Ministry of Fear: (1944. dir: Fritz Lang) Right now, at this moment, this is my favorite Lang film of all. Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is released from a madhouse (we don't know why until later; Lang is wonderfully coy with his exposition) during the heaviest part of the Blitz, and immediately steps into a chain of unsettling events. Milland has so amiable and capable a presence that we don't doubt all will turn out well, which assuages some of the bale from Graham Greene's book, for better or worse, but allows us to follow the very dark war-time spy-tale with confidence.
I was going to say that Lang unfolds his eerie story at an easy pace, but it's not easy, not at all. There are stuttering stops in it, dread-filled ebbs and pauses, emphasized by a master's use of shadow and light, but there is nothing easy about it. The war was not over when this was made, and it feels almost as if it's from a later time, a Red Scare "they're-under-our-beds" movie, only the Nazis are the ones who are suddenly everywhere in England, wearing English masks, speaking with posh, BBC diction. The innocent parts of life, --a cake won at a charity fete, a favor done for an elderly bookseller, minutes passing on a clock's face, the scissors of a tailor,-- twist into the darkest possible dangers, and the distinction between good guys and bad guys is nearly impossible to decipher. It's marred by a whimsically twee tag-on end-scene, but that is thankfully short, and the rest is marvellous.
Moonfleet: (1955. dir: Fritz Lang) It feels less like a Lang film than one of those Disney movies they used to show on Sunday night television when I was a kid. A little more violent, a little sexier, but just a little. I kept expecting Elsa Lanchester to emerge in a funny hat and bat someone over the head with an umbrella. It's charming, all the same, with Stewart Granger as nobleman Jeremy Fox, suaver than humanly possible while breaking hearts, running a gang of smugglers, fighting a duel with a rapier against a fellow wielding a halberd, and finding a wrench thrown into his works when the son of an old lover turns up on his doorstep. There's a spooky churchyard, the legend of a lost diamond, a pair of obvious aristocratic fiends (George Saunders and Joan Greenwood: you can tell straight off by the honey-tongued voices), also the hellish fury of a woman scorned (Viveca Lindfors, with funny hair and sultry gaze; see above), and a little boy's journey, not quite into manhood, since he's still very much in the dark when we leave him at the end, but a journey which anyway catalyzes Fox's own belated entry into adulthood.
Tap Roots: (1948. dir: George Marshall) A poor man's Gone With the Wind, with Van Heflin sporting both Rhett Butler's moustache and his particular brand of romantic cynicism, while Susan Hayward is the one having her bodice cinched tight whilst clinging to the bedpost.
As talk of secession mounts, the wealthy Dabneys, lords of Lebanon Valley in Mississippi, refuse to serve any masters at all, yank or reb, and send out a call that any who want to secede from both North and South should join them in their stubborn outpost. The story was ostensibly inspired by Newton Knight, a Mississippi rich man and Confederate deserter who refused to hold slaves and lived openly with his black wife, declaring his land holdings a free state, but poor Newton is betrayed by Alan Le May's screenplay, which is instead a pandering attempt to recapture the old GWTW magic, including fair-to-middlin' replicas of Mammy, Scarlett, Rhett, and Ward Bond as the family patriarch, who winds up wandering half-mad through the battle he's instigated in a near dead ringer for Thomas Mitchell's mad Mr. O'Hara.
It's a doomed project from the outset, because what can compete with the original? but Heflin and Hayward are good company, and it's given a racy understory, with the faux-Scarlett's faux-Ashley (in this version, he's paradoxically both far blander and far more villainous) betraying her with her sexy sister (Julie London) while she's confined to a sickbed.
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