The Big Screen (10 page)

Too often the drama is at this trite level, and by general consent, the resolution of
Metropolis
is not just foolish but also an evasion of the anxieties aroused by the film. The conclusion comes when Freder Fredersen brings his father and Grot (the workers' foreman) together with this handshake sentiment: “There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.”

Siegfried Kracauer, who was bent on tracing how German cinema had paved the way for Nazism—his book was called
From Caligari to Hitler
—pointed out accurately enough that this cliché was awfully close to the way Dr. Joseph Goebbels appealed to the heart: “Power based on a gun may be a good thing; it is however better and more gratifying to win the heart of a people and to keep it.”

Even as
Metropolis
opened at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, in Berlin on January 10, 1927, there were lamentations over the abyss that separated its “content” from the cinematic power. This reaction was more to the point because
Metropolis
was the most expensive production ever mounted in Germany. It had taken 310 days of shooting (plus 60 nights), and the budget was reported to be 5 million marks. (This meant over $1 million in 1927 money.) Ufa had had to seek large loans to survive, and as the film failed to get its money back, the company passed into the power of Dr. Alfred Hugenberg, a newspaper magnate. He also owned or controlled more than a hundred theaters. (In American terms, he was a monopolist.) Worse, he was sympathetic to the Nationalist Party. So, in an oblique way, the hand-and-heart bromide of the film was swept aside by realpolitik. Because of the film's commercial failure, Ufa became a Nazi company.

No one could suggest this was the long-term aim of Lang or von Harbou; the film's inane but lofty ambitions are far from that. Still, Lang would be told later by Goebbels (he said) that when Hitler saw
Metropolis
in Bavaria in 1927, he declared that Lang was the man who might one day make the Reich's films.

Was Hitler a good critic, a good audience? I fear he may have been, for both the sentiments and the sentimentality of
Metropolis
mean all too little compared with the dynamic of the imaging—the radical view of the workforce as just that, a force without individuality; the inspired or enflamed treatment of the two Marias (still photographs of the shooting make it clear what intimate, voyeurist, or collaborative attention Lang paid to Brigitte Helm as the robot Maria, especially in her snaking, erotic dance); the apocalyptic crisis of the city as it is flooded, the vectors of escape and destruction; and the aura of Rotwang, the most striking human figure in the film.

Am I suggesting that Fritz Lang was intrinsically fascist, or was it the medium? I'm not quite sure. As of 1927 that charge could not mean what it would mean by 1945. The record shows that Lang quit Nazi Germany, went to America, and made several films (
Fury
,
Hangmen Also Die
,
Cloak and Dagger
) that have overtly antifascist themes. What is tougher to assess is that Lang's natural coldness, his severe analytic eye, and his thrill at disaster amount to a fascistic feeling in
Metropolis
. The crowd is a blunt instrument, gullible and dangerous—it makes an intriguing comparison with Nathanael West's mob-in-waiting. The coda and its reassurance are trite. The clear impact of the film—and this was not unnatural from someone who had lived through Germany's instability in the 1920s—was that the sociopolitical order was headed for disaster, and that the dynamism on-screen was a compelling message.

Or was it just that the basic circumstances of cinema—the overwhelming screen, and its eager but estranged audience—were suited to a fascist state?

At the time, and in the decades since, commentators have wrestled with
Metropolis
and the mixture of awe and dismay it produces, just as the film's power remains disconcerting. H. G. Wells said it was maybe the silliest film he had ever seen—though he thought it had borrowed things from his writing. Decades later, Pauline Kael called it “a wonderful, stupefying folly”—and if that is not quite an official genre of movies it's one we should leave open. It will have company before this book is over.

Luis Buñuel said the picture was two films cobbled together very awkwardly. One part was its text, which he deplored.

That last point is important: the titles within the film seem to have been written there by Freder or Rotwang by hand (and Rotwang has an artificial hand). Throughout the film, they remind us that the screen is a screen, and not just the site of a story. It takes the film closer to graffiti and agitprop slogans. The writing is nervous, occult, and magical, but more human than most of the things the people in the film do.

Over the years,
Metropolis
has had several versions, including being accompanied by pop music. Yet it was known that part of the film was lost. Then it was found, in Argentina, and at the Berlin Film Festival of 2010 the longest version yet was played—in a large theater, but also on a special screen at the Brandenburg Gate for an open-air audience of several hundred braving a bad winter. Once more, the film looked amazing and felt alarming, even if the “lost” passages were of inferior technical quality. Never mind: Lang's
Metropolis
has the dread of impending apocalypse, which says so much of its era. It is evidence of Lang's disturbing genius and Germany's worse history.

