic components of the launch sequence.

The ladder which the heroine climbs to enter the rocket, is composed of repeating trapezoidal units.

The rocket berths are supported by triangular wire frames.

A Mysterious Image

The unmanned rocket brings back images of the moon's surface. These are shown in the film-within-the-film that is viewed by the crooked consortium. The titles of this film explicitly ind