Fritz Lang

When a wrongly accused prisoner barely survives a lynch mob attack and is presumed dead, he vindictively decides to fake his death and frame the mob for his supposed murder.Read More »

The Buddhist priest wants the Daughter of the Daimyo to become a priestess at the Forbidden Garden. The Daimyo thinks if he were in Europe that his daughter should decide on her own, but he is denounced and has to commit harakiri. She meets Olaf, a European officer, falls in love and marries him, but after a few months he has to return to Europe. She gives birth to a child and is waiting for him, while he marries in Europe. When he comes back to Japan four years later, he is accompanied by his European wife…Read More »

A desperate, haggard-looking man puts a message into a bottle, and is able to throw it into the sea just as he is shot by an arrow. Some time later, well-known sportsman Kay Hoog announces to a large audience that he has found the message, which tells of a lost civilization that possesses an immense treasure. Hoog immediately plans an expedition to find it. But Lio Sha, the head of a criminal organization known as the Spiders, plans her own expedition, and she is determined to get the treasure for herself.Read More »

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“When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime.”Read More »

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An under-valued classic
Fritz Lang’s superlative western teeters dangerously on the edge of campness, (it’s that infernal ‘Legend of Chuck-a-Luck’ ballad pounding away on the soundtrack, continually reminding us that this is a tale of ‘hate … murder and revenge’). Then, of course, there is that great gay icon Marlene Dietrich, looking extraordinary at fifty one as Altar Keane, boss of the outlaw hideout Chuck-a-Luck where Arthur Kennedy comes seeking the man who killed his girl in a robbery. In many respects the film is a perfect companion to Nicholas Ray’s not dissimilar “Johnny Guitar”, made around the same time and both featuring dominant women and weaker men and both dealing explicitly with ‘hate, murder and revenge’.Read More »

Synopsis:
Harald Berger and his Indian lover, the temple dancer Seetha, desperately flee from the shikaris (cavalry) of Eschanapur’s maharajah Chandra, who burn a whole village just for letting them pass invoking traditional hospitality. A spider weaves a web so the trackers won’t look for them in a Shiva temple, but she is caught outside, he left for dead after a steep fall into a crocodile-infested water. Meanwhile his sister Irene and brother-in-law Dr. Walter Rhode, the architect who refuses to build a tomb to bury Seetah alive for scorning the ruler’s love before the hospital he was asked for, guess the truth, and try to make their assigned Indian servant Asagara talk, who dreads incriminating his sovereign.Read More »

The last installment of Lang’s “social trilogy,” You and Me (preceded by Fury and You Only Live Once) was an ambitious experiment but ultimately a box-office failure. A studied attempt to craft a socially conscious satire in the tradition of Brecht’s didactic plays, the film—produced by Lang himself for Paramount—presents the story of a progressive department-store owner who employs ex-convicts, some of whom have not quite reformed. Although Lang’s directorial sleight of hand is visible everywhere, the film slips between the registers of drama and comedy in ways that may have perplexed contemporary audiences.Read More »

Synopsis: Spies (Spione) was the first independent production of German “thriller” director Fritz Lang. The years-ahead-of-its-time plotline involves Russian espionage activity in London. The mastermind is Haghi (Rudolph Klein-Rogge), a supposedly respectable carnival sideshow entertainer. Heading the good guys is Agent 326 (Willy Fritsch), with the help of defecting Russian spy Sonya (Gerda Maurus). The film moves swiftly to several potential climaxes, each one more exciting than its predecessor. Haghi’s ultimate demise is a superbly staged Pirandellian vignette. Anticipating Citizen Kane by a dozen years, director Lang dispenses with all transitional dissolves and fade-outs, flat-cutting territory from one scene to another. The film was co-scripted by Lang and his then-wife Thea Von Harbou. – Hal Erickson (AMG)Read More »

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An altruistic department-store owner hires ex-convicts in order to give them a second chance at life. Unfortunately, one of the convicts he hires recruits two of his fellow ex-convicts in a plan to rob the store.Read More »