Charles and I ran a videotape I’d brought over: Ministry of Fear, the stylish 1944 thriller based on a Graham Greene novel, directed by Fritz Lang (triumphantly reclaiming the thriller style he pioneered and Alfred Hitchcock copied and got credit for inventing) and starring Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds and (in a short but chilling part that made him a star of sorts, after Lang decided to build his career by giving him more extensive parts in his next two movies, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street) Dan Duryea. Lang complained to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse that his agent neglected to win him the contractual right to revise the script before and during shooting, which may account for the almost nonsensical elaborateness of the spy plot; the script contains a lot of barely believable situations that Lang might have cleaned up if he’d had the chance. (Charles wondered why the spy ring, based in London, had to smuggle out the secret microfilm to a country town so it could be passed to the enemy agent in the form of a cake being raffled off at a county fair, when the agent was just going to bring it back to the ring’s headquarters in London anyway — the plot kicks off when Milland, who’s just been released from a two-year term in an asylum for performing euthanasia on his terminally ill wife, mistakenly gives the password that leads to his being mistaken for the enemy agent who’s supposed to receive the cake.) What makes Ministry of Fear work is Lang’s superb sense of suspense and atmosphere, most notably in the movie’s many non-dialogue scenes (including one in which a close-up of the eyes of a “blind” man who’s joined Milland on a train to London reveals that he isn’t blind at all and prepares us for something sinister to happen) and a surprisingly good performance by Milland that proves his acting ability didn’t spring full-blown from the brow of Billy Wilder (like Lang, an Austrian turned German turned American refugee from Hitler) on The Lost Weekend a year later. Charles said he liked it much better than The Heiress because the characters, though less dimensional, are also more attractive, and because Lang so effectively keeps us in suspense about the moral status of the Marjorie Reynolds character (she’s a genuine refugee from Austria whose brother, ostensibly a refugee as well, is actually the head of the Nazi spy ring — and the question is whether or not she’s a Nazi, too) — even though Reynolds’ lame attempt at a German accent doesn’t convince us for a moment that she’s a foreigner. (It’s probably just as well that they had a card-carrying Englishman like Milland in the leading role!) — 10/20/96
•••••
The “feature” Charles and I watched last Thursday was Ministry
of Fear, a 1944 Paramount release (though
the copyright date was 1943) directed by Fritz Lang from a script by Seton I.
Miller, who also produced, based on a wartime novel by Graham Greene about a
man, Stephen Neale (Ray Milland), who’s just been released from a two-year
stint in a mental hospital for reasons we’re not told at first, who stumbles
upon a German spy ring operating in World War II England under the cover of a
charity called “Mothers of Free Nations.” By chance, near where he is to get
his train from Lembridge, location of the asylum, to London, a civic group is
holding a charity festival to benefit the Mothers of Free Nations, and the
grand prize is an elaborate cake (“made with real eggs,” the woman running the
concession insists — was there some sort of egg substitute used by bakers in
war-torn Britain?). The cake is really a set-up — it contains microfilm of some
British secret or other (it doesn’t really matter) and the idea was the contest
would be rigged in favor of an agent of the spy ring and he would collect the
cake by winning the contest to guess its weight. Stephen makes one guess and is
then accosted by a fortune-teller, Mrs. Bellane — an elderly and rather homely
woman — who, as part of her role
in the spy ring, tells him the correct weight and orders him back to the cake
booth to buy another chance with the new number. Of course the spies at the
carnival have mistaken Stephen for their real courier, since none of them have
ever seen him, and when their actual agent arrives they try to get the cake
back from him but he insists he won it fairly and takes it away with him on the
train. On the train he’s joined in his compartment by a blind man (Eustace
Wyatt) — only Lang gives us an extreme close-up of the man’s eyes following
Stephen so we know he’s not blind
at all — and when Stephen’s back is turned and the train is momentarily stopped
the “blind” man hits him with the cane and takes the cake. Stephen comes to in
time to follow the guy, who shoots him and hides out in a bombed-out farmhouse
— only the farmhouse is the target of another bomb, which blows it up
completely and kills Stephen’s mysterious assailant. (Nazis ex
machina.)
Back in London (though it’s not
clear how Stephen got there), he traces Mrs. Bellane — who turns out to be a
young, attractive woman (Hillary Brooke) in a lamé gown to die for — who leads
a séance at which another spy, Cost (Dan Duryea), is killed, and Stephen is
immediately suspected of killing him with the gun he took from the scene after
the guy who stole the cake from him was blown up in the countryside. Now he’s in
the position of a classic Hitchcock hero (in 1944 the original reviewers
accused Lang of ripping off Hitchcock, though in fact it was the other way
around; back in Weimar-era Germany Lang had been making Hitchcock-style movies
before Hitchcock was; British critics in the 1930’s called Hitchcock “our Fritz
Lang” and at least three of Hitchcock’s 1930’s films, The 39 Steps,
The Secret Agent and Sabotage, borrow key plot elements from Lang’s 1928 German
silent Spies), having to uncover
the spy ring and keep its agents from killing him. He stumbles upon a bookstore
that has an elaborate display of a book with a big swastika on the cover — it’s
called The Psychoanalysis of Nazism
and its author, Dr. J. M. Forrester (Alan Napier, who in the 1940’s got to make
films for estimable directors like Lang and Orson Welles — he’s the “Holy
Father” in the Welles Macbeth —
in the 1950’s was reduced to crap like The Mole People and in the 1960’s got a partial rehabilitation when
he played Alfred the butler in the Batman TV series), is posing as anti-Nazi when he’s really for them and is
part of the spy ring — though, in a reversal considerably less shocking than
Greene, Miller or Lang thought it was, the real head of it is Willi Hilfe (Carl
Esmond) — the last name is also the German word for “help” — who until the end
has seemed to be on the side of good along with his sister, Carla Hilfe
(Marjorie Reynolds, personable as usual but with one of the worst fake German
accents I’ve ever heard). The Hilfes were the main office staff of the Mothers
of Free Nations but Carla, unlike her brother, turns out to be an innocent dupe
who accepted her brother’s phony charity at face value.