Lang would make four more films in Germany at this time:
Spies
(1928),
Woman in the Moon
(1929),
M
(1931), and
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
(1932). The last is a sound film in which Mabuse's gang is still plotting the overthrow of all order. Lang claimed that he put many Nazi slogans into Mabuse's mouth, and apparently the Party heard him. For in March 1933 they banned the film “for its cruel and depraved content.” Whereupon Dr. Goebbels asked Lang to visit him in his office.

Lang gave several accounts of that testing interview. He said Goebbels was friendly, telling Lang about Hitler's admiration for his films. He apologized for the ban on the showing of
The Testament
and even indicated that a little recutting might solve the problem. Then he offered Fritz Lang the job of being in charge of moviemaking for the Third Reich.

Years later, Lang reported how he sweated through the interview, watching the clock advance—the clock is such a torture rack in
Metropolis
. He had reckoned as he listened to Goebbels that his number was up: he would have to leave Germany immediately; and he would have to gather what he could of his funds. The clock was urgent because the banks closed at three. But Goebbels talked and talked, and it was past five before Lang got away, promising to give Goebbels an answer as quickly as possible. He went home, gathered some money and jewelry from his apartment, and then that night took the train out of Berlin. He added in some versions of the story that it felt like being in a bad movie.

But it didn't happen. A great deal of research has been applied to the case, culminating in Patrick McGilligan's 1997 biography,
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
. This includes perusal of Lang's passport and its exit visas. There was no sudden departure. Instead, Lang made several trips within Europe and did not leave Berlin properly until July 1933—he went to Paris then, where he had a deal (with Erich Pommer) to make
Liliom
. He and Thea von Harbou were divorced in April. There is no record of the meeting in Goebbels's appointment diary—and he was a movie fan. A number of people had always doubted the “escape” story and noted how its details had varied in different tellings. Gottfried Reinhardt (the son of Max Reinhardt) had this to say: “Lang could have stayed in Germany, there's no question about it. If they hadn't found out that he was half-Jewish. He tried to stay. He was a dishonorable man, a totally cynical man. I don't think he gave a damn.”

It's not easy writing a fair history of cinema while locked into hero worship for directors. Yet many of us are resolved to be loyal to the medium, and to overlook the faults of its heroes. Are the pressures and opportunities in filmmaking so bound up with power over the millions, and so tied to money, that behavior suffers? Anyway, Lang didn't take the job with Nazi film. But there was another candidate, of course, and we'll be meeting her.

It can be hard being discovered. You may never quite possess yourself again. Fritz Lang would say later on that he had “discovered” Peter Lorre in the German theater. But Lorre had been acting for five years or so already, working hard. He was discovering himself, and so far as anyone could tell, he was set on a career onstage. But there were warning hints. A few people said that with his diminutive stature, his smart baby's face, his popping eyes (plus his weakness for drugs—begun after surgery, but extended to health), sooner or later Lorre was likely to be cast as villains or degenerates. He deserved better. He was accomplished at comedy and the grotesque, yet he had a plaintive streak in him, too. The photographer Lotte Jacobi could hardly stop looking at him and taking his picture. And Lorre had a girlfriend, Celia Lovsky, who believed that Peter should meet Fritz Lang.

This was 1929, in Berlin. Lorre was twenty-five, born László Löwenstein in a small town in Hungary. In just the last year he had had a dozen parts, including Ong Chi Seng, the intermediary, in a version of Somerset Maugham's
The Letter
, St. Just in
Danton's Death
, Dr. Nakamura in Brecht's
Happy End
(he and Brecht were friends), and the fourteen-year-old sex-crazed Moritz Stiefel in Wedekind's
Spring Awakening
. Lang saw that last show, at least, and was impressed. That's when he “discovered” the actor and asked him if he had made a movie yet. No, said Lorre (he was lying). Very well, said Lang, I want to use you in my first sound film. It is some way off still, so you must promise that you will not make a movie for anyone else.

What will this picture be? asked the actor, and Lang told him he could not say yet. Lorre agreed to the arrangement.

It's not clear if Lang had any real idea yet of
M
, or was just securing an actor and a presence he found striking. But by 1930 he was determined to make a sound picture, and inclined to use the new refinement like a shot of cocaine. He wanted to make a smaller picture than he had been accustomed to, something more intimate. So he asked his wife and his screenwriter, Thea, what was the most loathsome crime she could think of. She mulled it over and settled on the writing of poison-pen letters. (It's a sign that Thea von Harbou may have been a modest soul.) But Lang came back a little later and asked her, what about a child killer?

