On an upcoming installment of The Essentials, hosted by Robert Osborne and Drew Barrymore, TCM presents Metropolis, the 1926 Fritz Lang classic about a dystopian future that was very much about 1926 instead of the future in the same way M*A*S*H was about Vietnam much more than it was about Korea. The movie is easily Fritz Lang’s most well known. It is also quite the essential if “essential” in this case is defined as a movie one must see to further complete an education on cinema, to be able to say, “Yes, I’m a classic movies fan.” But is it essential to understanding Fritz Lang?
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Fritz Lang’s small film, Fury, with Sylvia Sidney and Spencer Tracy, doesn’t get as much press as Metropolis, M, his Dr. Mabuse films, The Big Heat, or even Scarlet Street, but it’s an essential film in his career and one of his best. It’s hard to call it a “small” picture since it starred Spencer Tracy, albeit before his two Oscars, and was produced by MGM, but it didn’t enjoy a very gracious reception upon its release by the American critics who felt it suffered in comparison to his German works. Naturally, they were wrong. To me, Fury is a distant cousin of his earlier masterpiece, M. In M, Lang does something quite stunning: He puts the viewer on the side of organized crime (the viewer is fully intended to root for them to catch the child killer) and then, in one of film history’s all time mind benders, turns the audience’s sympathy in favor of the child killer. No, not for him specifically, but for his legal plight. He even lets the child killer have the final say, in which he asks who’s worse, someone who kills for money or someone who kills because they’re mentally unstable. The point Lang seems to be making is that the world is covered in shades of grey and people who see it in the stark contrast of black and white are missing the bigger picture. He isn’t saying Peter Lorre’s child killer is a sympathetic figure, just a misunderstood one, but still one that commits acts of evil.
In Fury, he does much the same thing. At first, we are firmly with Spencer Tracy, as he is jailed for a murder he didn’t commit and then killed by a crazed mob who burn down the jail he’s being held in. Except, we find out, he wasn’t killed, he escaped. At this point, he can’t wait to see the members of the mob sent to the electric chair for his “death.” Again, as with M, Lang doesn’t seem to be saying it’s okay for people to be sent to their death for attempting to murder an innocent man but that we can understand Tracy’s fury given he was the innocent man almost killed. At the same time, by showing Tracy’s increasing irrationality in the face of the sensationalist trial of the mob members, Lang is also allowing us to sympathize with them. Mob rule isn’t being condoned, rather, Lang is allowing that they thought they were executing a murderer, which still doesn’t put them in the right but does allow their mindset to be understood.
In both movies, both parties come off rather badly. In M, Peter Lorre is a child killer and the men who put him on “trial” are ruthless murderers themselves. In Fury, Spencer Tracy’s victim becomes the guilty party and the mob members become the victims.
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Lang pulled off this trick a few times in his career, but one of my favorites, and one of the most successful, was in Scarlet Street. In that one, Edward G. Robinson starts off as the victim and ends up as the evil doer while Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea start off as evil doers and wind up the victims. What’s probably most extraordinary about Scarlet Street is that Robinson’s character, who lets another man, Dan Duryea, go to his death for a crime he himself committed, doesn’t go to jail. He’s not punished by anything other than his conscience. In doing so, Lang takes M and Fury one step further. In those two, the guilty party is eventually brought to justice. The killer in M gets and actual state trial and Tracy goes before the judge passing sentence on the mob members to let everyone know they’re not guilty of murder since he’s still alive. But Robinson, in Scarlet Street, lets the execution proceed. His personal demons will be his punishment.
Good and evil, crime and punishment, justice and revenge. These are just some of the themes I most closely associate with Fritz Lang’s work. They were clearly themes that interested him as he returned to them time and time again. The Big Heat, with Glenn Ford, made in 1953, was a great later example of Lang once again returning to the theme of revenge overriding justice. Metropolis has some of that, too, but is much more a socio-political commentary than anything else. It’s essential to film history but the films discussed above, from M to The Big Heat, are far more essential to Fritz Lang.