There’s a marvelous
final confrontation between Willi and Stephen in which Willi is about to shoot
Carla so she doesn’t betray his secret, Stephen says, “You’d kill your own
sister?” and Willi says to Stephen, “You killed your wife.” That’s a reference to what Stephen was doing in the
asylum in the first place: his wife had been terminally ill and had pleaded
with him to get poison and give it to her to end her suffering and let her die
in peace. He’d got the drug but had been unwilling to use it, but she found it
in their home and took it herself, and under the circumstances he was sentenced
to two years in the asylum instead of a death sentence or a long prison term.
The idea of euthanasia as Stephen’s big dark secret that explains why he can’t
go to the police is surprisingly modern, but for the most part Ministry
of Fear is a quite good thriller — though a
bit more sluggish and less creative than I’d remembered it being from when I
first saw it in the 1970’s (first on TV and then at the Cento Cedar revival
house in San Francisco). In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel
Greenberg for The Celluloid Muse,
Lang said he was dissatisfied with the film because the screenwriter, Seton I.
Miller, was also the producer and wouldn’t let him tweak the script as he was
accustomed to do. Lang had tried to buy the rights to Ministry of
Fear himself but Paramount had outbid him,
so when Paramount offered him the job of directing it “I jumped at it, but made
a big mistake by not specifying in my contract that I wanted to be able to work
on the script. I took it for granted, after all the years I’d been accustomed to
working on scripts, that my agent would have seen to it that the contract
contained some such clause. When I came back here, I found someone in charge of
the film who’d never made a picture before, who’d been a trombone player in a
band or something. On top of that, I was handed a script which had practically
none of the quality of the Graham Greene book. When I wanted to have changes
made in it, the writer resented it deeply. Then, when I wanted to step out of
the project, my agent told me I was contractually obligated to complete it. So
I finished the picture to the best of my ability.”
There’s a quite fascinating
message-board thread on the Ministry of Fear’s imdb.com page as to whether Ministry of
Fear is really film noir (though The Film Noir Encyclopedia lists it and nine other films by Lang — more than
any other single director, even though it’s confined to his U.S. films and
doesn’t mention the German productions which count as noir prototypes), kicked off by someone signing
him/herself “dmayo-911-597432”
who says Ministry of Fear isn’t film
noir because Milland’s character isn’t
morally ambiguous enough to be a noir hero — “[O]ur ‘man just out of a mental hospital’ has no history of
mental illness, let alone a stain on his character, [so] we can put our minds
at ease and simply enjoy the thrills until good triumphs over evil. This trick
of having it both ways to keep the show within the comfort zone of the general
public is typical of mainstream cinema. It’s alien to film noir.” Actually, one of the strategies of film
noir is precisely to plunk an ordinary
person leading a mainstream life into a criminal underworld he (or she) didn’t
even realize existed — and Ministry of Fear certainly qualifies on that count (as does The
Big Clock, a superb noir directed by John Farrow and starring Ray Milland
four years after Ministry of Fear).
Another message board contributor, “pt100,” wrote that Ministry of
Fear wasn’t film noir because it didn’t contain a femme fatale (certainly one could imagine Ministry of
Fear being closer to classic noir if the Marjorie Reynolds character had been part of
her brother’s spy ring and Stephen faced the Maltese Falcon dilemma at the end: love her or turn her in? —
though I don’t think a femme fatale
is an absolute requirement for film noir). Yet another contributor, “gcassidy2,” defended Ministry of
Fear, sort of — “It’s too optimistic to
truly fit in the (style/genre/movement) of noir, but I think Lang may have been
using a few of the elements that went into making many of the early 1940’s
movies that were setting the style, and it tricks you into thinking it falls
into that category.” S/he seems unaware that it was Fritz Lang in Germany in
the 1920’s who was creating a lot
of those elements — the 1928 Spies
in particular is part Hitchcock movie, part James Bond movie and part film
noir, and Lang’s last two German films, M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932), certainly qualify as noir prototypes even though there aren’t any femmes
fatales. (One reason I particularly like
Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train is the way he flipped the gender of the person who tries to ruin Our
Hero and created an homme fatal.)
This time around I found it a bit on the dull side and didn’t like it as much
as I had in the 1970’s, and it remains a minor work in the Lang canon — but it’s still worth seeing and an interesting
counterpoint to Milland’s one film for Hitchcock, Dial “M” for Murder (1953), even though Hitchcock, with his fabled desire
for anti-type casting, made Milland the villain in that one! — 10/1/16