There were several serial killers capturing headlines in the Germany of that time. In Berlin, there was a man named Großmann; in Hanover, there was a notorious “butcher”; and in Düsseldorf, there was Peter Kürten. Lang tried to make it clear that he and Thea had done their script for
M
before Kürten's story was revealed. But it hardly matters. I think we know that Fritz Lang could have imagined
M
, or what he had also thought of calling
The Murderer Among Us
. In addition, Peter Kürten was ready to kill anyone, while Hans Beckert, the character in
M
, has an eye that preys on children.

In 1931 no American studio would have entertained the thought of a film about a child killer—though Hollywood at that time was giddy with excitement (and box office) over gangsters. In
Public Enemy
(1931), James Cagney was made into a star as the street kid who becomes a hoodlum and guns down any number of people (more or less deserving of that fate, or employed to risk it).
Public Enemy
was rightly hailed as a “violent” picture, even if the most brutal moment in it for many people—because it is so unexpected—is where Cagney rams half a grapefruit into the face of his moll (played by Mae Clarke).

Violence is a tricky issue, and one we shall return to, but Fritz Lang protested that
M
was a film of “no violence—all this happens behind the scene, so to speak. I give an example: you remember the scene where the little girl is murdered? All you see is a ball rolling and stopping. Afterwards a balloon getting stuck in the telephone wires. Where is the violence?”

To be precise, Lang is correct (though he also tried to tell the same questioner that the scene in
The Big Heat
where Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame's face was not violent either). You don't have to trust what film directors say; it's hard enough sometimes to handle what they show. No, we do not see the murderer in
M
killing a child. Still, I doubt that anyone has ever seen
M
and not been affected by the thought of that action. That is a tribute to Lang's genius and purpose as an artist—which amounts to the attempt to show how thoroughly violence had eroded society. But if it was impossible to do
M
with the sight (and sound) of a child being strangled (and I hope it would be still), then it's worth asking ourselves what impact there has been in the seemingly endless and inventive spectacle of more or less attractive guys gunning down other guys—and this motif goes from
Public Enemy
to Michael Mann's
Public Enemies
(2009).

The thing about Lang's
M
that would have horrified an American studio in 1931 is the meticulous oppressiveness of the film and the airless dread in setting and mood that Lang carried over from
Metropolis
. That's why
M
is a great film, and so subversive. After all, the grim movie ends with a pious voice uttering the cry “We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children,” while it is shot through with the gloomy conviction that another kind of warped child—Peter Kürten himself, or Hans Beckert—must have his way in a cityscape that can only endure such outrages. At the start of the film, a children's game is introduced as a guarantee of malign fate. We see a circle of children playing a game, a version of “You're out,” with the chant “The evil little man in black will come…He will chop you up.” And it's not just those words, or the ghastly symbol of the game, it's the way the “open” ground where the children play is so palpably a set, part of an inescapable urban enclosure, where air has been replaced by theatrical light. Forget the fate of the children—what life could they find in a city that seems to be buried underground? Time and again, Lang's city is a mortuary where human figures make their frantic dance.

So in
M
the very texture of cinematic expression amounts to a trap in which the children and Beckert are caught. This predicament presages the coup of the film, an image that resounds with the tricky nature of cinema and the age-old dread of the doppelgänger who will confound his better self. I refer to the image where Beckert—identified by the street life as a murderer, and marked down as such—suddenly looks over his shoulder and sees the reflection of a ragged white-chalk
M
on his dark overcoat, like a wound or a disease. Not even Lotte Jacobi ever made more of Lorre's fleshy face or his horrified eyes. It is a superb image, expressive not just of this one film or even of Lang's haunting career, but of the idea throughout film that we may meet our other and know the dismay of exposure. It is one of those moments in which we are physically reminded that a character looking in a mirror is like us looking at a screen.

The structure of
M
that drew so much comment—of the murderer being pursued by the forces of both law and outlawry—is another version of the trap Beckert faces. And Lang is so expert at confronting two unwholesome gangs that we quickly devour the ironies whereby the good and the bad are equally determined to crush the deranged figure who has upset the balance of their city. Nothing in the movie bothers with the ugliness of that balance, or the degree to which it stands for a way of life that will suffocate true childhood—even if it disapproves of the strangling. Indeed, nothing in
M
, in
Metropolis
, or in
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
really believes in an urban order or style in which life might be worth living. I think the same charge can be leveled at the best films Lang made in America—
The Big Heat
(1953), for instance, where Glenn Ford's avenging detective is left alone at the end in the ruins of a corrupt city, and may be perilously unbalanced. But it is a very American touch that he loses a wife and saves his daughter. Lang's first American film,
Fury
(1936), in which Spencer Tracy plays a man who is nearly lynched, was prompted by an actual lynching in San Jose in November 1933 (the last recorded in California), when two men were dragged out of jail, stripped, castrated, and hung up for public inspection. The town mayor and the governor of California, James Rolph, Jr., approved of the lynching, and no one was ever imprisoned for it.
Fury
is a tough film for 1936—Graham Greene called it an extraordinary achievement—but it never got close to the reality of San Jose. In America, the industry and its urge to be positive conferred a sketchy optimism on Lang in return for his sacrificing the bleak magnificence of his art.

There is no one to like or admire in
M
—so what happens to the energy or involvement that the film's authority commands? It descends on the woeful figure of Beckert and his frenzied assertion of helplessness. It's at this point that our not seeing Beckert kill—in the way we are spared overt violence, as Lang might claim—is so important. After all, Beckert has no life or identity except that of killer. All we see of him is that drape of overcoat and the drab hat in which he prowls the city. He has no other exercise, and not the least explanation as to why he is a child killer.

Yet it's clear that Peter Lorre is the star of the film, no matter how heinous a figure Beckert may be. The drama is waiting on that moment when Beckert, captured and undergoing an unofficial trial, will break down and let his words tumble out. This is where the harsh sounds of the city, the eery whistling, and the tramping noise of brutal men give way to speech and acting. We realize that
M
would hardly have been possible or inviting to Lang as a silent film. Its action might have played out, but Lang's incentive is wanting to hear the murderer speak. And the film will end abruptly, without a verdict or a sentence in the “trial.” There is no doubt about Beckert's being a serial killer. But
M
does not settle his fate. He is arrested by the police (as opposed to the criminals), and the film stops. If he were to go on to a proper trial we'd know his testimony already. It spills out in Lorre's unrestrained performance, one of the first on film that depends on synchronized speech and its revelation of a deranged inner being:

It is a testament to helplessness, and there's a frightening link between human helplessness and the possibility that the camera can make irresponsibility available, because it so adept at “recording, not thinking.”

Observers of the filming reported that Lang drove Lorre hard—as was his custom. He also discouraged other people on the set from talking to his lead actor. He wanted to isolate him emotionally, as if to induce the killer's state of loneliness. Lorre stood up to the ordeal, despite long days on the “trial” sequence. His only shortcoming was that he could not whistle adequately—so Lang did the whistling himself. You can see Lorre's performance still, and it shows a demented person, just as it reveals that we are watching a film about a murderer, not the act or process of murder and not the victims. Lorre's biographer Stephen D. Youngkin also unearthed a print of
M, le Maudit
, the French version made right after the German
M
. It had another director (identity not known), but Youngkin reports that Lorre's performance in the French version—in which his voice was dubbed—was far more unrestrained and markedly less effective.

So here is a “classic,” and arguably Lang's greatest work. But notice how far-reaching it is in its consequences. Though the American gangster films of the early 1930s never dared show a child killer, they did equivocate over their “monsters.”
Scarface
(1932), with Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, was subtitled
Shame of a Nation
, in case the film was thought to be too enthusiastic about its gangsters. But that was the energy or vicarious thrill that made such films appealing, and which helped turn Cagney and Edward G. Robinson into flamboyant stars.

M
is a quite different case, in which Lang effectively introduces the idea, fleshed out by Lorre's intense performance, that the child killer is driven beyond self-control or moral self-awareness. Our society still struggles with such issues, and the growing reluctance to execute murderers has gone hand in hand with an attempt to understand psychopathic personality. One of the most alarming things in
M
concerns what can only be called sympathy. We do not respond to Beckert as someone who has actually killed children—our children. Not that there is any question about his guilt. Still, the killer's explanation of himself in
M
does not have to be believed. It may be beyond that just because it is so well acted. But is it Lorre acting, or is it Beckert? Here is one of the insoluble mysteries in film, the deepest level of doubling and moral confusion. Because we watch this confession (without having to witness the murders), our point of view is subtly detached. We are in awe of Lorre, and that cannot exclude sympathy, or something more complex than horror or loathing for what his character has done. This is the first notable killer on film who steps over that line of identity, and clearly he is carried over by sound, by speech, and the noise of breathing or being alive.